I've been looking for such a tablet as well. It would be great to properly make artwork and take notes with a stylus and run some of the usual software.
I was thinking about the Asus slate for a while, but now I have my eye on a Samsung tablet that they just released. The Samsung Series 7 Slate. It is very similar the Asus but slightly lighter, thinner, more widescreen, and longer battery life. Similar price. It looks like they are not quite meeting demand yet since it is sold out most places. There are a few configurations with 64gb or 128gb SSD drive and different "bundles" with dock and/or bluetooth keyboard and/or stand case. Best Buy Business, Microsoft Store.
I have been following this lightly for a while. On the one hand Rossi'shistory does not give confidence to this being real. On the other hand he doesn't seem to approach it like I would expect a scammer to approach it - he does get in touch with universities and professors, and he does not ask for money, even apparently financing the contruction of this 1 MW plant himself. Also holding a large-scale demonstration with big-name media present does not seem usual. If it is a hoax, I am not sure what he would get out of it besides publicity (being in the news).
There are 3 options: (1) it is a hoax/fraud, (2) he really believes it is true and cannot manage to do measurements correctly or is in some kind of denial and interprets the results incorrectly so they fit his beliefs, (3) it is true.
It is not clear whether this demonstration will make it clear. There have already been 11 other smaller-scale demonstrations and apparently there has never been conclusive evidence throughout all these. It also depends on who is vetting the test. There is someone from PESwiki there tweeting updates, tweeted "Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later." and expects to post an article on the wiki/blog in the next hour or so. PESwiki historically has followed/reported on hundreds of bogus technologies. But the customer is satisfied? Who is the customer!
Also an AP writer from NY is apparently attending the demo. However, a link to the likely writer says that he covers "telecommunications, consumer electronics, etc" for the AP, so it's not likely he is knowledgeable about energy technologies.
It will be very interesting to see the reports.
Here are the various semi-high-profile news articles about this technology that have recently been published, to collect them all in once place: Forbes blog, Oct 28th Wired, Oct 28th Forbes blog, Oct 17th Wired, Oct 6th
And then plenty of other sites like blogs and physorg since January of this year.
I think you are missing a step. If you just put atmospheric air through such a reactor, you might split the CO2 to CO but it will be in a gas stream with 99.96% other gasses (N2 and O2).. then you must separate the CO. Might as well separate the CO2 up front and avoid wasting all that energy heating up so much excess gasses. One can capture CO2 from the air and supply it in a concentrated form to the solar reactor.
Water thermochemical cracking is probably the most efficient method of converting solar energy to chemical energy that we have, perhaps that even exists considering the inefficiency of electrolysis.
First, with present technology, this is incorrect. Using solar photovoltaic plus electrolysis to produce fuels (hydrogen, carbon monoxide, or a mixture (syngas) appropriate for liquid hydrocarbon fuel synthesis) can be done with >30% sunlight-to-syngas efficiency using expensive concentrated photovoltaics (~40%) combined with high-efficiency high temperature electrolysis (>90%, see here and here). So far no thermochemical cycle has been demonstrated to achieve such a high efficiency.
Second, it is not about efficiency. In many cases one can achieve very high efficiency at the expense of using expensive materials. The idea here is to use cheap ceria-based oxide materials in the solar thermochemical reactor instead of expensive high-purity silicon semiconductors and other semiconducting materials in photovoltaics or photoelectrochemical cells.
Lifespans are significantly longer than a year now. See Fig 9 on pg 11 of this recent overview of solid oxide fuel cell development. You can see that degradation is on the order of 1% per 1000 h (around 9% per year) during year-long tests of cell stacks. The Siemens-Westinghouse (SWPC in the figure) cell is even far below 1% but it is a more expensive cell. The next few in the list (HTAS/Risoe, Chubu, FZJ) represent more state-of-the-art planar cells.
It is presented like it is a brand new invention and that they are the only ones making the product, however R&D on this technology has been going on since the 1960s by big companies like Westinghouse, GE, and tens of other companies all over the world. DOE has a 10-year old still-active program dedicated just to SOFCs. There is a book about solid oxide fuel cells.
