How to monetize free energy without revealing its existence?

Question

Just last week while developing a new CCTV camera system I accidentally produced a free energy generator. I know, what are the odds?

So now I'd like to make some money. Unfortunately, this device is so simple and effective that I cannot release the plans - the destructive potential is too great. I seriously doubt my ability to protect the design if spied upon or interrogated, so I need to monetize this without anyone knowing what I'm doing.

The device itself is trivial to build. It directly adds thermal energy to matter in a target region near the device. The first version cost me £1 in materials, weighed 500g with a volume of 1l and heated a 10cm³ spherical region 1m away from itself. I was unable to find an upper limit to the power it could produce before the device and my entire kitchen burst into flames (you see why I need money?) but I believe it can continually sustain at least 1MW. I can scale the device up or down with all the above variables changing linearly (a 2l device would cost £2, weigh 1kg and provide up to 2MW to a 20cm³ sphere 2m away). Power production can be turned up/down extremely fast.

Assume I am a 25 year old engineer in the UK with no special connections, £10k in savings and access to £20k in credit if necessary. I am willing to spend years on this plan if the return is sufficiently large (e.g. if it takes a decade to have a cheap gigawatt power plant pouring its profits into my bank account that is fine).

How do I monetize this device without revealing my invention or raising enough suspicion to prompt an investigation?

Answer 1

You could use your invention to power computer hardware to "mine" a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. "Proof of work" cryptocurrencies like bitcoin deliberately waste enormous amounts of energy generating redundant cryptographic hashes. Today, most cryptocurrency mining happens in places with cheap electricity, because the limiting economic factor is the cost of the electricity wasted relative to the value of the cryptographic tokens generated.

If you had a limitless source of free electricity, you could use it to power your bitcoin-mining rig, generating the tokens for free (minus initial setup costs), and then you could sell the resulting bitcoins (or other cryptocurrency tokens) on [relatively] anonymous online exchanges.

Answer 2

Seed money

So you've got a device which can increase the temperature of water in an arbitrary location far from the actual device. A 10 million pound version of this device is basically a weapon of mass destruction that can wipe out any city on the globe.

I can see why you want to be careful with it.

Fake fusion

Set up a fake "fusion" power scam company. With a twist, you let anyone as in literally anyone come in and examine your "fusion reactor", you even allow them to take it apart.

But what you'll allow them to take apart is not your real power source. it's a dummy. You built a £1000 model and placed it somewhere within the building less than 1000 meters away.

You're an engineer, dig up some examples of old fusion scams but add your own personal flair.

Make it complex. Make up some vaguely plausible technobabble and some parts that do nothing except add complexity and make it hard to conclusively say it's not a fusion reactor.

But you do something that almost no fusion scam artists ever do: you invite in any independent engineer willing to come and look, you allow them to take your "reactor" to pieces to verify that it has no batteries or any other known tricks.

You even invite in some professional magicians.

then you put it back together with them and turn it on and it blasts out lots of hot water for hours without any connections which could hide the trick.

People will still call it a scam

But you'll probably be able to get enough funding to build an industrial size model. What you actually do is spend another £1000 on one of your secret boxes and some of the investments on a big "reactor" and then you set it running.

It's hard to argue with "success"

You even patent you "fusion reactor" with detailed parts lists.

At this point, you're turning heads because you have a small real power station putting out real power but nobody can get copies of your "reactor" to work. You keep waffling about how they need to get the "quantum alignment of the modulators" completely correct.

You start getting billion dollar contracts to build full-size stations for countries.

What you actually do is hide one of your real reactors and aim it at the focus point of your fake "fusion reactors". Still, nobody can work out how they work or replicate them but nobody knows to look in the foundation of one of your admin buildings 10KM away. Spies keep focusing on your fake reactors.

Even when they steal one from a running plant they still can never get it to work outside of your own plant (except for a couple of times when you wanted to mess with them and powered it up remotely from one of your real reactors to make them think they'd finally figured it out or were getting close).

