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Wow, very interesting. For much of my life I've had great admiration for UK and your technical prowess. I often think every Brit owns a soldering iron and can build a simple radio without plans. You did great things in RADAR development in WW2, computing, codebreaking, etc. Everyone wants a British electric guitar amp, and being an audio buff, when I did some research for an EE college audio project, I found the UK stuff to be the best and I learned a lot. I assumed you designed and built your reactors.

Rally the troupes! Design better reactors! Build some! Tally Ho!

Build several smallish ones: https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-smallest-nuclear-reactors-4144463/

Don't cut corners. Enforce good project management. Fire lazy / inattentive people who prefer to drag their feet, inflate costs, cut corners, etc. Streamline the oversight / review process. Make it agile.

I don't want to say too much, but I'm working on a small project that's part of the reactor monitoring system. Frankly I see some errors in the design, which is 40 years old and went through years of a very expensive design review and approval process. I'm not allowed to change anything, even though there are some errors. Don't let any such bureaucracy drag you down. Agile development. Design reviews. Collaboration. I can easily justify any and all of my designs and proposed changes. Inspire people to want to do better design / construction. Find those who care and have enthusiasm. Some of us do!

Oops, my soapbox is needed elsewhere.

XXongo says

...This is an example of why you should always read the article, not just the headline....

You're right. I'm wrong. Often am. Probably just con-fusion on my part. There are fusion reactors out there now, who aim to fuse hydrogen into helium, and release incredible amounts of clean energy to the grid. But none sell electricity yet. So far, it's just research.

Right. In fact, not only do none of the fusion reactors sell electricity, none of them even make electricity. Since they haven't gotten fusion to work yet to the point where it produces more power out than you put power in, nobody's bothered to install generators to turn the power that they're not producing into electricity.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-uk-has-just-switch-on-its-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-reactor

If you read that article more carefully, the headline says that they've "switched the reactor on" but the text says that they "achieved 'first plasma'." That's "turning it on," I agree... but it's not fusion.

They haven't actually put deuterium (much less tritium) in yet, in fact, they haven't yet (as of the article) yet achieved fusion threshold temperature (the article you cite says at they "hope to achieve the fusion threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius" by next year; an article from this year says that they expect to hit 15 million degrees this year: https://www.power-technology.c...

The other key difference here is the use of waste heat for remote central heating. I'm not sure how they do it in North America but in Europe and Russia many places have dedicated district area central heating plants, either fueled by waste reprocessing, cogeneration on the back of power plants, or in some horrid cases, standalone. By combining it with the power plant you get massive increases in efficiency from the fuel source as you can repurpose waste heat that is too cool to generate power, and put it to use for heating systems.

Also information is all over the place. That Wikipedia article says the KLT-40S used in this installation needs 14% enriched uranium.
An article from Power Technology says it uses KLT-40C which combined generate 300MW of heat. https://www.power-technology.c...

According to my power bill, 87% of my electricity comes from hydro and 11% comes from nuclear.

Where do you live, Newhalem? (mostly kidding) But seriously, as far as I know, Microsoft gets power from Puget Sound Energy, and PSE says they get 31% from hydro:

https://www.pse.com/aboutpse/E...

Sadly 37% is coal. But 22% natural gas and 9% wind.

I did some Google searches and I found that you are correct: Washington just has a single coal plant, and it will shut down its coal burning by 2025. I believe it will burn natural gas after that; it already has a combined cycle gas turbine power unit, operating alongside the two coal power units. Since the two coal power units produce 1340 megaWatts and the combined cycle unit produces only 248 megaWatts, presumably they will be building more non-coal power units.

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/centralia/

But it's still possible to use coal power from out of state, as discussed here: https://www.opb.org/news/article/the-northwest-struggles-with-coal-generated-power-from-out-of-state/

You do realise that the years-out-of-date table of "Nuclear power plants under construction" in the Wikipedia article actually came from the World Nuclear Organisation's webpages?

China builds very few single-site reactors and the Wikipedia table only lists the start date of the first reactor on a given site -- for example Fangchenggang is going to have six reactors but the first two reactors only started construction in 2010 (they're now finished and in operation). The next two started building in December 2015 and December 2016 respectively. The final two reactors might start construction this year but it's not certain.