There is no platinum or other precious metals. It is ceramic oxides and nickel, similar to alkaline cells except these run at much higher rates per unit area which promises to make them cheaper than other types of cells. Read the links above for the materials. The electrodes are "inks" only during manufacturing - they are heat treated to form stable solid materials. Recently, developments in materials science has brought them close to commercialization (manufacturing cost and durability have been issues). Of the perhaps 50 companies attempting to commercialize this technology, it seems that the Bloom company is just the one that happens to be funded by silicon valley investors.
This is not to say the technology is not exciting and potentially can improve our use of fossil fuels. The same cells can also be run in the reverse direction as electrolyzers, applying renewable/nuclear (non-fossil) electricity to split water and carbon dioxide to create fuels (link1link2).
"people wil only plug in at night" is another pipe dream
It seems reasonable that the user could 'plug them in' anytime, but they could be hooked up to something as conceptually simple as a "vacation light timer". If the car's clock wasn't blinking 12:00, it seems like a tiny bit of electronics in the car could even be set so it didn't start charging until after a certain time.
Yes and the electricity will be cheaper at night, so there will be incentive to charge at night.
Solar and hydrogen are 2 completely different things and they are not exclusive. There is no reason to like hydrogen and not like solar.
Wind and Solar are ok ideas, but they can't be put into my tank...
First, neither can hydrogen, in your current tank.
But if you mean that you cannot put solar and wind energy directly into a tank, then aren't you talking about possibly storing that energy as chemical energy, as hydrogen?
If you want an infrastructure that doesn't depend on foreign resources, you can still use hydrocarbons, made from almost any non-foreign energy source (fossil, biomass, solar, etc). Or you can use hydrogen produced in the same way, or a bunch of other energy carriers.
I've seen a video of a crow fashioning a hook out of a piece of wire and using it to snare something from the bottom of a glass beaker which exceeded the length of the crow's beak.
"almost 100 percent of the current used for electrolysis goes into making oxygen and hydrogen."
This is not a big deal at all. Any good electrolyzers have near 100% current efficiency. That is, they do not make chemical byproducts, only H2 and O2. The voltage efficiency at a reasonable throughput is the one with significant losses, with the byproduct being heat.
Assuming near-100% current efficiency, any electrolyzer can be run near-100% overall efficiency by running it very slowly - the higher the current, the higher the operating voltage and farther from the reversible voltage or the thermoneutral voltage (farther from 100% efficiency). If you don't understand this, look up polarization curves.
What stops you from running the cell at 99% efficiency is that you need a reasonable throughput because the cell had a capital investment and it has a limited lifetime. So any time you hear that an electrolysis cell is 70% efficient, that means that is the economically optimal efficiency at which the cell is run (30% losses of electricity affects the operating cost and the throughput achieved works well for utilizing the capital cost economically).
The claim that it uses "10% of the electricity of current methods" is either a big mistake by a news reporter or it could mean that (1) they assume current methods have an extremely low current efficiency, (2) they are including the life-cycle energy to prepare the alkaline electrolytes of current electrolyzers in their calculation. Even then I think it is an impossible claim. Without those assumptions, a typical alkaline electrolyzer running at 70% energy efficiency (~57 kWh/kg H2 if you define 100% based on the thermoneutral voltage at which all electricity goes to H2; = 286 kJ/molH2 / 2 gmH2/molH2 / 70%), it is impossible that their electrolyzer could use 10% of the electricity (this would need to be 5.7 kWh/kg H2 or 700% energy efficiency).
People should review the thermodynamics of fuel cells/electrolyzers or electrochemical systems in general and understand what efficiency means here before attempting to discuss it.
unconcentrated solar cells, which nobody uses. At present, all the solar generating plants in the world use mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the solar cells, thereby greatly increasing performance.
Please cite your sources. Nobody uses unconcentrated cells? I've only heard of a few companies working on concentrated PV (SolFocus, Green & Gold Energy...), nevermind what is actually deployed! From a page about the first conference about concentrated photovoltaics, held in 2008: "CPV is as an industry on the brink of commercialisation."
You might be thinking of concentrated solar thermal which concentrates sunlight with mirrors to heat up a working fluid and drive a heat engine to make electricity?