Congratulations, you're now a multi-billionaire who could seize control of the entire world if he felt like it.

Answer 3

Consider looking into what and where power is needed, on demand, and people are willing to pay for it.

Take for example Electric Car charging points. If you can install one of these with a payment mechanism, people will assume it's using Grid energy when in reality it's generated from your invention.

The difficulty will come during the accounting phase, but I think this is true however you plan to make secret money!

Answer 4

Refine aluminium

A great many commodities require a lot of energy to produce, to the extent that it determines their value. For example, aluminium is extracted from bauxite via electrolysis and requires so much energy that it can be used as a virtual battery to even out demand. This could be a pretty good cover for both connecting to the grid and making money from pricing disparities in the energy market, and also selling a product of your excessive energy. Just build a power plant next door to cover the apparent abundance of energy.

Aluminium-Air battery technology might be another avenue; as it is a single-use technology, selling new Al-Air battery packs and recycling old ones would be a good cover, and if you can get everyone's cars hooked on cheap, light batteries there would be political reasons to protect you.

Or produce fresh water

Alternatively, desalination (extracting drinking water from sea water) is a huge barrier to irrigation in many countries which actually have a sea-coast. So you could conceivably set up shop in such a nation with some hand-waving argument about a super-efficient desalination process, and you'll find that apart from someone trying to extract the information from you, the population should protect you to keep their cheap irrigation going.

Unless you have a flair for the nefarious

Another longer-term option would be to secretly build up a store of something, and then when governments come knocking you can threaten to destabilise things unless they give you money/IP rights/their firstborn. This is a bit more Austin Powers - you build a secret store under the sea which is powered by this energy source, and build up a vast pile of aluminium/gold/etc.

Or join forces with one

A better, and simpler, option would be to engage another maverick with the capacity to make use of your thing, like Elon Musk. A magical power source would be just what he needs for electric cars and space rockets, albeit his solar stuff would suffer, and he could deal with the intellectual property needs.

An alternative might be to engage global companies like Google for whom the source would immediately save them vast sums, although the temptation would be to silence you as soon as they understand it.

But it would change the world, and endanger you with it

As soon as the magical power source is public, though, most of the bets are off - it is such an explosively powerful capability that unless the scientific detail is made freely available it would trigger a series of conflicts on the basis of differential access to it. So unless you want to be responsible for global wars just because you want a slice of the pie, it would be better to just publish the patent and hire a decent PR agent, perhaps after discussing the thing with your country's defence ministry/agency.

Unfortunately you are no longer safe from anyone, from political to business players, and the status quo is rather valuable to them.

One day, it will happen

Back in reality, when it comes, if it scales, fusion power will be utterly transformative for the human race. The deserts will bloom, the hungry will be fed, the world order will be overturned, the rich will escape to orbital habitats, or to Mars.

Answer 5

Many of the suggestions here include the idea of creating a power plant and laundering your electricity, but there is a safer way.

Geothermal power.

So you dig a big hole in your back yard, pump down cold water and hot water comes out. Normally the water temperature would increase by 1 - 4 degrees, but you can of course add some extra heating to the tube and get far larger gains.

If you don't deploy sensors there is no way to accurately check how hot it actually is down there, and thus it is impossible to detect this "fraud".

Answer 6

Since according the known laws of physics one cannot create energy from nowhere, your device, spitting out energy without any input would immediatly raise suspects.

Your only way for secrecy is therefore to fly low and to disguise it: sell it or show it as "highly optimized engine": you basically couple it to a conventional power source, and you use your invention to cover the gap between your source and the Carnot yield for the same source. (i.e. let's say it is a power generator with a Carnot yield of 40%, but it has an actual yield of 25%. You use your device to generate the missing part).

If you are also able to implement some sort of "destruction upon opening" you can further protect your invention from curious eyes.

