Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA’s Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun. But now he’s working on “a potential key to unlock a huge power source that’s rarely utilized today,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Waste heat… The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, or JTEC, has few moving parts, no combustion and no exhaust. All the work to generate electricity is done by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Inside the device, pressurized hydrogen gas is separated by a thin, filmlike membrane, with low pressure gas on one side and high pressure gas on the other. The difference in pressure in this “stack” is what drives the hydrogen to compress and expand, creating electricity as it circulates. And unlike a fuel cell, it does not need to be refueled with more hydrogen. All that’s needed to keep the process going and electricity flowing is a heat source.
As it turns out, there are enormous amounts of energy vented or otherwise lost from industrial facilities like power plants, factories, breweries and more. Between 20% and 50% of all energy used for industrial processes is dumped into the atmosphere and lost as waste heat, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The JTEC works with high temperatures, but the device’s ability to generate electricity efficiently from low-grade heat sources is what company executives are most excited about. Inside JTEC’s headquarters, engineers show off a demonstration unit that can power lights and a sound system with water that’s roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit — below the boiling point and barely warm enough to brew a cup of tea, said Julian Bell, JTEC’s vice president of engineering. Comas Haynes, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute specializing in thermal and hydrogen system designs, agrees the company could “hit a sweet spot” if it can capitalize on lower temperature heat…
For Johnson, the potential application he’s most excited about lies beneath our feet. Geothermal energy exists naturally in rocks and water beneath the Earth’s surface at various depths. Tapping into that resource through abandoned oil and gas wells — a well-known access point for underground heat — offers another opportunity. “You don’t need batteries and you can draw power when you need it from just about anywhere,” Johnson said. Right now, the company is building its first commercial JTEC unit, which is set to be deployed early next year. Mike McQuary, JTEC’s CEO and the former president of the pioneering internet service provider MindSpring, said he couldn’t reveal the customer, but said it’s a “major Southeast utility company.” “Crossing that bridge where you have commercial customers that believe in it and will pay for it is important,” McQuary said…
On top of some initial seed money, the company brought in $30 million in a Series A funding in 2022 — money that allowed the company to move to its Lee + White headquarters and hire more than 30 engineers. McQuary said it expects to begin another round of fundraising soon.
“Johnson, meanwhile, hasn’t stopped working on new inventions,” the article points out. “He continues to refine the design for his solid-state battery…”
Sun is distributing free energy maybe gathering that will help us. But problem is big petro and coal cant let that happen as there is no monopoly on sun.
This dude rules and is a freakin hero. Also love that the greatest invention was pressurized water device and this is pressurized hydrogen device.
I always thought there was more to be extracted from waste heat. Similarly I wonder if modern techniques could extract more from mine waste instead of opening more mines.
Earth needs more energy
…does it?
Yes, even without ai it’s better for people to move away from gas. Electric cars, heating and cooking dinner is all moving to electricity.
Yeah, having an abundance of nuclear power is good regardless of the economic system as long as it’s done safely.
Hypothetically, any energy harvested from a zero-emission strategy might at least displace combusting some hydrocarbons.
with water that’s roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit
barely warm enough to brew a cup of tea
That is scalding hot water brother LOL
It is scalding hot, but I think the key takeaway is that it’s not hot enough to boil into steam, which is our current go-to for harvesting energy from heat.
So after you do your steam turbine and you are left with not-quite boiling water, by today’s standards it is useless for further harvesting for electricity. If this article is as-advertised (a big if), then we can harvest more, adding efficiency to any process that boils water to turn a turbine.
Yup I get it, just don’t like marketing speak and downplaying what we are talking about - it takes a ton of joules to get water that hot and it’s dangerous.
It’s 95 Deg C. That’s not hot enough for a proper cup of tea you add milk to. It should be boiling.
So like a little removed from this but I always wondered why cant we harvest energy from busy buildings where people are closing and opening doors all the time? The doors typically already even have a motor on them to be handicap accessible and need to slow close anyways. If anything it could generate enough electricity for at least a couple lights or office computers
You’d make it harder to open doors and slower to close, wasting heat in winter and ac in summer.
Almost every commercial door has a door closer rhat does exactly this?
The benefit is trivial compared to the cost
The cost of installing the generator and wiring is far higher than the energy recouped.
That doesent make sense though because automatic doors and handicap accessible doors already have motors which also can be generators and are otherwise connected to power??
Like the only complexity I can think of would be smoothly and safely delivering the power back to the buildings grid but we definitely have overcome these complexities in other applications
Edit: has there been a study or at least some math done on how much force goes into opening and closing doors in commercial buildings?
Think about this… if it were profitable most white collar workers would be riding a stationary bike with a generator, much more energy than a door opening.
A stationary bike over an 8 hour workday would produce probably ~1kWh, so like 19 cents given the US average. That wouldn’t even pay for maintenance and replacement parts for the devices.
