Maisotsenko’s M-Cycle energy systems hold cheap solution to global energy crisis
|Published
Over the past five months, I intermittently wrote about a guru of deep tech, with 400 patents to his name, octogenarian Professor Valeriy Maisotsenko, who I believe has found a viable solution as the world faces an energy crisis that affects human development and exacerbates poverty.
Maisotsenko, who is the inventor of M-Cycle energy systems, argues that through the M-Cycle, responsible use of coal and oil is possible, contrary to the global view propagating the end of the use of fossil fuels to fight climate change.
As green energy is touted, an energy crisis began in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, with shortages and increased prices in oil, gas and electricity markets. This was then exacerbated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And according to the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 922 million people from the developing world were energy poor in 2021. This is one of the scandals of human beings of the 21st Century.
But energy is central to human development, and its production and consumption has to be consistent with the principles of sustainability of the planet and people.
Maisotsenko has come up with a viable solution to the energy crisis.
Maisotsenko argues his case on two fundamental science points. First, he argues that while there is nothing wrong with oil and coal, there is a lot wrong with the technology deployed for extraction and consumption of these natural materials.
Second, even if there was something wrong with oil and coal, the answer does not lie in solar and wind, as these are equally extracting.
The M-Cycle, therefore, in the first instance, is a critique not of coal and gas as natural gifts of nature but one against the Carnot cycle-inspired science responsible for the modern locomotive instruments that use oil and coal as energy systems.
A Carnot cycle is defined as an ideal reversible closed thermodynamic cycle. Four successive operations are involved: isothermal expansion, adiabatic expansion, isothermal compression, and adiabatic compression. Carnot makes a fundamentally flawed assumption of an infinite source to an infinite sink.
However, the scientific arguments contradict this in that for every unit spent - say a rand on petrol or fuel - 80% of that is lost to heat generated by the piston movement and exhaust emissions. Only 20% is spent to propel the automobile.
Not only is this energy system expensive, even to those who can afford it, but it is also unaffordable to the poor and unsustainable to people and the planet overall. The 80% that goes to waste is the contribution of the industrial revolution to global warming because of the technology deployed.
And, to the extent that alternative energy sources derive from the extraction of earthen materials at scale, Maisotsenko argues this is not the answer to the global warming crisis, while organic materials are in the main must be considered as is the case in M-Cycle.
The M-Cycle technology boasts more than 4000 research and peer-reviewed papers. It has a footprint in many universities. At an industrial research scale, M-Cycle has courted the juicy eye of corporates Airbus and BMW.
And what is exciting is Maisotsenko will be in South Africa from April 4-12 to engage scientists about his invention.
In tackling the energy crisis, with its various political lobbies for and against different energy sources and technology, there is no one-size fits all solution. And for Maisotsenko, he believes the answers for the best energy solutions lie in science.
For M-Cycle’s technological solution, Maisotsenko looked to Nikola Tesla’s principles of thermodynamics.
The principles of thermodynamics have been translated from Tesla’s dream of more than 200 years ago. Tesla argued the science of the preponderance of energy, which the movement of all celestial bodies and living organisms contributes to, should be to the benefit of all. So there is no defensible reason that fanning one’s face with one's own hands should be unaffordable, which is the solution M-Cycle rests on.
For data centres, the cost of cooling the electronics is high, but the M-Cycle Technology cuts that down by up to 90% through its superior cooling capabilities of indirect evaporate cooling.
And instead of the energy intensive and carbon foot-printing of the traditional vapour compression technology, which is employed in refrigeration, M-Cycle deploys abundantly free energy in the air (latent heat in water vapour and sensible heat) to sustain natural evaporation inside a complex heat and mass exchanger.
This heat and mass exchanger is uniquely designed to cool air passing through dry channels indirectly by the air current in the neighbouring wet channels. So an additional 15 percentage points can be generated on to the Energy Availability Factor (EAF) in coal fired power stations.
The M-Cycle also increases coal combustion and reduces emissions because of the relative condensation of oxygen that is blown into the furnace chambers. It also intensifies water cooling and thus increases the efficiency of the cooling cycle process in the towers.
Furthermore, M-Cycle increases the life of the coal and oil energy systems as a cheap source of energy and resolves energy poverty for years to come; while its thermodynamics is deep tech and can expand the scope of energy systems globally.
This as the M-Cycle system deployment can be rapid and continuous as the production of units is linear.
In summary, in the energy crisis-riddled South Africa, the deployment of the M-Cycle technology, especially to the current coal-fired fleet, can boost the energy availability factor by upwards of 40 percentage points and reduce emissions significantly.
In short, Eskom will have commissioned up to almost an equivalent of the current fleet without commissioning it AND with less than the current emissions. All this is achieved with a natural process of cooling by evaporation using water and air as a source of energy and little electricity that can be supplied through minimal solar.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.
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