Answer 7

Let me suggest that monetizing this energy producer is the wrong path. You're thinking too short-term. When economic drivers are reduced to their fundamental parts, energy is one-third of the equation (time and transportation being the other parts). If energy suddenly became free, there's strong reason to believe that humanity can finally enter that egalitarian utopia we've dreamed about since the first human didn't want to get up and scrounge for food in the morning. Free energy would represent a turning point in human development. It would mark the final nail of hindrance on human capacity (time can be made up by adding humans, and transportation is only affected by time now, because the energy to transport is free).

Release the plans to the public.¹ In only a year or two, you'll find that money is far less of a problem for you than it ever was. After you do that, people far more clever than you will learn how to control it, then offer cheap home generators on amazon and ebay. There may be a sudden rise in unemployment, making jobs difficult to acquire, but suddenly the cost of almost everything will drop significantly, and some things will become free.² Scientific advancement will start taking leaps in the following decades, instead of baby steps, because things like the LHC or launching a shuttle are now energy free (grants to operate them will no longer need to be so massive. Production of any good could be exponentially increased as needed, and eventually, actual energy-to-matter conversion will be discovered, developed, and mobilized for society's needs.

You've unintentionally solved almost all human problems. Or, you've at least made it possible. Utopia is no longer a dream; it is an attainable reality.

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1. Naturally, there's super-villains in every story that would rather subjugate than advance humanity (you don't sound like a super-villain, hence my alternative answer). These people would try their hardest to keep your discovery to themselves and exploit is for personal gain. That's why you would need to release the plans to the public. If everyone knows about it and it's simple enough to build at home, there may be an initial rise in burnt home kitchens, but the ultimate effect will be the removal of energy costs from the economic equation.
2. Utilities are the obvious first changers. After that will follow anything that depends heavily on energy consumption to produce. This includes freight-expensive, but cheap production, goods. Fuel will no longer be needed. All transportation will become electric, because electricity will be free, or nearly free. Food fits in here. So does any computing.

Answer 8

Build a power plant.

Not a power plant that utilizes your invention, but something like a wind/hydro station. Build the station, have all the real equipment in there, but at its heart hide your devices (in a broom closet or something no one would suspect, or even in your private office under the floor). So yeah, one that utilizes your invention... but doesn't.

Maybe even claim special turbine designs that are supposedly more efficient/cost-effective so that you aren't questioned on how you're outputting so much more energy/make so much more money. These designs are your trade secret and since no one in their right mind would consider a CCTV technology leading to free-energy, I doubt anyone will replicate your technology and therefore you don't need a patent or anything. EDIT: claiming special turbine designs will also lead anyone trying to replicate your technology down the wrong path, making it even more unlikely that anyone will duplicate your tech. Also, since it's not some new revolutionary technology like fusion, you will have fewer skeptics and fewer scientists trying to debunk/vet your designs.

This way, you'll pass industrial safety inspections because you actually have all the turbines and stuff, pass most scrutiny against your turbines since the designs a secret, and you'll secretly be supplying energy from your free energy device(s).

What I'm suggesting is essentially energy-laundering, like mafia's do with money but, you know, with energy. Make it look like legitimate energy production, but in truth it is not.

This has the benefit of you being able to create a huge company to make billions of dollars across the nation (I'm assuming the USA, even though you're a Britt, because it has the most corp-centric laws/attitudes in the world [in my opiion] and is one of the largest [or the largest] power consuming nation in the world).

Answer 9

Buy a petrol station, and set up a process to pull carbon dioxide from the air and convert it to gasoline.

You will still have to buy some petrol from a distributor, to avoid raising suspicion.

Once your first petrol station is profitable, buy a few. Once you own about a thousand, buy a gasoline distributor. Work your way up until you own an oil company. Then you can buy operational oil wells and shut them down.

