Keep in mind the power is fully mechanical so no electricity or control circuit is required. And based on the simplicity it seems like a good candidate to power something that you need to last 100 years with no maintenance for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VSmBl8Rv_o
This one shows that it is not as unbelievable as it sounds :)
It has pretty impressive performance.
Tech Ingredients did one or two vids as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNs_kNilSjk
Was thinking of whipping up a batch for my rv.
https://www.amazon.in/EXCEL-CoolCoat%C2%AE-Reflective-Coatin...
Basically, have a highly reflective white coat on your roof, to reduce temperatures by about 3 Degrees Celsius.
Almost all homes in Urban India are made from concrete and bricks, which can hold a lot of heat.
I myself have been in houses that use this to cover only some rooms of the house (mainly the bedroom), and the temperature difference is definitely noticeable. It also makes the room livable in the extreme hot summers in India.
Maybe there's some wiggle room here because solar infrared is mostly near IR and MWIR, and the place where we want high emissivity (absorptivity) is longwave IR, but to the extent that the advertisement makes any claims about infrared emissivity, it claims very low infrared emissivity, not high.
A paint with low emissivity across the spectrum will slow down the temperature rise when the sun is up, but also slow down the temperature drop when the sun is down. This can still make rooms livable, but it isn't the same as what you get with regular whitewash, where the temperature of the roof is actually lower than the temperature of the air around it.
I think one of the things in the paints that Ben adds is a set of microspheres that reject incident incoming infrared beyond a certain angle but allow it to pass through when radiated. Something like that.
You should be aware that there are rigorous constraints on how much absorptance can differ from emittance, known as Kirchhoff's Law of Thermal Radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity#Absorptance because without them you could get mechanical power generation from a uniform bath of thermal radiation, which would give you a perpetual-motion machine.
The product datasheet[0] claims a thermal emittance (aka LWIR) of 0.82. Having such a high value is typical for non-metallic surfaces.[1]
[0] https://5.imimg.com/data5/CA/RO/MY-653008/excel-cool-coat.pd...
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19840015630/downloads/19...
That effect is almost not perceptible in normal milled limestone.
I totally believe that you can get significant percentage improvements with the right mix of particle sizes, but the LWIR emittance of just about all nonmetals was upwards of 75% the emittance of an ideal blackbody. That puts a ceiling of about ⅓ (4:3) on the possible improvement on that end. And plain old whitewash has a reflectivity upwards of 90% in the visible, while the best known materials, such as polished silver, are something like 96%, so you might get 3:2 on that end—but probably won't even get 2:1. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/bulletin/07/nbsbulletinv7n... is one older reference on this, but https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=90... gives plots of silver mirrors' reflectance by wavelength, polarization, and angle of incidence.
As a side note, what people have been painting their houses with for thousands of years isn't normal milled limestone; it's slaked lime, which forms limestone by absorbing CO₂ from the air over about a month. Modern whitewash has milled limestone mixed into it, but the morphology of the final surface isn't very similar to milled limestone in a transparent binder.
Video of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5QEBqjkNjo
https://youtu.be/duuk_r--lqU?t=99
Even though the video uses the sun to heat the oil, I would think it would be feasible to use geothermal heat instead.
https://www.i2cool.com/tideflow/uwJVdixI.html
https://baitykool.com/radiativeskycooling.html
Peak performance, I think. Considering that they got the black white sides flipped
About two orders of magnitude weaker than solar panels, even over 24 hours.
E = (T2-T1) / T2
Not sure if you can get the MTBF on Stirling engines higher than on LFP batteries, though.
Nothing to sneeze at. Just be careful of midbrow high-effort dismissals from the old and wise:)
These guys are applying them to solar panels:
https://www.i2cool.com/tideflow/uwJVdixI.html
"Case Study 2: Solar Farm in Dubai
Problem: Solar panels lost 15–20% efficiency at 55°C+ temperatures.
Solution: Coated panels with i2Cool’s film.
Results:
Panel surface temperature: ▼25.7°C (from 58°C to 32.3°C)
Power output: ▲8% (equivalent to adding 2,400 new panels to a 30MW farm)"This is like shaving nickels to make money.
Certainly, there are better energy sources like the fusion reactor in the sky and building a fusion reactor (that's perpetually 30 years away).
TIL: Active nuclear reactors of all types around the world are mappable using antineutrino detectors. It would probably also expose the location of every stationary nuclear-powered ship and submarine too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
Just like this scheme, it's not very economically efficient.
Carnot efficiency is proportional to the temperature ratio between the hot end and the cold end in degrees Kelvin. If both temperatures are in the 200's, then efficiency will be low.
OTEC does provide lots of potable water though, so that's one advantage.
I've been stalking the citations for this paper for a while now. Surely people would be scrambling to replicate these results. It could truly be transformative for the world if it works and is scale-able.
The science looks good to me
Secondarily, using a deep ground source heat pump to power a Stirling cycle engine would probably be much more powerful than harvesting a few mW from ambient temperature gradient between surface and air.
That's my 2 centidollars.
HPsquared•2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
jasonpeacock•2mo ago
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project
There's a shore-based research OTEC in Hawaii, but the best is a floating, closed-loop OTEC in the ocean.
andbberger•2mo ago
pezezin•2mo ago
Source, page 39 of the full report:
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/electr...
nine_k•2mo ago
10,000 TWh/y = 1e+7 GWh/y, divide it by 365.25 days/y to produce daily output of 27,379 GWh/day, then by 24 h/day to get pure power of 1,141 GW. It's still more than a terawatt, three orders of magnitude larger than the largest nuclear reactors.
andbberger•2mo ago
WJW•2mo ago
IAmBroom•2mo ago
AstroNutt•2mo ago
adastra22•2mo ago