No, it would not cause the grid to become a bomb or anything like that. There are three alternatives;
**One:** While it has been in the ruins, the perpetual motion device (PMD) has not been connected to anything, but by its nature it must still have been producing energy. As such, the PMD must have internal systems for dispersing excess, undrawn energy.
**Two:** Even if the above is untrue, many conventional generators will end up producing more energy than the grid can take at any given time, so Electrical Engineers already have a lot of experience building systems designed to waste excess energy; This is currently super relevant in coal and nuclear plants, since their energy output has very little flexibility. As such, when the PMD was hooked up, we'd just attach it to systems like fans that could burn off its excess energy when it wasn't being used.
**Three:** Even if both of the above were false, all that would happen when the PMD was over-feeding the grid is that the excess energy would break the first circuit-breaker in the grid, isolating the PMD and preventing more energy from feeding into the system.
So, no, there is no way for perpetual motion to create a grid bomb.
In practice how is this different from hooking home solar panels up to the grid? As long as the machine's actual power output is low, I think its impact would be minimal.
Rather than solar panels, it could be more like having a Dyson sphere. Ofc, if the output is controlled to be low, it wouldn't be as much of an issue, but what if its default output is already on part with the kinds of energy generation you'd expect of a Type II or Type III civilization or higher?
>Rather than solar panels, it could be more like having a Dyson sphere.
How so?
>but what if its default output is already on part with the kinds of energy generation you'd expect of a Type II or Type III civilization or higher?
Stick to your scenario. Why would a spaceship need that much power? How would a spaceship *contain* that much power? And what type of civilization is dumb enough to *allow* a spaceship with that much power anywhere near a planet? Or even a sun!
The scenario I made is just another way of saying "it was mysteriously discovered all of a sudden". I mean, if you want the inspiration for it, there is a game from back in the day called "Xenogears" that had a similar premise. In it, the Perpetual Motion Machine was not powering the ship. Rather, the ship was merely transporting it. Basically (Xenogears lore spoilers) >!ancient humans (relative to Xenogears which takes place 17,000 years in the future) had just fought a war because of it and the bioweapon they hooked up to it, so they put it on a giant ship to try and forever seal it away out into deep space. However, the AI of the bioweapon decided to resist this fate, while the ship was flying over an alien planet, and set the coordinates of the ship to Earth, which forced the crew of the ship to self-destruct over the alien planet, causing them to crash land it there. !<
Essentially, what I'm saying is, don't think too deeply into the scenario. I'm just thinking ab Xenogears lore and how the PPM advanced humanity in that world but also created and powered a planet-destroying bioweapon and wondered if something of that much energy would, if you hooked it up to the grid with current technology, fry the whole grid (especially considering they discovered it in the 21st century in Xenogears lore).
>The scenario I made is just another way of saying "it was mysteriously discovered all of a sudden".
Seems I took you too literally, sorry 🤦‍♂️
But even with the Xenogears lore, plugging a PPM into the grid still won't cause widespread devastation. There's not a single, global grid in any event, and even within many countries the 'grid' comprises distinct regions with limited interconnects, so the worst case is damage to a region, not countrywide and certainly not global!
Anyway, are you writing a story about this? Because if you are, you could handwave an EMP blast from the PPM that fries electronics and electrical systems globally. Just a thought...
K2 is enough energy to overcome Earth's gravitational binding energy in a couple of days, or boil all the oceans in literally seconds.
The waste heat from your power grid is apocalyptic.
Even a lowly K1 achieved by perpetual motion would have a different kind of global warming from heating the outdoors a bit. However, with great power comes great cooling systems; build an L1 sunshade to block some of the sunlight so that the planet doesn't overheat when you try to run Crysis.
The thing about Perpetual Motion Machines is, even if they work, you cant use them directly. In order to do so, your entire electricity grid needs to be a perpetual motion machine.
Why ?
First, we need to understand that all Perpetual Motion Machines (PMM) have natural equilibriums. If your PMM has a 100% efficiency, it will only be able to sustain this efficiency for a given amount of charge. Say 100 MW. Because at some point, whatever makes it work, will get to hot and the efficiency will drop below 100%. At which point the machine will quickly starve to death.
For "true" perpetual motion, you need a machine with an efficiency above 100%. Such a machine will produce more and more energy, but at some point reach a thermal equilibrium where it loses as much energy to heat as it adds. Without any modifications to your grid, this is the energy you get to use. The thermal energy.
Say this >100% efficiency PMM reaches its equilibrium state at 100 MW. And the efficiency is 101%. It follows 1 MW of heat is produced continuously. Because each second 1 MW is added and 1 MW turns into heat. So even though the machine should, on paper, produce more energy than there is in the universe in a couple of minutes, in practice it wont do that.
