And this contradicts what I wrote how...? Musharraf is the current president of Pakistan, the person who has the potential to be hit most by the scandal at home. Bush is the current president of the US, a nation with the potential to be embarrassed by the fact that its closest ally in south Asia was one of the world's largest nuclear proliferators.
Wow, you're really unimaginative if all you can picture being on a satellite is cameras. Just as one possible example (among many, many possibilities): The US has spent the last decade trying to launch "stealth satellites". It has become the ultimate game for satellite spotters to try and find them. Not only do they regularly adjust their orbits, but they are believed to use articulated mirrors to try and reflect almost all light that hits them away from the Earth or onto remote locations, thus making them nearly black against the sky.
China's ASAT capability is a really, really big concern to the US military. Over the years, we've let ourselves become more and more dependant on satellite communications to guide our forces and control our weaponry. Yes, we have plenty of other means of communication, but satellite communications take up an increasing share of the traffic, and some systems only communicate through satellite. China being able to knock out our satellites during the opening salvo of any conflict wouldn't pose a fatal situation to our combat capabilities, but it would be a huge blow.
As an aside, one fun ASAT mechanism that a friend of mine who used to work in military intelligence told me about a while back: sand. You launch a missile full of sand into orbit, then detonate the missile with conventional explosives. You get sand moving at tens of thousands of meters per second crossing all sorts of different orbits, rendering space a no-go zone for decades. Of course, we know something like Starfish Prime would do a pretty good job on its own, as well as playing havoc with the electricity grid below where you detonate it.
The reactors distinctly do not reenter as a single chunk and leave a crater. Cosmos 954, for example, scattered its fuel over a 370 mile path in the Canadian wilderness, leading to a search that covered 48,000 square miles, and later an even larger one. They only recovered 1% of the fuel.
Tsar Bomba was the cleanest-burning nuclear explosion in human history, and it wasn't in the very sensitive upper atmosphere. Starfish Prime had massive effects, creating a brand new radiation belt for Earth that persisted for almost a decade. Its fallout was detected in lichens and fungi thousands of miles away. The russians did some high altitude tests as well but nothing as environmentally destructive as Starfish Prime.
It doesn't work that way. Nothing manmade reenters all in one place and leaves a "crater". Debris generally gets scattered along a trail across a thousand miles or two in chunks.
At least they never dared launch anything as crazy as Starfish Prime.
We are not the immaculate custodians of space that you seem to be picturing. Why, do you think, did we not shoot down the Delta II second stage that reentered in 1997 with a large amount of residual hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide onboard? We have stages with signficant amounts of toxic residual fuel reenter all the time. Why, in the same year, when we had a Delta II explode *full* on liftoff, did the Air Force tell people in the *immediate area* that the smoke posed no danger? This was a *full launch vehicle*, not just a satellite's orbital maneuvering system. Do you have any idea how much beryllium we've had reenter? We sit by as large amounts of toxic materials enter all the time. As for the hydrazine itself, what do you think happens *on its own* to pressurized tanks of highly flammable fluids on reentry? I can't think of a *single* sizable object that's survived reentry still pressuretight.
I find it quaint, the notion that the real reason they have to shoot the satellite down is because it has a tank of hydrazine onboard. Meanwhile, the Russians have let *freaking nuclear reactors* reenter our atmosphere. It's pretty transparent that they're A) trying to upstage the Chinese, and B) prevent any tech from making it into the hands of hostile parties. Even more transparent than the whole thing with A.Q. Kahn:
1) Pakistan funds its bloody nuclear program via nuclear equipment sales. 2) The international community eventually can no longer look the other way. 3) Khan steps forward. "Whoops, it was me! My bad. Every sale we made to every single country, I arranged, negotiated, and shipped everything, all with government aircraft, all of my own. No Musharraf involvement, nosiree!" 4) Bush and Musharraf: "Bad Khan! Well, that case is solved." 5) "House arrest", of the kind that lets you travel across the country. No charges pressed. Everyone wins.
Any limit on bond energy would also apply to chemical fuels. You may limit a particular battery chemistry (although the limits they show aren't particularly constraining at all, and they didn't touch li-ion, which clearly isn't anywhere close to it's limits), but not all battery chemistries. Their info is also sorely dated (which would probably be why li-ion wasn't even mentioned); it's a bunch of references from the 1950s. 40Wh/lb for silver zinc? Try 80.
