I’m a bit bored after that whole Nikkogen thing and looking for something fresh to get my teeth into, something new. Even the intellectual charnal house that is Mad Mel Phillips is not going to be enough today.

So, I as delighted to stumble across the sententious musings of Anthony Browne, chief political correspondent in The Times, on the subject of Christian opposition to the upcoming Sexual Orientation Regulations, or as we prefer to call it at the Ministry, flagrant homophobic bigotry.

Emboldened churches join forces to scupper new law on gay rights

The letter from Haringey council came as a shock. Gosia Shannon, a Polish immigrant, had been running a flourishing centre for isolated Eastern European families with pre-school children in the North London borough. But the council was threatening to withdraw all funding and close the group by the end of this month.

A fortnight earlier the group had made the mistake of voting to include the word “Christian” in its name, and the council discovered that it had a habit of singing songs about Jesus. In particular, a council official said that “Gosia’s attitudes toward gay parents worry me”. To keep its funding, the group would have to stop all religious activity and pledge to be open to Eastern Europeans regardless of their sexual orientation.

Ms Shannon insists that she welcomed the one lesbian couple who visited. “We don’t promote homosexuality but we welcome homosexuals. They are trying to impose their own culture on us, not the culture the community wants. Christianity is part of who we are.”

And we’re off to the flyer with that grand old staple, the ‘loony’ left, obsessed-with-political-correctness, Labour-controlled, London Borough Council.

Except…

This has almost certainly got fuck all to do with the views of a single, unnamed, council official on whether or not the group is sufficiently open to the gay community.

It turns out this particular project is funding via Sure Start, and in common with many, if not most government funding programmes, one of the many things that is excluded from being funded by such programmes are specifically religious activities.

Playgroup = money. Godbothering = no money.

This is not difficult to understand.

One might well think that the officer who wrote to the group threatening to pull its funding was being rather overzealous, and indeed, within a day of the letter going out, Haringey Council withdrew it and invited the centre leader to discuss their funding situation, and I can’t say that I’d disagree overmuch in relation to the main issue that was raised, that of teaching tots traditional Polish Christmas song - it’s a catholic country, for fucks sake, so what do they think they sing about at Chrismas? Tractors?

Nevertheless, other advice given to the group, about the inadvisability of making too much of its Christian values and the seeming omission of a statement in its constitution committing it to not discriminate against homosexuals is actual valid advice. The fact is, a Christian voluntary groups know this perfectly well, many funders will not give funding for specifically religious activities. The Awards 4 All programme, which distributes small ‘lottery grants’ will not fund ‘activities promoting religious beliefs’, thats the exact statement in their guidance for applicants.

That doesn’t that religious groups cannot get funding, far from it, but it does mean that the primary purpose of the funding must not be simply to push their beliefs down the throats of others, it must do somethiing else, like provide a playgroup, or a bingo club or lunch club or any one of myriad of other things, just not primarily or exclusively promote religious belief.

Likewise many funders want to see an equal opportunities statement, either in the group’s constitution or as a separate policy, and those funders do look for significant omissions in the wording of such a policy. You won’t, usually, hit a problem if you neglect to mention trans-gendered people explicitly - who can recall everyone? - but miss out on any of the main classes of discrimination; gender, ethnicity, disability or sexuality, and you could hit problems.

It’s perfectly reasonable to point out the facts of voluntary sector funding, and its then up to the group to decide whether to come into line with mainstream funder’s expectations or take their chances and leave themselves with a much smaller range of funding opportunities.

What Haringey council is trying to enforce with its purse strings, the Government is attempting through legislation. Religious groups are outraged that, from next April, it will be illegal to discriminate against homosexuals or transsexuals when providing goods and services. The clash between religion and secular liberalism is stirring high passions and has even brought threats of civil disobedience.

What a load of bollocks. Haringey isn’t trying to enforce anything with its purse strings - its a take it or leave it deal, you either meet the criteria under which we give you taxpayers money, or you don’t and you raise the money you need somewhere else. There is no basic right, divine or otherwise, to local government funding for a voluntary sector playgroup or any other project for that matter.

And as for this presumed clash between ‘religion’ and ’secular liberalism’, why don’t we just call it for what it really is, a clash between archaic, irrational bigotry and common-sense rationality.

