If heat is energy, why isn’t it possible to genereate electricity out of thin (warm) air and by that cooling our atmosphere while generating (nearly) endless energy?
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It’s an interesting idea, at least, since you can’t get more energy out of a system than you put in, by draining heat from the atmosphere, you could lower the ambient temperature around the location. The problem with using (thin) air for this project is the incredibly low ROI for such a project. If one assumes a given volume of air, at a specific rate of motion upwards and a particular mass, one quickly finds that the size of a generator needed to produce energy from that volume would be too large (given current materials technology) to produce enough power over its lifetime to overcome the costs of construction (and its not a close margin). It’s not “free” energy, either (as some will try to claim), because the air is being heated by the sun and other human processes. It’s just the absolute least efficient way of using solar energy to provide power.
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