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I find this "hacking" of the Prius really exciting, and a good protent for the future. If anything, toyota should spin this into a sales pitch:

"Buy a Prius and get 60mpg right out of the gate. But if you would like to save even more on gas, get the Prius Extension Kit for $49.95 and draw electricity form your home to your Prius, doubling the car's mileage."

"But wait - there's MORE! with the Prius Pro Developers Kit, you can swap out the batteries for other even more powerful batteries, and not just doubling your mileage, but TRIPLLING your mileage!"

"Why WAIT? Call Now! Operators Are Standing By!"

Seriously: just like ever punk ass kid can dope up his Honda Civic lifback into a firebreathing psych machine, you should be able to totally juice the crap out of a Prius.

this is the kind of technology that was envisioned years ago by the Rocky Mountian Institute's notions of a hypercar.

I want one of those...

RS

From this article:

Janet Ginsberg: how many camps and average size? How long do they last?

Larry Thompson: 10,000 people is an average size. Some have up to 600,000 people. Some camps exist for around 15-20 years. In Palestine some have been there 40-50 years. We tend to put people in camps and forget about them. In Kosovo--UNHCR had plans on orderly return--the refugees all went home in a number of days. The thought is that many Afghans will go home this spring. But, unless there are demonstrated economic incentives to go home, they won't leave.

His non profit site has lots of information: Rocky Mountain Institute. I would also search around the web for webcasts or interviews with him.

And here's a quasi-interesting (I guess) story on how much the internet uses. How Much Electricity Does the Internet Use?

Replacing foriegn oil imports is vital to continued economic growth and ensuring security for any nation or society. A country would be foolish to place their bets on a resource that is dwindling and susceptible to manipulation by foreign interests. The good news is that it is mearly a technical problem but the lead time requires planning and foresight - which in some unnamed countries is sadly lacking.

Anyone interested this topic should checkout the Rocky Mountain Institute and read up on the ideas of Amory Lovins.

The Rocky Mountain Institute has published a number of papers on hydrogen and the hydrogen economy. This page contains links to papers (as pdf) including Twenty Hydrogen Myths and A Strategy for the Hydrogen Transition amongst others. They also have a separate website for one of their book publications called Winning the Oil Endgame.

The Rocky Mountain Institute has published a number of papers on hydrogen and the hydrogen economy. This page contains links to papers (as pdf) including Twenty Hydrogen Myths and A Strategy for the Hydrogen Transition amongst others. They also have a separate website for one of their book publications called Winning the Oil Endgame.

Tell that to France. They have a GREAT nuclear program, AND lower energy costs. The generate over 75% of their electricity from nuclear power.

1. Did you even read your own link? It says "France has been one of the slowest countries in the EU to open its electricity and natural gas sectors to competition in line with EU regulations." Why? Because they are not competitive. In fact "In France, the nation that made the biggest investment in nuclear energy, the national utility, Electricite de France, is carrying a $30 billion debt, mostly because of its nuclear investments"

"And while French nuclear advocates like to praise the nation's cheap domestic power prices, in reality, when compared to 10 other European Union nations, France ranks fifth in domestic power prices. In fact, since 1985, France's electricity prices have seen the smallest decrease in the EU. And while four new reactors are under construction there, none have been initiated since 1996."

Your link also says: "French government organized a national energy policy debate, which focused on determining France's energy mix for the next 30 years, particularly the status of nuclear power and the future role of renewables...Key of the aspects of the white paper included: increasing the use of renewables..."

Smart engineers are able to solve problems....they leave that to management.

2. You read too much Dilbert. Engineering is finding the best solution to a constellation of problems. Those problems include cost, schedule, profit, economics, safety, nuclear proliferation, waste disposal, operational reliability, etc. etc. etc. If you think you can develop a 100% perfect system (not 6 nines, or 9 nines, or whatever, but perfect) you are naive and potentially dangerous to those who use your products. You have two technological design options, one where the stakes are VERY high no matter how unlikely, but has NO advantages over the other path, which tromps it on almost every measure. Would you pick the first one? Just cause its technologically wizbang geeky?

Nuclear proliferation...Pretty much a non-issue,

3. Don't you even read the news? How did North Korea build their nuclear weapons? With a breeder reactor built for power generation. Many other countries have followed this same formula, A nuclear power plant is the fast track to nuclear weapons. Read, learn. (Try "Nuclear Choices", MIT press for a nonbiased technical but down to earth read).

For example, solar power is definitely NOT cheaper than nuclear power on any meaningful scale.