Ok. I hope this will clear up some confusion about this and whether they are claiming to violate thermodynamics... Although the hype articles and the company itself are calling it the "H2O car", the slashdot summary says "The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank," so obviously they are not really claiming that water is the energy source. Something else (the real energy "generator" - which is actually an energy carrier itself, see last paragraph) splits the water to make hydrogen which is then used in a hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity to power an electric motor and drive the vehicle.
The engadget article says the same: "The key to that system, it seems, is its membrane electrode assembly (or MEA), which contains a material that's capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction."
So most likely they have something that is reactive with water sitting on or near the electrode of the fuel cell (MEA) which splits the water, and then the fuel cell electrode consumes the resulting hydrogen. This material could be a metal, which spontaneously gets oxidized and reduces the water, for example Zn + H2O = ZnO + H2. In which case zinc is the energy source. Lots of metals have been tried for similar systems for vehicles. Or it could be other materials besides pure meatls that can get oxidized (e.g. an iron oxide (FeO) to a more oxidized iron oxide (Fe3O4)).
The claims that get very close to lies are when the company says you only ever need to put water in the car. Well, if they load it up with enough zinc (or whatever splits the water; probably not actually zinc) to begin with to last for the life of the car, that is true, but very unlikely. They would more likely have to sneak in and replenish the water reducer without you knowing for the claim to appear true. In any case, regardless of if you are replenishing the real energy source or you get the car containing a huge stock of it, it's going to be as expensive as hydrogen. The reducer must be produced by using a similar amount of energy as hydrogen. e.g. if Zn, one starts from an oxidized form of the metal, either zinc sulfide or zinc oxide (like the "spent fuel" of the vehicle) and must reduce it with energy (see zinc smelting). The reducer is an energy carrier and the energy that is stored during its production (or extraction from an oxide) comes from heat or electric energy sources. This is analogous to water splitting to produce an energy carrier - hydrogen (so the water in the vehicle is just one of the last steps in a chain of energy transfers).
I would rather hear in detail about how you would like to get the funding for necessary research and changes without the driving force of a market, rather than paranoid / conspiracy theorist, putting words in my mouth with things I did not say or imply, and insults and hyperboles. If you have a point, the way you write really hides it well.
...if you just fund the research in the first place and faze the implementation of it in from a forced manor.
How do you propose phasing it in in a forced manner? Isn't that the purpose of a market? Where do you get the funding for the research? The same place a carbon pricing method would get its money. A market could "fund the research in the first place".
But more to the carbon tax. You right, it was my word. But that is because your words "and a price on carbon emissions" has the same effect. But seeing how you didn't use the word "Tax" and insist on clarifying that, now I am scared to how you think we could effect a price on carbon emissions.
There are several methods in global discussion to affect a price on carbon emissions, as I'm sure you're well aware. To be scared of how it could work is paranoid.
I hope your not thinking of paying third world countries to not develop and compete in the real world and basically redistribute the wealth of richer nations in some form of world wide welfare program.
No, no one here said anything like that.
If you attach the costs universally to every industry, it will only be passed to the consumer who will demand more wages and it will eventually equal out into the same situation we have today.
Again, no one said anything about that - attaching the costs universally to every industry.
IF the market could have solved this problem, it would have by now.... Why is it that we haven't solved the issue yet?
Because the market has not been created. That is what we are discussing, the creation of this market.
You see, this is where actions like Kyoto fail miserably and fall into the scam department.
No one said Kyoto is doing a great job, though we can see it is your personal opinion that it is a scam.
If there was a serious problem that needed to be addressed, it would be more prudent to start a collaborative international research group dedicated to the problem and have it offer royalty free, any technology developed from it that can fix the problem. You would still have the market working, a facotry in Japan might be able to product a specific component cheaper... Instead, we want to dick around with a carbon tax to force countries to effectively do the same thing so we can pass money off to someone else when we can cut the bullshit and just get it done in the first place.
Sounds like wishful thinking to have such global cooperation, and the opposite of the market approach. What incentive do you propose to "just get it done in the first place"? It seems money is quite a good incentive, which would be the point of the market.
Scamming circus clowns wasn't a swipe at people in particular, it refers to how they get you to look at one thing to shock you with another. A technique if you will.
I'm aware of such alarmist techniques, and you do come across as using them in your posts.
it is designed to redistribute wealth more then anything. You either have to tax everyone or increase the "price of carbon emissions" everywhere or it is a scam to pump money from one person to another.