The row has been rumbling on since the law was proposed last year, but exploded this week when the Government laid down the Sexual Orientation Regulations for Northern Ireland, to come into force from January 1. It provoked a political storm in the Province, while a group of black pentecostal churches took out a full-page advertisement in The Times in protest that the rest of Britain would follow.

The Catholic and Anglican churches have said that their adoption agencies, youth clubs and hospices might have to close. Christian bed-and-breakfast owners say they would shut rather than be forced to allow gay couples to sleep together in their house. The churches claim that Christian printers could be sued if they refuse to print gay literature, and that Christian bookshops could be sued for stocking denunciations of homosexuality.

Reading crap like this generally only provokes one reaction from me; ‘Well that’s real fucking Christian of you, isn’t it?’

The simple fact is that there are very few references to homosexuality in the Bible and most of them are, in one way or another, open to interpretation and subject to a degree of dispute as to the precise meaning of the passages - more often than not, what has been presented as general injunctions against homosexuality appear to relate far more to practices such as temple prosititution and have their historical origins in the rivalry between the Jewish priesthood, which eschewed homosexuality, and that of the priesthhood of Baal, which celebrated it.

It’s also the case that the vast bulk of these references come from either the Old Testement or from St Paul, who really was a dreary old mysogynistic bigot anyway.

As for the number one guy, Jesus, he had next to fuck all to say on the subject, and the four gospels certainly do not contain a reference to him every saying ’suffer the little children to come unto me… only not the shirt-lifters and carpet-munchers’.

In fact, if there is anything in the gospels that deals with Jesus’ attutide towards homosexuality it lies in a story told in Matthew 8:5-13 and again in Luke 7:2, which tell of a Roman Centurion asking Jesus to cure his ‘pais’ (that’s Greek, BTW) who lay paralysed or in agony and who was praised by Jesus for his faith.

Pais, which is the word used in the original Greek text of the passage in Matthew, translates roughly as a young male kept for sexual purposes by his adult ‘owner’ - ‘pais’ is the greek root word fron which the English word ‘pederasty’ is derived. In the version that appears in Luke, this word is omitted and the boy was altered to be a slave of interdeteminate age who was, eupheistically ‘dear to’ the centurion; one might say they were both very ‘earnest’ in their affections for each other.

This is the latest conflict in a wider war. Religious groups have been emboldened by their successes in forcing British Airways to drop its ban on a worker wearing a cross, and in getting the Government to backtrack on its threat to faith schools.

Andrea Williams, of the Lawyers Christian Fellowship, which has led the campaign against the gay law, said: “This is truly a clash of fundamental human rights. It would seem that, when these rights clash, the homosexual person’s rights trump the religious person’s rights.”

Oh look, its Andrea Minichiello Williams of the Lawyer’s Christian Fellowship, yet again.

I do love this particular organisation - a Lawyer’s organisation that doesn’t understand a very basic principle of human rights law; the right to hold a particular belief does not necessarily confer a right to manifest that belief in actions if such actions are unlawful and held to be contrary to the common good.

Rastas believe ganja to be a gift from god and an important part of their spirituality - doesn’t stop them getting nicked for possession.

Satanists might go in for sacrificing chickens - they’re still fucked if the breach animal cruelty and health and safety regulations when they do it.

And some Christians might believe they have a god-given right to act like a bunch of bigoted arseholes - doesn’t make it right and it certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t screw the bastards to the wall for unlawful discrimination just because they’ve got a book that says its okay. If someone owns a book on cannibalism, that doesn’t make it right to eat people, does it?

This seems to be the bit that these idiots struggle with, comprehension-wise - ‘god says so’ is not a rational argument and suffers from one major flaw, if someone doesn’t believe in your particular version of god then arguments like that cut no ice at all.

The campaign to bring in the Sexual Offences Regulations was led by Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights group Stonewall. Mr Summerskill reels off examples of anti-gay discrimination he encountered when he took up the job: “We were dealing with lesbians who were denied smear tests, and gay people being struck off GPs’ lists. Household insurance was refused. Older people were not being allowed to share rooms in a care home. These weren’t exceptions.”

Yoe see that’s really what we’re talking about here. Not some pissy bullshit about bed and breakfasts but crap like this, for which there is no possible justification. Yet to hear these bastards going on, you’d think that’s there an army of queers out there, carrying maps of every Christian-owned B&B in the country, just itching for the chance to pile in there and soil their nice Christian bed-linen with their abominatory bodily fluids.

