Validating Breakthrough Energy Concepts, a Discussion with George Hathaway
A sustainable energy transition and growing demands for energy will require creative and novel ideas in energy science to become reality. How should we evaluate novel claims? What are some of the most promising areas of research in breakthrough energy? George Hathaway is an experimental scientist and engineer whose career has focused on how to use experiments to validate novel and breakthrough energy concepts.
In the latest episode of Sustainability Leaders, George shares his thoughts with me on some of the most innovative areas of research on breakthrough energy currently underway and how he examines and validates such claims for inventors and investors.
Sustainability Leaders podcast is live on all major channels, including Apple
and Spotify.
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George Hathaway:
I'm hoping that we're on the cusp of some really new and somewhat radical ideas that will help us to move into a more sustainable energy future.
Michael Torrance:
Welcome to Sustainability Leaders. I'm Michael Torrance, Chief Sustainability Officer at BMO. On this show, we will talk with leading sustainability practitioners from the corporate, investor, academic, and NGO communities to explore how this rapidly evolving field of sustainability is impacting global investment, business practices and our world.
Disclosure:
The views expressed here are those of the participants and not those of Bank of Montreal, its affiliates or subsidiaries.
Michael Torrance:
Today I'm joined by George Hathaway, who's the founder and president of Hathaway Research International, a research and development laboratory. George has spent the better part of the past 50 years focused on renewable energy research and novel technology development, including at the forefront of breakthrough energy and propulsion physics research and experimentation. HRI's clients include inventors and investors interested in having inventions validated by independent experts. Our conversation will be about breakthrough energy technologies that could be part of the future of the energy transition. Welcome to the show, George.
George Hathaway:
Thank you very much, and I appreciate the opportunity to discuss these important issues with you.
Michael Torrance:
Well, let's start maybe with your background. How did you get started in your work and how did you decide to focus on topics like breakthrough energy and propulsion research?
George Hathaway:
Well, back in 1974, I graduated from U of T, Electrical Engineering. And my fourth year thesis was to extend a computer program that I had recently come across in a book called The Limits to Growth. And one of the authors, Jay Forrester, had produced a computer model called the World Model, as it turns out. We included energy stocks and flows as a distinct category, distinct from population, raw materials and pollution and other categories.
That exercise introduced me to the strengths and the weaknesses of computer modeling as well as the perils of continued growth at all costs. Shortly after that, and during the oil crisis of the 1970s, 1973-74, I was hired on as the wind energy expert at a new company called Middleton Associates in Toronto, which was an outgrowth of Pollution Probe at the University of Toronto. And then at about that time, I formed my own company, Hathaway Consulting Services, to extend that work that I was doing at Middleton Associates in renewable energy.
Then in about 2017, I renamed Hathaway Consulting Services as Hathaway Research, and what we currently do is provide specialized services in the areas of energy supply, transmission as well as use, and examining novel propulsion technologies, which have obviously a great connection to energy.
Our clients fall into two main groups, the inventors who are interested in having their inventions validated or not, by independent experts such as ourselves, and investors who are interested in having inventions that they're interested in funding verified by independent experts. Typically, people come to me when they cannot find government labs or universities or military to look at their ideas. Our mission is to evaluate new ideas principally and energy production and propulsion, and give a fair hearing as well to the sometimes bizarre claims of inventors for those ideas, which seem to me at least worthy of further investigation.
Michael Torrance:
It's very prescient because of course now the world is really in the midst of focusing on these kinds of topics about energy transition. One of the things that may be most curious to speak to you, George, is your work also in more unconventional and emerging technologies, and you've in your career, been exposed to some pretty novel approaches to energy creation. Can you describe some of that work and what concepts outside of the mainstream have you been looking at over the years?
George Hathaway:
Yeah, sure. There have been quite a few. Still today, the internet is filled with claims of devices promising free energy, and these range from simple magnetic devices with coils and different windings and stuff like that to electrostatic devices. And for instance, one of the more interesting technologies was centered on very powerful water arc explosions. That means driving a very high current electrical discharge underwater, and that was invented or developed by a professor at Northeastern University quite a few decades ago in his pursuit of low temperature fusion. He was considering that if we were able to produce a very large discharge in deuterium or deuterated, water as it's called, the hydrogen or the deuterons would fuse together and produce more energy than the energy required to make them fuse together. And what they were hoping to do is make them fuse together with a big high voltage, high current impulse into deuterated water.