They also have substantially higher energy density today than the theoretical limit of chemical batteries. That counts for an awful lot.
What "theoretical limit" do you speak of? I've never heard of any sort of "battery limit". So far, it's all seemed to be due to engineering and materials challenges -- for example, like the recent silicon nanowire anode to replace graphite anodes in li-ion batteries, which allows 8x (10x on the first charge) higher lithium density. Get a corresponding cathode improvement, and you've increased the energy density of li-ion batteries 8-fold. Which would easily make EVs have longer range than gasoline cars, let alone hydrogen cars (which are only minimally longer range than EVs currently, at the cost of having half the energy efficiency, a lot more containment problems, and no real cost savings (thanks to how expensive fuel cells are))
Interestingly enough, everyone's favorite new solar technology, CIGS (the tech Nanosolar uses), is not only ubercheap to produce (profitable selling at $0.50/W to $1.50/W), but it's also amazingly tolerantof radiation.
Hydrogen is a lousy source of potential energy. It's bulky, corrosive, explosive, leaks *very* easily, is very inefficient, and in general is an expensive pain to work with. It's no surprise that most of the energy storage mechanisms being looked into for bulk storage of electricity are not hydrogen but "pumped" storage, either water or air. The largest in the world is a pumped water storage system in China.
As for battery/capacitor breakthroughs, there are now no fewer than three of them trying to make their way to market that promise 2-3x energy density and reduction in costs (barium titanate supercaps, and for lithium ion batteries, lithium vanadium oxide and silicon nanowires).
Indeed. Water alone is bad enough for corrosion, let alone water containing free hydrogen and oxygen. Some of their cells have operated only for days. On top of this, the cells use an expensive "special glass" (haven't seen anywhere that goes into more detail than that) to pull off the trick. Really, the tech looks to be at about the point that solar cells were in the '60s.
Not that hydrogen cars are a realistic solution to our current problems anyways.
Well, we in the US try to do our part. For example, just last week, I got opposition to the DMCA, restoration of the public domain, and other similar planks added to the Johnson County Democratic Party platform (we're the fifth largest county in the state, out of 99 counties). It's not much, but it's a start; in a couple months we'll be trying to carry it over to the state platform.
Ordinary people can do their part, however small it may be.
Yes, but the Canadians have wisely avoided killing their queens or destroying their habitat. As a consequence, the queen population has remained relatively constant over the years, while our eagle populations fell dramatically.
When was the last time you saw a queen breeding center make releases into the wild to help restore local royalty populations?
I don't see the electric motor being a factor of two better in efficiency.
The factor of two is the combination of electrolysis and the fuel cells, especially the latter.
And again hydrogen has much higher energy density than any electricity storage. Googling around, I'm seeing at least a factor of 5 better just for pressurized hydrogen (over supercaps).
First off, blanket statements like that don't work; you have to indicate a hydrogen pressure. Secondly, "supercaps" vary a lot; are you talking about traditional double-layer supercaps, next-gen double-layer supercaps, or barium titanate supercaps (which are really just regular caps on steroids)? Third, energy density statements can relate to either volume or mass, and yes, it does matter. Fourth, hydrogen has a tank to wheel efficiency of 30-40%, while electricity has a battery to wheel efficiency of 85-90%, so a joule of stored electricity takes you 2-3 times further than a joule of stored hydrogen energy.
The FCX is a somewhat light but standard 4 passenger car while the Tesla is a 2 person convertible.
With enough horsepower to do 0-60 in 4 seconds.
The Tesla is also in excess of $80,000 while the FCX will be competing with mundane gas powered cars and has to be a lot cheaper.
---- "Honda hasn't publicly disclosed its investment in hydrogen technology, but General Motors has committed more than $1 billion and produced only a handful of cars. When vehicles are hand-made by Ph.D.'s as part of blue-sky research projects, can you even speculate on how much they are "worth"? A Honda spokesman, Andy Boyd, says the FCX's estimated expense ($1 million to $2 million) is based on "the cost of body and powertrain, and also the experimental nature of some key components, like the fuel cell itself."
The pricing of hydrogen remains fluid. The Department of Energy has estimated that the cost of a kilogram of hydrogen (with roughly the energy content of a gallon of gasoline) could fall to $3 by 2008, but that assumes certain economies of scale that have not yet been established.