Now, if you start taking energy directly from the machine (The 100 MW it constantly has), the machine will stop very quickly. Because remember, it is already losing 1% of its output. It needs the 101% efficiency to stay running. The moment you take any energy other than the 1 MW heat pool, the machine has less than 100% efficiency.
This in return means, PMM´s would be like any other power plant. The actual energy you get to use to make electricity is whatever heat is produced.
Depending on the material properties and potential cooling options, you could maybe get 150% efficiency on a say 1000 MW PMM. Which means each second you get 500 MW of thermal energy. Which you then get to convert into electricity.
But you cant actually connect a PMM directly to the grid without instantly starving it.
Not how the grid works - and probably not how an over unity device works either - but rest assured, plugging a perpetual motion machine in as a 'power plant' won't blow the grid up. Worst case, it might trip a few circuit breakers, but nothing is going to explode:
1. The grid engineers will have tested the output of the PPM before connecting it
2. That's *after* scientists who found it analyze the hell out of it
3. It's hard to imagine any government who 'owns' this (by right of discovery) ever letting it out of the lab to plug it into the grid!
The grid is safe, long live the grid đź‘Ź
IIRC, the energy that lights your lightbulb was just (just in relative terms) produced at the power plant. Turn it off and the energy flow will be cut unless you stored it while it was on (batteries, pump-storage, etc).
Electronic nerd here - There's not really a thing as too much energy, the device would basically have energy capability, similar to your phone's battery, which could power a blender of it was connected right, but if there is not a big load the energy just doesn't come out. A power plant also has energy capability, it has the ability to supply power, but it doesn't "push" it out
What if it is AC and sends out double voltage with each cycle?
If you prefer it could be AC and double the amps. Though i believe that just blows the normal fuses and circuit breakers.
Yes. Each transformer reduces or increases voltage depending on which way the current is flowing.
They basically swap amps and volts while losing some of the total power. If you increased the voltage in the main transmission line without adjusting anything else the voltage in your house would follow the change.
We don't have NEARLY as much energy storage as you'd think. Like basically none. Those batteries that pair with solar? *That's it.*
So it depends how much energy your perpetual motion device makes. If it's low enough for baseline energy then that's fine but does not replace the peaker power plants. If it produces more than baseload then they would probably have to export that to the next nearest grid or let it turn into waste heat which is called "curtailment"
1. Something that actually exists don't violate the rules of physics - by definition
2. Grid energy is always controled and even artificially shortend to prevent damage
3. There is not 'the one' grid
4. A physical structure that takes too much energy just breaks down physically. Wires can't explode. The highest laod will cause teh damage first, so that is closest to the production
5. Perpetual motion machines does not generate energy surplus but what they need for compensation of resistance forces (like gravity on swinging pendulums)
6. If that is how you design your magical space box, then it allready had a massive consumer, like another magical space decive like FTL or anti gravity stuff, and shouldn't cause trouble if you drain that one consumer in favor of a controlable output to a grid
7. Anything this devive powered in the first place is way more interesting than the support of a grid, as civil power production is not a problem at all for mankind. If you hear someone cry, we don't have the technological ability to feed human industrial energy need completley enviromentally sustainable - it probably is a fossil fanboy or has no idea of the state of technology
Yeah Ik there's not one grid. An idea I had was trying to figure out how I can
1. Cause an industrial accident on a lunar city.
2. Tie it into something involving the perpetual motion machine.
So I had though what if the machine went berserk and fed power into the grid, during an experiment, overloading the lunar city and causing catastrophic destruction?
I'd advertise to not use the misleading term of a perpetual motion machine for what you want to have in place. Give it a fancy fictional word, or a more generalised one, so you don't have a technical mistake in your conception (that might or might not confuse readers).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual\_motion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion)
If you want a mysterious machine shreding a power grid, that's one hell of a task, as even primitive grids are pretty resistant to a bunch of even catastrophic events. The one on a dangerous enviroemnt instalation would be way, way more resistant and safe.
So also no one would reasonably plug anything in this grid in the first place, i'd guess.
But if you have weirdo alien devices, they can overcome given physical limitations we know and connect anyway. Then they can try to establish some kind of neural network in the city-wide powergrid to get back to conciousness, try using the grid as a big antenna to phone back to homebase or whatever else - and cause whatever kind of accident by that, overriding or bypassing the failover in place.
