This is the world we live in now: somebody has invented a way to put a tornado in a can and use it to generate electricity. It’s an incredibly green method of power generation, but we suspect it has more to do with the engineer who cracked it wanting the champion of all pickup lines: “I control tornadoes.”
AVETech
The generator is surprisingly simple: You just need a circular station, and introduce warm air into it. The warm air triggers convection and pretty quickly you have a simple whirlwind, spinning turbines and generating power.
It’s also about as ecofriendly as it gets: There are no carbon emissions, obviously, it doesn’t require any on-site power storage, and it’s cheap as well. Once you get past the initial need for heat, you could power it with waste heat from industrial processes. In theory, this thing could drive electricity prices as low as three cents a kilowatt hour; basically you could leave a 60-watt bulb on for 1000 hours and you’d be out, quite literally, a buck eighty.
It’s still in prototype, though: The Canadians in question are testing it as we speak. But we’re sure the macking has already begun.
Atmospheric Vortex Engine [Official Site]