That turned into a resultant experiment we did here and produced a massive amount of fog out of a barrel, you might say, where these two electrodes were placed in the barrel of a gun and water was put in the gun and the thing, made a big arc and a spark and water and fog shot out. And we estimated the energy in the fog by various means, projectile speeds and things like that, and said, "Wow, we're getting several times the energy in the kinetic energy of the fog than we put in, in electrical energy. Wow, we've got something here." But this was because the inventor himself, the professor looked at this from a particular computational standpoint. Namely, he assumed that what was being produced was fast fog from these electrodes.
Well, as it turned out, that was not the case. What was actually being produced was a pressure wave, called a shock wave, which produced fog at the surface of the water. Anyway, the point of the story is that in his case, he used the assumption of one aspect, of looking at one aspect of the invention to justify the calculation of energy output versus energy input. But when the actual physical phenomena was investigated, namely a shock wave rather than fog production, it turned out that the energy advantage disappeared.
Michael Torrance:
It goes to show the need for very carefully designed testing and experimental approaches to be able to validate those kinds of claims. Are there any types of novel approaches that you find most interesting or that really should be the focus of further experimentation and research?
George Hathaway:
There are new developments and understandings in basic physics that I believe are of great importance, and if you allow me, I'll just describe a few of them-
Michael Torrance:
Please do.
George Hathaway:
... that I think should be examined quite carefully. And it stems from the re-examination of something called the second law of thermodynamics. I don't want to get too deep in the technical aspects, but the laws of thermodynamics were developed basically just as the steam engine was being developed. And these laws pertain to how much work you could obtain from the difference between a hot source like steam and a cold source like regular air, which is a 20 degrees C, whereas the steam can be up to 700 or so C, and the temperature difference between those two bodies, you might say. And you apply a mechanical device between them and you can get work like a piston. A steam engine, for instance, can produce rotary motion from a piston going back and forth between a cold and a hot body.
And it was always assumed thereafter that the second law of thermodynamics, which said that you can only get energy out of a system when you cool a hot body to a lower temperature, has stayed with us as an axiom and an immutable law since for over hundreds of years. This law, of course, forbids the production of energy from within a system at a constant temperature. Well, work by a number of physicists and others have shown that under certain circumstances, this law, and I put that in quotes, is not inviolable. In fact, it is possible to extract work from this so-called isothermal bath and actually lower its temperature while doing so.
The circumstances however, have to be very particular including the requirement for highly asymmetrical systems and operation at the boundaries of certain systems. I'll give you some examples, too. Professor Sheehan at University of San Diego has demonstrated, and I witnessed it, a patent-pending energy producing device's fundamental component is something called the asymmetric membrane concentration cell. Sounds a mouthful, but this cell generates electricity from a concentration difference produced by a chemically asymmetric membrane. In other words, you have a liquid solution which has two concentrations, let's say of salt. More salt in this one, less salt in this one. Not higher temperature and lower temperature, but more salt and less salt.
And from that concentration difference and some other things, he's able to produce electrical energy. If you can imagine that a freshwater river flowing into the salty sea is a salt concentration gradient. It is envisioned in the future that concentration gradient cells such as his could circumvent the second law of thermodynamics and produce energy from an isothermal bath. The water flowing in, it's all the same temperature, but there's certain other differences like concentration differences, and he's demonstrated possibility.
Not only do you extract energy from such a system, but you can cool it at the same time. So the thermal bath that surrounds us, our air and water mostly at an isothermal condition, can be used not only to extract energy in the form of electricity, but can be used to cool. The apparatus can be used to cool that area. So you can imagine having novel kinds of air conditioners, for instance, which not only give you cooler air, but also you get a little bit of energy out of it at the same time. You don't have to put energy in. This is in the future, but Professor Sheehan has actually demonstrated such a cell.
