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The (Possible) Future of Alternative Energy
Sponge! writes: "The stuff that turns oil into margarine. The stuff that made the Hindenburg float. The stuff that combines with oxygen to make water and with carbon to make methane. The stuff that sends the space shuttle skyward and could someday power your car, office building, house, cell phone, even your hearing aid. That "Stuff" is hydrogen, and according to Amory Lovins, it is the future of energy. Here is an interesting article on Lovins and his view of hydrogen as the number one fuel."
Convincing Industry and Govt of the Big Gobs Of Money to be had with alternate energy should be the first step. Unless they see a buck in it and preferably an easily redemable one, Alternate energy isnt going to go far.
That being said, Does anyone realise Texas is one place where this happen and hence Wind Turbines are being built. Odd that it is in Geoge W Buhs's state - but I can say it was NOT done to save the enviroment. It was dnoe because there was shown to be a buck in it.
Soory Greenies, that's the way it works. You want to save the enviroment, prove to someone with dollars that there is more dollars to be had and quickly. Convince the money men of that aand watch how fast these clean technologies get built
"Old Rallydrivers never die - they just fail to book in on time"
Cost is the issue here, along with time i might add (as you said). The problem we have is all the artificial pressure keeping fuel prices 'stable', okay excluding OPEC's efforts to the contrary. If fuel costs kept rising at at greater rate than they have been, we would be far more inclined to find and USE new (and perhaps) re-newable energy sources.
I believe its a very short-sighted policy to think that we must keep our oil costs down at any cost. A perfect example being the end of 2000 and begining of this year when oil prices went up, people across Europe and America i think (and later here in Australia) protested to the government to cut tax's on fuels. Eventually many governments complied, such as the Australian govt early this year cutting the re-indexing of fuel tax. The fact is although tax makes up a huge percentage (over 50% was it here??) fuel costs will contiune to rise how much more can we cut the taxes?
In my opinion the tax's should remain, and despite the short-medium term hardship it may cause prices should not be controlled so vigerously! The fact is, oil is non-renewable, and unless we start PAYING more now the general short-sigtedness we seem to suffer from will cause us HUGE problems in the future! Imagine in 30-50 years when we have used up the last reserves (excluding the disgusting (IMO) ideas of oil drilling in Antartica and Alaska) if we havnt used these years to prepare for that eventuality.
That's the main problem with 'artificial' price controls on oil, its naturally going to get much MUCH more expensive, and there is NOTHING we can do about it. Besides of course alternative fuels.
Hydrogen is a clean fuel, in that it can be burned without harmful emissions. Because water is plentiful, hydrogen is also a sort of a battery. Electrical current can be used to separate it from water molecules, and some of this energy can be recovered in fuel cells.
Hydrogen extracted from fossil fuels necessarily produces less energy than the raw fuels themselves. Hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis is an energy sink.
Hydrogen may be extracted from water by using solar energy. That is solar energy, not hydrogen energy.
Whether hydrogen is a suitable fuel for vehicles depends on whether the energy costs are worth the emissions benefits. If so, this will make energy more scarce, because of the inefficiencies of converting energy in some other form into the energy of electrolysis.
Whether electrolysis of water is the right method for storage of solar energy depends on the comparative costs, risks and benefits of alternative storage technologies.
In neither case is hydrogen competing with fossil fuels as an energy source. It is competing with fossil fuels and batteries and flywheels and passive heating media as an energu storage system in both cases.
There are no significant pools of free hydrogen on the planet that can be used as an energy source.
Hydrogen is an energy storage strategy and not an energy supply strategy. It may have its uses as the former. Proposing it as a replacement for fossil or nuclear energy is complete nonsense.
All the above should be fully understood by anyone trying to venture an opinion on this subject.
Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who misses this point is one of the following: 1) not seriously interested in the subject 2) incompetent or 3) dishonest.
mt
Fuel cells? Bleh. They're a new and expensive, unreliable and largly an academic item. Now look at internal combustion engines; They're well understood, reliable, and relitivly cheap.
Just make the goddamn engine run on hydrogen.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I love the way people talk about the "pure, clean" nature of hydrogen as a fuel.
:-)
Unfortunately the reality is that it has a long list of problems associated with it -- and a number of them are environmental.
As others have pointed out -- it's a fuel with a very low energy density (by volume), it's very difficult/expensive to store, and most of it is produced by "dirty" methods such as the cracking of hydrocarbons which come from -- you guessed it -- oil!
In short, hydrogen is a fuel for the academics amongst us -- those who find the easiest way to deal with reality is to ignore it.
You know -- these are the kind of people who write computer software that does no error-checking on its input data. When such a program crashes, the response tends to be "well don't enter bad data then."
Unfortunately, if we want to write software for the general public -- or in this case if we want to create a practical, clean fuel, then reality can't be dismissed.
We've got a long way to go before hydrogen becomes everything it's cracked up to be.
By the way, what ever happened to those breakthroughs in solar-cell technology that were going to bring us ultra-low cost energy from the sun?
Bah... humbug... I think I'll just go and burn a few more gallons of dinosaur-extract in my pulsejet
It would be nice to think that people would wise up and convert before all of the fossil fuels are gone, but we know it won't happen until someone either takes out OPEC or manages to invent a hydrogen engine more efficient (and crucially, more profitable) than a petrol engine.
Money makes the world go round. Not common sense. :-(
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
When I was studying engineering, I never understood why people folk tried to experiment with alternative forms of fuel such as wind, solar and my personal favourite biomass :)
Take out the benefit of them being limitless, and you are not left with a lot, possibly their only other strength is that a lot of these systems can be installed in remote places.