It redistributes wealth from those who are emitting to those who are not. You just offered a valid option of "increasing the 'price of carbon emissions' everywhere". Is "everywhere" the key word that makes it not a scam to you? This seems to contradict your previous statements, which I agree with, about not applying such carbon pricing exactly the same to every
Of course the price on carbon would trickle down to the end user. Notice I didn't say tax; tax was your word. However, this added cost would be solving a problem and as you admit near the end it would accelerate the economic competitiveness of alternative energy technologies, making it a very valid and useful added cost in comparison with other costs that get passed down such as military -- and it would be a relatively smaller cost and potentially achieve some of the same outcomes.
Putting a price creates a market for alternatives, whether alternative energy or carbon capture and storage; whoever can do it the most cheaply and effectively for the greatest profit does it, like any market. The market then solves the problem. How is this "ridiculous"?
The fact that you believe that you've really examined the situation and other "scamming circus clowns" have not, and that you enjoy forcefully asserting that many parts of it are "of course ridiculous" with examples that don't prove your point, does not make you correct.
Depending on your definition of "better-than-nature", we can already do this. If better is more efficient, for instance. If you mean economical compared with fossil gasoline, then we're not there. Maybe with further technological development and a price on carbon emissions. This concept was discussed a bit on slashdot lastmonth.
Right now, if we capture carbon dioxide (and we have the technology to do that already pretty efficiently) we have a huge problem of what to do with it. The best technology available today involved injecting it into the ground or under the sea - neither of which are good options. The technology that's being talked about is carbon mineralifcation - the technology to turn CO2 into graphite, or diamond, or soot. That's would be a huge help in fighting global warming. Carbon mineralifcation is actually called mineral carbonation, and it is not what you say. It is converting silicate minerals into carbonate minerals by reacting their cations with CO2, a process that is constantly happening to rocks everywhere but on geologic timescales. As a stable, permanent carbon storage option, those studying it are looking to accelerate the reaction as an economic, industrial process. See here or here for information.
Turning CO2 into graphite, diamond or soot is the opposite in a way - it would be an energetically uphill process that must be driven by non-fossil energy or else you have no choice but to produce more CO2 in the process. One could see this as storing renewable or nuclear energy in solid carbon by splitting CO2, similar to recycling CO2 to liquid fuels.
I would add: An electric battery with an energy density comparable to gasoline. The problem is that gasoline combustion gets about 80% by weight of its reactants from the air (O2). Though the energy stored in batteries can be much more efficiently used, they store their oxidizer inside, so even if we could gasoline itself in a battery, it cannot be as dense. Unless it is an air battery, at which point you are looking more and more like a fuel cell.
That is very obvious. What you are saying is "to store energy (by reducing an oxide) requires energy". Yes... it requires the energy that you are storing plus additional. No one said it would *not* cost energy to recycle CO2, nor that one can split water for free. So what brilliant point of your's are we to "wait for"?
If you would like to think more about the concept, see the other slashdot article I linked to or my comment in that article.
I have to imagine they are not present in nature, and thus take lots of energy to make. Thus, to soak up a lot of CO2 takes a lot of energy - but using lots of energy is why we have CO2 to begin with. From the article: "He said the crystals are non-toxic and would require little extra energy from a power plant, making them an ideal alternative to current methods of CO2 filtering."
To those who are asking "what do we do with the crystal once it is full, bury it", no - this is a potential method for selectively capturing CO2 (most likely from the flue gas of power plants, aluminum smelters, etc), not storing it. The CO2 would be released from the material as a concentrated gas and stored by one of the many proposed sequestration methods (geologic injection, mineral carbonation, etc), or recycled into a fuel. Read the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage if you want to know more about this.
Oops please ignore my last post- its links are fixed here.
The direct alternative to biofuels that you speak of, which does not depend on growing biomass, was the topic of a recent Slashdot discussion (the specific Sandia technology), and I wrote a response about it and that there are other means of achieving the same end. It is definitely a good idea to cut out the biomass and eliminate all of the associated environmental issues, land area constraints, and greenhouse gas issues that are the topic of this discussion.
The journal articles that this current discussion refers to (regarding "biofuels make greenhouse gases worse") were both made available in Science a few of days ago: one, two, and they were also discussed in the New York Times.
