Slashdot Mirror

At the NASCAR Plaza in Charlotte, N.C., today, officials from the Energy Department, NASCAR, and Sprint Corp. announced the companies' participation in the Department's Workplace Charging Challenge—a collaborative effort to increase the number of U.S. employers offering workplace charging by tenfold. The Challenge also supports the broader efforts of the Department's EV Everywhere Grand Challenge to make plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) as affordable and convenient for the American family as gasoline-powered vehicles within the next 10 years. Full Story on Energy.gov

You may want to check your tracking then, because there are very real hydrogen cars running around in California and quite a few fueling stations.

That is not vapor, any more than the tiny handful of all-electric cars actually sold is.

To prove your point, could you please name me a single make and model of car that I can walk down to the local dealer and purchase today? I've actually tried googling it and can't seem to find an answer. This article says that hydrogen cars will be on the road in 2015. However they also say that the cars will not be sold, they will be leased (because of the high cost).

You're saying that they're not vapor, but I can't find a shred of evidence to support your claim.

The use of hydrogen is inevitable, as the engineering challenges there are much easier to get over than the mythical better battery.

Telsa has just driven across the country in 72 hours. If your statement were true, why aren't we seeing similar headlines about all the hydrogen cars on the road today? It might be because there's only 10 hydrogen fueling stations in the US. The evidence says that they're solving the battery engineering challenges faster than the hydrogen ones.

Meanwhile, in reality, you ignored the following tiny caveats:
* the average price of a 16kW solar PV rig will be around $72480
* 1/10 of that will buy you around 1812 gallons of gas (at $4/gallon)
* a good, fuel-efficient gasoline car with around 50 mpg will drive approximately 90600 miles on that
* at the average of 15000 miles driven per year this will last you around 6 years
* 72 months is easily above the average amount of time that owners hold on to cars (somewhere around 60 months)
Oh and lest we forget, during the day, when your solar rig is producing the most power, is also when you're most like to be out with your car, i.e. not charging it. This effect will be least problematic during the summer (longest day, lowest energy consumption by car), and most problematic during the winter (highest energy consumption by car, and a day most probably too short to get any sunlight on the panels while the car's in the driveway).

The fact is, the fossil fuel industry doesn't receive ANY subsidies.

Bullshit.

In 2009:

• Tenaska's Taylorville Energy Center – loan coverage $2.6 billion for a 730 MW coal-fired IGCC with CCS.
• Leucadia's Indiana Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.6 billion to produce Substitute Natural Gas (syngas) from coal for sale to customers in Indiana, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.
• Leucadia's Mississippi Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.689 billion to produce syngas from petroleum coke feedstock, for sale to electric utilities in the region, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.

Subsidies identical to the type received by Tesla and Solyndra both.

In July 2013, the US Department of Energy made available $8 billion in loan guarantees to the fossil fuel industry, again, the identical type of subsidy received by Tesla. For an industry that has been recording record profits for the past 6 years.

So either stop claiming Solyndra received a subsidy or stop claiming fossil fuel industries don't receive any. You can't have it both ways.

That's why there have been standards in place for more efficient applicances and cars. People just don't bitch about those so much.

As a rough guideline, 1 amp hour ~= 10,000 farads.
That's the capacity of a large ultra capacitor or a AAA battery.

Have you clicked the link provided by GP ?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3143769&cid=41458249

Inside that link there's another link to a very useful PDF - http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/piprod/documents/Session_D_Miller_rev.pdf -- which has all the information regarding ultra-capacitors.

Do yourself a favor, before you start telling us about your notion of a "large ultracapacitor", click on the link as provided by GP http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/piprod/documents/Session_D_Miller_rev.pdf

As a rough guideline, 1 amp hour ~= 10,000 farads.
That's the capacity of a large ultra capacitor or a AAA battery.

Have you clicked the link provided by GP ?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3143769&cid=41458249

Inside that link there's another link to a very useful PDF - http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/piprod/documents/Session_D_Miller_rev.pdf -- which has all the information regarding ultra-capacitors.