Their problem is that the technology behind them is so underveloped and so implementing any systems is not only initially very expensive, but also costly to maintain. For what you put in, you normally get *very* little out.
What always got me was that the amount of heat billowing out of the chimney tops of convential electrical power stations is tremendous. I have yet to see any country implement a widescale plan to harnass some of that power. It would be no trouble to redirect that steam and heat up more steam for the turbines, or to heat up water for local community. And of coure the wasted heat energy begs the question of just how much they power stations are in the first place.
Regards,
Po
The piece really underplayed the role of wind generators. The cost of windpower has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. In the early '80s it was nearly 40 cents per kilowatt hour, it is now between 3 and 6 cents. Worldwide wind power is starting to take off. It increased by 29% in the USA alone between 1998 and 1999. By using hydrogen generation as an energy storage and transportation medium, the benefits of windpower can be extended to all energy using sectors.
For more info, here is an article by Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute.
"Soory Greenies, that's the way it works. You want to save the enviroment, prove to someone with dollars that there is more dollars to be had and quickly"
And that's why we are all on a collision course with calamity.
There is no profit in preserving life. A bluefin tuna swimming in the ocean is worthless to anybody. The same tuna when killed is worth a thousand dollars. Same with clean waters and clean air. They are both worthless but if you can make a lot of money polluting them.
The problem is one of ethics. Most people are willing to deprive your great grandchildren to make money today. The so called greenies are trying to preseve the remaining planet for future generations. Unfortunately there is no profit in that. As a result they are not as rich are the business owners and shareholders. As a result the natural resources of the world keep spiraling down. Nothing can be done about it except maybe violence.
War is necrophilia.
" The main thing that gets glossed over in his argument is that unlike oil or solar you never get more energy from hydrogen than you put in."
Actually the main thing that gets glossed over is that we use too much energy in the first place. If everybody carpooled one day out of the week we would cut gasoline usage by 25%. Hey we could be free of mideast oil if we just stopped driving one day a week. The solution is so easy too bad it takes actual sacrifice and no american would ever take the bus or carpool, it would be too inconvenient.
War is necrophilia.
Hydrogen is not really a fuel as such, in the way that Oil, Gas or Wood are fuels - because you have to use some other fuel to produce it.
Hydrogen is best thought of as a way to transport energy to places where you can't make it on the spot efficiently, or in sufficient quantities.
For example, the average suburban house has enough sunlight and wind to cater for all its energy needs. If we make solar and wind capture more efficient, every garage could have a small 'charger' cracking Hydrogen and storing it for the car.
A similar idea is being researched for Mars projects (using CO and O2, but the same principle). This allows an ongoing process (powered by the sun for the martian experiment) to generate useful amounts of transportable 'fuel'.
By turning the energy model on its head, away from the current 'few big power stations' model to 'millions of tiny power stations' model we not only get better efficiency but less polluting powerstations because they are in EVERYONES back yard.
Hydrogen has a role to play, so might CO. But this is no fuel of the future - the fuel of the future is the sun and the wind.
That site is nutty. Can you provide a link to a site with hemp facts that doesn't go on about the wacky tobaccy? I just want the facts on the one part, not the other.
I think that the crossover between the industrial hemp and pothead crowd is killing your crusade as well as any gov't conspiracy.
This is, indeed, a vile lie. Hydroelectricity, which involves building huge dams to collect water in reservoirs, has a huge detrimental impact on the environment. Thousands of river based eco-systems have been devastated because of hydroelectricity plants.
Everytime time a huge dam is built, millions of local people are displaced. Unfortunately, many of the so-called developing nations have embraced hydroelectricity, and often in these countries, these displaced people are left destitute. While the rich folk in rural areas get all the energy they need, the poorer displaced people lose their lively hoods.
I totally agree that it is high time that we moved away from burning fossil fuels to harness energy, but there is no point in finding alternatives that are equally, or as in this case even more, environmentally hazardous.
Some axioms:
- There are no energy sources, just temporary energy storage forms. The only true energy source on earth is sunlight.
- Every use of energy creates some form of "pollution" (1st law of thermodynamics). What differs is how much, how unpleasant it is for humans, at where it is created. (eg, electric cars still create air pollution, but it is moved back to the generating station, instead of the car tailpipe)
- Every conversion of energy from one form to another is lossy (3rd law of thermo). And constitutes a "use" of energy, which creates "pollution".
So, the real questions about comparing energy sources amount to these criteria:
- What does it cost us to find and access the stored energy?
- How easy/cheap is it to convert the stored energy into a useful form (eg, rotational kinetic energy of a car driveshaft)?
- How efficient is that conversion? How much of the sourced energy is lost as general thermal radiation (ie, friciton losses, i^2r transmission line losses, etc)
- Doing so creates what form of pollution, in what amounts, and at what locations?
- How politically acceptable is that particular pollution arrangement? Who benefits, who suffers?
One way to get cheap Hydrogen is to mine it from one of the Gas Giants. Jupiter is the biggest and closest. Finally put NASA to good use.
saru mo ki kara ochiru
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
I think hyrdrogen has potential as a storage and transport medium for renewable energy sources. Many of these resources have short term variations in their availability:
Solar: doesn't work at night;
Tidal: only works on the outgoing tide;
Wind: doesn't work when the wind is slack.
Conversion of the energy to hydrogen and transporting it by pipeline would buffer the variations in powerflow, the way a capacitor does in a power supply.
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