An Energy tower is a new concept for producing electrical power for consumer consumption, the brainchild of Professor Dan Zaslavsky. An Energy Tower produces electricity by drawing the energy from the air around it.

Concept Summary

An Energy Tower is a tall hollow cylinder with a water spray system at the top. The water is pumped up to the top of the tower and then sprayed inside the tower which cools the warm air hovering at the top. The cooled air, being denser than the outside warmer air, falls to the bottom of the cylinder which causes a turbine at the bottom of the cylinder to spin. The turbine is connected to a generator which produces the electricity.

The tower should optimally be situated in a hot dry climate, which thus allows for the greatest extraction of energy from the air. Proximity to water source is important as well. This may prove a problem, however, due to the fact that in hot, dry climates, water can be relatively expensive, and hot dry climates near to large bodies of cheap usable water may be rare.

An alternative approach to this is the Solar Tower, which however requires huge diameter (up to 36 kilometres) agricultural glass house collectors to capture the solar heated air. Even though energy towers use some energy (about 50% of the turbine output) by having to pump water to the top and pressurizing nozzles, their advantage is that they require no such large collection areas, because dry air, if available, is continuously drawn at the top from the surroundings. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Solar Tower Buronga. ... A kilometre (American spelling: kilometer) (symbol: km) is a unit of length equal to 1000 metres (from the Greek words khilia = thousand and metro = count/measure). ...

From a purely financial point of view, Solar Towers may prove more attractive regardless, as land in hot, dry, areas of the world (such as deserts) is relatively cheap, and a glass collector would be a one-time up front cost, placing put the Solar Tower in a well understood asset class of high up-front cost investments that consume no inputs and generate constant revenue over time, such as bridges and toll roads.

Implementation

Currently, no known physical implementation of an energy tower exists.

External links and further reading

• "Concept Overview"

• "Solar Energy Without a Collector"

• Energy Towers: Pros and Cons of the Arubot Sharav Alternative Energy Proposal

• Evaluation of the global potential of energy towers