Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Patrizia C Romeo Tomasini
Steve Mazan: This is our current energy electrical delivery system that we have.
Factory, to lines, to house.
You want to tear it down and replace it.
Robert Green: That's right.
The worldwide electrical grid
is too ill suited, dangerous, and too inefficient
to produce and convey electrical current.
In fact, it is proven to be dangerous and harmful
to the economies and the well being of people all over the world.
The electrical grid itself
is contrary to the products of electricity.
Electricity is not suited for long-distance transmission.
Which is where we're at, right?
We have a factory where we make it,
and then it goes along lines delivering it.
To get to your house, it's a long way.
- Right, and the reason is because
the longer the lines, the greater the resistance.
And that resistance
will actually take most of the electricity out of the lines...
- So we're wasting a lot - ... and convert it into heat.
The way the grid deals with that resistance
is to use huge transformers
to up the voltage to as much as 500,000
in order to force it through the lines.
That high voltage actually promotes
and encourages outages and failure
by defying another law of electricity,
which is that electricity always seeks the path of least resistance.
That high voltage actually causes the electricity
to try to evade and try to escape
and jump to a line or somewhere else.
- An easier route. - Right, an easier route.
- Then we have to bring it back down too, right? - Right.
- Homes don't take it like that.
- There are other transformers
that brings it down to low voltage - 120 volt - that we use now.
Those also cause more resistance.
All of these transformers actually take electricity away from the grid.
- Like you said, pretty inefficient.
- But when these transformers fail,
they fail because if there's a high demand of electricity
they get too hot,
and they'll actually burn out or shut down.
And that causes blackouts of huge areas.
There's really no way of -
But the most common outages are caused by trees,
that are in the way of the lines.
Then, of course, the other causes of failure
are things like - you already know this -
- I see trees all the time. They're always cutting,
on every street they're cutting down, trying to go around.
This is number two? [Laughters]
- Yeah, this is the second biggest cause of electrical failure.
- They seem like troublemakers, yeah.
[Laughter]
- Then you have the weather, is the third,
and fires, and accidents, and so.
- That looks like Michigan and Illinois, where I grew up.
- Then, what we also have to look forward to
is sabotage and cyberattacks in the future.
There's a cyber attacker. [Laughter]
- Those seem like maybe a drunken sabotage
and this one a zoo escape.
On a serious note, you mean even terrorism.
We're very susceptible to that.
- Right.
But besides that, the grid is just an ugly monster.
It's really not aesthetically pleasing.
You could see by these major lines and so on: it is not beautiful.
Why can't we just upgrade this system?
Why can't it be fixed?
There's just too much friction to overcome
and too much loss to friction.
And there's too much vulnerability
to all of these things that I have suggested before.
Utility companies have to have a huge staff on hand
for an occurrence that may or may not happen.
It's impossible to deal with that.
But actually, the failures and these grid blackouts, and so on,
have caused [a loss of] about $35-55 bn a year to our economy.
- That's a huge amount.
- If there could be an easy solution to this problem,
certainly they would have done it by now.
- Yeah, would have been there, done it.
Whenever we talk about energy,
the first two things people always come out with as the next solution
tend to be wind or solar, [those] are the two.
Could that be the fix you're talking about?
- Not really,
because wind and solar use the grid to transmit over the same lines.
Even when there is a power failure, these are automatically shut down.
These are intermittent energy supplies, so they really depend on the grid.
They can't even really help with power failures.
They can never replace the grid, by themselves.
- We are here in California, obviously.
Up north we have the big wind farms,
and on the way to Vegas you can see solar farms.
They are creating electricity,
but you're saying the delivery system ends up being the same problem.
- Right. - We could have the same problem, it doesn't matter if we fix that.
- Long-distance transmission is the problem.
- Is still a problem.
So what is the solution?
I'm told that you have a revolutionary idea on it.
- The only thing that can take the place of the grid,
we'd have to get rid of long-distance transmission.
- We'd have to do these things on the front, here.
- Right, we'd have to use a reliable source
of locally produced energy and fuel,
and it would work night and day in any weather,
which solar and wind doesn't.
Scalable for industrial and home use, all uses.
Very small footprint, and [it would] be invisible, essentially.
Not like the grid, which is not invisible.
It has to use renewable, carbon-neutral fuels.
From waste, actually.
And it has to be quiet,
and be able to operate in homes and in buildings.
Then, also, it has to provide energy on demand
that needs little or no backup or storage.
- Obviously, that's a lot.
To say the thing we need to replace would have to do all these things.
I assume you are going to tell me that this is part of the solution,
that we have something that could do this?
- Yes, the only thing that can cover everything on this list
is a modern piston steam engine.
There is one there.
- The old modern steam engines seem big.
They were running steamboats and stuff like that.
High steam pressure.
This is obviously not that.
- No, it's low-pressure steam.
But also, it can incorporate many functions
at the same time as producing electricity.
The efficiency and the simplicity
is really the high, for any system.
It can operate on any scale.
- This would be, maybe I would assume
this size would be the kind you'd have in a house?
- Yes, this could run a house.
- Just this engine, here, would run a house?
- Yes. - So obviously it would fit
in the same place that your water heater is.
- Yeah, it fits in with a heater tank.
You don't have the same kind of water heater
because this provides your hot water.
- It'd replace that too, with the heat excess coming off this.
- Yes. -You are saying we wouldn't have power lines coming in anymore.
We wouldn't have to worry about our power's coming from somewhere,
if the electrical grid goes down.
- That's right, it's independent of the electrical grid.
- No blackouts. It's just you. - Right.
- If you go down, your house goes down.
Your neighbor would be fine, everyone around you. - Right.