4. Wrong. On capital costs alone solar is competitive with nuclear, and after you consider operational costs, security cost, waste disposal costs, decommissioning costs, and etc - solar tromps it. Nuclear cost $2/W in capital cost alone. New photovoltaic technologies are being produced for $1/W, and wind hydro and geothermal even less, never mind all the other "hidden" external costs of nuclear. In fact, nuclear After a trillion-dollar taxpayer investment, it delivers little more U.S. energy than wood. Globally, it produces less energy than renewables."

That's a policy issue not a technical one. Let the gov't build the plants then

5. Of course its not a technical issue. Technically Nuclear power works just fine. But outside of science experiments, just because something is cool doesn't mean it should be done. It would be cool to freeze your arm in liquid nitrogen, hit it with a hammer and watch it shatter to

I found a paper about the 20 hydrogen myths (pdf format). It tells a lot about the Hindemburg, and other urban legends related to hydrogen.

Anyway, having pressurized hydrogen in your car is _NOT_ what the latest technology advancements are about. It's about hydrogen cells. And nanotechnology provides a way of storing hydrogen in solid media under low pressures.

For more info, check out nanoapex news and search the topic "nanoenergy".

(Note to editors:
Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, moderate this post as 'insightful'!)

While all fuels are inherently dangerous, hydrogen is notably safer in several ways, such as it's tendency to dissipate skywards when leaked and the fact that it's nontoxic.

Cost to build a solar thermal plant is currently $2 to $3 per watt, resulting in a cost of 9 to 12 cents per kWh delivered. Reference. That's in contrast to 2.5 to 5 cents per kWh for gas or coal plants. Expected advances (within the next few decades) should bring the solar cost down to 4 to 5 cents.

You said that system inefficiencies (batteries, inverters, etc.) are not applicable to solar thermal plants. How so? Thermal storage requires energy transfer, and converting heat to electricity isn't 100% efficient. You'll also need inverters and step-up transformers to get any generated electricity to the grid. The literature isn't terribly clear on whether "transmission line losses" include the losses you incur in converting your source's power stream into alternating current at whatever frequency and voltage the grid is expecting.

I didn't want to imply that solar plants (photovoltaic or solar thermal) should be dismissed out of hand. I was more laughing at the idea of covering the entire state of Arizona with solar cells. I'll will admit that I did get a little carried away.

I think solar can become an important part of our energy needs, but I doubt that it will become the major source or even a primary source in the near future.

It's unfortunate that I fucked up the math by a factor of 1,000 (the hazards of using a calculator rather than writing the stuff down). Fortunately I screwed up uniformly, so the cost numbers match the generation numbers.

The system we're talking about, using my wildly optimistic numbers and covering 5% of the state (340 million kWh) is roughly equivalent to a 15,000 Megawatt power plant. That's about four times as much power as is generated by the Palo Verde nuclear plant west of Phoenix.

In any event, even covering 5% of Arizona (that'd be 5,700 square miles, probably about the size of the military training ground there between Gila Bend and Yuma) would have some serious environmental effects.

I can see it now...

Protestor: "No Nukes!"

Advocate: "Would you rather build four nuclear plants, or permanently destroy 5,700 square miles of pristine desert by covering it with mirrors?"

Please read Twenty hydrogen myths (pdf). (HTML version by Google). This guy KNOWS what he's talking about.

I was kinda shocked when I read that many people who died at the hindemburg incident did so because they JUMPED OFF the thing before it could land.

And when i read about the hydrogen exploding with a "pop" instead of a "boom" in laboratory, i remembered my chemistry lessons. We DID put a flame in a test tube full of hydrogen. It popped really nice :)

You better check out the article to get more informed.

There's a very informative white paper written by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute which talks about this in great detail. He goes into the efficiency tradeoffs of centralized distribution vs. distributing electricity to local cracking stations, and so forth. He includes guesstimates of conversion efficiency, so it's not all hand-waving. It's well worth a read.

There's a very informative white paper written by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute which talks about this in great detail. He goes into the efficiency tradeoffs of centralized distribution vs. distributing electricity to local cracking stations, and so forth. He includes guesstimates of conversion efficiency, so it's not all hand-waving. It's well worth a read.

The only reason GM wouldn't sell such a car is if they couldn't turn a profit on it. Since you're telling people to do research (with some totaly uncalled for obscenity thrown in), why don't you provide some references to back that claim up?

First of all, I don't see any references backing up your claim that the only reason that GM wouldn't sell such a car is that they couldn't turn a profit on it. The profit motive is not the only factor in corporate beauracracies, but that is a whole other argument altogether.

No, the probable reason that GM wouldn't produce and sell such a car (in the short term), is that they have X billion dollars invested in current capital infrastructure, and producing a sporty sedan with 100 mpg would completely cannibalise their current market, thus requiring them to write off said X billion dollars. Never mind the 100 or so suppliers to GM that would be put out of business due to the complete change in the manufacturing process.