The direct alternative to biofuels that you speak of, which does not depend on growing biomass, was the topic of a recent Slashdot discussion (the specific Sandia technology), and I wrote a response about it and that there are other means of achieving the same end. It is definitely a good idea to cut out the biomass and eliminate all of the associated environmental issues, land area constraints, and greenhouse gas issues that are the topic of this discussion.
The journal articles that this current discussion refers to (regarding "biofuels make greenhouse gases worse") were both made available in Science a few of days ago: one, two, and they were also discussed in the New York Times.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been looking for such a tablet as well. It would be great to properly make artwork and take notes with a stylus and run some of the usual software.
I was thinking about the Asus slate for a while, but now I have my eye on a Samsung tablet that they just released. The Samsung Series 7 Slate. It is very similar the Asus but slightly lighter, thinner, more widescreen, and longer battery life. Similar price. It looks like they are not quite meeting demand yet since it is sold out most places. There are a few configurations with 64gb or 128gb SSD drive and different "bundles" with dock and/or bluetooth keyboard and/or stand case. Best Buy Business, Microsoft Store.
I have been following this lightly for a while. On the one hand Rossi's history does not give confidence to this being real. On the other hand he doesn't seem to approach it like I would expect a scammer to approach it - he does get in touch with universities and professors, and he does not ask for money, even apparently financing the contruction of this 1 MW plant himself. Also holding a large-scale demonstration with big-name media present does not seem usual. If it is a hoax, I am not sure what he would get out of it besides publicity (being in the news).
There are 3 options: (1) it is a hoax/fraud, (2) he really believes it is true and cannot manage to do measurements correctly or is in some kind of denial and interprets the results incorrectly so they fit his beliefs, (3) it is true.
It is not clear whether this demonstration will make it clear. There have already been 11 other smaller-scale demonstrations and apparently there has never been conclusive evidence throughout all these. It also depends on who is vetting the test. There is someone from PESwiki there tweeting updates, tweeted "Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later." and expects to post an article on the wiki/blog in the next hour or so. PESwiki historically has followed/reported on hundreds of bogus technologies. But the customer is satisfied? Who is the customer! Also an AP writer from NY is apparently attending the demo. However, a link to the likely writer says that he covers "telecommunications, consumer electronics, etc" for the AP, so it's not likely he is knowledgeable about energy technologies.
It will be very interesting to see the reports.
Here are the various semi-high-profile news articles about this technology that have recently been published, to collect them all in once place:
Forbes blog, Oct 28th
Wired, Oct 28th
Forbes blog, Oct 17th
Wired, Oct 6th
And then plenty of other sites like blogs and physorg since January of this year.
I think you are missing a step. If you just put atmospheric air through such a reactor, you might split the CO2 to CO but it will be in a gas stream with 99.96% other gasses (N2 and O2).. then you must separate the CO. Might as well separate the CO2 up front and avoid wasting all that energy heating up so much excess gasses. One can capture CO2 from the air and supply it in a concentrated form to the solar reactor.
Water thermochemical cracking is probably the most efficient method of converting solar energy to chemical energy that we have, perhaps that even exists considering the inefficiency of electrolysis.
First, with present technology, this is incorrect. Using solar photovoltaic plus electrolysis to produce fuels (hydrogen, carbon monoxide, or a mixture (syngas) appropriate for liquid hydrocarbon fuel synthesis) can be done with >30% sunlight-to-syngas efficiency using expensive concentrated photovoltaics (~40%) combined with high-efficiency high temperature electrolysis (>90%, see here and here). So far no thermochemical cycle has been demonstrated to achieve such a high efficiency.
Second, it is not about efficiency. In many cases one can achieve very high efficiency at the expense of using expensive materials. The idea here is to use cheap ceria-based oxide materials in the solar thermochemical reactor instead of expensive high-purity silicon semiconductors and other semiconducting materials in photovoltaics or photoelectrochemical cells.
Here is a recent overview of the status of SOFC technology.