The California Fuel Cell Partnership puts the average capital cost to add low-volume hydrogen refueling to gas stations in that state at $450,000. The cost of the Latham station - opened by Honda and a locally based engineering company, Plug Power, aided by a $735,000 state grant - is proprietary.
At my daughters' school, the youngsters were happy to squeeze into the back seat like college students in a phone booth. Their questions about fuel cells were simple.
"Is this the car of the future?" they asked. "Maybe," I said. ----
Why so expensive? Partly because they're low production -- but then again, so are automotive li-ion batteries. But also because, quite simply, fuel cells are inherently expensive beasts. They require nanoscale perfection on the membranes. They involve the use of precious metals like platinum. There's no way that something like that can ever become "cheap". Even when you consider the highly subsidized price -- a $600/mo vehicle lease -- that equates to something like $50k per car. That's more expensive than the EV1's subsidized price, which was something like $350-$520/mo (I'd have to look up the exact numbers) (the EV1 actually cost GM $80k per car, which doesn't include liability risk or profit).
But they are severely hindered by energy storage.
The range statistics on production electricity vehicles speak otherwise -- and EVs have a 2-3x increase on their horizon from three different techs, while hydrogen cars only have different, even more energy wasteful storage mediums that offer only incremental improvement on the horizon.
Neither of the above options has the infrastructure in place for mass use.
Yeah, when will we get some of this "electric infrast
No. At best your going to have an average of different locations at certain temperatures but that has no real reflection of the situation.climate zones depend on climate falling within a given statistical range or anything, or that changing that range would be a change to a completely different zone. What was I thinking?
First, A feedback can have a forcing effect.
Look, you can argue against definitions all you want. Feedback is, by definition, not forcing.
That is to say that a feedback can raise temperatures which under the Co2 model would generally be a forcing.
No! That is feedback. It occurs in response to a long-lasting stimulus, and only in response to that stimulus. Feedback can be positive or negative. What you described is known as "positive feedback".
Water vapor is a feedback and a forcing though, I though I made that clear.
But under the Co2 models, they aren't prepared to account for water vapor as a variable which is why you see explanations using it as a constant.
In *NO* model is water vapor a constant.
And no, water doesn't average 10 days in the atmosphere because the saturation points differ.
Wow, do we need to go all the way back to the definition of the word average?
I suggest you quite getting your information from loaded sites designed to convince you regardless of the truth. Real science and at least one of the scientist contributing to it is one of them.
I suggest you get your data from somewhere other than your a**^H^H^Himagination.
They're talking about onboard reformation of hydrocarbon fuels
Which is even worse. The longer the chains of hydrocarbons, the less efficient reformation is, and methane reformation is only ~65-75% efficient in industrial scales. Make a reformer smaller, and you can't recover as much of the lost heat. I'd be surprised if they get more than 30% efficiency or so on the reformation. Then you have 40-60% efficiency on the fuel cell, then factor in an electric motor, for a grand total of something like 12% efficiency, *not counting the energy used to make the biodiesel*. Might as well just burn gasoline if you're going to waste energy like that.
So are you negative about this because it's Georgia Tech? Hate greenies? Or are you an Ubergreen of the "all we need is solar and cannabis" variety
Yes, let's not talk numbers -- let's insinuate motives for disagreement and degenerate to insults.
Eh, while electric engines are somewhat more efficient than internal combustion or hydrogen fuel cell
Huh? What planet are you from?
* ICE: 30-35% efficiency for the engine, but due to internal losses, only about 20% efficient to the wheel well * Fuel cell: 40-60% efficient *before* the power goes to the electric motor. * Electric motor: 85-90% efficient in typical driving conditions (in optimal conditions, with an optimal engine, you can near 95% efficiency).
They have the same power generation inefficiency and higher transmission losses than hydrogen.
Huh? In the US, there's only an average 7.2% efficiency loss in electricity transmission. That doesn't even compare to the energy costs of making and pressurizing/pumping hydrogen.