There's another aspect of this whole thing. Professor Lee at Old Dominion University is showing that certain types of biological cells, like cells in the body, have concentration gradients that produce enough energy within the cell itself to make ATP, one of the building blocks of our biological existence. And let me see, I have a quote from Lee's recent paper. These processes that he's describing, these isothermal processes, which to most physicists would say, "Forget it, they don't work because they're violating the second law." "These processes," says Lee, "Isothermally utilizing endless and environmental heat energy can help to liberate all peoples from their dependence on fossil fuel energy, thus helping to reduce greenhouse gas CO2 emissions and control climate changes towards a sustainable future for humanity on earth." That's in an accepted scientific paper that has been published recently.
I'll finish with one more, if that's all right. It's the exploitation of quantum scale effects for extraction of usable energy from the quantum vacuum. These previous two ideas of Sheehan and Lee have talked about extracting energy from an isothermal bath, namely constant temperature, no cold and hot areas, something else. But there's a different way, a different avenue, which is the possible extraction of useful energy from the quantum vacuum field, as it's called, by using a technique involving something called a Casimir cavity, which is a device basically consisting of two very closely spaced plates, which exclude certain electromagnetic frequencies associated with certain quantum states.
But when physically coupling one of these Casimir cavities to one side of a specially designed electric diode, as it's called, professor Garret Moddel at University of Colorado, has demonstrated the extraction of small amounts of energy from the quantum vacuum fluctuations that are all around us, according to physics, and have been shown, from an array of tiny solid state devices. So that's another aspect of nature that should be exploited and has been exploited on a very small scale to show that there are other avenues of energy production that are just now being realized by extracting ourselves from the strictures of the so-called second law of thermodynamics.
Michael Torrance:
That's fascinating. So there are many types of more conventional approaches to renewable energy and the generation of energy more generally. Why do you think it's important to experiment and to test these kinds of novel ideas?
George Hathaway:
I think that, as I've noted with this re-examination of the second law of thermodynamics, there may be other aspects of conventional physics that are preventing us from looking in directions that we haven't really examined before. Even, I'll break out of the earth's surface to say there may be aspects of energy in the solar system, for instance, that heretofore astrophysicists have said, "No, there's nothing really there. It's all gravity. There's no electrical activity to speak of except there's some charge particles coming off the sun and making auroras and things like that."
Well, there may be aspects that we haven't examined yet of solar physics that would allow us to increase the efficiencies of the kinds of, certainly solar cells and other aspects of solar energy. These novel areas are just beginning to be examined, so perhaps funding will be able to be directed to these new ideas and to, I think, the greater benefit of mankind.
Michael Torrance:
What then, in your experience are some of the greatest barriers to successfully developing these kinds of breakthrough technologies?
George Hathaway:
One of the greatest barriers is public acquiescence in the status quo, as well as the lack of scientific and political focus on deeper understanding of the role of energy extraction, production, transmission and use, especially as it relates to the environment and how it contributes to climate change. This awareness, of course, has been going on in isolated instances and is certainly growing, but it needs to be emphasized at all times. It's this interrelatedness of energy and climate and our general wellbeing.
And I think the other aspect that we haven't been paying enough attention to is something called life cycle costing, and that life cycle costing, especially when applied to both energy technologies as well as to the human and the natural environment, is needed more than ever. And until, I guess, the general public and politicians and environmentalists realize that we have to know what the energy costs are from beginning to end.
And when I say energy costs and life cycle costing, I mean, for example, the difference between an electric vehicle and an internal combustion vehicle. Yes, you can look at just the energy usage per vehicle, but there's also all the energy required for extracting the iron ore and producing the beams and the shell and the glass and all that stuff. That needs to be taken into account much more and is, in my opinion, still a barrier to the complete understanding of the energy impacts of technology on our existence.
Michael Torrance:
They're important points. Then in terms of investors, and you do a lot of work to validate claims like this for investors, what would be just a few tips you would say they should keep in mind when looking at new and novel claims of breakthrough energy?
George Hathaway:
It depends on which area they're coming at the idea. We'll take an investor's viewpoint. Some of the investors I've come across are technically savvy. They have looked at the literature, not from an engineering or a physics perspective, but they have an overview of where this particular device that they're looking at might fit in. And they look at it from at least two aspects. One is, is it technically feasible? And secondarily, is it scalable to commercially useful devices and technology?