I took a look at Google Maps for the Fangchenggang reactor site -- the satellite view dated 2017 shows two completed reactors on the east coast of the peninsula with two more reactors under construction to the west of them (you can see the circular basemats quite clearly). Here's a picture of Fangchenggang 3 under construction:

http://www.power-technology.co...

No one in the world is sending power at any quantity thousands of miles if they can avoid it, you lose too much in transmission.

Five of the world's longest

Of course, in developed countries, a whole networked grid is used instead, but hey, we already knew that. So should you. Oh wait, you're in proud ole Texas, which don't cotton to none of that.

For now. That's changing. Especially as folks realize the price of doing as you do.

Of course, you come from Germany, where you have been completely brainwashed into thinking you should pay 30+ cents per KWh, and the irony is that you've been lied to, thinking you're all green...

But you're really not. But go ahead and believe the propaganda, you seem to like it so.

You're probably one of the people who believed the propaganda about the California power crisis, which was incessantly attributed to the greens in that state, and a lack of new power construction.

Then lo and behold, we find out the real crux problem was in Houston, at a company called Enron.

Hey, how about some Texas Justice there?

But no, you've got your chromed-out trucks to drive, and your big-ole steaks to chew down on, while you've got a bunch of rifles to open carry.

Meanwhile, you live in a house that can't manage to be comfortable without you paying to keep it conditioned, you can't seem to manage without continuous showers for your family so you install even more water heaters, and for some reason, you don't realize that your money is being frittered away every time you run the dishwasher to clean a single plate. Try using a handscrubber for a few weeks till you can afford to buy 2 more plates.

Seriously, you must be brainwashed as much as you go on about how you can't change the way you live, how it's so offensive that anybody asks anything different of you. Better than facing the realization that maybe you ought to have done things differently.

They are pretty common. Here is one from my neck of the woods. http://www.power-technology.co...

Japan officially unveiled today its 7 megawatt (MW) wind turbine, the world’s largest offshore turbine to date. It is slated to be operational by September [of 2015].

Let's also look at contenders.

The SeaTitan 10MW wind turbine designed by American energy technologies company AMSC is currently the biggest wind turbine in the world. [...] AMSC is currently negotiating with potential partners to build and commercialise the SeaTitan 10MW wind turbines.

That one's not in production yet.

The ST10 offshore wind turbine designed and developed by the Norwegian technology company Sway, is the world's second biggest wind turbine. It has a power output of 10MW, is equipped with a rotor of 164m diameter, has a 2rpm nominal speed and blades 67m in length. [...] Sway Turbine is looking for potential partners to commercialise the ST10 turbine technology.

Looking to commercialize this one, too.

French energy company Areva's 8MW wind turbine, launched in November 2013, is the world's third biggest wind turbine by rated capacity. [...] The turbine's prototype is scheduled to be installed in 2015, while commercial production is expected to begin in 2018.

This is the third-highest-nameplate-capacity turbine in the world, behind the two 10MW ones that haven't even gone into production yet. This one is looking for a prototype test in 2015, and maybe commercial production in 2018.

Shit this big doesn't exist yet. No single 10MW turbine exists yet. You're claiming you've got single 25MW turbines installed, when they don't exist either. Do you also have Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny over there, and a functional warp drive and space fold generator?

Dude, I pointed you at a specific example. Here's the dashboard for the generation in France
That is not base load, that is the "load following" curve, ofc that is changing drastically. A picture explaining base laod: http://www.abc.net.au/science/...
Here is again a picture explaining what base load is: http://www.eike-klima-energie....
The blue part is base load.
This picture explains what base load is: http://www.allmystery.de/i/taf... it is the yellow and brown part (note the horizontal never changing line)
Something from Swizerland: http://www.win-swiss.ch/htm/st... the second last picture shows what base load is: it is everything up to the red line.

