An explainer on how to avoid falling for energy technology scams! Anyone can learn to apply the first two laws of thermodynamics to separate actual developments from perpetual motion machines.

In my work as a consultant developing renewable energy and sustainability technologies I am often shown a new technology and I need to quickly assess whether it has promise. I don't have time to understand the intimate details of every energy technology that comes my way, but luckily first law of thermodynamics and the second law of thermodynamics provide a kind of short cut to assess whether the new tech at least obeys the laws of physics.

In this video I use the interesting example of hydrogen to illustrate the process I use to quickly sort the free energy scams from real engineering. Water-as-fuel and hydrogen fuel cells are both examples of a hydrogen car, that claim to provide a solution to climate change but the former doesn't obey thermodynamics chemistry laws, so it is a scam. I will show you how you can check a new technology without needing to understand every detail of it.

Concepts covered in this STEM education video include energy transformations for fossil fuels and other electricity generation methods, enthalpy and entropy.

This video is based on an article I published in The Startup publication on Medium:
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-avoid-falling-for-energy-technology-scams-93a73d306d55

Sources for footage:
Water to hydrogen reaction: By JSquish - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29669662

Fuel cell and water splitting animations: Energy 101 video U.S. Department of Energy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons


#technology #science #stem

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