Answer 10

Put the results on arxiv, send a paper to Science. Then wait one year to collect the Nobel prize. As discussed in the above answers, you'd have given the world free energy and everything would change. With your prize money, you can retire in a nice third world country like mine and live happily ever after.

Answer 11

Colonise Mars

Use one of the methods described elsewhere on this page to get enough money to construct a robust closed ecological system on Earth. When you feel you are close to being discovered, you blast off! Your generator can be used as a rocket engine; either heat up some propellent for a fast trip, or position the heated point on the other side of a mirror for a reaction less drive.

When you get to Mars, unplug the generator from your engines, and use it to power greenhouses. Take along some friends, and congratulations. You're humanity's best hope for survival.

I know you said monetise, and strictly speaking this doesn't produce cash you can spend, but hey - you're the monarch of a whole planet. That's got to count for something.

Answer 12

I am surprised nobody mentioned the following yet:

Manipulate Stock Markets

Using his device, the protagonist can easily create unexpected (and prevent anticipated) natural disasters, create energy blackouts, turn the tide of military conflicts, create fake terrorist attacks where by "pure luck" (i.e., your careful planning) nobody gets hurt, etc.. On every such event, the protagonist buys put/call options on a stock. Since such events have dramatic impacts on the stock market, an option can sell for a multiple of its price. The activity can be well hidden by also buying options which do not monetize.

Once the protagonist earned enough money, many of the other answers to this question (for example the fake fusion plant) become feasible.

Answer 13

Producing or selling any kind of engine, generator or power plant will very shortly lead to the discovery of your invention, no matter how well you're trying to cover it up. At the lower levels, hobbyists and tinkerers get in your way, and at the higher levels safety inspectors get you.

So you'll need to add indirections. Sell the product, not the energy. I got so many ideas, but most of them fail if you can't even afford to renovate your kitchen.

For starters you need something you can operate from a basement, something regulators don't understand, and something which benefits a lot from cheap energy. I hate to suggest this, because it gets mentioned so often when it doesn't really fit, but it seems like you'll become a bitcoin miner.

Answer 14

If you stumbled across it, and it's so simple that it will automatically spread, then you have to assume that others will discover it as well. This is made that much uglier by the fact that no secrecy is perfect. any means of making money off this has a decent chance of eventually revealing it to the world, particularly if you're involving other people. Plans that require a large number of years are, as such, likely to be untenable - the chance is too high that someone else will publish the thing in the meantime, your competitive advantage will vanish, and you'll be left even further in debt than you were.

So the question changes a bit - how do you make money off of this thing while you have it, and how do you limit the devastation in the world once it gets out?

For the first, you in part should try to be making money off of knowing that things are about to change. Short-selling aluminum futures, for example. For the second, it's a matter of figuring out what the real risks are, and then figuring out who to warn so that they can prep for the release of the information (and then who to release it to).

Also, when you do release it, do so in a way that makes you a chunk of change up front, gets you entirely out of the power-generation business (except perhaps as a technical consultant) and makes sure that people know that you were the one that made it all happen. There are a lot of people who will fight bitterly over control of easily accessible power. You don't want any part of that battle. On the other hand, working the celebrity factor can be pretty lucrative too (if exhausting) and doesn't carry anything like the same level of risk (though it does make your personal life massively overexposed).

Answer 15

The best way to make money is to sell it to someone like an oil company. They will happily hand you a pile of cash not to tell anyone about it.

Just make sure you have a deadman failsafe that will release the designs on the internet should you "slip" in the bathroom and break your neck.

Answer 16

Become the worlds most unstoppable and deadly assassin

This is an option if you're willing to go to the dark side.

Spend 10K on a 10GW version.

You can now zap any location within 10km. Zapping full force for 1 second at 10 GWatts/h is roughly equivalent to setting off a few pounds of TNT at that location.

Move to a major city, put lots of effort into creating ridiculously hard to trace ways to receive payments and go into business offering assassination as a service.