And now in english:
http://www.renew-reuse-recycle... The base load line is not visible, judging from the peak of roughly 50GW, base load is somewhere around 20GW - 25GW (Germany has 40% base load versus peak load relation, France has roughly 50% base load versus peak load relation)

OH A PERFECT PAGE You should pay me for trying to hammer this into your brain: http://www.geothermal-electric...
The "red" line is the base load line. Rather strange to have such a high base load, interesting.
I cite: In this graph, the base load is 120 megawatts, in the early hours of the morning. Demand does not fall below this base load at any time during the 24 hours.
Do you grasp it? Base load: the amount of power I always feed into the greed regardless of demand In germany actually around that time "demand is falling below" base load. I mentioned that to you in one of my first posts. The excess is mainly used to fill up our own pumped storages. So we create an artificial demand, if you want to say so, with the effect that our base load is a bit higher than it "could be".

Something you should have googled yourself instead of making an idiot of yourself: http://www.power-technology.co...
Care to read the text at the lowest dashed line? Or can you already guess what is written there?

A base load solar plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Unfortunately no picture here: http://www.kcet.org/news/rewir...
But a laymen's explanation, I cite: As you can see, even when California is on "standby" setting, around 5:00 am or so, we still consume a considerable amount of power. That's the power consumption base load.

For the next wrong answers of yours, I demand my usually salary which is $100 per hour for correcting your mistakes. Or stay dumb ... that is free of course.

292 mile range off a 85kWh battery, or 651kJ/km.

Ok

Adding in battery manufacture and allowing a generous 1000 cycles, that goes up to 923kJ/km.

Where did you get these numbers? Where are the numbers for combustion engine manufacture?

Allowing for losses in electricity generation (40% at best)

This chart claims it is 5% at best, 10% at worst.

and transmission (~7%)

I suspect losses for shuttling around gas tankers is above and beyond ~7%. Care to factor that in?

A medium size diesel gets about 60mpg (UK gallons)

One of those tin cans on wheels? Economy cars in US get 30 mpg, and cars size/power/luxury class of Tesla get 18 mpg

Ok, so I found 3 Humboldt Countys in California, Iowa and Nevada, but based on size it appears you mean the CA one, of course it only really has 2.2million acres of land, the rest is water.

According to this report (http://postcarboncities.net/humboldt-county-ca-energy-element-background-technical-report) Humboldt county (apologies if I got the wrong one or anything) used 940 GWh of electricity alone in 2003, which comes out to around 2500MWH averaged daily - that is a heck of a jump from your 100MWH, 25 times as much. And that doesn't count usage growth over the last 8 years, nor the natural gas heating, cooking and hot water (about 45million therms) nor transportation energy costs.

I'm pretty concerned by your numbers now, but even taking your 25 acre 5MW station at face value, and even allowing that it's a molten salt plant and stores enough energy to provide that 5MW continuously day and night with backup storage to last several weeks and to provide that 5MW during the local solar minimum you would need 12500 acres to provide just the electrical energy. 10 cubic meters of molten salt can provide 1MWH of storage, since you'd need 2500MWH of storage for a single day, and several weeks of storage you're talking about 350k cubic meters of molten salt, a heck of a lot.

Sure all of this is relatively minor compared to the actual size of Humboldt county but I'd guess the cost of manufacture of a 5MW plant to be around the $20million mark (unaccurately based on http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/ and scaling down), so if you have to build 500 of them just to handle the electrical load you're talking about $10billion to manufacture (and remember this is for purely the electrical generation of 2003, not transport or natural gas). The population of 2008 is estimated at about 130k (http://mapzones.org/Humboldt_County_California.html) meaning that would cost about $77k per resident. The same report shows that the average per-capita income of Humboldt county residents is $17k annually - or 4.5 times the cost.

I don't know about you but I'm a little puzzled as to how you're going to pay for all of this? Not to mention over doubling it for powering hydrogen/electrical vehicles and replacing natural gas completely - something you'll have to do to have this green revolution of yours.

What you, and everyone who thinks that "popular pundit b.s." is just "b.s." seem to fail to understand is that this is a huge engineering, financial and technological issue to overcome. There are many reasons why it hasn't happened already, and aside from energy density and reliability the biggest reason is cost, are you really willing to have an additional 50% tax on all income in your state for the next 10 years to pay for constructing the plants necessary? Think of what that would mean, can you cope with 50% less money every payday?

