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."

Comments

Profitability

[Once&FutureRocketman]

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.

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.

Re:Hydrogen for free

[CaptainCarrot]

OTEC is fairly limited as an electrical generation plant, which is what it was originally conceived as, because it really needs to be situated in tropical waters to work well. There's an experimental plant off the coast of Hawaii, which admittedly doesn't produce any net power largely because it's made from parts designed for other purposes and so operates suboptimally. (Its primary purpose right now is to validate a particular design of heat exchanger.) But the location requirements imposes insuperable tramsmission obstacles. It's just not practical to transmit the electricity from tropical oceans to the industrialized countries that need the power.

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.