Its less about the profit and more about offsetting costs. Yes one door wouldnt be really worthwhile but in this circumstance you’re using parts you already need to maintain and run(door pistons and accessibility) and the complexity added to the system could be bypassed should it fail without impacting that core operation
Well then you need to handle backfeeding all sorts of circuits, which is generally a pain to the extent it works. But it also would barely do anything.
Yes as you typically do with most forms of generation. One door wouldnt do much but multiple doors opening and closing constantly all day surely has the potential to generate some amount of energy.
Ive been in places where the door basically doesent stop moving for hours at a time, even if the door doesent close fully its still moving by someone either opening it wider or it coasting back towards closed position. Compliant exterior doors are typically set to take about 8.5-10lbs of force to open. Im not super good at math but surely that much “weight” moving constantly could generate some electricity. There are small wind turbines that move with less force constantly
So assuming 10 lbs of force, as measured 1 meter away from the hinge, you have about 44.5 Nm of torque. Assuming each door opening was about 90 degrees, then you have about 70 Joules per door operating event.
Each door opening would have a physical theoretical max of 0.02 watt-hours.
Assuming you spent 8 hours opening a door every 10 seconds constantly, then you have 58 watt-hours of energy at the end of the day if you had 100% efficient generators. One typical solar panel would hit that in under 15 minutes in real-world energy collection, not theoretical.
Good soup thank you very much for doing the math. I was struggling
Most doors that are controlled for handicap accessability are control using a hydraulic cylinder that costs hundreds of dollars, and not a motor. Any motorized doors cost way way more than that.
I had the same thought when I was younger about putting generators attached to a bouy in the ocean, which has waves constantly and would generate power all day. Just like your door idea, it would work and would make power, but it wouldnt turn a profit. Its too expensive for the output you would get in return. So… yeah… we are gonna continue to burn fossil fuels for now cause its the cheapest… once we deplete enough of them that it gets more expensive than something else, we will switch to that until we destroy the world, or skynet takes over and we become the next power source.
Hey isint that buoy or at least power generated by waves idea something thats currently kinda being done though?
Many many proposals have been made in the past to utilize waste heat, some with success, others not so much. One of the few that have worked is taking waste heat from industrial processes, connect that to a regular heater (usually gas powered) and connect that up to tens of thousands of homes as a central heating source.
One of the big issues is waste heat is usually in a very low energy high entropy form. The way we normally use extract work from energy is by moving it from a high energy low entropy state into a low energy high entropy state. This is due to the laws of physics and can’t be worked around, so extracting anything useful from waste heat is very hard. Most projects involve simply transporting the heat and using it as heating, that way no transformation is required for it to be useful.
I don’t know if this dude is onto something, but with the laws of physics being what they are, I would be surprised if what he has actually works very well. Like enough that it’s worth doing.
It’s for example very easy to plop a tec (peltier) device onto something a bit warm, cool the other side with the surrounding atmosphere, and out comes electric energy. Useful energy and with a lot of devices you get out a lot of power. However it is not worth doing, those devices cost money to produce and install and would need some maintenance. This makes the power it produces more expensive than what we get from even expensive regular power sources. And the power is only there locally, transporting electric energy is pretty hard. So it isn’t all that useful and not economically attractive. So it’s never done. Usually it’s better to put that time and money into making the thing producing the waste heat more efficient, that pays off a lot more often.
Yeah converting waste heat into useful energy sounds very very much like “making entropy go down.” We know we can make entropy go down in one spot by increasing it even more in others. But for them to do that here… they’d be turning high entropy into low entropy PLUS more high entropy, which sounds circularly self-fueling or essentially a perpetual motion machine.
Most of our electrical generation capabilities use heat at some point to boil water, but what makes that work is water’s phase change behavior, accessible temperature for that phase exchange, and water’s ubiquity. If he can find another water that does something equally useful but at lower temperatures, without exotic materials… I mean John Galt can fuck right off.
If they can pull this off: amazing. But it sounds very much like a quixotic adventure for a legendary inventor’s final days. Someone call me when they have something applicable.
The inventor/founder at the center of the article, Lonnie Johnson, was on the team at JPL that designed and implemented the thermoelectric generators (heated by radioactive decay from plutonium-238 pellets) on the Galileo spacecraft sent to Jupiter. So I would expect that he’s more familiar with the thermodynamic and engineering challenges than even a typical expert.
The PR fluff put out by the company mentions that the theoretical basis for this specific type of generator was worked out a while ago but needed materials science to advance to the point where this type of generator can be thermodynamically and commercially feasible.
Looking at how this generator is supposed to work, it’s interesting in that it does rely on the movement of fluid, but is supposed to be a totally closed loop, to be a bit different than the pure solid state, semiconductor-based Seebeck generators that are already well known.
The other area talked about in this article is that they believe that it can be effective with lower temperature differentials than any previous technology, which might make a huge difference in whether it can be deployed to more useful places and thereby make it economically feasible more easily than prior concepts.