Do yourself a favor, before you start telling us about your notion of a "large ultracapacitor", click on the link as provided by GP http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/piprod/documents/Session_D_Miller_rev.pdf

Calling All Coders: Help Advance America’s Ocean Power Industry
With more than 50% of the nation’s population living within 50 miles of coastlines, we have vast potential to provide clean, renewable electricity to communities and cities across the United States using marine and hydrokinetic (MHK) technologies.
To help this emerging industry develop new models and tools that improve the design, development, and optimization of MHK devices, the Energy Department's Water Power Program kicked off the Open-WARP (Open Wave Analysis and Response Program) Challenge. A collaboration with NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) and Harvard Business School, Open-WARP is a software coding competition that will draw on the expertise of members of TopCoder, one of the world’s largest community of programmers, to develop a computational model for calculating the response of a wave energy converter (WEC) device to waves with given heights and periods.
With support from the Energy Department, TopCoder will run Open-WARP, which consists of a series of contests broken up into two phases and four milestones that will enable hydrodynamics and device components to be simulated in separate modules. Coders can win cash prizes for each of the different milestones. In the challenge, coders can show off their skills in several topic areas, including conceptualization and data analysis. For the complete story, see the EERE Blog.

Try again. Cellulosic ethanol is made from cellulose(corn stalks, wood, etc.). Production of cellulosic ethanol in the US is very low compared to corn and other grains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol_commercialization#Commercial_development
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11551
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_production.html

AFUE (annual fuel utilization efficiency) is not the same as actual efficiency.

You're right, it's not. The AFUE number will always be lower than the "true efficiency" because AFUE measures average efficiency, not peaks. It's arguably a more useful and relevant measure of efficiency.

The purpose of the AFUE is to tell you that for ever dollar you spend on the energy source $0.97 is being used for heating and $0.03 is wasted (using a 97 AFUE).

Technically true, I suppose, but irrelevant and not at all its "purpose". AFUE has nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of the fuel being used AFUE simply measures how efficiently the unit converts fuel to heat. A 97 AFUE natural gas furnace converts 1 Therm of natural has into 97,000 BTU of heat. Whether natural gas is free or a million dollars per therm, the AFUE remains the same.

It takes into account the energy source NG being cheaper than LP which is cheaper than electric. A cheaper fuel source leads to a higher AFUE, but doesn't mean it's necessarily more efficient, just cheaper to operate.

False. Indoor electric baseboard heat has an AFUE of 100.

Building on the Energy Department's all-of-the-above energy strategy to continue U.S. leadership in clean energy innovation, the Department today announced over $13 million for five projects to strengthen domestic solar manufacturing and speed commercialization of efficient, affordable photovoltaic and concentrating solar power technologies.
Full story

Nestled in Piney Flats, Tennessee, is a small company poised for big growth. Diversified Power International (DPI) designs and manufactures a wide range of products that greatly improve the efficiency of battery-related drive systems including solar energy storage systems and all-electric vehicles.
As the nation moves toward greater adoption of new energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, DPI is rapidly expanding its engineering, development, and manufacturing operations to keep up with demand. Through the Energy Department’s State Energy Program (SEP), DPI leveraged funds from the Tennessee Solar Institute, funded by the Tennessee State Energy Office, to provide high-level training to both its existing and new employees and upgrade its production facility. The upgrades included new equipment and new process lines, as well as energy efficiency measures.
More importantly, DPI established a manufacturing line for products previously made overseas, bringing high-tech jobs back to the United States. For the complete story, see the EERE Blog.

Building on $2 billion in financing commitments from the private sector for energy efficiency updates to commercial buildings under the president's Better Buildings Challenge, the U.S. Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development today expanded the Challenge to multifamily housing such as apartments and condominiums and launched the Better Buildings Accelerators to support state- and local government-led efforts to cut energy waste and eliminate market and technical barriers to greater building efficiency. The Obama Administration also announced it will challenge federal agencies to further expand their use of performance- based contracts through 2016 to upgrade the energy efficiency of federal buildings at no cost to taxpayers—helping the federal government save money and further reduce energy use.

Full Story

This has got to be the most full of crap post I have ever read on slashdot. Even in Australia, where they have a history of being big on Carbon (enough to spark a backlash of late) they won't claim half of that. Australia has ideal solar capacity and even they are projecting that they theoretically could reach 50% of baseline with renewables by 2040 and that is the most aggressive credible study I have ever heard of.

Keep in mind that Australia is largely ideally suited for renewables with ample sunshine, and a low population that is largely either in large cities or small towns and very little in-between. That makes it about one of the best places you could possibly have short of a small island for having a renewables based energy source. The resources to scale up windmills, solar panels and other forms of renewables are not infinite and have to come from somewhere.