Plus there are usually very profitable "kick back" arrangements from suppliers that certain employees would be very reluctant to give up, and general corporate inertia as well.

My references to the car itself don't specify why GM corporate decided not to proceed. Only that the two cars were built in 100 days "by hand", and the resulting manufactuing process would be simpler and cheaper than the existing one, offsetting the higher cost of the materials.

My sources are the book Factor Four and the RMI site.

Sorry about the expletive ;)

"It's not going to change the overall vehicle to be unrecognizable from today," Hass [manager of physical and environmental sciences at Ford] said. "But the biggest impact may well be beyond anybody's imagination today."

I thought I'd add a few interesting ideas and resources to this discussion.

Check out the works of Amory Lovins / L. Hunter Lovins / Paul Hawken;
they have an interesting book which can be read free online or be purchased
in print depending on one's desire --
Read 'Natural Capitalism' free online or buy the book!
Read 'Natural Capitalism' free online
Read 'Natural Capitalism' free online

Amory Lovins has a lot to do with the Rocky Mountain Instutute
Rocky Mountain Instutute and there's a lot more information about efficient
technologies and industrial / social evolutions there.

"Natural Capitalism: Creating the next industrial revolution" is all about
paradigm shifts that evaluates efficiency and resource conservation as
being key factors both for environmental reasons as well as economic reasons --
economics is about the market prosperity of the most efficient products and
services, and surely there are disadvantages in inefficient use of one's
inputs.

"Achieve multiple benefits with single expendutures" -- and the book/ebook
is full of really thought provoking and compelling practical paradigms to
illustrate the power of that thinking!

Ok so my next salient point and resource on the subject of power supply efficiency is to look beyond the power supply to the load and realize that
computing itself can be as close to a "zero power needed" technology as one
cares to implement. Current digital circuits waste the vast majority of their
power by irreversably converting 1's to 0's and 0's to ones, basically charging
up capacitors to make a high voltage "1" where there was no voltage before
and then wasting all that energy a bit later shunting it to ground / zero volts
to make a "0" again. This isn't necessary to achieve the computing function!
And here are some interesting readings on that area:

"Reversible Logic" is one such practical approach to it --
Article At MIT

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=%22rever si ble+logic%22+%2BMIT

And otherwise: Book Info: "Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information"
"Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information"
a great read on the relationship between information theory, computing,
and thermodynamic entropy's relationship to data entropy, even touching
on how many "bits" of information a black hole must accumulate based upon
the entropy of the infalling matter/energy!

Besides classical circuit theory implementations like "Reversible Logic"
to save power there are very exciting opportunities in other quantum-computing
technologies like "Spintronics" (e.g. using the spin-quantum of currents flowing between magnetized metals / semiconductors to represent "1", "0" or
multi-level logic which is basically related to the way a NMR device gets
its signals):
Spintronics
Google It ...and various other quantum-effect computing technologies.

As for efficient power supplies, how about one that's 99% efficient,
generally non-toxic, cheap to manufacture (actually it's self manufacturing!)
and generates perfectly 'clean energy'?
Wired: Algae based fuel cells!
How about using the same kinds of photosynthesis that every green plant
on earth uses to split Hydrogen apart from Oxygen and create a microscopic
electrochemical fuel cell complete with the option of integrated
efficient 'storage batteries' for holding power when the sun's no

Are cars you lease rather than buy.

Some of this exists already, but the big car makers have to bring this to its logical conclusion.

If car makers have to pay for maintenance and disposal costs, they will be given an incentive to build the cars so they will be durable. Parts likely wouldn't break down as often, and would be easily replaced, just like you can change RAM on your box. And the whole thing will have to be recyclable.

Or we could simply go with a ten-year-old idea, the Hypercar. (more info)

Co-generation tends to be cheaper than normal generation because you not only get electricity - you also keep some of the heat. Still, natural gas prices are high at the moment.

As for the plans for US energy... I've read them, and they're utterly insane.

The DOE planners have historically been way off when predicting future energy needs: they simply did not take the potential for energy efficiency seriously.

So, the building of coal plants may start in earnest... but I doubt it will proceed as predicted!

These folks would suggest first determining how much energy is really needed and in what form, then figuring out which source best meets that need. With this methodology, it is cheaper to reduce demand first, until efficiency improvements become more expensive than the life cycle costs of more power plants, then seeing which kind of power plant might be needed.

It's now out of print, but Amory Lovins' book "Least Cost Energy: Solving the CO2 Problem" discussed this at length and in detail. It was published maybe twenty years ago. Its principles are still sound... for those who care to listen, anyway.

• Microchip fabrication facilities (or "fabs") are complex and energy-intensive.
  