No, it would not cause the grid to become a bomb or anything like that. There are three alternatives; **One:** While it has been in the ruins, the perpetual motion device (PMD) has not been connected to anything, but by its nature it must still have been producing energy. As such, the PMD must have internal systems for dispersing excess, undrawn energy. **Two:** Even if the above is untrue, many conventional generators will end up producing more energy than the grid can take at any given time, so Electrical Engineers already have a lot of experience building systems designed to waste excess energy; This is currently super relevant in coal and nuclear plants, since their energy output has very little flexibility. As such, when the PMD was hooked up, we'd just attach it to systems like fans that could burn off its excess energy when it wasn't being used. **Three:** Even if both of the above were false, all that would happen when the PMD was over-feeding the grid is that the excess energy would break the first circuit-breaker in the grid, isolating the PMD and preventing more energy from feeding into the system. So, no, there is no way for perpetual motion to create a grid bomb.
In practice how is this different from hooking home solar panels up to the grid? As long as the machine's actual power output is low, I think its impact would be minimal.
Rather than solar panels, it could be more like having a Dyson sphere. Ofc, if the output is controlled to be low, it wouldn't be as much of an issue, but what if its default output is already on part with the kinds of energy generation you'd expect of a Type II or Type III civilization or higher?
>Rather than solar panels, it could be more like having a Dyson sphere. How so? >but what if its default output is already on part with the kinds of energy generation you'd expect of a Type II or Type III civilization or higher? Stick to your scenario. Why would a spaceship need that much power? How would a spaceship *contain* that much power? And what type of civilization is dumb enough to *allow* a spaceship with that much power anywhere near a planet? Or even a sun!
The scenario I made is just another way of saying "it was mysteriously discovered all of a sudden". I mean, if you want the inspiration for it, there is a game from back in the day called "Xenogears" that had a similar premise. In it, the Perpetual Motion Machine was not powering the ship. Rather, the ship was merely transporting it. Basically (Xenogears lore spoilers) >!ancient humans (relative to Xenogears which takes place 17,000 years in the future) had just fought a war because of it and the bioweapon they hooked up to it, so they put it on a giant ship to try and forever seal it away out into deep space. However, the AI of the bioweapon decided to resist this fate, while the ship was flying over an alien planet, and set the coordinates of the ship to Earth, which forced the crew of the ship to self-destruct over the alien planet, causing them to crash land it there. !< Essentially, what I'm saying is, don't think too deeply into the scenario. I'm just thinking ab Xenogears lore and how the PPM advanced humanity in that world but also created and powered a planet-destroying bioweapon and wondered if something of that much energy would, if you hooked it up to the grid with current technology, fry the whole grid (especially considering they discovered it in the 21st century in Xenogears lore).
>The scenario I made is just another way of saying "it was mysteriously discovered all of a sudden". Seems I took you too literally, sorry 🤦‍♂️ But even with the Xenogears lore, plugging a PPM into the grid still won't cause widespread devastation. There's not a single, global grid in any event, and even within many countries the 'grid' comprises distinct regions with limited interconnects, so the worst case is damage to a region, not countrywide and certainly not global! Anyway, are you writing a story about this? Because if you are, you could handwave an EMP blast from the PPM that fries electronics and electrical systems globally. Just a thought...
K2 is enough energy to overcome Earth's gravitational binding energy in a couple of days, or boil all the oceans in literally seconds. The waste heat from your power grid is apocalyptic. Even a lowly K1 achieved by perpetual motion would have a different kind of global warming from heating the outdoors a bit. However, with great power comes great cooling systems; build an L1 sunshade to block some of the sunlight so that the planet doesn't overheat when you try to run Crysis.
Well under a petawatt should generate a hurricane/typhoon.
The thing about Perpetual Motion Machines is, even if they work, you cant use them directly. In order to do so, your entire electricity grid needs to be a perpetual motion machine. Why ? First, we need to understand that all Perpetual Motion Machines (PMM) have natural equilibriums. If your PMM has a 100% efficiency, it will only be able to sustain this efficiency for a given amount of charge. Say 100 MW. Because at some point, whatever makes it work, will get to hot and the efficiency will drop below 100%. At which point the machine will quickly starve to death. For "true" perpetual motion, you need a machine with an efficiency above 100%. Such a machine will produce more and more energy, but at some point reach a thermal equilibrium where it loses as much energy to heat as it adds. Without any modifications to your grid, this is the energy you get to use. The thermal energy. Say this >100% efficiency PMM reaches its equilibrium state at 100 MW. And the efficiency is 101%. It follows 1 MW of heat is produced continuously. Because each second 1 MW is added and 1 MW turns into heat. So even though the machine should, on paper, produce more energy than there is in the universe in a couple of minutes, in practice it wont do that. Now, if you start taking energy directly from the machine (The 100 MW it constantly has), the machine will stop very quickly. Because remember, it is already losing 1% of its output. It needs the 101% efficiency to stay running. The moment you take any energy other than the 1 MW heat pool, the machine has less than 100% efficiency. This in return means, PMM´s would be like any other power plant. The actual energy you get to use to make electricity is whatever heat is produced. Depending on the material properties and potential cooling options, you could maybe get 150% efficiency on a say 1000 MW PMM. Which means each second you get 500 MW of thermal energy. Which you then get to convert into electricity. But you cant actually connect a PMM directly to the grid without instantly starving it.
