Discovery News now reports that a group of physicists want to teleport energy, which would move from one place to another without traveling into the space in between, which would mean no more line losses.
The implications are fairly staggering. Currently, line losses take 2/3rds of all energy produced. To use a watt of power at your house, the power plant has to make 3 watts. The other 2 are lost as heat somewhere along the way. With teleported energy, we would only need 1/3rd as many operating power plants. Which would be larger, with massive teleportation rooms.
How would teleportation work? Entanglement. Electrical devices in your home would "pull" the entanglement, and receive power. On the other end, the entanglement would suck power from the power plant's grid. (There's no free lunch -- if the plant's grid has no power, then pulling the entanglement gives you a fat lot of nothing.)
2 comments:
Entanglement is dasterdly to maintain, according to a book I'd been reading (you might enjoy it - Physics of the Impossible). I think warm temperature superconductors will be a better bet in the near run.
Just think how big our line losses would be if Edison had his way!
Entanglement reminds me of fusion power. Technically possible, promises beyond our wildest dreams, but totally impractical to maintain.
Actually, wait, that's wrong. People are actually building fusion power stations now that are getting close to net generation. (Close, but not quite enough yet.)
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