• Energy accounts for less than 2 percent of a chip's cost, yet electricity can be the largest single operating expense for a chipmaker, totaling millions of dollars annually at a single fab.
  
• Despite great innovation, semiconductor manufacturing fosters a risk-averse corporate culture due to exacting process requirements, safety risks, the high cost of downtime, and brutal competition in a fast-moving marketplace.
  

• DOD uses 5 Billion gallons of fuel a year
  
• B-52 bombers could be refitted to modern ones using a third less fuel to achieve up to half again as much range. There are hundreds more similar examples.
  
• fuel was assumed to cost $1/gallon, but actual delivery costs can put that at $400-600 on the battlefield.
  

Discussions like this usually begin with, "What is the best way to deliver x (well, okay, n) megawatts to this community? But as Amory Lovins and others have pointed out, the starting point has to be determining how much energy is really needed. The least-cost approach would look at efficiency improvements first, because anything that reduces demand at a cost of less than $2000 per KW is a better buy than this power plant.

Economically, none of the existing ones have ever turned a profit without generous government assistance. I humbly submit an interesting organizations' website to this discussion: The Rocky Mountain Institute. They are a think tank on environmental and energy issues, which strives not to have a particular agenda, but only to base their analyses on proven science and solid economic reasoning. They don't lobby governments, and most of their recommendations are squarely aimed at industries.

Also, the notion that solar energy generation could never provide enough energy without taking up too much space is absurd. A back of the envelope calculation shows that a desert installation of mirrors focused on heating towers (working prototypes exist) or photovoltaics with today's available efficiencies, can do the job. The USA's electricity demand could be met with an installation the size of Rhode Island.

Readers of The Industrial Physicist will also recall from a recent article (and discussion in the letters to the editor) that we are not limited to Earth-based generation. Within decades, we could be placing photovoltaic installation on the moon, and beaming the energy to stations on the Earth's surface by focussed microwaves.

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has been proposing something like this for a while now, but with an interesting bootstraping step. Quoting a bit from Natural Capitalism (full text is available online):

A sufficient production volume to achieve $100 per kilowatt could readily come from using fuel cells first in buildings--a huge market that accounts for two-thirds of America's electricity use. The reason to start with buildings is that fuel cells can turn 50 to 60-odd percent of the hydrogen's energy into highly reliable, premium-quality electricity, and the remainder into water heated to about 170F--ideal for the tasks of heating, cooling, and dehumidifying. In a typical structure, such services would help pay for natural gas and a fuel processor to convert it into what a fuel cell needs--hydrogen. With the fuel expenses thus largely covered, electricity from early-production fuel cells should be cheap enough to undercut even the operating cost of existing coal and nuclear power stations, let alone the extra cost to deliver their power, which in 1996 averaged 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Electric or gas utilities could lease and operate the fuel cells most effectively if they initially placed them in buildings in those neighborhoods where the electrical distribution grid was fully loaded and needed costly expansions to meet growing demand, or where fuel cells' unmatched power quality and reliability are valued for special uses like powering computers.

Once fuel cells become cost-effective and are installed in a Hypercar [his term for an aerodynamic, lightweight, fuel cell vehicle, described in more detail in the book], the vehicle becomes, in effect, a clean, silent power station on wheels, with a generating capacity of around 20 to 40 kilowatts. The average American car is parked about 96 percent of the time, usually in habitual places. Suppose you pay an annual lease fee of about $4,000 to $5,000 for the privilege of driving your "power plant" the other 4 percent of the time. When you are not using it, rather than plugging your car into the electric grid to recharge it--as battery cars require--you plug it in as a generating asset. While you sit at your desk, your power-plant-onwheels is sending 20-plus kilowatts of electricity back to the grid. You're automatically credited for this production at the real-time price, which is highest in the daytime. Thus your second-largest, but previously idle, household asset is now repaying a significant fraction of its own lease fee. It wouldn't require many people's taking advantage of this deal to put all coal and nuclear power plants out of business, because ultimately the U.S. Hypercar fleet could have five to ten times the generating capacity of the national grid.

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has been proposing something like this for a while now, but with an interesting bootstraping step. Quoting a bit from Natural Capitalism (full text is available online):

A sufficient production volume to achieve $100 per kilowatt could readily come from using fuel cells first in buildings--a huge market that accounts for two-thirds of America's electricity use. The reason to start with buildings is that fuel cells can turn 50 to 60-odd percent of the hydrogen's energy into highly reliable, premium-quality electricity, and the remainder into water heated to about 170F--ideal for the tasks of heating, cooling, and dehumidifying. In a typical structure, such services would help pay for natural gas and a fuel processor to convert it into what a fuel cell needs--hydrogen. With the fuel expenses thus largely covered, electricity from early-production fuel cells should be cheap enough to undercut even the operating cost of existing coal and nuclear power stations, let alone the extra cost to deliver their power, which in 1996 averaged 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Electric or gas utilities could lease and operate the fuel cells most effectively if they initially placed them in buildings in those neighborhoods where the electrical distribution grid was fully loaded and needed costly expansions to meet growing demand, or where fuel cells' unmatched power quality and reliability are valued for special uses like powering computers.

