Why can’t we use the kinetic energy of Earth spinning to generate electricity?
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We already do… sort of.
We have wind, wave, and ocean current generators. Part of these are due to rotation of the Earth.
We *can*! It’s just difficult.
While we may harvest energy, momentum is conserved. This leaves us with two options:
1. Lift objects away from the axis of spinning. This is the ‘easiest’ solution, but requires fighting gravity, and at that point we’re throwing away more energy fighting gravity than we’re gaining from the spin.
2. Find some other object in space to exchange momentum with. The nearest such object is the moon. Exchanging momentum with the moon isn’t really something we can do (yet) with human structures, but it is exactly what the tides are already doing. By harvesting some tidal energy we can generate useful energy from the Earth’s rotation. Unfortunately, tidal energy is often inconvenient and not particularly powerful.
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Generating electricity from the kinetic energy of Earth spinning is not practical from an engineering standpoint. This is because the rotational speed and energy of the Earth is too small to be harnessed to create a useful amount of electricity.
Furthermore, the energy is spread out over the entire surface of the Earth and would be difficult to concentrate in one area. Additionally, it would be difficult to account for and correct for the changes in the Earth’s rotation speed due to the gravitational pull of the Moon, Sun, and other planets.
We are, just indirectly, tides are used as a way to generate power, earth spins, and the moon around it, because of earths rotation, it allows the moon to enact a weak, but strong enough gravity to cause tides, if the earth was not spinning, well, ill be fried, and everyones gonna die, but nonetheless, tides would be MUCH more infrequent
Because we’re spinning with it too. Relative to you, the earth is standing still so there’s no kinetic energy to take advantage of.
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