Stay green

            Some things that we could do is plant more trees, open windows and turn the AC off when it is warm outside to use less air-conditioning, and to upgrade the two cylinder AC to a four cylinder AC.

            This previous change would cool/heat the upper and lower levels of the building. This would distribute the same amount of hot/cold air, but it would spread the effect out.

            We could also switch all of the double pain and single pain windows up to a triple pain.

That may work in making the building more energy efficient, but what if we change where the energy comes from? Since it would be hard and impractical to ask for the power company to change the energy sources, maybe we could make energy at school. One way to do that would be to put solar panels on a lot of our spare roof space. That would provide some electricity, but with today’s solar technology, we would still need a lot more power. Also, solar panels are pretty useless on cloudy days, or at night. We could use them to charge batteries to rely on at times, but a better idea has been pushed by some members of the group.

 A Canadian engineer named Louis Michaud has proposed an “Atmospheric Vortex Engine” that would use heat to create an artificial tornado that could reach 30 feet wide and several kilometers high. After a bit of energy to start it, the tornado would continue to spin as long as constant heat was supplied. It would not be able to escape from the base unless the air around it was as hot as or hotter than the base’s air, which would be almost impossible.

How does this work? Hot water is pumped through pipes under the base. Energy is used to spin fans to send cold, dry air against the tubes. The air picks up heat, and as it rises, spinning into a vortex. The fans would be turned off and the vortex would continue to suck up air to fuel it. The tornado would then spin the fans, making them act as wind turbines. This generates a lot of energy. No one has yet built a full sized one, but test of 1 meter high vortices have been promising.