Once fuel cells become cost-effective and are installed in a Hypercar [his term for an aerodynamic, lightweight, fuel cell vehicle, described in more detail in the book], the vehicle becomes, in effect, a clean, silent power station on wheels, with a generating capacity of around 20 to 40 kilowatts. The average American car is parked about 96 percent of the time, usually in habitual places. Suppose you pay an annual lease fee of about $4,000 to $5,000 for the privilege of driving your "power plant" the other 4 percent of the time. When you are not using it, rather than plugging your car into the electric grid to recharge it--as battery cars require--you plug it in as a generating asset. While you sit at your desk, your power-plant-onwheels is sending 20-plus kilowatts of electricity back to the grid. You're automatically credited for this production at the real-time price, which is highest in the daytime. Thus your second-largest, but previously idle, household asset is now repaying a significant fraction of its own lease fee. It wouldn't require many people's taking advantage of this deal to put all coal and nuclear power plants out of business, because ultimately the U.S. Hypercar fleet could have five to ten times the generating capacity of the national grid.

20 Hydrogen Myths (pdf) pretty much explains the whole "hydrogen economy" thing, including debunking pretty much all of the common objections.

It covers where do you get the hydrogen (natural gas at first, renewables later), why bother (electric motors are very efficient compared to combustion engines and renewables like wind can make your total supply cheaper) and what technologies need to be developed for it all to work.

sigh

Ok, all of this is answered quite comprehensively in 20 Hydrogen Myths a paper by the Rocky Mountain Institute.

The short answer to your questions is this: you make hydrogen from methane. Why do you bother? Because in an electric car, hydrogen-from-methane is still twice as efficient as any other fuel source: i.e in dollars per vehicle mile, it costs half of gasoline. Why? Because electric motors are just much, much better than internal combustion engines, and probably always will be.

Good enough? But there's more!

Electrolysis *IS* good enough: you can still take 3c / KWh grid electicity, make hydrogen, and run a fuel cell car cheaper than a gasoline vehicle.

Not much cheaper, but it's a start.

And here's the kicker: renewables can power hydrogen cars, so as well as cheaper driving now, you get to build the infrastructure of a renewable economy while you're at it.

Now, do I believe even 50% of the hydrogen hype? No, but it's a viable alternative for some situations now, and people are going to explore those first: hydrogen fuel cell car and bus fleets will be here in a few years.

If those work, then let's talk about a hydrogen economy.

sigh

Ok, all of this is answered quite comprehensively in 20 Hydrogen Myths a paper by the Rocky Mountain Institute.

The short answer to your questions is this: you make hydrogen from methane. Why do you bother? Because in an electric car, hydrogen-from-methane is still twice as efficient as any other fuel source: i.e in dollars per vehicle mile, it costs half of gasoline. Why? Because electric motors are just much, much better than internal combustion engines, and probably always will be.

Good enough? But there's more!

Electrolysis *IS* good enough: you can still take 3c / KWh grid electicity, make hydrogen, and run a fuel cell car cheaper than a gasoline vehicle.

Not much cheaper, but it's a start.

And here's the kicker: renewables can power hydrogen cars, so as well as cheaper driving now, you get to build the infrastructure of a renewable economy while you're at it.

Now, do I believe even 50% of the hydrogen hype? No, but it's a viable alternative for some situations now, and people are going to explore those first: hydrogen fuel cell car and bus fleets will be here in a few years.

If those work, then let's talk about a hydrogen economy.

Small Is Profitable - The Hidden Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size by the Rocky Mountain Institute covers the technical, financial and quality of service arguments for making a mixed power generation economy the standard approach to service provision.

What does that mean in real terms? Not windmills and solar everywhere, but about 8 - 15% wind and solar at carefully picked positions, augmented by microturbines.

It's a good book, if you can make it through four hundred pages about loadhsap matching and energy futures.

20 Hydrogen Myths paper covers a lot of the issues wrt. hydrogen pipelines.

There are upsides, and there are downsides.

There's also an interesting blog entry about the relationship between information and energy by Joi Ito. Puts the whole thing in a certain kind of perspective.