Windmills and solar panels require rare earth minerals and those come from mines that are almost exclusively in China. A new mine has recently opened in the US so at least one mine will be run with environmental standards. However your notion that we have enough supplies to build enough windmills to power the world is absurd. Don't forget about present shortages in silicon for creating solar panels with the today's production capacity. The idea that we have the materials to supply the world is absurd as cold fusion.

Even when you get the power which often comes at less than ideal times (when it's sunny, windy etc) you have to store somewhere. That means creating batteries and batteries are either going to use materials that are bad for the environment or going to be hyrdopower based or air based and difficult to scale. They can be built, however you simply cannot scale these on a world wide basis at any kind of realistic rate, no matter how well they work at a small scale because the capacity simply isn't there.

I firmly support renewables and have followed the technology for decades. However I have to call out pie in the sky posts like yours as being environmentally irresponsible. The result of always claiming baseline renewables were right around the corner has been decades of keeping society firmly in the hands of the coal industry. Meanwhile we could have had real environmental change by building nuclear power plants instead of more coal power plants because people forget the power has to come from somewhere.

As part of the Obama Administration's commitment to expand access to data and give consumers more transportation options that save money at the pump, the Energy Department today launched a new mobile app to help drivers find stations that provide alternative fuel for vehicles.

The Energy Department on November 1 began the process to select collegiate teams to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2015. Colleges, universities, and other post-secondary educational institutions are welcome to submit proposals, which are reviewed, scored, and ranked based on a merit review process. Subject to the quantity and quality of proposals, up to 20 teams will be selected to begin a two-year project to build solar-powered, highly energy-efficient houses that combine affordability, consumer appeal, and design excellence.
Throughout the two-year project, the selected teams will design, construct, and test their houses before reassembling them at the Solar Decathlon 2015 competition site, which will be announced in the coming months. As part of the Solar Decathlon, teams compete in ten different contest categories—ranging from best architecture and engineering to energy production for heating and cooling—while gaining valuable real-world experience in a growing global industry.
In fall 2015, the student teams will showcase their solar-powered houses to the public, highlighting renewable energy systems and energy-efficient technologies, products, and appliances that are already available to homeowners to help them save money by saving energy. The selected teams and their proposed projects will represent a diverse range of design approaches, building technologies, target markets, geographic locations, climates, and regions, including urban, suburban, and rural settings.
Since 2002, the National Mall in Washington, D.C., had been the venue for five successful Solar Decathlons. In 2013, the Energy Department moved the competition to Irvine, California. Solar Decathlon 2013 concluded on October 13. See the Energy Department progress alert.

As part of the Obama Administration's efforts to ensure America's continued leadership in clean energy and double renewable electricity generation once again by 2020, the Energy Department today announced eight teams to spur solar power deployment by cutting red tape for residential and small commercial rooftop solar systems.

It depends on the fuel cell and the fuel. Platinum is used in lightweight, low-temperature fuel cells meant for rapid load changes (as in cars and such). If you are running from natural gas or other fuel sources, and are running with a high-temperature fuel cell, you don't need platinum.

But people are forgetting about the distribution costs with electricity. A significant portion of the energy is lost as heat in the distribution system - both as I2R losses in the wires and inefficiencies in the transformers. Unless you have a big leak in the piping, shipping natural gas around is basically loss-less aside from pumping costs.

Fuel cells running more or less at steady state at the point of use are very economical.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/fccs_omaha10.pdf

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1139680

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-06-21/ebay-fuel-cells/55732562/1

The Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), as part of its commitment to strengthen the nation's clean energy economy and to increase communications with the public and other stakeholders, today announced the launch of a new blog on Energy.gov.

Apples to apples? Hanford Site cleans 1.4 billion gallons of groundwater a year, which is about 14.5 million liters a day. I'm sure you'll object that the levels of contamination are lower (though there's a lot of nasty stuff there), and yes, it's quite possible that nothing exists exactly like what is needed at Fukushima, in large part because the other massive radioactive material cleanups were different sorts of situations. However, the quote was , "You can't filter that much. Nobody can." A statement of possibility, not of existence. Do you really believe this to be physically impossible, rather than merely unfeasible, or just very expensive?

"This place is not a place of honor." The general theory has been to create a megalith which is inherently foreboding and discomforting to human beings. Giant spikes protruding from the ground, irregular black stones too hot and close together to be used for shelter, fields of sharp objects jutting in all directions, the sort of landscape that's hostile to human life and repellant rather than beautiful and attractive.

