Coming Soon - Free Energy!

Imagine a world where cars run on air instead of petrol. Where heating for homes gets extracted from the air that circulates naturally around the home. Where fossil fuels are no longer burned, electricity comes from giant windmills, and coal mining and oil rigs are a thing of the past.

Forty years ago a home computer was unimaginable. Twenty years ago electric cars were a dream for the future. But the future is here, or at least it could be with the right backing.

An inventor in France has designed and built prototypes of cars that run on air instead of petrol. They operate using tanks of compressed air as 'fuel', and at a fraction of the cost and pollution of existing vehicles. The manufacturer is hoping to have them for sale within a year or two.

They would benefit from more investment in the technology involved but the car companies, who make millions of dollars from existing technology, seem curiously unwilling to help out.

There has been a slightly better take-up of heat-pumps, at least in countries where fuel is expensive – in France and several other European countries heatpumps are now quite commonly used, for example.

There are various types of heat pump, but the general principle is that they extract heat from the ground or air that surrounds your property, and use the energy extracted to heat the inside of your property.

The process is best imagined as the reverse of a fridge. A fridge extracts the heat from the air to create a cold environment and pumps the heat out of the back. A heat-pump does the same – pumping heat out of the air and into your home.

Some electricity is involved in the process, and a typical heat pump uses one unit of electricity for each four units of heating energy created, but the cost of this form of heating works out cheaper than almost any other (except woodburning, if you have access to free wood for heating).

The future is just around the corner, and could arrive very soon with the backing of governments and large corporations. It is our duty to help bring these efficient energy sources to the public attention so that the dream becomes reality as soon as possible.