Small is Profitable by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute is about the benefits of generating your electricity using small, modular power systems where you need them. It turns out that grid infrastructure is often well over 50% of the cost of providing power, and that if you simply install systems like microturbines or small-scale combined wind/solar installations (explained below), you can significantly outperform the grid in terms of end-user price and capital requirement.

That's not a big deal here, where we already have a grid, but it's a huge, huge deal in the third world.

The combined solar/wind thing works like this. Electricity demands have a thing called a "load shape" - basically demand graphed against time. It turns out that solar energy supplies match the load shape of things like air conditioners pretty well, but when the clouds come out, your solar supply goes to hell.

However, wind systems work best when there's a sudden change in temperature, causing new low or high pressure areas, so usually cloudy days have ample wind. If you combine local solar and wind systems in a single "local area grid" you get a hybrid system which produces power in almost exactly the same loadshape as your actual demand, reducing expensive overcapacity, and with excellent availability in all weather conditions.

Renewable energy requires a lot more smarts than "this is a huge factory which produces megawatts a day" - you don't see nearly the full benefit unless you actually take advantages of the full range of renewable solutions, using factors like their modularity, size, loadshape matching, low capital requirements, grid independence and many other subtle factors.

Small is Profitable is a hard read: about 400 pages of really densely argued financial and technical analysis, but it's pretty much the definitive work in the area. If you want to know more, it's the book to get.

Hint, it doesn't cost $100B. Infrastructure buildout should cost less than $100M. In the article, it's budgeted at $5B. The hydrogen storage system has to provide 300 miles in range not 400 as this article says is necessary. Honda currently ships a fuel cell car that has a range of 220 miles so we're already 2/3rds of the way there. The article says that Detroit is already gearing up for fuel cell mass production. If they're already doing that, they have no need of the taxpayer's $10B. As for renewables, this is just a bolt on and has nothing to do intrinsicly with hydrogen. Scratch another $10B for that (or at least put it in its own program). $25B to shove uneconomic hydrogen cars down the consumer's throat? I don't think so. $10B for the oil companies to make hydrogen pipelines? Again, no way. Let them pay their own way. When you strip out the unnescessary expenses and just leave the technical problems of fuel tanks and a bare bones national hydrogen infrastructure, you end up with less than $20B in federal spending. Kicking it off with $1.2B this year doesn't seem unreasonable all of a sudden.

Ok, do you realize how much more dangerous than a simple propane tank a hydrogen tank is?

The danger of hydrogen vs hydrocarbon fuels is a hotly debated issue. Don't write it off as fact.

In fact, the Rocky Mountain Institute (who has been playing with Fuel Cells for more then a decade), says that Hydrogen is about as dangerous as Propane.

Specifically:


Tests conducted at the College of Engineering at Miami University aimed to find this out. 3000 cubic feet per minute of hydrogen was leaked from a vehicle tank and set alight. Over the course of the burn, temperature sensors inside the vehicle did not measure a raise of more than 1 or 2 degrees centigrade anywhere inside the vehicle. The temperature of the surface of the outside of the vehicle did not climb above that of a vehicle sitting in the sunshine!

This might sound unintuitive. But when a carbon-based fuel like gasoline burns, glowing hot soot particles transfer the heat to its surroundings--potentially including you. But because hydrogen contains no carbon, it burns cleanly without a residue of hot soot, producing little radiant energy. This means that a victim would have to be practically in the flame in order to get burned.

"Grid-provided" electric just isn't the way to go. Most folks that are looking to eliminate fossil fuel engines from cars are now working on hydrogen-based fuel cells. The reasons for this are fairly simple:

"Electric cars" that charge off the power grid are just moving their fossil fuel consumption over to a power plant (unless the power is provided by nuclear generation, which has its own huge set of problems).

With a non-material "fuel", there is a wait time associated with recharing. It takes a lot less time to fill up a hydrogen tank (or even swap an empty one for a full one) then it does to recharge a big bank of batteries.

A reasonably-sized efficient fuel cell would be revolutionary far beyond personal conveyances. Rather than persue research that would result in, at best, a full-scale version of toys kids have played with for years, why not work on a method of power generation that could vastly change the way we physically structure our societies and make giant leaps towards restoring Earth's natural capital?

Groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute have been pushing fuel cell cars for a decade (search their site for "hypercar"). It's nice of the auto industry to catch up. :-)

and here's link concerning the powertrain:

here

fuel cells!

check out natural capitalism

turn off that tv, save some power, and read.

and here's link concerning the powertrain:

here

fuel cells!

check out natural capitalism

turn off that tv, save some power, and read.

and here's link concerning the powertrain:

here

fuel cells!

check out natural capitalism

turn off that tv, save some power, and read.