The idea is not to SCALE UP the newer technologies, but rather to Scale them DOWN.

Small Modular Reactors is the focus of this Administration. These SMRs could be fabricated and fueled in a factory, sealed and transported to sites for power generation or process heat, and then returned to the factory for defueling at the end of the life cycle. So at least there is some indication they are budgeting in the shutdown costs.

And while I agree there have been no major costly failures, there have been some exorbitantly costly "successes", where the cost of permitting, construction, operation, refueling, and mothballing has exceeded the the wildest expectations by factors in excess of 100.

The technology is mature enough, it is 3rd or 4th generation technology after all. What is not clear is if it makes sense to drop a hundred 160-200MWe pre-fabricated, truck delivered reactors around the country near every major city.

Personally, I'm fine with running many plants at 70% capacity rather than fewer plants at 90%.

You citation needed folks get on my nerves, but in my line of work the saying is "show me the data." I have alot of free time so I went ahead and googled it for you. Now most of the studies are behind paywalls and the wiki articles all allude to the problem. You however went ahead and thought you were being clever by quantifying anything over 100Hz. As I said, most of the wiki document alluding to it were behind paywalls but I did find ONE that has a number in it. It's a PDF and it is on slide 2. Go read that and holler back at me. Once you have your revelation, you can accept it as a fact that doesn't mean the end of all physics, or you can move your goalposts some more.

From the DOE
Also for your perusal Go to the lighting section.
Here is one of the offending paywall studies. The synopsis says there is some negative effects but it didn't have that magical 100Hz mentioned and I'm not paying to find out- I already know.

One of the big reasons they won't be profitable without state sponsorship is the military applications of enriched Uranium. The US made Energy a whole cabinet level entity chiefly because of nuclear prolifieration issues. Any effort by the far right in the US to "drown government in a bathtub" runs into the problem of how you can have a tiny federal government with a multi-billion dollar Dept. of Energy.
          ( As a small proof of these statements, the total budget for DOE 2014 is a tad over 26 Billion dollars, and the portion of it that is for dealing with weapons and prolifieration related activities is the largest single section of that total at just over 11 billion.)

                                                                                        http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/FY14_DOE_Budget_Highlights_Final.pdf

  (If readers want to cut to the chase, try the table on page 19). Interested people may note that the costs of all kinds of energy generation and of environmental activities are grouped together as one section, but they still come out smaller even lumped together, than the 'blowing things up and stopping other people from doing the same back at us' section does. Scientific research is smaller yet, only about a sixth of the budget. Then there's the question, how much of that environmental clean up and scientific research is actually to support the military parts of DoE activites and maybe ought to show up as another cost of war and proliferation?

        Those costs are going to be incurred so long as the US runs a Nuclear Navy, has H-bombs in its arsenal, and wants to stop various 'rogue nations and state sponsored action groups' from getting their hands on the resulting materials. Stop all civilian energy research (of all kinds, not just nuclear) and all civilian nuclear power plants cold, and you still have that 11 billion, plus its share of general administration costs, internal safety inspections, workforce health compliance, and such. The complex legal procedures for civilian nuclear involve taking fees that are supposed to help offset other DoE costs, then giving more back in exchange, more that is paid for by common taxation, so that it is very hard to say just how much of the grants actually go to the civil corporations and how much of them involves using the corps as a pass through to transfer money back to the military side.
              No other power generation technology faces this problem. We don't have to worry about the costs of military prolifieration of, say, wind or hydro technologies. But, what will happen if we start having to pay to prevent dirty coal projects in other countries? What if, for example, the US starts taking Kyoto seriously and wants to really cut coal prolifieration? About the only options we would have (short of just stopping all those nations from building enough powerplants of any sorts to keep their people alive), would be to let some of them develop nuclear plants. Those costs would then again be counted as part of our nuclear power costs. In other words, A large part of the cost of reducing other nations dirty coal emissions and greenhouse gasses would show up in the US budget as a nuclear proliferation control cost, even if the US completely stopped building or running all civilian nuclear plants on its own soil. Our economic system isn't just built to reward dangerous cost cutting, it is built to push costs that are only tangentially related to nuclear power into counting as 'Nuclear power' costs. That alone means Nukes will never be economically viable without taxation, but it's an artifact of the way we do the budget.

