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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."
I love reading about alternatives to horribly invasive forms of energy we use today. This is a meta stop gap solution, a way of reducing peaking by bleeding compressed air to help the generators during peak usage. The crux of the issue remains, our power generation techniques are dirty and deprecated.
Most of quelling of useful technology is done by: the old boys club not wanting to give up on the profits, a lot of it is mis-information, and the remainder of the reason why we use horribly inefficient power sources is lack of attention (by our sheep like media).
I used to live near a nuclear power plant in Minnesota. I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power. There used to be a lot of cancer there, and everyone jumped on the power plant, but it was shown that most of the cancers were not related to the power plant at all, there was solvents being dumped into the local water supplies that were causing intestinal cancer. People don't understand radiation cancers always occur in statistical rings, that certain percentage of the people a certain distance get some very specific cancers. Nevertheless, even after the nuclear power plant was vindicated - the media failed to report that the solvents killed the people, not the power plant.
Anyways, here we are burning coal and fossil fuels all day long. Fuel cells, gyroscope technology, ceramic engine and electric cars are getting the kibosh due to the retrofitting costs. And we burn, burn burn.
Today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2001, Coal and Utility companies are lobbying the ever-environment-hating White House to reduce the clean air rules on power plants. Cheney said the administration energy policy will focus on more output for oil and natural gas.
They can continue to sell us electricity at higher prices, cut the cost, pollute the air, and keep real technology from proliferating.
Some say time is the fire in which we burn. My time is running out
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Three Mile Island particularly showed that the people who were in charge of the plant should probably not be trusted with anything as dangerous as a motor vehicle - the contractors x-rayed the same weld joint dozens of times (and changed the id numbers) instead of inspecting the whole plant because they knew that no-one would check up on them.
Fission is clean power to public relations people and a government that wants a good source of radioactive material for weapons, but to engineers it is very dirty power that needs to be very carefully contained in case it gets out and kills everything near the powerplant.
The financial cost of construction and decomissioning nuclear power plants is enormous - that price may come down after a few more have been decommisioned, but for now it is an expensive form of power over the life cycle of the plant. All of those rare earths and hi-tech materials are not cheap - and everything used in the steam cycle is going to be radioactive enough to cause storage problems for more than a lifetime. The environmental costs have been enormous in the Ukrane, and may be high in other places in the future.
For all it's good points, people often gloss over the one big dealbreaker - hydrogen is a gas. And a very, very small gas as well, which has a tendency to work it's way even through metal containers, making them brittle in the process. In a nutshell, it's difficult to store. Even if you overcome that with tanks on cars or buildings, what are you going to do for smaller devices like lawnmowers or whatnot? If you run out of gas on the road, you won't be able to just walk to the nearest station to fill up a tank.
The fact is, for practical purposes, gases are difficult fuels, even relatively easy ones like LPNG. We need a liquid alternative that we can make in a renewable fashion, even if it doesn't trigger as many buzzwords. Methanol would be ideal for most purposes. Alternatively, rather than using hydrogen and oxygen we could use the easier-to-store sytem of ammonium and nitrous oxide. That produces water and nitrogen as a byproduct.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I wonder how much if at all a Hydrogen based enerygy system would alter the weather, think of all the cars, sure they are emitting 0 pollutants
Very good question. Even the smallest effect from a Hydrogen car would be multiplied by the millions of vehicles out there. But really, fog from H2 cars is better than smog from gas cars any day.
Also do these vehicles store the water, and plug into the power socket to charge? Or do you need to fill them up with water? Or just with H2
It'd be really silly to have the car store water and then charge from a socket. The whole point is to use H2 as a battery to power the car. How you 'charge' that battery is up for grabs. I imagine that the most efficient thing to do would be do make the hydrogen at industrial or even home-based systems and then fill-er-up with fresh tanks of H2. That way, you can build more efficient water-breaking systems and not worry about making them portable. See the arguments about electric cars charged from the grid vs ones that generate their own oomph from gas or whatever.
However, if solar panels become reasonable useful, it might indeed be feasible to put everything in the car. Start off with a tank full of hydrogen and an empty one of water. As it uses the H2 to drive, the car uses solar power to break up the waste water and fills up the H2 tank. It's not quite a perfect system, since you may do a lot of night driving or park in a garage and thus end up with all water and no hydrogen, in which case you'd have to tank up with H2. The system would also leak a small amount of water, which I supose could be replaced from capturing rainfall. Depeding on the efficiency of the electrolysis and solar cells, it becomes something between a gas mileage enhancer and a true self-contained car. But still, being able to drive for a few thousand miles before having to stop for fuel would kick ass to an amazing degree.
Dyolf Knip
Couldn't agree more. It's been done. Read Natural Capitalism by (among others) Amory Lovins.
Or, to paraphrase The Natural Step, every business, regardless of industry, produces only two things: Product, and non-product. Selling product makes money. Non-product is, at best, worthless and is frequently a liability.
The ratio varies by industry of course, but when you trace through the entire supply chain, usually only 5-10% of the materials stream winds up in product. Improving this figure is a huge opportunity to add money to the bottom line, and generally speaking, there is alot of room for improvement!
As far as the political process goes, the main thing the government needs to do is to:
1) Stop subsidizing waste.
2) Correct the legal structures that currently allow industries to externalze costs. Just to give a timely example, a gallon of gas would cost alot more than $1.50 if the oil companies had to foot, say, 25% of the nation's defense budget every year to preserve access to the oil (the ethical considerations notwithstanding, of course.) As it is, the taxpayers pick up the tab instead. A whole lot of "fringe" and "green" technologies would be much more in demand if the users of current technology had to pay the true costs of that technology.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Hydrogen doesn't have that limitation, but it's also not now a mainstream power source. If proton exchange membrane fuel cells come into common use, that will undoubtedly change. But as things are, it's just not profitable enough to make it worth the capital investment.
And the brethren went away edified.