You never get closer than 5KM's from the target, you can even be publicly visible on a mall security camera miles away when the targets hotel room explodes.

eventually you may start to attract law enforcement attention... but your machine on low power can also burn a warning message into the wall of a state governers home.

You can become a shadow-gangster running an organization from the shadows capable of taking out any rival.

Once you have some cash from smaller hits build a 100K or million dollar version and just move across the country to somewhere out of the way where no suspicion can fall on you.

Go for higher end targets from further away with more power. You can take out a head of state from a thousand KM away now.

eventually build yourself a 10 million dollar version. Now you can kill anyone anywhere on earth. You can blow apart any military bunker, you can burn any city to bedrock, kill any head of state who defies you or kill anyone who gets within 100KM of your supervillian lair (which is of course about 500 km from your real residence which is a nice beach house)

An interesting side note: 1000 dollar versions set to quickly turn on and off at lowest power could also be used to transmit data from one location to another 1km away without any possibility of tracing the connection and can also burn the other node and anything nearby at a moments notice should it face being compromised.

Become the worlds secret leader with the threat of death hanging over the heads of anyone who defies you.

Answer 17

It seems there is but one obvious answer: Build giant lasers and point them at major cities.

Use a subtle strategy to launder the energy and use the capital to build energy weapons.

Once the threat is believed (might take some aggressive convincing) and the blackmail money starts coming in, I doubt anyone would question the source of the energy when the loudspeaker blares "one step closer mr inspector and downtown Manhattan gets vaporised".

Answer 18

Grow marijuana. You don't have the capital for a power plant. Basement growers get caught because their energy bills go up, but you don't have that problem. Absent-mindedly add sparky-shoddy-looking "line filters" on the power lines, "to keep the cops from noticing".

The correct idea is Magicsowon's "publish and retire", but your guy could be entertainingly naive in some ways. Until he hires/befriends the genial, "retired" Professor Pothead...

Answer 19

Sell the power to a power company.

This kind of thing happens all the time. One company will promise its consumers that a certain percentage of their power going forward will come from solar or wind, or perhaps they end up with more customers than they can support on their own without building/buying a new facility. So what they will do in order to meet their commitments is actually buy power from another company to resell to its consumers, either as a permanent solution or in the meantime while they acquire new facilities.

So, solution is simple. Build 100MW worth of devices, get a business license, sell it for less than your customers (the power company) charges their consumers, rake in dough. The US national average is about 11 cents per KWh, which at 100MW and a 50% margin for the power company, nets you about $8k/hr at full capacity. If you give them a high enough margin, you'll get more and more business from more and more companies.

Then just build a massive vault so you can swim in all your gold coins.

You might have to get a bit creative on how you pitch the power to the company without revealing where it comes from... but you can think of something.

Answer 20

(explanation:)

This is the worldbuilding stackexchange, so, even though you mention the UK, we must not be just talking about a pretext for a novel. We must be talking about building an alternate future for this world. And what would a free energy source be good for other than making a Utopia?

(end explanation)

This world is not the kind of world that deals well with Utopias, so don't get grand plans that direction, if it's this world you are talking about.

(explanation:)

But, then again, it could be an alternate time-line or a look-alike world.

(end explanation)

If it's another world (in the story you're writing), you control all the variables. Take the course that is interesting to you, and remember, worlds do not exist to be made into Utopias.

(explanation)

It should go without saying I think, that you can decide what kind of access your inventor character has to banks, businesses, trusted partners, not-so-trustworthy partners, etc. Or maybe it's not just the energy source, but the actual ability to perform alchemy. You control the laws of physics.

But there are a few things you can't control in building worlds.

(end explanation)

Intelligence is there to be used. That means that worlds are there for giving intelligent beings problems to solve. So even if you are writing a novel, it comes back to one thing:

Do you want the invention to cause destruction or to help people?

