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Hydrogen Buses In Iceland
dapyx writes "As part of the shift away from the fossil fuels, Iceland began its switch to hydrogen-powered buses, which are now used on the streets of the capital, Reykjavik. About 70 percent of Iceland's energy is already met by green power. Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050."
Iceland is rather green. It's Greenland that has the ice.
"Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050." Wow. That's impressive. So they're not going to use any products made from plastic, or oil-based paints, lubricants, etc?
Electrolysis of water, powered by geothermal energy.
First the robots will win the World Cup then Iceland will become oil free. 2050 will be marked down for ages as a year of great change and upheaval.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
True enough, but Iceland is unique in having ready access to more geothermal energy than they'll ever need. Not renewable, yes, but there's more of it around than they'll ever need, and it doesn't significantly contribute to CO2 levels.
Thanks to Iceland being basically one Giant Volcano, they've lots of Free Geothermal energy to make electricity and (bonus bell rings) it's surrounded by water. Put the two together and bingo: hydrogen.
It's going to be funny to see the Icelanders, who are already an incredibly literate and well educated people, will do with all the loot.
Personally, I look forward to our new Viking Overlords.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
One of the advantages of living on a geologically active island...
Let us not explore too much the disadvantages.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now, some people may debate exactly how 'green' hydro dams are, but they are certainly more green than fossil fuels. However, there is one strange twist here, which is somewhat offtopic: more than a few dams in Iceland, including a massive one that is currently being constructed at Karahjukar are erected for the exlusive purpose of providing power for aluminum smelters, which are not that green.
Hydrogen generation is at least a noble attempt to use some of the available electricity for slightly more eco-friendly purposes, and surely causes less polution than fossil fuels if it is powered by hydro power.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
While I commend the notion, Iceland has a unique feature not mentioned in the article -- an extremely small population. According to the CIA (spare the check-your-facts comments, thanks), it is currently less than 300,000 people.
To put that into perspective, there are over 1200 CITIES in the world with more that 300,000 people. Seriously, more people live in Toledo than all of Iceland. As far as the Hydrogen economy goes, it's a start, but such a very small start. By 2050 I sure hope we're further along worldwide.
Anybody want a peanut?
Sometimes I really wonder about /.
/. contributors, but one thing that seems to be consistant is the over-riding negativity of the people here. People set noble aims (e.g. stop using oil) and all the armchair whingers can do is complain that it isn't a perfect solution, and it isn't here now; or in the case of anything Mac "I want it twice as powerful, free, and to have a time-machine built in, and it should run Linux". Some people just never seem to be satisfied.
/. and crappy TV comment show got off their arses and did something we might get there a little quicker.
/., someone will go on about how there isn't really any evidence, and the climate was going to get warmer anyway. I don't need evidence for global warming, because I understand the theory. I don't need evidence for evolution because given my understanding of genetics, I cannot see how it can't be the case, evolution is the natural result of genetics and natural selection. Likewise, we know that CO2 and methane (the two major GHGs) cause a greenhouse effect. We know that without them the earth would be a lot colder, and that if we want to terraform Mars CO2 would be the first thing to put there. We also know that we are pumping out huge quantities of the stuff
So far half the high rated comments have been either, "hydrogen isn't a fuel, it's an energy store", or "huh, how will they survive without plastic/lubricants etc".
It's normally dangerous to generalise about
Hydrogen
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No, hydrogen is not a fuel. Yes it is a storage medium. But more importantly it is an energy *transmission* system. It allows you to generate energy in one place, and then use it somewhere else. Ideally we would just send electricity down the power lines and store it in batteries in our cars, but until someone makes some serious improvements in the energy density of batteries, that isn't going to happen, and hydrogen remains one of the best alternatives.
Yes you can use *dirty* methods of generation to generate the electricity you use to make the hydrogen, but at least you have the option of using clean methods where they are available. You can use what is appropriate. The Icelandics are using Geothermal, good for them. Until you take that step and move to using hydrogen, you don't have a choice over clean or dirty, you only have oil (for cars that is).
"Green" Generation
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Another prime one for the "but I want it perfect and now, and with a pony" crowd. Every time someone mentions a method of power generation like wind, solar, or tidal, someone will go "but that won't work where I am so it's no good and we should just carry on using coal". I live in the UK, and lets face it, we are never going to get much of our power from the sun, but there is work going into building an increasing number of wind farms and experiments with tidal systems, because that is what we have. Most places have something they can use to generate power, the Icelandics are just lucky that they have so much. The Aussies have loads of sun, and Colorado (right state?) gets most of its power from hydro. You use what you have as the tech comes available.
