Slashdot Mirror
"H-Prize" Announced
An anonymous reader writes " The House passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel creating the "H-Prize",allowing scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, and smaller prizes. The Department of Energy would put together a private foundation to set up guidelines and requirements for the prizes. Anyone can participate, as long as the research is performed in the United States and the person, if employed by the government or a national lab, does the research on his own time.
Best political Quote: "If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create." said bill sponsor Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C."
So initially we used coal to power steam engines. Why? Because there were literally tons of it laying underground. So we strip mined America for a couple centuries.
...
It's long been known that oil (petroleum or organic) would fuel fire. And it was discovered that refining it lowered it stability and made it explosive. But where was an abundance of oil? Why, also underneath the ground.
The fact of the matter is that our energy concerns can't be solved by anything that requires more energy to make (insert corn ethanol reference here) than it produces.
So now we need to figure out how to use hydrogen and many car companies have done that but the form that hydrogen abounds in is gas--not liquid. And most hydrogen powered cars require refilling a compressed hydrogen tank. But to make this hydrogen requires electricity and this electricity requires some fuel or energy to make in the beginning
I think the real challenge here should be "just hydrogen" as an alternative fuel but instead "anything we got a lot of lying around in a ready form."
My work here is dung.
Oh, I think they understand it just fine. The Whitehouse administration has been in bed with the oil industry from the beginning. The whole 'hydrogen economy' promotion is just an attempt to make it look like they are taking action towards energy independance and alternative energy source development, as to divert interest/funds for alternative energy research towards their fossil-fuel industry cronies.
The most tragic thing about this whole scenario is that it diverts resources away from alternative energy source developments which could have an impact in the immediate to short term future (like wind, solar and hydro-electric power, gas electric hybrid cars, and energy conservation) in favour of a pipe-dream that even the proponents admit is decades away.
The administration is shameless
>Everyone is focused on everything except one. WHY is the government not looking
>at NON centralized NON corporatist methods of achieving alternative energy sources?
I think you hit the nail on the head, and I have long suspected that the fear of losing their deathgrip on the control of scarce energy resources has been driving huge government and business interests to make sure other, less centralized options are kept off the table.
Energy is a multi-billion dollar industry. What would happen to that industry if anyone could make their own fuel?
What if anyone could buy a bottle of Iogen's ( http://www.iogen.ca/ ) new cellulase enzymes at the grocery store, just like we buy Rid-X enzymes for our septic tanks, throw it in a trashcan in the backyard full of water and lawnmower clippings, and make their own ethanol?
What if anyone really could easily and rapidly convert water into hydrogen? (spare me the jabs on how easy electrolysis already is, please)
I'm no tinfoil-hat guy, but there are huge, huge interests that would be massively hurt by such innovations.
Lately I've been doing a lot of googling on biodiesel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel ), ethanol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol ), and even wood gas generators (pyrolysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis )
From what I've seen, most of these processes are fairly simple to do, even at home. I don't think these processes would take much more technical innovation to make simple, practical, cheap decentralized fuel production a reality.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
A well maintained, large capacity power plant, even if it uses gasoline, can be a lot more efficient than a car's engine which has to be small, light weight, and low maintainance. Hydrogen is a transfer mechanism, but a better transfer mechanism will let us use gasoline for efficiently.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I'm not that old, but i just don't understand when morality became part of the equation when it comes to using energy? Is someone in Botswana that lives in a hut a better person than a bloke in Surrey who mows a lawn with an electric lawn mower? If so, i don't seem to understand it.
And honestly, I don't understand - well maybe i do - why it is that people get all flummoxed at the idea of removing human transport devices from the global warming equation. Yes, yes, for now, it is just pushing the problem up the chain, but is that the job of the car makers?
If a car is fairly efficient, and it is no longer spewing out global warming gasses - what the hell else do you expect car makers to do? Not everyone - some could - but not everyone could survive driving a euro golf cart around because it wouldn't hold kids or baggage, etc.
If the car manufacturers are going to make devices that can run 100% clean and are saleable to the public meeting demand, then if you ask me, its high time we start coming up with energy solutions that are not dependent upon unstable thocracies and kingdoms in the middle east, hockey playing blue-nosers in north america, or corrupt countires like Mexico and the rest of central America. The car makers hold up their end, its someone else's responsibility to hold up the other end.
And honestly, we see that China is - amazingly enough - going to lead the way with pebble-bed reactors... 1 for each city or more. It is utterly remarkable to me that a communist county has the stones to get this problem figured out while a country like the US is handcuffed by granola munching tree huggers... except for the founder of the Sierra Club... he gets it.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
This is linear thinking. Granted, the current public transport system doesn't work well. That's in part due to the cost, but mostly due to the lack of flexibility. When you know the bus will arrive within a 5-10min window at a particular location and carry you to a particular destination, from which you will very likely need to walk or transfer to a different bus or train, it is easy to see why one might not want to sacrifice one's personal transportation. I believe the bus system will always be like this, with static routes and schedules. This is due to the size of the vehicle. It is inefficient to have a vehicle capable of carrying 50 people that drives around like a taxi, picking people up wherever they are instead of driving a set path.
I envision a system of smaller vehicles, possibly 6- or 8-passenger vans, where each vehicle is given dynamic tasking based on requests through an internet portal. When a passenger needs to get to work, they submit a travel request to this portal and the system determines which of the fleet vehicles can most closely accomodate the request. That vehicle's path is then altered to include the new request, and all the current passengers' times of arrival are adjusted to support the additional passenger. Ideally, this would be 100% automated, with a computer controlling the vehicle completely. However, that solution puts working-class people out of jobs, so maybe it's better to have a person driving the vehicle and a computer telling the person where to go. With the increasing inclusion of navigation systems and communications systems like OnStar in automotive product lines, it's not a big step to integrate a two-way communication link between the vehicle and a central computer.
By increasing the flexibility of the system, more travellers are attracted to using it. By increasing the number of vehicles, more jobs are created. By organizing the travel of large numbers of people into optimized paths, traffic congestion, fuel usage, and pollution are reduced. There will always be people who are unwilling to sacrifice their freedom for such benefits, but as the system becomes more optimized and more attractive, it becomes more efficient.