In the end, if these generators can output some electric voltage/current, it might just take on similar generation characteristics as photovoltaics, which could mean that hooking these up to the grid could draw on some of the lessons learned from the rise of grid scale solar.
Thank you. I made a comment about it being a shame that we don’t capture the waste heat from some process a while back and someone quipped something like “2nd law of thermodynamics moment”. I went and did some reading, but couldn’t make sense of it. Your explanation makes sense.
So yes, the law says there is some unavoidable, unusable waste heat, the question is how much of that heat is really unusable?
For example, you have lava at around 1,000 degrees. You certainly can harvest energy from that, hit some water with it and spin a turbine.
For the most part, once we get under 100C we run out of ideas on how to realistically harvest energy out of it, but there’s still a pretty good delta between that an ambient. The claim of this article is he has an approach to harvest energy at an even lower temperature delta.
If it got to harvesting all of the temperature delta of a system, then we can say “not at all possible based on current understanding of physics”, but if the process leaves some waste heat unharvested, then it’s not yet violating that law. The law just says it gets less and less likely as the amount of heat in question diminishes.
A passive heat pump can generate power below 100C. That’s still plenty warm enough to travel up a water column, across a cooling tank, and down to a closed loop or exit. +A turbine to capture the falling water.
No idea how much energy it can capture. It seems obvious? So probably not much.
Even with the comment making a lot of sense, if someone has a good summary / write up / video that helps build an intuition or understanding a bit more of thermodynamics then I’d love the recommendation
Great write-up. I’m so glad my college thermodynamics classes armed me with proper skepticism.
Assuming it’s cheap and reliable, exploiting geothermal resources for a local power solution would be useful in some places, I would think.
The laws of physics didn’t need breaking when the heat pump was invented to circumvent theoretical limits. Maybe its that kind of deal. He has a phenomenal track record, might be worth waiting for.
It’s for example very easy to plop a tec (peltier) device onto something a bit warm, cool the other side with the surrounding atmosphere, and out comes electric energy.
Peltier devices have horrible efficiency. Juice would not be worth the squeeze.
ICE cars generate an incredible amount of waste heat.
80% of what you put into a gas tanks is just wasted as heat.
Certainly, anything that can improve on the efficiency of thermometric conversion, let alone a solid-state device would be great news with wide-ranging positive ramifications. Especially over the massive range of scales that is claimed. Let’s see if the concept can deliver.
The company describes this generator as a solid state device, but the diagrams show the reliance on fluid/flow of hydrogen between the hot side and the cold side for moving some protons around. That seems to be something in between the semiconductor-based solid state thermoelectric generators that are already commonly understood and some kind of generator with moving solid parts.
It still seems like a low maintenance solution to have a closed loop of hydrogen, but that seems like a potential maintenance/failure point, as well, to rely on the chamber to remain filled with hydrogen gas.
I’ll believe it when I see it. I kinda get the impression that the primary purpose of this article is that…
McQuary said it expects to begin another round of fundraising soon.
I don’t disagree, but the article also mentioned that they’ve already sold their first commercial deployment so I don’t think it’s entirely vaporware…?
you mean like Tesla solar tiles???
Only if we want more AI. And we don’t.
…and electric cars. And green energy.
We’ve had electric car in a major capacity since the late 2010s, why is it all of a sudden this big problem?
AI is a major energy consumer, requiring their own damn nuclear reactors.
I can’t imagine we currently produce enough electricity for every car to be electric.
Plus all the production processes for the cars themselves, and the energy to power them puts off waste heat. Even solar panels benefit from running cooler by having heat removed from them.
Its been a problem for a very long time now, electric cars require large amounts of electricity to charge and that needs to be supplied through the residential grid. Higher use of electric cars means more electricity necessary. Electric cars usage is still going up and that is not likely to change soon. As for the more important part: Lots of power plants are not green, and replacing them means building more power generators. This device converts heat to (green) electricity. How could you possibly see this as a negative?
This device converts heat to (green) electricity. How could you possibly see this as a negative?
in theory.
Lots of these startups fail on practical applications.
We can cover the current population of EV used, but we couldn’t cover the full population of car users on evs. Which means we need to expand our power production.
And given that most people are likely charging at night when production decreases…
…they should charge at work during peak solar and run their homes off their car batteries at night. That’s where you were going, right?
You going to force companies to provide chargers in their parking lots? Hell, plenty of people have to pay their employees to park their car at work already. You think they’re just going to give free electricity?
And no, my point was we don’t have enough electricity for a full population of evs regardless of when they charge them
Mine was kinda that we do if we could adjust our patterns and habits a little bit to live with the world as it is vs imposing ourselves on it. Forcing “companies” (read corpos) to do something other than maximize extraction is a big part of that
A lot of grids have put battery storage into operation so there’s not nearly as much curtailment during the day time anymore
no it doesn’t