Absolutely, and if you want to solve congestion problems, problems with particle pollution and problems for asthmatics, cars is one place to start. If you want to cut CO2 emissions, even putting cars into the discussion (personal transportation) is ignorant and stupid, since removing all gasoline powered cars will not have any impact on what you are trying to solve... What we should focus on is electricity production etc, since that can have an impact. Moving to EVs will not.

You are simply ignorant of the facts:

Annual Emissions per Vehicle (National Average)
8,000 lbs Electric Vehicle
13,000 lbs Conventional Gas Vehicle

The source even has a graph for you. While it is true that converting to electric doesn't automatically mean it produces less carbon, it is also true that America's current electricity production with zero improvements would produce far less CO2 emissions. Add in some low-hanging efficiency improvements to the electrical grid, and you can intelligently charge vehicles just with temporary spare capacity throughout the day and night.

What you don't understand is that standardizing more of our country's energy usage into electrical power is the easiest way to improve efficiency. Electricity doesn't have to be moved with trucks from one side of a town to the other, and our country is already completely covered in a decent electrical infrastructure. And what's easier or more environmentally friendly: improving the emission standards of a single power plant, or attempting to drag a few hundred thousand cars in to be tuned up?

Do not forget that renewables are extreme polluters though. The most common, wind and solar, uses rare-earth minerals which are strip-mined in China in a process that devestates city after city, river after river and mile after square mile of fertile land. When it comes to absolute pollution, Solar (for example) has a devestating impact on the environment.

Well, perhaps in your bizarre alternate reality. Here on planet earth:

Making solar or photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. It even produces greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Still, the researchers found that if people switched from conventional fossil fuel-burning power plants to solar cells, air pollution would be cut by roughly 90 percent.

No, I wouldn't. For many reasons. One, I am not retarded, but I am starting to wonder about you.

Every time you use language like that, you are an embarrassment to every person you associate yourself with.

I have only stuck to the reality of the matter, and when it comes to CO2 emissions, the reality of the matter is that if you move the entire world to EVs using magic tomorrow, the total impact on CO2 emissions would be very close to zero. That is the only thing I am saying. I am not talking about the virtues of renewables, so why you bring them up is a little unclear to me.

Because your idiotic and baseless assumptions are further entrenched in the premise that all power generation is from fossil fuels. Eliminating CO2 from the electrical generation process would almost completely eliminate a person's carbon foot print if they were driving an EV. (Hopefully you understand how that works.) The only polluting portion would occur during the manufacturing process, and with all of the advances rolling in from materials science, I'm sure that can be tackled as well.

I don't know who is filling your head with all of the lies you are spitting back up, but you may want to consider who benefits from your ignorance. Maybe you are the member of some doomsday cult wringing yo

In the sciences we already have facilities for anyone to access. They are called user-facilities.

Besides this telescope is going to need way more than $1,000,000. That my buy the hardware but it won't pay for operational time.

The difference between historical design and best practice is somewhere in the vicinity of being able to power 6 million US households.

Not to mention the strawman you have made there. This isn't an either-or choice. Why can't we improve energy efficiency AND make an effort to rely less on bottled water?

Nothing wrong with netware and pentium 4s. The former's stability record might only come in danger once somebody bothers to leave NetBSD running for over a decade. And the latter is one of the most efficient ways to convert electricity to heat, no need for central heating when you have a pentium 4!

No, it's usually more efficient to use a heat pump. A Pentium 4 can only heat your house by using the energy coursing through it. A heat pump can extract heat from the outdoors, bringing up to 4 times as much heat into your building for the same amount of electricity.

To get real uptimes, you need a mainframe. That Netware system in the news with an epic uptime? It wasn't doing anything useful for the last several years. It just sat in the corner wasting electricity and accumulating numbers in its uptime counter.

By and large, the U.S. power grid is in a very good position to support the adoption of electric vehicles while still reducing emissions. This can not be said about some places, such as India and China, whose power plants are more dirty than gasoline cars.

To get an idea, consider the energy output of a windmill and divide it by the span of the prop to get the amount of energy removed per centimetre of length, assuming the width is about the same all the way is good enough. That puts it at the scale of a small fragile bat. The number you get is very small because it is less than the pressure of the prevailing wind on an area the size of a bat since you can't get all the energy out of the wind due to bearing friction etc.
Now do you see why I am dismissing the "bats killed by pressure drop" stupid bullshit as the PR campaign lie it is? It's the sort of thing that sounds OK initially due to technical terms thrown in to hide the really stupid lie, but if you think about how a windmill works the audacious lie is apparent. People caught out with it are also likely to be embarrassed that they fell for something so stupid so it's hard to talk them out of it.