Here is an article on hydrogen fuel cells and safety, including results of BMW's simulated collisions:

<clip>
Many real-life tests have demonstrated the safety of pressurized hydrogen storage. Simulated 55 mph crash tests left the car totaled, but the hydrogen tank intact. To prove the safety of its hydrogen vehicles, BMW tested its hydrogen tanks in a series of accident simulations that included collision, fire and tank ruptures. In all cases, the hydrogen cars fared as well as conventional gasoline vehicles. And hydrogen-fueled cars are designed to preclude the possibility of leaked hydrogen collecting within the vehicle.
<clip>

To put all this hysteria in perspective, about the same number of people as died in the WTC disaster die on U.S. roads each and every month and few seem to mind. If writers want to end a character immediately in a soap opera, they can just say they had a car accident and no one will question it. Yet, U.S. policies still promote cars over other alternatives (mass transit, working from home, mixed use zoning). Millions more middle aged lives are cut short each year from lack of exercise -- where are the walking trails and bicycle trails in every U.S. city and suburb (compared to say, the Netherlands)? So from this point of view, even if a million U.S. citizens are killed a year by terrorists, bicycle paths are still a better investment in American health and safety than more surveillance. So, my starting position is what people care about seems really strange when looked at from the big picture perspective. And fear, and building and economy and tax structure and new laws based directly on short-term fear, have direct negative effects on U.S. society, as U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

The problem is that the ways to safety have all been outlined for the last forty years and ignored. They are essentially summed up in: people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. So, as an action agenda for the most safety:
1. Stop throwing stones.
2. Make houses out of something else than glass.
3. Help others to live in non-glass houses and to stop throwing stones.
I'm not going to talk about stopping throwing stones as that is now considered unpatriotic (although I have done so for a long time in the past). But I can still talk about glass houses, I guess.

Consider this book "Brittle Power" written around 1980: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/art7095.php Federal energy policy continues to promote the most centralized, unforgiving, and vulnerable sources and infrastructures, while ignoring or suppressing the more efficient, diverse, dispersed, localized, and renewable options that could in time make major supply failures impossible by design. At present, the Department of Energy, apparently unwittingly but quite effectively, is undercutting the antiterrorist mission of the Department of Defense.

The problem with the U.S. from a safety perspective is that because the way the economy is set up, the most money can be made by centralizing a service, like Microsoft centralizes the OS, or agribusiness centralizes monocultures, or the oil company centralizes with a few pipelines. All these are the most profitable concerns because they are centralized, and backed by social, legal, political, and financial systems that keep them that way and supress alternatives. And because they are centralized, they are vulnerable.

What are the safe choices?

Consider, for example, a suggestion I read years ago that taking one year of the money spent on maintain the Persian Gulf Deployment, and applying it to insulating U.S. homes, would eliminate U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The figures may have changed since (and may have been optimistic) but do you see the point? Passive solar architecture shouldn't just be an oddity -- it should be the law, if we are serious about building a safer society. Yet, it is more profitable to centralized companies for have the U.S. government subsidize oil costs (some economist say to $60 per barrel) than to consider a decentralized approach like home insulation. Same with resisting the non-brainer of fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.

Another safe choice -- local community supported agriculture, to reduce the length of food supply lines (typically 1500 miles). Other forms of alternative energy (especially wind power) could be developed. Well insulated refrigerators can be 10X more efficient than current ones (that is the major consumer of electricity in many american homes).

Basically, take much of the stuff environmentalists, consumer advocates, small farmers, civil rights leaders, and probably the green party have been saying for years, and do it. But you know what, it isn't "profitable". It's somehow "profitable" to tax Americans a trillion dollars a year to prop up the current system, but somehow talk about doing things that provide true safety, and while we're at it, also compassion, and justice, and humaneness, and fairness, and one will get mostly blank stares. Seems so much easier to just declare a war on terrorists and the problem seems almost solved -- it seems like the president is doing something, instead of providing leadership on home insulation (an effectively impossible thing for an oil man to ever do...)

My own tiny efforts along that line (mostly laughed at or ignored): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak That, and helping people learn how to grow more of their own food with a garden simulator. The problem is, when the current approaches keep being tried, and they keep not working, any alternative is going to seem laughable. We can spend $300 billion dollars on defense, but suggest spending $100 billion dollars a year on sustainable technology research and that seems laughable.

The ironic thing is, all the people who messed up the system already as far as promoting policies producing an unsafe U.S. are mainly the ones getting rewarded by the new spurt of government funding. And we get solutions like pump more arctic oil when it will take ten years to get it, it will be expensive, and any yahoo with a hunting rifle can shut down the Alaskan pipeline for days or weeks (as recently happened from one shot).

These people are working on a report for Congress that will hopefully show a better way: http://www.nepinitiative.org/ Bet they recommend insulating homes as the number one way to fight terrorism. A laughable idea, or is it?