“We going cottaging tonight, Lance?

Nah, fuck it. I thought we’s try that Christian B&B by the chippy, just to piss them off…”

As if…

So when the Government was legislating to introduce a commission for human rights, he persuaded the gay Labour peer Lord Alli to tack on an amendment to make it illegal to discriminate against gays when providing goods or services. The Government put it out to consultation and held a series of often embarrassing meetings with church leaders and gay lobbyists. It got such a huge response that the legislation was delayed by six months. A long official silence followed, only broken with the Northern Ireland decision last week.

Vincent Nichols, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, has threatened to withdraw co-operation over schools and adoption agencies. Catholic priests are being urged to preach to their congregations and ask them to write to the Government.

In the Church of England, the Right Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, has said that church youth clubs and welfare projects may have to close. “In these proposed regulations there is no clear exemption for religious belief, even though it is widely known that several of the faiths in this country will have serious difficulty.”

And that’s the threat is it? Do what we say or we’ll take our ball home?

Fuck ‘em, much of this stuff they’re talking about relies on state funding in the first place, and if they’re not going to do it, there’s plenty of voluntary groups out there that would be glad of the cash injection and the chance to do a bit of good for all their local community. not just those who buy into godbothering in a big way.

If the Catholics don’t want to cooperate on schools, don’t fund their schools - it’s not as if the fuckers are short of few quid, so let’s see the Vatican sticking its hand in its pocket if its so all fire keen to run schools.

Seriously, if they want to play hardball then lets just call their bluff and pull the plug on public funding for faith groups that won’t accept the new regulations. Look at it this way, if what these groups are genuinely about is social welfare, good works and charity then it shouldn’t matter one bit who comes wandering in the door, gay, straight, black, white, whatever. The Bible says ‘love thy neighbour as thy self’ and doesn’t carry on to say, ‘…but not the queers, obviously - you can hate them if you like’.

The right to discriminate only matters if you’re not really, deep down, motivated by Christian charity but see your little community project as kind of religious timeshare presentation to sucker in the unwary so you can preach at them, and if that’s you’re motivation then you can fuck right off as far as I am concerned, especially when you want the taxpayer to cough up for it.

But the strongest reaction came from Britain’s conservative black church groups, who took out the Times advertisement. One of the leaders behind it, Alfred Williams, of the Christ Faith Tabernacle in New Cross, said: “People think it is better to die than to sin against their God.There will be a spontaneous reaction. There will be civil disobedience.”

Better to die than sin against god? Not the best thing to be saying right now, not if you don’t want MI5 round to pay you a visit.

There will be civil disobedience? Oh this is too fucking good for words. The Christians are planning to go on strike…

Mwahahahahahahaha!!! Who the fuck’s going to notice.

Can you just imagine this shit in practice?

More tea, Vicar?

No, sorry, I can’t. I’m on a work to rule… 

What are they going to do. Shut all the churches on Sunday?

You just imagine the owners of Ikea reacting to that, ‘Oh, be still my beating profit margin’.

Cancel Christmas?

We’ll just have a week long Saturnalia party instead, I’m sure the Romans won’t mind…

Shut down the God Channel? Hey this is sounding better and better as it goes along.

How about mass suicide? They did, after all, say that Christians think it would be better to die than sin against god. In fact, after saying something like that, isn’t, ‘there will be civil disobedience’ just a bit of cop out? I’m prepared to die for what I believe, just not quite yet. Maybe in thirty or forty years time… peacefully in my bed… of natural causes…

Lets face it, martyrdom just ain’t what it used to be. There’s no sense chucking yourself fearlessly into the gaping maw of a hungry lion shouting defiently that yours is the one true god, not when you can stand outside your local church hall in the freezing cold with a few homemade placards, a flask of tea and a junior reporter from the weekly free paper.

The Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association urged “massive resistence to this religious pressure”. George Broadhead, its secretary, said: “This is a truly poisonous campaign by a large number of Christian organisations. They are seeking to rob gay people of their basic right to protection from unjust treatment.”

And lest we forget, that’s what’s really at stake here -not special or extra rights for gay people, just the same basic rights to live their lives free from irrational and unlawful discrimination that are enjoyed by everyone else.

