New power chip to solve energy problems?

[mugaliens]

Eneco details revolutionary power chip (http://green.itweek.co.uk/2006/11/eneco_details_r.html)

Personally, I don't see it, unless efficiencies improve dramatically. Large-scale power production uses big turbines, whether powered by steam, wind, or running water. They may not be as efficient as the tiny chips when it comes to converting heat into energy, but they're far more economically efficient.

I can see these chips being used to recover lost thermal energy in laptops, but not in large-scale power production.

Even in laptops, better efficiencies are being realized all the time. I just replaced my four-year-old blazing fast (back then) video card that cost me almost $300. It had not one, but two fans.

The one I replaced it with is more than three times as fast, cost just $70, and runs at about half the temperature. Without any fans!

[snarkophilus]

As one potential investor who has flown all the way from Scotland for the two hour presentation confides: "I had to come, it just sounded too good to be true."

What's the first rule when something sounds too good to be true? It probably is. Time will tell, I guess.

In theory this approach would be far cleaner as the burners that Eneco is planning to employ use Ethanol – a biofuel that is carbon neutral as the CO2 emitted when it burns is consumed as the original plant grows.

So now our computers are going to emit carbon dioxide, too?

[mugaliens]

Only the CO2 that was captured by the plant to make the biofuel. So, yes, but no. Zero sum game, unlike oil and natural gas, which releases the CO2 captured by plants during the last many millions of years in just under two centuries.

Hey, I'm not advocating the technology, as I think it has incredible hurdles compared to current technologies which don't (other than consumer acceptance).

But my question is - if plants captured that much CO2 over several hundred (billions?) of years, then the Earth must have had a lot more CO2 back then than it does now, right?

So are we really worried about "destroying the planet," or is the arguement simply that the planet's climate is going to change (yet again, for perhaps the ten-thousandth time), and that life will adapt as it's always done, including us humans.

[snarkophilus]

Only the CO2 that was captured by the plant to make the biofuel. So, yes, but no. Zero sum game, unlike oil and natural gas, which releases the CO2 captured by plants during the last many millions of years in just under two centuries.

If you'd used that land to grow plants and then not burned them in a computer, then you'd have even less CO2.

I'm not saying it's a terrible idea, because fuel cells in laptops is pretty neat. It'd just be better (more honest) if they didn't try to throw in this biofuel stuff to try to rationalize it. Also, that could be accomplished even without this chip, through electrochemical methods, and probably a lot more efficiently.