A
Canadian engineer has a plan to extract
energy from a man-made tornado.  It all depends on heating the air near the surface so that it is much warmer than the air above.

Convective air currents are only useful if they can be
channeled in some way. That is why Louis Michaud proposes using a tornado
as a kind of drinking straw between the warm ground below and the cold
sky above. Wind turbines placed at the bottom could generate
electricity from the sucked-up air.

Tornadoes
and hurricanes form when sun-heated air near the surface rises and
displaces cooler air above. As outside air rushes in to replace the
rising air, the whole mass begins to rotate.

Michaud
got the notion of a man-made tornado — what he calls the Atmospheric
Vortex Engine (AVE) — while working as an engineer on gas turbines.

The AVE structure
is a 200-meter-wide arena with 100-meter-high walls. Warm humid air
enters at the sides, directed to flow in a circular fashion. As the air
whirls around at speeds up to 200 mph, a vacuum forms in the center,
which holds the vortex together as it extends several miles into the
sky.

The concept is similar to a solar chimney
with the swirling walls of the vortex replacing the brick walls of the
tower. With
wind turbines at the inlets to the arena, Michaud calculates that as
much as 200 megawatts of electricity (enough for a small city) could be
extracted without draining the vortex of its power.  The AVE could get its warm air from the exhaust of a power plant.

"Most power plants reject more than half of the heat that they make," he said.

While this sounds absolutely fascinating, I wonder what the neighbors would think...

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