That’s the real issue, the hypothetical B&B owner so beloved of these idiots campaigners - no I was right first time - idiots could not legally turn someone away and refuse them a booking because they’re black, or female, or have a disability, or , now, because they’re too young or too old, or even because of their religion, so why should we not extend the same basic legal protections against unfair and unlawful discrimination to gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

Give me a rational argument, here. One that doesn’t involve quoting mistranslated scriptures, the so-called word of a god I don’t believe it or which claims, falsely, that homosexuality is a mere lifestyle choice, something akin to choosing to wear a beret or drink Tia Maria or watch Countdown.
You can’t can you?

Not without arguing that its your inalienable legal right to be a bigoted, homophobic twat…

…which is true, you can’t legislate to prevent people being assholes, but you can legislate to stop them behaving like one, which is precisely what these regulations are intended to accomplish.

I’m basically a reasonable kind of person, which is why, following yesterday’s ructions with Nikkogen, I think its only fair that I explain in a little more detail why I’m rather skeptical about their proposed power generation system and the claims made for it, not least because, to fair to them, this also gives them a chance to respond in technical terms and demonstrate that they have overcome the technical limitations that are the cause of my own… err… uncertainties about the merits of their system.

Let’s set the parameters first - and don’t worry, I will try to keep out of the serious brain crunching physics as much as possible.

What Nikkogen are pitching is a sizeable power generation system in the 40-240 megawatt output range, which they claim will offer the following benefits:

# Zero Emissions – No harmful gases emitted from our Power Stations.
# Zero Carbon-Based fuel source – Does not use coal, gas or oil.
# Minimum ongoing costs – There are NO ongoing fuel costs only a small maintenance cost.
# Managed Power Generation – We can provide Zero-Emission Power Stations with Operating Staff, allowing non-utility companies into the power-generation industry.
# Modular design and low maintenance costs.
# Small physical “footprint” area for complete Power Station.
# No large storage yards and cooling towers are required.
# Location independent – can be built almost anywhere.
# Can be configured for grid or local electricity distribution – Where two or more nikkogen Power Stations are co-located.
# No heavy rail access required.
# Clean limited-noise operation.
# No dust or particulate emissions.
# No potentially harmful or dangerous gases or fluid storage required
# The whole power station facility is less dangerous than a Petrol/Gas filling Station– which we are happy to have located in our business and residential areas.
# Electricity generated available 24 hours, 365 days a year.

All very impressive, if it can be delivered.

What we also know, from communications with the company is this:

Our technology is not rocket science it’s a well proven system. What we have done is to apply the latest engineering technology to it. All I am prepared to say is that Its fluid based and it has an interesting flywheel mechanism. It provides enough continuous energy output to drive a single 3 phase electrical alternators sized between 40 Megawatts through to 240 Megawatts .

It’s not a perpetual motion machine as it’s not 100% efficient – what it does however is self regulate for increasing loads as the alternator output current increases.

So there’s a flywheel arrangement in there somewhere driven, in some way, by ‘fluid’ - quite how this is achieved or what the fluid actually is, is not made clear, but then with a patent pending you wouldn’t expect such detailed information anyway.

The last piece of information of relevance is that Nikkogen refer to this a ‘Prime Mover’ system, which unless they’re going to redefine the term as its currently used, refers to an electronic torque management system that’s already in use in conventional power generation systems (i.e gas turbine, oil, etc.) and which, from the technical information I’ve managed to trace, does indeed offer improvements in efficiency but at a premium in terms of capital costs - i.e. these systems are not cheap, by any means. but they do appear commercially viable so, somewhere along the line the benefits they provide must outweigh their initial capital cost.

Now for the science bit.

For the time being we’ll put the question of powering this system to one side and consider only what happens from the flywheel onwards.

A flywheel does not generate energy its, rather it stores energy (as kinetic energy) which can then be released to drive an alternator - and to be fair, a well designed and implemented flywheel can be a very efficient means of storing energy (anything up to 90% efficiency is possible), far more efficient, in fact, than a conventional chemical battery.