Lifespans are significantly longer than a year now. See Fig 9 on pg 11 of this recent overview of solid oxide fuel cell development. You can see that degradation is on the order of 1% per 1000 h (around 9% per year) during year-long tests of cell stacks. The Siemens-Westinghouse (SWPC in the figure) cell is even far below 1% but it is a more expensive cell. The next few in the list (HTAS/Risoe, Chubu, FZJ) represent more state-of-the-art planar cells.
It is a solid oxide fuel cell. There is nothing magical.
It is presented like it is a brand new invention and that they are the only ones making the product, however R&D on this technology has been going on since the 1960s by big companies like Westinghouse, GE, and tens of other companies all over the world. DOE has a 10-year old still-active program dedicated just to SOFCs. There is a book about solid oxide fuel cells.
There is no platinum or other precious metals. It is ceramic oxides and nickel, similar to alkaline cells except these run at much higher rates per unit area which promises to make them cheaper than other types of cells. Read the links above for the materials. The electrodes are "inks" only during manufacturing - they are heat treated to form stable solid materials. Recently, developments in materials science has brought them close to commercialization (manufacturing cost and durability have been issues). Of the perhaps 50 companies attempting to commercialize this technology, it seems that the Bloom company is just the one that happens to be funded by silicon valley investors.
This is not to say the technology is not exciting and potentially can improve our use of fossil fuels. The same cells can also be run in the reverse direction as electrolyzers, applying renewable/nuclear (non-fossil) electricity to split water and carbon dioxide to create fuels (link1 link2).
It seems reasonable that the user could 'plug them in' anytime, but they could be hooked up to something as conceptually simple as a "vacation light timer". If the car's clock wasn't blinking 12:00, it seems like a tiny bit of electronics in the car could even be set so it didn't start charging until after a certain time.
Yes and the electricity will be cheaper at night, so there will be incentive to charge at night.
Wind and Solar are ok ideas, but they can't be put into my tank...
First, neither can hydrogen, in your current tank.
But if you mean that you cannot put solar and wind energy directly into a tank, then aren't you talking about possibly storing that energy as chemical energy, as hydrogen?
If you want an infrastructure that doesn't depend on foreign resources, you can still use hydrocarbons, made from almost any non-foreign energy source (fossil, biomass, solar, etc). Or you can use hydrogen produced in the same way, or a bunch of other energy carriers.
I've seen a video of a crow fashioning a hook out of a piece of wire and using it to snare something from the bottom of a glass beaker which exceeded the length of the crow's beak.
Here's the video you saw and here's more about the research about crow intelligence.
Please explain what you mean by "platinum efficiency is about 50-70%" and see the post I just made for my concerns about this.
"almost 100 percent of the current used for electrolysis goes into making oxygen and hydrogen."
This is not a big deal at all. Any good electrolyzers have near 100% current efficiency. That is, they do not make chemical byproducts, only H2 and O2. The voltage efficiency at a reasonable throughput is the one with significant losses, with the byproduct being heat.
Assuming near-100% current efficiency, any electrolyzer can be run near-100% overall efficiency by running it very slowly - the higher the current, the higher the operating voltage and farther from the reversible voltage or the thermoneutral voltage (farther from 100% efficiency). If you don't understand this, look up polarization curves.
What stops you from running the cell at 99% efficiency is that you need a reasonable throughput because the cell had a capital investment and it has a limited lifetime. So any time you hear that an electrolysis cell is 70% efficient, that means that is the economically optimal efficiency at which the cell is run (30% losses of electricity affects the operating cost and the throughput achieved works well for utilizing the capital cost economically).
The claim that it uses "10% of the electricity of current methods" is either a big mistake by a news reporter or it could mean that (1) they assume current methods have an extremely low current efficiency, (2) they are including the life-cycle energy to prepare the alkaline electrolytes of current electrolyzers in their calculation. Even then I think it is an impossible claim. Without those assumptions, a typical alkaline electrolyzer running at 70% energy efficiency (~57 kWh/kg H2 if you define 100% based on the thermoneutral voltage at which all electricity goes to H2; = 286 kJ/molH2 / 2 gmH2/molH2 / 70%), it is impossible that their electrolyzer could use 10% of the electricity (this would need to be 5.7 kWh/kg H2 or 700% energy efficiency).
People should review the thermodynamics of fuel cells/electrolyzers or electrochemical systems in general and understand what efficiency means here before attempting to discuss it.
unconcentrated solar cells, which nobody uses. At present, all the solar generating plants in the world use mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the solar cells, thereby greatly increasing performance.