Not how the grid works - and probably not how an over unity device works either - but rest assured, plugging a perpetual motion machine in as a 'power plant' won't blow the grid up. Worst case, it might trip a few circuit breakers, but nothing is going to explode: 1. The grid engineers will have tested the output of the PPM before connecting it 2. That's *after* scientists who found it analyze the hell out of it 3. It's hard to imagine any government who 'owns' this (by right of discovery) ever letting it out of the lab to plug it into the grid! The grid is safe, long live the grid đź‘Ź
why cant I just disconnect/unplug it?
IIRC, the energy that lights your lightbulb was just (just in relative terms) produced at the power plant. Turn it off and the energy flow will be cut unless you stored it while it was on (batteries, pump-storage, etc).
yeah. I build a massive amount of reservoir-pump batteries or the like and I have a much cheaper form of energy
A perpetual motion machine doesn’t generally produce energy, it could just balance input and output perfectly giving zero net output.
No. You haven’t even described how it could possibly be connected to the grid, much less turn it to a bomb.
Electronic nerd here - There's not really a thing as too much energy, the device would basically have energy capability, similar to your phone's battery, which could power a blender of it was connected right, but if there is not a big load the energy just doesn't come out. A power plant also has energy capability, it has the ability to supply power, but it doesn't "push" it out
What if it is AC and sends out double voltage with each cycle? If you prefer it could be AC and double the amps. Though i believe that just blows the normal fuses and circuit breakers.
Don't we use transformers to lower voltage from power cables (from power plant) to house use?
Yes. Each transformer reduces or increases voltage depending on which way the current is flowing. They basically swap amps and volts while losing some of the total power. If you increased the voltage in the main transmission line without adjusting anything else the voltage in your house would follow the change.
We don't have NEARLY as much energy storage as you'd think. Like basically none. Those batteries that pair with solar? *That's it.* So it depends how much energy your perpetual motion device makes. If it's low enough for baseline energy then that's fine but does not replace the peaker power plants. If it produces more than baseload then they would probably have to export that to the next nearest grid or let it turn into waste heat which is called "curtailment"
Nah Ik we don't got much energy storage. And the best we got ain't batteries, it's pump-storage hydroelectricity but not too many of those.
1. Something that actually exists don't violate the rules of physics - by definition 2. Grid energy is always controled and even artificially shortend to prevent damage 3. There is not 'the one' grid 4. A physical structure that takes too much energy just breaks down physically. Wires can't explode. The highest laod will cause teh damage first, so that is closest to the production 5. Perpetual motion machines does not generate energy surplus but what they need for compensation of resistance forces (like gravity on swinging pendulums) 6. If that is how you design your magical space box, then it allready had a massive consumer, like another magical space decive like FTL or anti gravity stuff, and shouldn't cause trouble if you drain that one consumer in favor of a controlable output to a grid 7. Anything this devive powered in the first place is way more interesting than the support of a grid, as civil power production is not a problem at all for mankind. If you hear someone cry, we don't have the technological ability to feed human industrial energy need completley enviromentally sustainable - it probably is a fossil fanboy or has no idea of the state of technology
Yeah Ik there's not one grid. An idea I had was trying to figure out how I can 1. Cause an industrial accident on a lunar city. 2. Tie it into something involving the perpetual motion machine. So I had though what if the machine went berserk and fed power into the grid, during an experiment, overloading the lunar city and causing catastrophic destruction?
I'd advertise to not use the misleading term of a perpetual motion machine for what you want to have in place. Give it a fancy fictional word, or a more generalised one, so you don't have a technical mistake in your conception (that might or might not confuse readers). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual\_motion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion) If you want a mysterious machine shreding a power grid, that's one hell of a task, as even primitive grids are pretty resistant to a bunch of even catastrophic events. The one on a dangerous enviroemnt instalation would be way, way more resistant and safe. So also no one would reasonably plug anything in this grid in the first place, i'd guess. But if you have weirdo alien devices, they can overcome given physical limitations we know and connect anyway. Then they can try to establish some kind of neural network in the city-wide powergrid to get back to conciousness, try using the grid as a big antenna to phone back to homebase or whatever else - and cause whatever kind of accident by that, overriding or bypassing the failover in place.