However, if you look at where flywheels are currently being used, what you find is that its pretty small scale stuff. Aside from cropping up in the area of electric cars, as in this patent - which, interestingly, describes a hydraulically driven electric motor that could be considered ‘fluid powered’ but at a much, much smaller scale than anything proposed by Nikkogen - the main uses of flywheel energy storage appear to be in some uninterruptable power supply (UPS) systems, but only as a shortlived last resort to enable an orderly emergency shutdown if everything fails, even the UPS, or as backup energy storage in wind-powered microgeneration systems, to keep the juice coming when the wind drops.

In terms of power output, the largest current project I’ve been able to find anywhere is a 50kWh system being developed by the Central Japan Railway Company, which aims to use a superconducting magnet to levitate the flywheel - giving near zero friction - for which the projected development costs are 1.1 billion yen. Now that’s not that badly priced for a high tech R&D project - a shade under £5 million at current exchange rates, but it does make for interesting point of comparison with Nikkogen’s proposed system. The Japanese system, according to its base specifications, will use a flywheel of approximately 2 metres in diameter, weighing 20 tons and rotating at 2000 rpm.

To get from this Japanese system to the kind of power output are promising from the smallest generation system necessitates an increase in the kinetic energy of the flywheel by a factor of 800, in fact more as the alternator will not be 100% efficient (this is impossible due to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) so to make matters easier we’ll assume 80% efficiency in the alternator, giving a nice round factor of 1000.

To increase the energy of the flywheel, you can increase its mass (actually you increase its moment of inertia, which is bit more complicated to work out as it depends on the shape and construction of the flywheel, but for our purposes here maas will do nicely) in which case the energy of the flywheel will increase in direct proportion to the mass - double the mass, double the energy.

Alternatively you can increase the angular velocity of the flywheel’s rotation - this is the more productive route as the energy increases in proportion to the square of the angular velocity - double the velocity means four times the energy, but this introduces massive stresses into the flywheel - and believe me, if anything were to go pear shaped with the 20 ton Japanese system while it was rotating at its full 2000 rpm, such a failure in the magnetic levitation system or the flywheel disintegrating under the stresses of its angular velocity, then you really don’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when it goes. 20 tons at 2000 rpm is a hell of a lot of momentum to have suddenly flailing around the place.

To upscale the Japanese system to the 50 megawatt mark that Nikkogen would need, approximately, for its smallest generation system, would require a 20000 ton flywheel rotating at 2000 rpm or a 20 ton flywheel rotating at something of the order of 63,000 rpm or some combination in between.

So far as I am aware - and I stand ready to be corrected - a flywheel energy storage system at the scale suggest is beyond current engineering capabilities and materials technology - the small flywheels used in some UPS systems, which run at speeds up from 40,000-100,000 rpm, have to be made of spun kevlar to withstand the stresses. The underlying science is basically sound, but a 40-50 megawatt flywheel is, so far as I understand the technology, too much of an ask at the present time.

However, to pursue this further, lets assume for the sake of argument, that Nikkogen could produce just such a flywheel energy storage system with a 40-50 megawatt capacity. That’s still only half of the equation - before you can store 40MW of power in the flywheel you got to generate at least 40MW (actually 45-5oMX, assuming 80-90% efficiency) to put into the flywheel to begin with.

Now, remember, leaving aside the fluid issue, Nikkogen are promising zero emissions, zero carbon and no ongoing fuel costs, which rather limits your options.

Hydrocarbons are right out, as Nikkogen make entirely clear, and with no ongoing fuel costs we can also rule out hydrogen cells and nuclear energy (as the fuel certain does cost money, and plenty of it). The system is also location independent, so we can forget wave/tidal power, water power (as in hydroelectricity) and conventional geothermal energy (for which there’s no working system anyway).

Unless anyone can think of something I’m missing here (millions of hamsters?) this leave three main conventional possibilities, wind, solar and a Sterling engine, plus the mysterious fluid drive mentioned in Nikkogen’s patent.

Again we butt against problems of scale.

Wind power could drive a flywheel energy storage system - indeed such arrangements are used in wind-powered microgeneration systems which store energy in a flywheel as a hedge against the loss of direction should wind drop off. But… and its a big but, the largest current wind turbines max out at 6MW output and comes in at a stonking 186m (610ft) tall with a diameter of 114m (384ft) - for perspective, Britain’s tallest building, Canary Wharf Tower, is 235.1m tall. To generate the 45-50MW input to the system, you’d need 8-9 of those, and some extreme good fortune with the planning system. A more conventional wind power solution, using the 90m towers one sees in commercial wind farms, would require 25 turbines as these deliver 2MW output.