Please cite your sources. Nobody uses unconcentrated cells? I've only heard of a few companies working on concentrated PV (SolFocus, Green & Gold Energy...), nevermind what is actually deployed! From a page about the first conference about concentrated photovoltaics, held in 2008: "CPV is as an industry on the brink of commercialisation."
You might be thinking of concentrated solar thermal which concentrates sunlight with mirrors to heat up a working fluid and drive a heat engine to make electricity?
Ah, I had left this post unsubmitted for a while and see by now a number of people already cleared this up, in the thread.
Ok. I hope this will clear up some confusion about this and whether they are claiming to violate thermodynamics... Although the hype articles and the company itself are calling it the "H2O car", the slashdot summary says "The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank," so obviously they are not really claiming that water is the energy source. Something else (the real energy "generator" - which is actually an energy carrier itself, see last paragraph) splits the water to make hydrogen which is then used in a hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity to power an electric motor and drive the vehicle.
The engadget article says the same: "The key to that system, it seems, is its membrane electrode assembly (or MEA), which contains a material that's capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction."
So most likely they have something that is reactive with water sitting on or near the electrode of the fuel cell (MEA) which splits the water, and then the fuel cell electrode consumes the resulting hydrogen. This material could be a metal, which spontaneously gets oxidized and reduces the water, for example Zn + H2O = ZnO + H2. In which case zinc is the energy source. Lots of metals have been tried for similar systems for vehicles. Or it could be other materials besides pure meatls that can get oxidized (e.g. an iron oxide (FeO) to a more oxidized iron oxide (Fe3O4)).
The claims that get very close to lies are when the company says you only ever need to put water in the car. Well, if they load it up with enough zinc (or whatever splits the water; probably not actually zinc) to begin with to last for the life of the car, that is true, but very unlikely. They would more likely have to sneak in and replenish the water reducer without you knowing for the claim to appear true. In any case, regardless of if you are replenishing the real energy source or you get the car containing a huge stock of it, it's going to be as expensive as hydrogen. The reducer must be produced by using a similar amount of energy as hydrogen. e.g. if Zn, one starts from an oxidized form of the metal, either zinc sulfide or zinc oxide (like the "spent fuel" of the vehicle) and must reduce it with energy (see zinc smelting). The reducer is an energy carrier and the energy that is stored during its production (or extraction from an oxide) comes from heat or electric energy sources. This is analogous to water splitting to produce an energy carrier - hydrogen (so the water in the vehicle is just one of the last steps in a chain of energy transfers).
...if you just fund the research in the first place and faze the implementation of it in from a forced manor.
How do you propose phasing it in in a forced manner? Isn't that the purpose of a market? Where do you get the funding for the research? The same place a carbon pricing method would get its money. A market could "fund the research in the first place".
But more to the carbon tax. You right, it was my word. But that is because your words "and a price on carbon emissions" has the same effect. But seeing how you didn't use the word "Tax" and insist on clarifying that, now I am scared to how you think we could effect a price on carbon emissions.
There are several methods in global discussion to affect a price on carbon emissions, as I'm sure you're well aware. To be scared of how it could work is paranoid.
I hope your not thinking of paying third world countries to not develop and compete in the real world and basically redistribute the wealth of richer nations in some form of world wide welfare program.
No, no one here said anything like that.
If you attach the costs universally to every industry, it will only be passed to the consumer who will demand more wages and it will eventually equal out into the same situation we have today.
Again, no one said anything about that - attaching the costs universally to every industry.
IF the market could have solved this problem, it would have by now. ... Why is it that we haven't solved the issue yet?
Because the market has not been created. That is what we are discussing, the creation of this market.
You see, this is where actions like Kyoto fail miserably and fall into the scam department.
No one said Kyoto is doing a great job, though we can see it is your personal opinion that it is a scam.
If there was a serious problem that needed to be addressed, it would be more prudent to start a collaborative international research group dedicated to the problem and have it offer royalty free, any technology developed from it that can fix the problem. You would still have the market working, a facotry in Japan might be able to product a specific component cheaper ... Instead, we want to dick around with a carbon tax to force countries to effectively do the same thing so we can pass money off to someone else when we can cut the bullshit and just get it done in the first place.