I don 't know if the length is directly proportional to the amount of energy captured by wind mills. I bet the area of the blade, as well as it's pitch, is more important. Oh, and obviously the height. The bottom of the blades are supposed to be higher than the tallest thing that can block the wind. That includes trees. And I bet that that is higher than most bats will be flying.

And no I don't expect your explanation as to why you dismiss the "bats killed by pressure drop" as stupid bullshit. For all I know what you said was bullshit. More of the NIMBY shit delaying wind farms, even off the coast. You still did not provide evidence which is what I asked for. Can you provide scientific studies supporting your position? That is what I'm looking for.

Now here are some of the things I found:

• Wind turbines make bat lungs explode
• The Wind Turbine Interactions with Birds, Bats, and their Habitats: A Summary of Research Results and Priority Questions [pdf] section "What is the effect of barotrauma injuries to bats" says
  "While direct collision is thought to be responsible for most of the bat fatalities observed at wind facilities (Horn et al. 2008), recent work by Baerwald et al. (2008) suggests that some of the observed bat fatality may be due to barotrauma (i.e., injury resulting from suddenly altered air pressure). Fast- moving wind turbine blades create vortices and turbulence in their wakes, and bats may experience rapid pressure changes as they pass through this disturbed air, potentially causing internal injuries leading to death. The occurrence of barotrauma in bats, the proportion of individuals that succumb immediately versus those that fly away injured, and the associated influences on the estimation of bat fatalities are uncertain."
• Adirondack Bats: Wind Turbine Bat Threat says there are 2 causes of death to bats found at wind generators, blunt-force trauma and barotrauma.
• On a Wing and Low Air: The Surprising Way Wind Turbines Kill Bats says "It is the pressure change--not the blades--that wipe out thousands of bats annually at wind farms".
• Bats' Lungs Burst When They Fly Close to Wind Turbines

That's 5 links to science to your zero links. I found those by Googling

gas is 4 bucks a gallon, 10 years ago it was 98 cents

Ganjadude, WTF are you smoking?

https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2005/fcvt_fotw367.html

Might want to do a bit of research before saying things like this.

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/fuel_comparison_chart.pdf

Diesel is more energy dense than gasoline. However, diesel has a higher percentage of carbon than gasoline.

Funny has the Dept of Energy price chart http://energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources cuts off in 2008 (despite it being labeled as 2009) and shows rising natural gas prices which peaked in 2008 and have fallen dramatically http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm . Artificially increasing energy prices is the worse form of taxation.

The answer to your question is: DoE
http://energy.gov/mission

Oh, if only science were elevated to Department status, with a cabinet-level secretary!

I think you mean Department of Energy, Office of Science.

Oh, if only science were elevated to Department status, with a cabinet-level secretary!

I think you mean Department of Energy, Office of Science.

I don't know why you went AC on this, but it is absolutely correct.

Big Rigs (Tractors with Trailers) do the most damage to the road way.

hell most "Big SUVs" still fall into the light duty vehicle category (< 10001 lbs) according to the AFDC.

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Freight_transport_statistics

17.1% by rail and 6.5% by water in the EU.

https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2006_fcvt_fotw412.html

US: 36% rail, 20% water.

It's probably as much down to the population / economic distributions of the two continents. I'd bet the total tonne-km is less in the EU. (Consider rearranging the US so all the "poor" states are in the east, and the richer ones in the west, but one of the richest on an island.)

Corn to Ethanol production is current waste of time. The growing of corn takes more fuel than what it produces or in some newer studies it makes just slightly more than it takes to produce it. http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html

In the US, All coal plants have scrubbers, all new plants used fluidized bed boilers, and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.

You can continue to demonize clean coal all you want. It makes you trendy. But it doesn't make you right. Just makes you look uninformed.

I'm not so sure. Google brought up tons of examples of such fluidized bed plants that are still polluting for several reasons, such as not fully implementing the "green" technology to save money, dumping of hazardous coal ash in local wet lands, etc. It looks like coal CAN be a clean form of power, but the power conglomerates are cutting corners.

In the US, All coal plants have scrubbers, all new plants used fluidized bed boilers, and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.

You can continue to demonize clean coal all you want. It makes you trendy. But it doesn't make you right. Just makes you look uninformed.