Your fuel tank isn't under pressure like a hydro tank would be. A puncture in your fuel tank won't cause a massive explosion. Besides, a bowl of gasoline on fire doesn't cause a violent explosion, say, compared to a bowl/whatever of hydrogen.

A common misconception. Actually, a bowl of gasoline is much more damaging than an equivalent volume of hydrogen. I'm not sure where you got your misconception, since there are several sources, but the most common example is the Hindenberg. Contrary to popular belief, the Hindenberg didn't explode due to its hydrogen contents, but its skin caught fire from a spark and burned. From the Rocky Mountain Insitute page:

Most hydrogen concerns stem from the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. The hydrogen gas that once filled the Hindenburg zeppelin did burn, but it did so quickly, upwardly, and away from the people below. When the airship was docking, an unexpected electrical discharge ignited the airship's canvas (which was unknowingly treated with two major components of rocket fuel!) The clean hydrogen flames swirled above the occupants of the passenger compartment, and all those who rode the airship down to the ground survived. 35 of the 37 casualties perished from jumping to the ground, and most other injuries resulted from diesel burns.

As you can see this clearly indicates that the hydrogen on the Hindenburg was not the problem.

This article from the latest Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter highlights a cool biomimicry based design that looks cool and may be better in terms of noise and efficiency.

This article from the latest Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter highlights a cool biomimicry based design that looks cool and may be better in terms of noise and efficiency.

This article from the latest Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter highlights a cool biomimicry based design that looks cool and may be better in terms of noise and efficiency.

2. The Economist approves of the book because it doesn't want to upset it's right leaning advertisers/readers?"

Implication: Science and Economics are religions. Ignore them both. They're each eating the Earth - and our bodies as part of it.

For non-ideological argument regarding ecology and energy and body impact on human health etc.:

'natural capitalism' especially energy incentives
'global climate institute' especially 'value of life' stuff
Rocky Mountain Institute especially service economics
Hubley versus groupthink
Hook versus amoral purchasing
Milani on green micro-economics
Moore on secession
Mattioli listing books on what happens if you ignore the above

Anti-ideological "deep green" references are not concerned with "left versus right" industrial bargaining tactics or absurd moral code swapping (all morality is aesthetic anyway, ethics is the sharable stuff). It's all, only, about energy and process and creativity. Just and only that.

Yep, very true. I don't know if the design of something as delicate as a new car engine can be really entrusted to someone who thinks he has invented anti-gravity. Let's get real here: If he has anto-grav, then he needs to mount a jet engine on a floating car, not something to apply a torque on wheels.

Also, what I don't like is the mention of solar panel on the car's roof as the source of energy. Excuse me for doing some arithmetics here, but let's assume a 40 percent efficiency in solar panels (hah! 20 is more like it) and an 800W/m2 solar power.

Then a perfectly-exposed (90-degree incident angle), 6-sq. meter (about 60 sq. feet) solar panel would only supply 1920 W. That's less than 3 HP. And a 60 sq. ft panel is already very bulky.

So I am afraid the whole concept is based on very shaky fundations. I'd rather put my money and my hopes on the people who are working on fuel cell for car (nice summary at RMI here).

-- SysKoll

Actually, you can have your cake and eat it too. Business does not have to rape the environment to turn a profit.

This is a *very good* thing, in my opinion. One large flaw of our economic system is that people tend to buy cheap, crappy, low-quality merchandise which in the long run is more expensive than high-quality products. In a service model, the service's best interest will be in giving you high-quality products, because they'll be the ones paying for the cost if they fail. And if it doesn't provide the level of service it should, you can leave the service. Furthermore, services can handle goods in bulk, repairs in bulk, and disposal, so the overall costs should go down.

Services also let you easily figure out how much something's going to cost. If you buy, and the product dies after the warranty's out, you're out a ton of money. The risk factor is much larger.

Take a look at Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute for some examples of services replacing traditional buy-once-hope-for-the-best purchase of goods.

Since it is Earth Week, if you are interested in efficient building, check out the Rocky Mountain Institute. I just heard Amory Lovins (co-author of Natural Capitalism) speak last night. In their energy-efficient headquarters, located in the mountains of Colorado, they grow bananas year-round.

Beat that, black paint people!

1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all)
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm

2. Open source knowledge management systems
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion /

3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome .htm
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/

5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/

6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html

7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite .co m/edusims.html
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml

8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/enviro nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm

9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

10. Make corporations more accountable to human needs
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+penal ty&hl=en
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/

11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)

12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l

When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml

My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities.
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity .ht ml
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/

Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/

There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html ;

Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.

It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.

Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.