Electro Harmonix still wants to harvest the magnetosphere’s energy – this time for AI
When you think of Electro Harmonix, you probably think of their guitar pedals first and foremost – but that’s not all the company is about. Fans of the brand who subscribe to their newsletter were recently left stumped by an email proclaiming that the company has a plan to solve an AI-induced energy crisis by harvesting a near-infinite supply of energy that’s hiding out in the planet’s magnetosphere.
READ MORE: Electro-Harmonix shares intentions to raise funding to harvest energy from the Earth’s magnetosphere
The crux of the email repeats much of the same points Matthews made back in 2022, the last time he sent out an email about this plan. However this time, the angle is that the increasing energy requirements of artificial intelligence datacentres redouble the need to figure out how to tap the magnetosphere’s energy.
AI’s extreme grid usage is well-documented – it is far more than traditional computing’s when it comes to doing comparable tasks. Some forecasts say that electricity needs from datacentres will have doubled between 2022 and 2026 thanks to the sheer scale of AI’s power usage.
And so Matthews is proposing his long-standing plan to address this growing need. The basic mechanism that Matthews lays out is this: solar winds, made of ions with their own charge, collide with and compress the Earth’s magnetic field on the side that faces the sun. Like a compressed spring, the magnetosphere is therefore a huge planet-wide store of potential energy. Matthews has long been interested in this as a source of usable energy. In 1999 he wrote a letter to NASA scientist David Stern and asked for a calculation of the energy within the side of the Earth’s magnetosphere that faces the sun
“I won’t calculate it here – it’s long and hard,” Stern wrote back, “but [I’ll] just give you an order of magnitude estimate based on a formula which is really appropriate to a different case, and isn’t even exact there.” The resulting calculation gives 6.9 × 10^14 joules, which Matthews formats as 690,000,000,000,000 joules – presumably to drive home the size of the number.
While this figure is indeed large, it’s important to remember that it’s somewhat arbitrary for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was a self-admitted back-of-the-envelope calculation that Stern admitted was a rough order of magnitude estimate. Secondly, space is famously big – a number relating to the potential energy of anything on a planetary scale is obviously going to be enormous. The potential energy from the entire planet’s wind would obviously be a similarly massive number, but this has to be modulated by the practicalities of building and maintaining wind farms and their related grid infrastructure.
And so what are Matthews’ wind farm analogues, then? Well, the company ai3ms to “team up with the right partner(s) who will provide parallel satellites orbiting earth at about 500 miles.” These satellites would contain “electronics to build up an increasing oscillation,” designed by EHX and Bell Labs alum Bob Myer. Matthews says that “This would conceivably be an easy first step to getting the energy 500 miles up. For example, spaceships launched from earth use most of their energy to get into orbit. With this energy, those spacecraft can be refueled. Additionally, there are numerous defense applications and cryptocurrency mining uses.”
This is, in a word, ambitious. Spacebound energy generation that’s transferred to Earth remains in the realm of science fiction, for now. And lest we forget, this is a communication that’s been sent to the guitar pedal community via EHX’s email list. This is not normally how energy revolutions begin, and instead it’s just left those receiving the email rather baffled. Many have called the plan pseudoscientific, or just chalked it up to Matthews’ well-documented eccentricity.
Accusations of pseudoscientific thinking are not helped by the unimaginable scale of the project and the scattershot list of applications. Nor are they helped by the mention of Thomas Henry Moray, a scientist who claimed to have invented a device that took energy from “the metafrequency oscillations of empty space itself.” The device itself never took off, obviously, as that was in the 1920s and we don’t currently power things via these zero-point vacuum devices. Matthews’ press release states that Myer was inspired by Moray and posited that this machine could have worked by tapping into that magnetosphere – a claim that’s, shall we say, hard to verify. We really only have Moray’s word that his machine actually functioned, and so it’s hard to speculate how it might have worked.
In any case, it is obviously a little unlikely that this plan is ever enacted. But until then, Mike Matthews is clearly still passionate about it – so, er, all power to him.
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