I'm not so sure. Google brought up tons of examples of such fluidized bed plants that are still polluting for several reasons, such as not fully implementing the "green" technology to save money, dumping of hazardous coal ash in local wet lands, etc. It looks like coal CAN be a clean form of power, but the power conglomerates are cutting corners.

The words CLEAN and the word COAL should not be allowed next to each other until at least 10% of the coal plants are actually clean.

They are all Clean, Especially in the US and Western European countries. Even China is building new clean coal plants.

In the US, All coal plants have scrubbers, all new plants used fluidized bed boilers, and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.

You can continue to demonize clean coal all you want. It makes you trendy. But it doesn't make you right. Just makes you look uninformed.
   

The words CLEAN and the word COAL should not be allowed next to each other until at least 10% of the coal plants are actually clean.

They are all Clean, Especially in the US and Western European countries. Even China is building new clean coal plants.

In the US, All coal plants have scrubbers, all new plants used fluidized bed boilers, and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.

You can continue to demonize clean coal all you want. It makes you trendy. But it doesn't make you right. Just makes you look uninformed.
   

• Kettle: http://www.philips.com.ph/c/tea-and-boiling/viva-collection-1.0l-2400w-1-cup-ind.-white-lavender-hd4676_40/prd/
• Hairdryer: http://www.amazon.com/Turbo-5000-Professional-Dryer-Watts/dp/B008DI7WBQ

According to energy.gov, clothes dryers use 1800-5000W, although the latter are surely industrial as they would need to sit on a three phase socket This still raises the question as to how long you really need to boil water for 2400W for a minute or two is not going to significantly shorten the life of the battery pack in the article.

Those 8 TFLOPS would have landed it somewhere at the top of the #500 supercomputer performance list in November, 2011. ASCI White used 8192 375MHz Power3 cores to achieve this performance. It took up a fair bit of space and used 3 MW to run the machine with a further 3 MW needed for cooling. It had a theoretical processing speed of 12.3 teraflops.

https://lpo.energy.gov/?projects=fisker-automotive
http://nlpc.org/stories/2012/02/08/many-unanswered-questions-surround-fisker-layoffs
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/09/25/obamacar-bad-karma-for-taxpayers/

I'm conservative and I didn't mod you down.

I just provided facts about what a totally corrupt, clusterfuck Obama's green energy programs are and I didn't even do it tangentially. Biden was the Senator from Delaware before he was VP, what a coincidence! The cars catching fire just prove what a ill-designed piece of shit they are. We should be grateful that there are not many of them actually on the road.

Wikipedia's energy efficiency in transportation page has useful data on this. In particular it says the average car occupancy rate goes from 1.3 in the Bay Area to 1.59 in the UK. That that range seems to be confirmed by the DoE. So your car does 39 to 47.7mpg (4.9 to 6 l/100km/passenger). Now planes don't always travel full either but I'd expect them to be 60 to 80% full which would give them 54 to 73 mpg according to the above calculation. But luckily for us Wikipedia also indicates that the average fuel consumption for planes is 4.8 l/100km/passenger which is as good as or better than what can be expected from your sample car.

slashdot concensus? try Facts
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw615.html

average: 10 miles
average to work: 12.6 miles

Didn't mean to make that an AC post. Been so long since I posted here ;-) Here's the link to the DoE study on EV road wheel efficiency I took the figure from. Hint: it's 24lb's of COe

Private security contractors strike again

Are you implying that if the security were nationalized (ala TSA) that such ineptitude would not exist?

Why the explicit blame on "private security contractors"? Why not fire any private company who is not doing their job and find one that can/will?

Probably has to do with this quote and link from the article:

The obvious problems that result from so much contractor freedom are made clear by the recent inspector general report, which determined that this lack of federal oversight at least partially contributed to the success of the break-in PDF: "When questioned as to why action was not taken to address growing maintenance backlogs, Federal officials told us that with the advent of NNSA's contractor governance system (Contractor Assurance System), they could no longer intervene." In light of these findings, the inspector general had serious questions about the Energy Department's overall approach and determined that "current initiatives to reduce Federal oversight of the nuclear weapons complex, especially as they relate to security functions, need to be carefully considered."

There are many forms of nationalized security: some very bad (TSA) and some very good (National Guard). Private industry will save you money and, when pitted against each other in true capitalism form, they will cut corners to win contracts. Somethings should have security independent of how the economy is doing or how low some no talent ass clown is willing to bid on a contract.