As for Solar energy, we can forget the photovoltaic cells that people are most familiar with. At 7-17% efficiency they’re just not up to the job and even the best current system, which used solar energy focussed by parabolic mirrors to drive a Sterling engine (a heat engine) delivers only 30% efficiency at 1KW per square metre.

That said, a solar-powered Sterling engine system could deliver the kind of power input needed, but to put these requirements into perspective Southern California Edison are currently constructing the worlds largest solar installation, using Sterling engines, which will deliver, when complete, 500MW. The downside to this is this installation will require 20,000 generation units covering an area of 4,500 acres (19 square kilometres), so scaling down to match the requirements of Nikkogen’s smallest proposed plant would still require 450 acres. Oh, and solar-powered Sterling engines don’t tend to work well in British conditions, in fact they don’t work at all if its overcast, which rather puts a dampener on that idea.

Which, at last, brings us to the mysterious realms of fluid power, and as much as I think about it, I just can’t ’see’ it, if you get what I mean. The generate energy from a fluid medium, other than by means of chemical reaction, you have to get it moving somehow, either under gravity (as in the case of hydro-electric power), pressurising it or by generating convection currents by applying heat.

In all cases, unless to take advantage of potential energy arising from natural sources, natural height differentials, river flows, tides, ocean currents, you have to put energy into the system to get the fluid moving and out dear friend the second law of thermodynamics comes into play - you cannot get more energy out that you put in.

This all a bit dry, to say the least, so its time for a comic song, if not the comic song of all-time, by Flanders and Swann, which coincidentally also explains thermodynamics.

[Michael:] Snow says that nobody can consider themselves educated who doesn’t know at least the basic language of Science. I mean, things like Sir Edward Boyle’s Law, for example: the greater the external pressure, the greater the volume of hot air. Or the Second Law of Thermodynamics - this is very important. I was somewhat shocked the other day to discover that my partner not only doesn’t know the Second Law, he doesn’t even know the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Going back to first principles, very briefly, thermodynamics is of course derived from two Greek words: thermos, meaning hot, if you don’t drop it, and dinamiks, meaning dynamic, work; and thermodynamics is simply the science of heat and work and the relationships between the two, as laid down in the Laws of Thermodynamics, which may be expressed in the following simple terms…

After me…

The First Law of Thermodymamics:
Heat is work and work is heat
Heat is work and work is heat
Very good!
The Second Law of Thermodymamics:
Heat cannot of itself pass from one body to a hotter body
(scat music starts)
Heat cannot of itself pass from one body to a hotter body
Heat won’t pass from a cooler to a hotter
Heat won’t pass from a cooler to a hotter
You can try it if you like but you far better notter
You can try it if you like but you far better notter
‘Cos the cold in the cooler with get hotter as a ruler
‘Cos the cold in the cooler with get hotter as a ruler
‘Cos the hotter body’s heat will pass to the cooler
‘Cos the hotter body’s heat will pass to the cooler

First Law:
Heat is work and work is heat and work is heat and heat is work
Heat will pass by conduction
Heat will pass by conduction
Heat will pass by convection
Heat will pass by convection
Heat will pass by radiation
Heat will pass by radiation
And that’s a physical law

Heat is work and work’s a curse
And all the heat in the Universe
Is gonna cooool down ‘cos it can’t increase
Then there’ll be no more work and there’ll be perfect peace
Really?
Yeah - that’s entropy, man!

And all because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which lays down:

That you can’t pass heat from the cooler to the hotter
Try it if you like but you far better notter
‘Cos the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler
‘Cos the hotter body’s heat will pass to the cooler
Oh, you can’t pass heat from the cooler to the hotter
You can try it if you like but you’ll only look a fooler
‘Cos the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler
That’s a physical Law!

Oh, I’m hot!
Hot? That’s because you’ve been working!
Oh, Beatles - nothing!
That’s the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics! 

Right, so that’s thermodynamics, which is enough of problem to be tackling, except that if we’re dealing with fluid systems that we also, very possibly, will have to deal with turbulence as well.

I’m not even going to attempt to explain turbulence in any great detail, and certainly not the maths, which legitimately frightens even the particle physics mob. Put it this way, there is a wonderful, if apocryphal, story regarding the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was reputedly askedwhat he would ask God, given the opportunity.