And what we've been trying to do is address both ends because without a knowledge of the technology and the techniques that are incumbent, required, I should say, to validate a new idea in the first place, it's not worth spending a lot of extra capital to determine whether the thing is going to be scalable and where it fits in at a marketing standpoint. So if it's possible that a device does pass muster, or technology or an idea passed muster technologically from a measurement standpoint and from all the other aspects I've talked about, independent replication and control experiments and all that other scientific stuff. Then it becomes important to take the pieces of the device itself of the idea and look at them from both the supply and the demand side, and not only from an energy supply and demand, but also the constituent parts that make up the device.
So, if the device is a wonderful, a beautiful breakthrough but requires what is colloquially known as un-obtainium, some kind of magic, extremely expensive alloy or something like that, its marketing is going to be different. It's going to be a niche market device. It's only going to be usable in wearable electronics or something like that. It takes some magic chemical composition, takes body sweat and converts it into electricity, which can then take your insulin check and transmit it to a doctor's office somewhere like that. Actually, those kinds of things are available.
But the point is that you have to understand not only the physics and the measurement aspects of the device, but also how it may grow and how it may be able to, maybe we should change this aspect a little bit, and if we do, we don't have to use this magic material or the marketing aspect may change. Maybe it's no longer useful for powering an electric toothbrush, but it might actually be much more useful in producing backup power for your laptop or something like that. And it has therefore a much greater commercial possible commercial market.
So we try to help investors look at the broader aspects of the markets for these energy devices as well as providing them with a verification or validation of the devices themselves.
Michael Torrance:
Great. And now in the last question, if we were to fast-forward to the year 2050 or 2100, what do you think our energy systems will look like?
George Hathaway:
Well, I'll put on my crystal ball glasses. I won't see very far, but I think there will be an added emphasis in the future on both increasing the transmission capabilities, and I'm not talking about necessarily energy production, but all sorts of other aspects of the energy system. And I concentrate generally on electrical. But anyway, I think there'll be added emphasis on both increasing the capabilities for transmitting electrical energy and other energies, maybe hydrogen or ammonia, which contains hydrogen, and increasing and enhancing the transmission capabilities.
And at least as importantly, the security of our electricity grid as well as improving the efficiency of the devices that use energy. And the increasing use of electricity in all aspects of life will be coming on in the future. Most notably, heating, cooling and transportation certainly necessitate an overhaul of the electrical grid across the globe. There will be new ideas, like there has been just recently certain kinds of farm agriculture underneath solar panels, especially when the solar panels are semi-transparent, and that's a new aspect of material science just coming in to show that, in fact, you can make windows for your house that produce electricity. Well, you can make large solar fields and grow stuff underneath them because there will be enough solar insulation.
So there's new aspects there that I think are coming up. I think the major change has been the world no longer takes energy for granted. That is, there's been an increasing awareness of the interconnectedness between our energy supply and use in the human natural environments. Now, the energy purview has been greatly expanded to include almost every aspect of life. So as to paraphrase where I started, the limits to growth are becoming more apparent. That's where you move ahead and we're facing some of these limits right now.
Michael Torrance:
Well, maybe that's a good place to end it, then. Thank you so much, George, for your time and sharing your experience and your thoughts on this topic.
George Hathaway:
Sure, it's been a pleasure.
Michael Torrance:
Thanks for listening to Sustainability Leaders. This podcast is presented by BMO. You can find our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player. Press the follow button if you want to get notified when new episodes are published. We value your input, so please leave a rating review and any feedback that you might have, or visit us at bmo.com/sustainability leaders. Our show and resources are produced with support from BMO's marketing team and Puddle Creative. Until next time, thanks for listening and have a great week.
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For BMO disclosures, please visit bmocm.com/podcast/disclaimer.
Michael Torrance
Chief Sustainability Officer
Michael Torrance is Chief Sustainability Officer of BMO Financial Group and is passionate about sustainability, especially as it pertains to corporate governance an…(..)
View Full Profile >A sustainable energy transition and growing demands for energy will require creative and novel ideas in energy science to become reality. How should we evaluate novel claims? What are some of the most promising areas of research in breakthrough energy? George Hathaway is an experimental scientist and engineer whose career has focused on how to use experiments to validate novel and breakthrough energy concepts.
In the latest episode of Sustainability Leaders, George shares his thoughts with me on some of the most innovative areas of research on breakthrough energy currently underway and how he examines and validates such claims for inventors and investors.
Sustainability Leaders podcast is live on all major channels, including Apple and Spotify.
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