Just as a comparison a 320MW natural gas power station costs about $150million dollars (http://www.power-technology.com/projects/laverton/), so you're looking at about the equivalent of 8 of them, or $1.2billion dollars - your solar plan is an order of magnitude more expensive. If you're saying that they should be built with loans and then amortised over the lifetime of the plant with the cost being the energy, you're still looking at about 5 times more expensive electricity (yes I know the fuel costs are minimal - mirror maintenance is a pain but you don't have to buy gas) unless you subsidise it somehow (in which case it's still 5 times as expensive but you're pretending it's not).

If you're going to have statements like "Now you see where the science behind green makes sense, and the popular pundit b.s. that is constantly echoed is just exaggerated doubt and nonsense claims." then you had really better match that with actual verifiable numbers and facts. Rather than just repeating what you've heard without really understanding it - it is completely possible, but then again so

I'm pretty sure you've not thought that through.

That was purely the cost of the oil - which is only about 40% of the US energy usage, so assuming costs are roughly on par for the rest of the energy usage then it's over twice as much, so you could say that the energy costs we're spending over the next 40 years adds up to $240trillion, but then again you've ignore that 85 million barrels a day is crude oil consumption - for lots of different types of fuel, for plastics, for fertilisers etc. This might make the figures much more acceptable except that they're incorrect:

3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines ($19 trillion @ $5m each)
49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants ($59trillion @ $1.2billion each - http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/)
40,000 300 MW solar PV power plants ($44trillion @ $1.1billion each - http://www.thebioenergysite.com/news/3845/300-mw-solar-plant-planned-in-ningxia)
1.7 billion 3 kWrooftop PV systems ($102trillion @ $60k each)
5350 100 MWgeothermal power plants, ($1.6trillion @$300million each - http://www.globalenergymagazine.com/?p=2438)
270 new 1300 MWhydroelectric power plants, ($135billion @ $500m each)
720,000 0.75 MWwave devices ($6.48trillion @$9million each - http://cleantech.com/news/4276/pelamis-sinks-portugal-wave-power-p)
490,000 1 MWtidal turbines ($3.92trillion @$8million each - http://www.energyefficiencynews.com/policy/i/3710/)

Giving a rough total of $236trillion... Of course not even close to counting the hydrogen infrastructure the electrolysis plants needed to make the hydrogen, nor the new global transmission infrastructure or the necessary energy storage.

And this was to handle the projected consumption of 2030, not 2050, so what it really works out to is something like $59trillion in oil costs up until 2030 - and this isn't just fuel at the pump, it's all oil, from fuel to plastic to fertiliser.

Which means it's not double, it's not triple it's 4 times as much as you're paying now - for all oil. And even of the oil that is burnt 72% of that is used for cars... Cars that won't magically convert to running on electricity and hydrogen, that's a lot of cars you need to replace, and filling stations, and human behaviour.

To be frank I think the cost will be an order of magnitude higher than it is now - 10 times as much as you're paying, not your double.

Finally, don't forget you'll have to pay it at the same time as everything is built, meaning it's oil AND these costs (in fact this will drive oil prices up massively as all the materials have to come from somewhere, there's transport, manufacture, installation etc - all using oil) which are really optimistic.

Oh yes, and the report mentions a new improved electricity grid, mainly because the power is never where (or when) you need it - no idea of the cost of that. It

And this ignores the fact that the world would be a very different place after this big change occurred, I mean who actually needs constant uninterrupted power? That's a luxury we can all do without. Not one of these studies has ever dealt with the variability of the energy source, the need to ship it half way around the world and the fact that roughly 20% of it (the solar) doesn't work at least 50% of the time, and that 73% of the energy generation comes from wind, wind known to have long periods when it's useless; from too windy to no wind, for weeks at a time.

Storage is hugely inefficient, transmission is very inefficient and I must have missed the part of the report that mentions it all. With costings..

My conclusion? Wow, they just don't bother looking at it seriously, after all who wants t

Spain is doing something similar. But different.

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/

Hydro, geothermal and wave, fine. Wind and solar? You still have to keep fossil and nuclear plants running 24/7, or eat the brownouts. Power generation figures for wind and solar are bullshit - show me the figures for reductions in fossil and nuclear generation in areas where wind and solar are "contributing" to the load.