His reply was: “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”

You get the general picture. Turbulence is a flow regime characterised by chaotic stochastic property changes, i.e. a complete bugger to deal with.
However, there is a lovely little poem by Lewis F Richardson, which nicely illustrates the problem:

Big whorls have little whorls
That feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.

Turbulence creates drag, and drag dissipates energy, so a turbulent fluid flow in inherently inefficient. Throw turbulence into the mix, and it’ll turn up unpredictably and where you least expect it, and you’re again losing energy from the system and increasing the amounts of energy you have to put into the system to begin with to get your required output.

From what I can tell about Nikkogen’s project, some of it makes sense, in principle, particularly the flywheel and torque management system arrangement which could well provide a very efficient means of driving an alternator to generate power - and were I approached about this in the context of a microgeneration system that claims to offer zero emission and a small (or even zero) energy cost using an established renewable energy source then I’d certain give it very good look over.

But, at the kinds of power output being talked about, I have to be skeptical and we’re talking of a system that exceeds any other existing/prototype system that I’m aware of by some orders of magnitude - the flywheel alone would appear represent a major engineering feat akin to leaping straight from a Greek Trireme to the SS Great Britain, never mind that simply to get that flywheel moving with sufficient energy to deliver 40MW of electricity would require, in a best case scenario, an input of 50MW of free, no fuel, zero emissions energy.

That’s not to say that the patent is entirely without merit. We have a saying in the Black Country, ‘Yo’m eyes am bigger than yer bally’ (your eyes are bigger than your belly), which describes situations in which someone is being vastly overambitious or overreaching themselves, and it strikes me that this could well be the situation here - the science might stack up at the small scales required for a scale prototype or even a working microgeneration system - a fliud-based heat engine, like a Sterling engine or the hypothetical Carnot Engine, coupled with flywheel energy storage is possible and, with the right engineering, likely to be very efficient - but I just can’t see that the technology will scale to the degree that Nikkogen suggest, at least not within kinds of timescales that venture capitalists consider in looking for a return on their investment.

Tim Worstall will have a better view of the ‘investment potential’ of this system but from my own economic laymans perspective, one has to wonder quite what the underlying business model is here, whether it is the actual delivery of a working power generation system or a South Sea bubble model in which the primary objective is to sell the possibility of such a system all the way to an IPO on the promise that what look to be pretty insurmountable technological hurdles, at the moment, could be overcome in five or ten years time, and then get out before the bubble bursts.
Having said all that, the one truly troubling statement in all this, knowing the history of flywheel systems, is this one:

It’s not a perpetual motion machine as it’s not 100% efficient – what it does however is self regulate for increasing loads as the alternator output current increases.

I could be misreading this statement, but this looks a little too suspiciously like the holy grail of all past flywheel systems, most of which tended to suggest magnetism rather than fluids as a motive force, the creation of a self or near self-sustaining feedback loop to drive the system.

The idea sounds plausible enough if you don’t understand thermodynamics - you get the flywheel rotating up to speed and then tap just a little of the power output of the alternator, which you feed back into the system (usually in bursts or pulses) to keep the flywheel turning.

The classic interpretation of such a system generally proposes the use of magnetic repulsion to push the flywheel - a simplified version of this it that you mount a magnet in only location one the flywheel’s edge with the north pole facing outwards, with a correponding electromagnet housed in the casing surround in the flywheel in line with the its axis rotation. As the magnetic section of the flywheel passed the electromagnet, you briefly shunt a pulse of electricity from the output alternator to the electromagnet which gives the flywheel a ‘push’ to keep it turning at a constant velocity, while tapping off the alternator’s output for the rest of the cycle as ‘free’ energy to be sold.

It sounds incredibly plausible, because, like a flywheel-powered ‘friction’ motor in a child’s toy, you’re just giving it a bit of push to get it started and then it appears to retain retain energy for a relatively long time after that push…

But it still doesn’t work because you cannot get more energy out of the system than you put in - the electromagnetic force generated by the pulse taken from the output generator is not sufficient to sustain the flywheel at a constant velocity, it doesn’t push hard enough, and the flywheel will eventually run down, just as a ‘friction-powered’ toy car will come to a stop.
You see that’s the thing about entropy - it’ll get you every single time.