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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"
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.
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"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.
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?
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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