Plastics
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Stop being so unimaginative. There is absolutly no requirement to use oil in the production of construction materials. There are huge numbers of people and companies working on plant based alternatives. In fact the car industry has already started to use some of these for certain components. We can't produce all the materials we need yet, but we are getting better, and one by one the challanges are being overcome; science just tends to take a little while.
The point (yes, there really is a point) is that all these things move us gradually towards a (slightly) better world. They might not get us there right away, but it's one step closer, and if all the whingers on
Another quick rant while I'm at it - Global Warming
Everytime anything like this comes up on
Paul Leader
Notice how both of the other replies to you used almost the exact same wording. ;) These people are all just citing the meme that originated with Addison Bain in the late 90s as if it were gospel truth - the Bain Incendiary Paint Theory (IPT).
The funny thing is, it's been incredibly well debunked:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/L Z129fire.pd f
The main issues:
1) An electrical spark would not have had sufficient energy to ignite the paint
2) Even if there were a spark, it couldn't have jumped in the required direction (Bain indicated that it only would have worked in one direction)
3) The rate of burn of the paint is orders of magnitude too low (about 1000x), and is not "rocket fuel" by any standard. Even if it were coated with *real* rocket fuel, like used in the shuttle's SRBs, it would take 10 hours to burn. Instead, it took 34 seconds.
They address numerous other points. For example:
* You can very easily see that individual cells are burning and others not burning by the unnatural lines that the fire traces along the surface; they discuss where the cells are, and it becomes very obvious that the fire isn't spreading along the (quite continuous) surface but only spreading as new cells catch fire.
* The "color flame issue" is nonsense, because even the earliest blimps (not coated with any similar material) burned with a similar appearance (the appearance is due to the burning of the skin at such high temperatures, making it act like a glow mantle of a gas lantern).
* The tail remained level as one would expect given a huge updraft of the hydrogen that was supporting it previously and was now not only buoyant, but very hot
* The panels were not electrically isolated from each other, as called for by Bain's guesswork
* The Hindenburg had actually survived several lightning strikes in the past that burned right through the paint; plus, the Hindenburg, at the time of ignition, was wet (it was raining during approach, and was 98% humidity), making the paint even harder to ignite. The spark would have had to first vapirized the water, and then with the remaining energy ignited the paint (something lightning failed to do previously)
* Electrical current takes the path of least resistance - i.e., over the wet surface, not through the fabric. The dielectric strength of the cellulose acetate is 100kV/cm; there's no way the current would go through it.
* The energy needed to ignite the paint is 23 joules; one charged panel could have held a maximum of 0.01 joules. To get his sample to light, Bain used a bloody Jacob's Ladder on dry fabric, and even had trouble igniting it with that.
* The very reason why there are so many scraps of Hindenburg fabric available to collectors (and people like Bain) is that, once it was lifted by updrafts out of the heat of the hydrogen fire, it was insufficient to keep itself burning.
* The paint is continuous between cells (unlike Bain's mistaken conception that, because they used separate pieces of cloth, the paint wasn't continuous, and thus charges could build up). It was painted after assembly, across the whole surface.
* The wet, continuous skin, by all effective means, would be an equipotential surface. Consequently, such a spark would be perpendicular to the surface, a situation that Bain couldn't even cause to light the fabric in the Jacob's Ladder - either from the airframe to the exterior, or from the exterior to the air (coronal discharge, i.e., St. Elmo's Fire)
* The skin is not a "rocket fuel" because it has no oxidizer, which is critical to the rapid combustion of solid rocket fuels.
* Cellulose acetate (which was used) burns (relatively) poorly in air, unlike cellulose nitrate (which wasn't used) out of concerns of saftey.
* Solid rocket propellants, which it has been compared to, have about the burn rate of sparklers in atmospheric condition. However,
We're practicing our labials.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about the Hindenberg, but I would like to warn about misinterpreting this urban myth about the flow of electricity. In a parallel circuit (i.e., a circuit with different paths), electrical current will flow along all of the paths, the amount being inversely proportional to the resistance of each path. For modelling two or three dimensional objects, integrating over all of the different paths electricity can take to figure out how much current will flow through one region of an object versus another can be quite complicated.