Actually, I have a friend who's got a cabin up in the hills that's completely off the grid. Septic system, well water, solar power, electric everything (including stove and bbq). The in-house lines have a natural 16V system which powers major appliances and lights, and there's an up-converted 120V power supply for things like TV or computer.

He uses these things called "batteries" to store extra energy that's generated during the day in order to power things at night. Coupled with turning things off at night, his system generates more than enough electricity to keep things going, and can go for about 2 weeks if the weather's overcast before he has to switch to the gasoline generator to charge the batteries.

Now while it's unusual to have 2 weeks' straight overcast weather, it's not unheard of. But you can get past that by building a distributed network that covers a large land area. We may have about 60% cloud cover in our atmosphere, up to 80% on some days, but it's always sunny somewhere, and you can use generation from places where it is sunny to help supplement the needs/generation where it's not.

If we were to get serious about conservation and turning stuff off when we don't need it, then we could switch to solar tomorrow. more practically, as the GP said, we should be using solar as much as we can, and use something that's not clean to make up the deficit.

And before you start talking about how dirty solar panels are, and how much energy is required to produce them, I'll draw your attention to this. There's other ways to use solar energy to generate power. This one uses nothing more dirty than concrete and mirrors, coupled with a large water tank and a turbine. It's so efficient that on a bright day as much as 40% of the mirrors are directed *away* from the focal point, as it produces far more energy than the system can use.

where I said 1.8KWh above, I should have said 1.8Wh, but this is wrong anyway.

It takes 1400 gallons of diesel to ship the container, so that means that each bulb is using 1400 * 40000 Wh / 22000 = 2500 Wh

So it takes 35 hours for the CFL to recoup the energy used in shipping.

I didn't take into account the fact that turning diesel into electricity is not 100% efficient, so you're not going to get 40KHw out of a gallon of diesel. In real life it's probably closer to 50%. So that makes my numbers even more conservative and it's probably closer to 17 hours to recoup the energy cost.

Seen this really beautiful solar tower yet? Here's the best picture I could find of it in operation.

That's still not really cheap, and it wont replace all gas/oil/cole/nuclear plants... but imho it's another nice step into the right direction :)

You said

"Oil burning plants were eliminated after Carter's oil crisis."

Which is wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant#Gas_turbine_combined-cycle_plants

See those? They use oil. And as it happens, a quick search reveals where you can find them, like Texas

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/midlothian/

They are basically water powered generators utilizing a large storage lake

Well, no.

The piece of information that's missing from the article is the density of this thing.

Absorbing 83 times its volume in CO2 is all well and good until you realize they're talking about a *gas*. With a density of about 1.8 kg/m3. So 83 litres is about 150 grams. If those crystals weight more than 1kg/l (and I assume they don't float), they absorb less than 15% of CO2 in mass. Which is rather less impressive.

I'm sure they'll find applications in space flight, submarines and what not, but, well this 420MW plant produces 1.2MT of CO2 a year (and seems fairly clean and efficient). Thinking about carrying 5.6 MT of those crystal there and back is just plain stupid.

Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.

Fair enough. But again you're omitting some key facts, are you not?

To start on the water reservoir business, you have to put about a billion USD on the table and that's if you're building the damn thing in China dozen years ago!? The chinese plant has storage capacity of around 9300MWh (13000MWh gravity potential at 70% efficiency). That takes 8 million cubic meters of water pumped 600 meters up. Or about 200m by 40m by 1km pool. Whoa nelly. Let's say one modern nuke plant is at around 1000MW so that engineering monster can store about nine hours worth of power output from the plant. Going to have to build quite a few pools to survive between September and April.

Let's look at that energy storage cost figure next, shall we? one billion cost, 9300MWh storage cap. Divide 1e9 with 9.3e6 and you have 107,5USD / kWh. Oops.

The price per watt is *NOT* the price of the power output. It's the price of a cell producing a "standard watt". You then plug this in to how much insolation you get in a given region, factor in all of the other capital costs, and then amortize them (and maintenance) over the life of the system.

Really, you must think people are utter idiots if they can't figure out that you need to do that.


No, I just think people who preach numbers as gospel without checking them are idiots.

