Wu Chin-tu (吳金塗), a Taiwanese engineer, had long toyed with the idea of using magnetic fields to create a perpetual energy source. Solar energy is the world’s most abundant resource, but its present-day inefficiency and difficulties in energy storage leave it woefully underutilized.
In the past, many have tried to set magnets into perpetual motion to generate a continuous electric current, but all previous efforts have been inevitably thwarted by a combination of air resistance and friction.
Wu could not figure out how to overcome these obstacles until, one day, he found himself on an airplane pondering the inner mechanisms that propelled the plane forward.
Suddenly, a light went off.
The blades in power jet engines spin in a way that creates a quasi-vacuum within the turbine, eliminating air resistance and friction. Would a turbine-shaped array of magnets create a vacuum powerful enough to enable perpetual motion?
After nearly a decade of strenuous research and lots of failed experiments, Wu finally has an answer to this question. Along with Amis indigenous tribe member Karo Fono, Wu has discovered a method to amplify the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries using magnetic fields—a potential breakthrough in the storage of solar energy. Their next step: Bringing this technology to remote, off-grid indigenous villages in the mountains of Taiwan.
The Need for a Perpetual Magnetic Generator
Every hour, the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth is more than the planet’s total annual energy consumption. This statistic debunks the idea that modern civilization would collapse without fossil fuels—and yet, solar accounts for less than 5% of the world’s total energy generation.
The reason for the vast chasm between available and captured solar energy is, in a word, inefficiency. For starters, solar panels themselves are painfully inept at converting solar radiation into electric current—the most efficient solar cells operate at just 22.2% efficiency, while the average hovers around 15-17%—making solar panels incredibly land-intensive. For example, if Taiwan, an island with a total installed electricity capacity of just over 41 gigawatts, were to install enough solar panels to meet total electricity demand, it would occupy an area of approximately 35,980 square kilometers, roughly equivalent to 21 Taiwans.
Secondly, solar panels only generate electricity when the sun is shining. To counteract this, many companies are working on developing high-capacity lithium-ion batteries. But even the Tesla Powerwall—the Mount Everest of lithium-ion batteries—only has a capacity of 13.5 kilowatt hours, just enough to power an air conditioner for four hours.
The best hope for solar is thus to increase solar panel efficiency and improve energy storage—and Wu and Karo Fono hope they have the answer with a generator they call tSG.
Wu Chin-tu created an electric generator that amplifies the stored electricity in lithium-ion batteries using magnetic fields.
Using Magnetic Fields to Store Electricity
In the current prototype of tSG—short for “Transfer, Store, Generate”—an electric current, supplied by a battery, kicks the magnets into motion. The magnets rapidly rotate around each other, creating a quasi-vacuum and generating an electric current that can power other appliances.
The current model is able to amplify 800 watts of electrical input by over 500%, generating five kilowatts that can be used to power air conditioners, washing machines, lights, and other small appliances. A small portion of the generated electricity will also be funneled back into the lithium-ion battery, creating a continuous system.
Wu and his co-founder, Karo Fono, have already received patents on the technology and have conducted tests at a few dozen sites across Southeast Asia. tSG is now drawing water from a well in rural Vietnam—replacing the draft animals that used to power the process—and is running the filtration system on a shrimp pool in the southern Chinese province of Hainan, offering an emissions-free energy source to replace the diesel-powered electric generator that came before it.
At this point, Wu and Karo Fono have already worked out most of the kinks of the prototype—and they now want to take tSG to remote indigenous villages in Taiwan.
The magnets are assembled in a turbine shape to create a quasi-vacuum within the generator to enable nearly perpetual motion.
Taiwan is an electronics manufacturing hub and the world’s 17th richest country. Perplexingly, it is also one of the only industrialized economies with a rural electrification rate below 100%.
Around 1% of Taiwan’s population, largely residents of mountaintop indigenous villages, still go without electricity.
As young indigenous peoples have flocked to the cities to make a living, these mountaintop villages have been mostly abandoned; besides just a handful of mostly elderly people, only empty houses remain. Karo Fono believes much of this emigration can be attributed to the off-grid nature of many mountaintop villages.
“A lack of electricity forces young people to make an impossible choice. Stay, and choose not to participate in the modern economy—thus sacrificing your children’s education and completely isolating yourself from the rest of society—or move into the city to exchange labor for money,” he says.
But Karo Fono thinks that by bringing clean, emissions-free electricity into villages—already flourishing ecosystems rich in biodiversity—you can open up economic opportunities in ecotourism and handicrafts, preserving traditional aboriginal lifestyle without isolating aboriginals from the modern economy.
“There’s a lot of things you can learn living in the mountains,” he says, “but mountain life has been so far removed from modern society that most people don’t have a chance to see and learn about it.”
He hopes that clean electricity will allow more people to visit the villages and learn more about indigenous culture and ecological conservation.
In 2018, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs announced a plan to subsidize renewable energy in indigenous villages. While this plan seems to mostly allude to solar panels, Karo Fono believes that tSG is a much better alternative—and he hopes the government will support their efforts to bring this sustainable energy source to remote regions across Taiwan.
Later this month, Karo Fono and a team of indigenous peoples will be bringing one of the tSG generators to an isolated indigenous village for a test drive. They hope this will be the first of many successful initiatives to bring clean energy to the mountains of Taiwan.
“tSG can provide a clean energy source for aboriginal people—and the whole world,” he says.
“But without the government’s support, our only choice is to install tSG tribe by tribe, relying on the strength and resilience of aboriginal people to make it happen.
“We’re bringing clean energy to the tribes either way, but we hope the government can join us.”
Karo Fono (far left) and Wu Chin-tu (2nd left) want to bring sustainable energy to remote indigenous tribes.
(Cover photo by Jukka Niittymaa on Pixabay, all other photos by Madeleine Work)