(explanation:)

It cannot be automatically assumed that destruction is contrary to the assumed goal of worldbuilding. Bad guys, by their arrogance and other failings, often take themselves out of the social equation by blowing themselves up or attacking the wrong people, etc., and, by their disappearance, leave a world that is "better" or more ideal or something.

(end explanation)

If you want it to cause destruction, use it to try to help other people magically.

If you want to use it to help other people, use it to help yourself, first. Hide it from the fire inspector, get a real job, save up money, use it to heat the apartment in winter and pump the coolant in the summer. As you figure out ways to use it for your own needs, you can figure out ways it can help others.

When you meet others who have discovered it and are doing the same, you help each other. Eventually, enough people know how it works and are using it that the empire builders will be unable to do anything really bad with it any more.

(explanation:)

For all sorts of reasons, sudden social change is generally disruptive. Even in fiction, it's easier to keep social change under control when the changes are introduced gradually, and the gradual introduction is the best way to keep your free energy thingy secret.

I'm not saying the slow approach is always best, just that it's the easiest to keep control of and the easiest to keep secret.

(end explanation)

Answer 21

Create efficiencies for industry

Find some existing businesses which would profit from your idea, and share it with a small number of members of each business. This will allow them to reduce costs by a huge amount, and they could pass some of the savings onto you. If you share your ideas with only a moderate number of competitors in each industry, you could keep some competition in the marketplace, so the savings were passed on to customers. Co-operate with members of those companies to devise ways to hide the free energy, such as through fake proprietary methods for doing X more efficiently.

Every company would have an incentive to hide the fact of the new technology, since doing so would prevent a significant further increase in competition. They would also have an incentive to ensure that only a small number of people ever learned the workings of the new technology. They might try to introduce the technology to new areas, but you would be alert to any other industries where one or a few businesses had a sudden price drop. You could muscle in with your technology to claim your share and to dramatically reduce that other company's margins, but in the end, society would still get cheaper products with the same incentive towards secrecy about your device.

Answer 22

Deceive, inveigle, obfuscate. Hide in the complexity of other things.

Run a crypto exchange. Become reverse FTX.

Your business has a cover. And the cover is you exchange cryptocurrencies, sort of like the infamous FTX. Except instead of actually running a deficit and using Ponzi like devices to prop yourself up, you run a surplus and use the complexity of the business to hide it. I.E. Laundering electricity.

One aspect of your business is mining crypto on your own computers. Where do you get the electricity to do this? Financial regulators don't CARE. This is the crux of your "scam": no one ever asks where your electricity comes from. But you do a lot more:

• John Bogle 101: The real money in investing is made on charging the customer expenses and fees. So the sly old broker trick is to sell extremely complex derivatives; very complex financial products that nobody can really understand, so it's impossible to compare them to market indexes to see if they're a good investment. Traditionally brokers use it to conceal fees. So you sell a lot of them: no one is surprised when a derivatives trader makes a ton of money.
• Unlike FTX, you handle customer investments absolutely prudently and correctly, so no-one ever has a basis to complain, and investigations are quickly closed. Where a real tragedy happens, you reach into your own profits and cover some losses. Regulators start viewing you as a "a rare good guy" and so become skeptical of complaints about you.

Double it up by openly making electricity

To muddy the above water further, make sure to own solar, wind and battery farms located on the same property as the crypto mines and real generators. This can also be used as a cover to sell to the grid somewhat more electricity than you are actually generating with the solar/wind, if "electricity" is paying more than "crypto", which it will at peak times.

Do not do fossil, nuclear or hydro - those are too closely regulated and require too many highly technical staff who might notice. :) For instance the plant engineer who takes fierce pride in running "their" combined-cycle plant at 55.1% and not 54.9%, is gonna notice when their "baby" is running at 63% :) You want that guy to not exist.

Whereas it's perfectly fine to have technicians maintaining individual windmills or solar banks - their unit is one of hundreds, they have no sense of pride/ownership of it since it's one of many they service, and they don't expect to see the whole picture.