You admitted it yourself the $1/W figure is completely meaningless. What matters is what's the average cost for kWh in any given region in average. In california you may have nice positive feedback since you need more AC the more sun you get, but over here we need more heating when we get f- all sunlight for months during winter. Even if it's technically daytime, it's usually overcast. In summer sun may be up 20 hours / day but didn't we just have a discussion on the practicality of large scale energy storage?

I'm sure your amortization calculations factor in a modest profit for capital for the projected 50 year service life and add to the cost of the energy accordingly?

a vacuum also conducts electricity .Maybe not as well.could they use a vacuum?

Only when there is a source of free electrons nearby. A CRT works by having an electron gun in the back. When it is dead, the electron flow stops. Add a small amount of gas and excite it and you have a low pressure plasma much like in a neon tube or plasma sphere. A vacuum is used as an insulator. Here is an example..

http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/electric_power/illustrated_glossary/substation_equipment/vacuum_circuit_breakers.html
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1601629
http://www.power-technology.com/contractors/switchgear/huayi/huayi5.html

no gas. no plasma. little arc from vaporised metal.

Around $1,000 per KW of generating capacity according to wikipedia, given that you seem to be trolling for info I can't be arsed doing more research than that. For 100GW that's an outlay of $100B.

TBH that figure surprised me, a small cooking fire generates well more than a KW, however this http://www.power-technology.com/projects/blackpoin t/ shows just under $1M per KW. It really does seem that none of these numbers add up. Perhaps the problem is not dependence on oil/coal/pixie dust but the centralised power generation model.

Umm, probably about a quarter acre large. Here's a picture of a bulk electric (500 kV) 252 MVAr (Volts-Amps-Reactive) capacitor bank using existing technologies; that's on the high end of size for a 500 kV station (typical on the east coast USA's grid is about 160 MR if a station needs it), and they can get expensive. You can find more pictures in a Google Image Search. I am told that large capacitors actually give off an audible (high-pitched) "whine" that can get quite annoying (and loud) to anyone in the vicinity.

Is there a coal plant in Centralia? I don't know, but I suspect not. I do know that if there is, that it processes a lot less than 28,000 tons of coal a day -- No 10 plants in the world combines process that amount combined. According to this site: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html in 1982 (a year in which more coal was burned than 2005) the entire world processed 2.8 billion tons, but you'd have us believe that one plant in Centralia output 1.2 billion tons of Carbon Dioxide in a year from processing coal? If that's true, it'd explain the dismal overcast over western Washington most of the time, but if you're right, most of it didn't come from coal. Since I decided to look up statistics, I decided to find out, and yes, there is actually a coal plant in Centralia, though it's a model of efficiency and low environmental impact: http://www.power-technology.com/projects/centralia / According to the site, it provides roughly enough power for all of Seattle.

Here are some real numbers:
* 55% efficiency of fuel->electric in combined cycle plant (powered by crude or gas)
* 85% efficiency of electrolysis
* 50% efficiency of a PEM fuel cell
* ~90% efficiency of an electric controller/motor
* 12% efficiency of an IC engine in an average drive cycle
* 40% efficiency of crude oil->gasoline

So comparing systems normalized on crude oil, and assuming the same transmission and friction losses in the vehicle:
* Crude->gas->ic engine->motion is about 4.8% efficient
* Crude->electricity->electrolysis->fuel cell-motion is 21% efficient. 4.3 times better

To give an idea of how bad current vehicles are a 1995 Ford Taurus throughout the driving cycle only requires on average 6.3 kW (150 MPG) in motive energy, but only achieves ~28 MPG. And that is before addressing issues like reduced weight.

But more importantly hydrogen can be generated by solar, wind, or biological processes. Look at the economics. Wind can be purchased in bulk for ~3 cent/kWh. At 36.6 kWh/gallon gasoline equivalent and 85% electrolyzer efficiency: Hydrogen costs $1.10 per gallon of gas equivalent today using renewables . Right now that is sounding rather good. Not that hydrogen is the end all, but it is a good alternative to oil.