Sounds like wishful thinking to have such global cooperation, and the opposite of the market approach. What incentive do you propose to "just get it done in the first place"? It seems money is quite a good incentive, which would be the point of the market.
Scamming circus clowns wasn't a swipe at people in particular, it refers to how they get you to look at one thing to shock you with another. A technique if you will.
I'm aware of such alarmist techniques, and you do come across as using them in your posts.
it is designed to redistribute wealth more then anything. You either have to tax everyone or increase the "price of carbon emissions" everywhere or it is a scam to pump money from one person to another.
It redistributes wealth from those who are emitting to those who are not. You just offered a valid option of "increasing the 'price of carbon emissions' everywhere". Is "everywhere" the key word that makes it not a scam to you? This seems to contradict your previous statements, which I agree with, about not applying such carbon pricing exactly the same to every
Of course the price on carbon would trickle down to the end user. Notice I didn't say tax; tax was your word. However, this added cost would be solving a problem and as you admit near the end it would accelerate the economic competitiveness of alternative energy technologies, making it a very valid and useful added cost in comparison with other costs that get passed down such as military -- and it would be a relatively smaller cost and potentially achieve some of the same outcomes.
Putting a price creates a market for alternatives, whether alternative energy or carbon capture and storage; whoever can do it the most cheaply and effectively for the greatest profit does it, like any market. The market then solves the problem. How is this "ridiculous"?
The fact that you believe that you've really examined the situation and other "scamming circus clowns" have not, and that you enjoy forcefully asserting that many parts of it are "of course ridiculous" with examples that don't prove your point, does not make you correct.
Depending on your definition of "better-than-nature", we can already do this. If better is more efficient, for instance. If you mean economical compared with fossil gasoline, then we're not there. Maybe with further technological development and a price on carbon emissions. This concept was discussed a bit on slashdot last month.
missing word: ...even if we could *use* gasoline itself in a battery...
Turning CO2 into graphite, diamond or soot is the opposite in a way - it would be an energetically uphill process that must be driven by non-fossil energy or else you have no choice but to produce more CO2 in the process. One could see this as storing renewable or nuclear energy in solid carbon by splitting CO2, similar to recycling CO2 to liquid fuels.
But, yes hopefully we can approach "comparable".
That is very obvious. What you are saying is "to store energy (by reducing an oxide) requires energy". Yes... it requires the energy that you are storing plus additional. No one said it would *not* cost energy to recycle CO2, nor that one can split water for free. So what brilliant point of your's are we to "wait for"?
If you would like to think more about the concept, see the other slashdot article I linked to or my comment in that article.
The Science article that is being discussed is here: High-Throughput Synthesis of Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks and Application to CO2 Capture.
To those who are asking "what do we do with the crystal once it is full, bury it", no - this is a potential method for selectively capturing CO2 (most likely from the flue gas of power plants, aluminum smelters, etc), not storing it. The CO2 would be released from the material as a concentrated gas and stored by one of the many proposed sequestration methods (geologic injection, mineral carbonation, etc), or recycled into a fuel. Read the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage if you want to know more about this.
Oops please ignore my last post- its links are fixed here.
The direct alternative to biofuels that you speak of, which does not depend on growing biomass, was the topic of a recent Slashdot discussion (the specific Sandia technology), and I wrote a response about it and that there are other means of achieving the same end. It is definitely a good idea to cut out the biomass and eliminate all of the associated environmental issues, land area constraints, and greenhouse gas issues that are the topic of this discussion.
The journal articles that this current discussion refers to (regarding "biofuels make greenhouse gases worse") were both made available in Science a few of days ago: one, two, and they were also discussed in the New York Times.
The direct alternative to biofuels that you speak of, which does not depend on growing biomass, was the topic of a recent Slashdot discussion (the specific Sandia technology), and I wrote a response about it and that there are other means of achieving the same end. It is definitely a good idea to cut out the biomass and eliminate all of the associated environmental issues, land area constraints, and greenhouse gas issues that are the topic of this discussion.
The journal articles that this current discussion refers to (regarding "biofuels make greenhouse gases worse") were both made available in Science a few of days ago: one, two, and they were also discussed in the New York Times.