- You said it runs on renewable fuels.
What exactly are they? How do you describe them?
- Renewable fuels are any waste. Biomass is any living thing.
The source of the... - Soylent green?
- [Laughs] Yeah.
The source of the fuel
could be any of these things that I have mentioned here,
and basically things that fit in landfills.
In fact, this mitigates the need for landfill.
- It almost reminds you,
I think it was the end of the first "Back to the Future,"
where they're putting banana peels in, and that kind of thing.
- Yeah, it's everything.
- It could use that to power, that kind of stuff.
- That's right, any kind of biomass will work,
and that can be converted into biogas,
which can be delivered by the existing gas lines.
- The gas lines that are already out there
that some use for stoves, hot water and... - Yes.
- Are these engines, is this just a prototype?
Is this just an idea, or are these actual...?
- These are made today.
My company is making these engines,
but we also offer a patented technology
and offer licenses for the technology for developing complete energy systems.
So they are available online.
- As you said, this would be the one for a house,
but a building would have a much bigger [one]
- Oh, yes. They'd have large ones.
- And these are safe?
My idea of a steam engine
is an engine on a boat or something like that.
It's very hot and crazy.
That's not how it would be in your house.
These would make big advancements, I'd assume?
- All of the heat is used.
so it is taken away and used,
so you'd have your own heating system in the house,
and the heating system is what runs the engine.
- It runs that.
- And makes your hot water and your space heat.
Everything together.
- I'm told that even an engine like this
can keep recharging an electrical car.
- Oh yes, yeah.
This is a car that's being developed now in Singapore
that's a steam / electric car.
- One of these is inside there?
- Right, it actually runs on rice husks.
- Oh wow, so this is the new DeLorean, basically.
- Yeah.
[Laughter]
- That's great. That's amazing.
You mentioned all the things it would have to do
for people to even consider this as the alternative in the future,
but I'm told there are some other benefits
that this will provide, besides the things we need.
Yes, in addition to producing electricity, like I said before
it produces all your space heat, hot water, and your air conditioning,
as well as it can actually make its own fuel.
It can also be used for direct mechanical energy;
for water pumping, air compression, refrigeration.
Anything that you'd use mechanical energy for.
And it has water distilling capabilities,
so you can distill water with it
at the same time you're making electricity.
- So you'd be making water, clean water in your house.
- Yes, you can recycle your water.
It can recycle wastewater, even sewage water,
and convert it into reusable water.
But it also can run off of waste heat in industrial processes.
It can be used in geothermal,
and it's capable of giving energy on demand, of course.
It's suitable for greenhouses because it can run complete greenhouses.
Everything in a greenhouse can run off a single engine.
- You said this is obviously much more local.
People would have this in their house.
It takes away the grid, stops the mass blackouts.
It would work, obviously - we talked about solar and wind before.
It'd work in conjunction, but you'd have it locally
rather than a gigantic farm that you're receiving that power.
Right, it can work in conjunction with a home solar system.
It can actually run off of solar, itself,
because you can actually make steam with solar.
- Through the solar.
I'm told you have a schematic that shows us exactly how this happens,
how the steam engine provides all these things.
- 90 percent of electricity today is made with steam.
But it's made with fossil fuels and nuclear fuel.
- I don't know if you know Robert, I hadn't told you before.
I served on board a nuclear submarine.
Our whole idea was, we...
- Right, that runs with steam, too.
- You have the reactor just so you can make steam.
That's what it ends up being. - Right.
- But you're saying we could get rid of the reactor,
the dangerous stuff, the fossil fuels.
- Yes.
- And this is how.
- Right, this can run on biofuels instead.
But the way the steam is recycled in a utility system is...
Because they have to take the heat out of the steam,
in order to convert it back into water in order to recycle it.
- Yeah, the big cooling towers. - Yeah.
So they cool the steam by putting them through cooling towers.
Here's an example of cooling towers in a utility.
And this is just total waste.
A waste of energy.
All that waste, all that energy is just going into the atmosphere.
But with this system,
with a steam engine power system
it produces, instead of waste, you put it into your water tank,
and your space heat,
and it can make air conditioning and distill water at the same time.
When you are making the electricity,
you are using all of that waste heat for all of these processes.
- You mentioned the fuels,
and we were talking about the biomass and our own refuse kind of stuff,
like leftover banana peels and that kind of stuff to put in.
Are there other fuels being used today?
- There's a lot of companies
that are making biomass pellets and pellet gas.
They are also are making biogas, and they are making biogas systems today.
- So if you didn't have those things,
then there would be a provider of these pellets
that would power these things?
Yes, pellets are great for rural areas where you just put it into a hopper
and you just fill the hopper up once a week.
- Would you need a battery for this as well?
- No, that's the great thing about this.
You don't need large electrical storage.
You only need a few hours of storage,
so you really don't need those big storage batteries
like Elon Musk wants.
- He looks sad. - Sorry, Elon.
- [Laughter] You've let him down.
You are not going to use his batteries.
It's a pretty incredible idea, and like I said, revolutionary
that you want to tear everything down and start ...
This is probably where we start, today.
What's your vision for the future?
- The first thing, I'd like to burn
all of the utility poles that are in use today.
- Yeah, start us there. - That's a good start for now.
- Would you use that for fuel? It'd last. - Right, it'd last a while.
There are many different fuels that you can use,
but this is an example of the pellets.
In general, that industry
is another industry that's going to be growing up
out of this new system.
It can be made all locally,
from the local biomass and waste
that needs to be gotten rid of anyway.
- You see waste as our future, right? - Yes.
- That's revolutionary, Robert.
Robert Green, and his modern piston steam engine.
- Thank you. (Applause)