Here are some real numbers:
* 55% efficiency of fuel->electric in combined cycle plant (powered by crude or gas)
* 85% efficiency of electrolysis
* 50% efficiency of a PEM fuel cell
* ~90% efficiency of an electric controller/motor
* 12% efficiency of an IC engine in an average drive cycle
* 40% efficiency of crude oil->gasoline

So comparing systems normalized on crude oil, and assuming the same transmission and friction losses in the vehicle:
* Crude->gas->ic engine->motion is about 4.8% efficient
* Crude->electricity->electrolysis->fuel cell-motion is 21% efficient. 4.3 times better

To give an idea of how bad current vehicles are a 1995 Ford Taurus throughout the driving cycle only requires on average 6.3 kW (150 MPG) in motive energy, but only achieves ~28 MPG. And that is before addressing issues like reduced weight.

But more importantly hydrogen can be generated by solar, wind, or biological processes. Look at the economics. Wind can be purchased in bulk for ~3 cent/kWh. At 36.6 kWh/gallon gasoline equivalent and 85% electrolyzer efficiency: Hydrogen costs $1.10 per gallon of gas equivalent today using renewables . Right now that is sounding rather good. Not that hydrogen is the end all, but it is a good alternative to oil.

Unfortunately, not many countries have free surplus electricity. Maybe China when they finish that huge hydro dam.

I don't think you'll see any surplus electricity from the Three Rivers Project. At 18,200 MW it's pretty impressive and is 10% of China's current electric requirement.... but that's "current" not "future" (they are trying to achieve an American standard of living -- obviously that is going to suck down more KwH then the current standard -- for better or worse depending on who you ask) and even 10% of your total energy requirement isn't "free surplus electricity".

Granted Hydro is always impressive and with our current technology it's about the best possible option all around on a cost and environmental basis with nuclear fission being a close second (great for the environment -- expensive as hell though). Yeah I know building dams sucks (ugly, hurts the river ecosystem) but they are better then a coal plant spewing radioactive materials, acid rain and huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

90% chemical-to-heat efficiency
30-40% internal-combustion engine efficiency
60-70% large scale turbine efficiency
70% lead-acid battery efficiency
Another reference for gasoline energy density

Which numbers were out to lunch in the real world, and what are the correct numbers?

Having gone to college in Bethlehem (Lehigh) and having spent a good deal of time in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area visiting friends, I can honestly say that the Wilkes-Barre area is far more depressed than Bethlehem.

The North side of the Lehigh is beautiful. The newly renovated Hotel Bethlehem. The Moravian College area (Main St.). Very few empty store fronts. (Wilkes-Barre can't claim that.) Beautiful historic sites. New development. A wondeful stock of well maintained older brick Victorian homes.

Though I can see how if you've only been to South Bethlehem, you might think otherwise. Still, even the South Side is improving. On a recent visit, I was amazed to see 3rd St (for those that know it) loaded with new stores, clean, and people shopping. (Bear in mind, this is happening even during a recession!) Bethlehem Steel closed 8 years ago. In its place on the old Bethlehem Steel property is the new high tech company incubation district. Hi-tech, biotech startups, fostered by below market rent and help from Lehigh. A new Rail intermodal terminal already functioning, providing replacement non-service-sector blue-collar jobs. A new natural gas power plant (more replacement jobs). A new hockey rink will soon be built by the Philladelphia Flyers. And the piece de resistance, the Smithsonian is planning on opening a large museum of industrial history around the old steel blast furnaces. Awesome!

In short, there's plenty of hope (and progress) in Bethlehem.

Go to Pittston, near W-B, and tell me about the empty lots, burned down buildings (just last week this huge downtown place went up) and vacant, decaying store fronts. The Wilkes-Barre area's number #1 employer is the government. #2 is Techneglas, which just layed off one of my engineer friends and who knows how many other workers. #3... the service industry (you know, minimum wage jobs like at CVS). So you have only one company bringing money -into- the W-B area, and they're having real difficulty.

On the plus side, the people are really really nice and real estate sure is cheap...

I dunno. Driving around the W-B area I get this feeling of hopelessness that I don't get in Bethlehem.

Now Allentown and Easton... feel free to dis those cities, because they aren't doing well like Bethlehem... Sorry about the rant. There's just no way you can say Wilkes-Barre is doing better than Bethlehem...

they do combined cycle diesels too, and they are not past the mid 50s in efficiency. Diesels without the combined cycle are lucky to hit 50.

5-10% may not sound like alot but it is huge! hell, 1% is huge when you are talking about this stuff...