[quote]Then toss in the considerably lower energy density of electricity storage[/quote]
Once again, huh? Hydrogen not in a storage medium will get you 250 miles, perhaps 300 at best. Li-ion present-day typically gets 200-250, but there are three different techs being worked on which each individually can 2x-3x that range (lithium vanadium oxide, silicon nanowires, and barium titanate caps). To get the range on hydrogen up, you need to either increase the pressure (which nobody wants to do), use liquid hydrogen (whole host of major, major problems that nobody wants to deal with), or use a storage medium. With a storage medium, you can get up to 300-350x (the reported range of the upcoming all-electric ZAP-X is 350mi, might I add -- and 300-350x is still way below the upcoming battery techs), but you lose even more efficiency in the process. The more hydrogen dense a storage medium, in general, the more inefficient it becomes. So, you take something that's already less efficient than an ICE, and you're making it *even worse*.
and even though you might get more wheel torque from the original source, the vehicle is going to be heavier than a fuel cell driven vehicle (even though the latter will probably have some sort of electricity storage as well).
Since when are fuel cell vehicles any lighter than electrics? The FCX weighs in at almost two tons. The Tesla Roadster's not even 1 1/2 tons.
We already have one better than that: RV parks. RV receptacles are 240V/50A, and you can even find them in the boonies. That's enough to charge an Aptera Typ-1e's batteries from dead to full in 50 minutes. One step up from there, three-phase power sources are nationwide, so any charger that runs on three phase power could easily bring that time down to the low double digits. And obviously, installing an extra fast discharge battery pack in a given location means that you can rapid charge even big vehicles in minutes.
The problem with this is that there is no normal X. It varies due to temperature and numerous other factors,?I>
At a given point in time in a given location? No. Statistically, across the entire planet, over years? There most definitely is. And this is what we know as "global climate".
Once again, something that averages 10 days in the atmosphere simply cannot be forcing, by the very definition of forcing. It can only be feedback. Any water thrown "out of whack" will simply be rebalanced in short order.
Really, though, you think they're studying shopping mall attacks? They studied "12,000 terrorist attacks". Bet you didn't know there had been 12,000 terrorist attacks in Iraq in the past four years, did you, let alone 12,000 well documented enough to study? Assuming an average of 20 people killed per attack, that'd mean ~250k people had been killed in well-documented terrorist attacks without the media catching on to the overwhelming majority of it. With that many people being killed by terrorists, who needs insurgents?
Here's a wild notion: they're doing what the US government usually does and calling any insurgent attack a "terrorist attack". Which is why this research is being carried out for the DoD instead of the Department of Homeland Security.
No, well. yes and no. It would be a feedback no matter how you looked at it because it isn't a driving source. Solar energy being the most common alternative to Co2. But water vapor can stay in the atmosphere quite a bit longer then a couple days.
"To demonstrate how quickly water reacts, I did a GCM experiment where I removed all the water in the atmosphere and waited to see how quickly it would fill up again (through evaporation from the ocean) . The result is shown in the figure. It's not a very exciting graph because the atmosphere fills up very quickly. At Day 0 there is zero water, but after only 14 days, the water is back to 90% of its normal value, and after 50 days it's back to within 1%. That's less than 3 months. Compared to the residence time for perturbations to CO2 (decades to centuries) or CH4 (a decade), this is a really short time."
Do realize that those batteries don't provide a 10x increase in energy density. After the first charge, the capacity drops to only 8x. Furthermore, it's only an anode advancement, so it would only provide a 2-3x increase in battery density. Of course, in pure electric vehicles, that's good enough to put them on range-parity with gasoline. Other techs that have the potential to do the same are lithium vanadium oxide and barium titaniate ultracapacitors.
Also, two neat things happen as you increase the energy density. Unless they cost a lot more to manufacture, you lower the cost per stored watt at the same time. Also, you reduce the number of charge/discharge cycles they need to be able to tolerate, since a single charge/discharge cycle takes you further. Then factor in mass production on top of that all...
Yeah, the future for EVs looks pretty good right now.
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And this contradicts what I wrote how...? Musharraf is the current president of Pakistan, the person who has the potential to be hit most by the scandal at home. Bush is the current president of the US, a nation with the potential to be embarrassed by the fact that its closest ally in south Asia was one of the world's largest nuclear proliferators.
You do realize that the US military's budget is ~500 *billion* dollars per year, right?
Wow, you're really unimaginative if all you can picture being on a satellite is cameras. Just as one possible example (among many, many possibilities): The US has spent the last decade trying to launch "stealth satellites". It has become the ultimate game for satellite spotters to try and find them. Not only do they regularly adjust their orbits, but they are believed to use articulated mirrors to try and reflect almost all light that hits them away from the Earth or onto remote locations, thus making them nearly black against the sky.
China's ASAT capability is a really, really big concern to the US military. Over the years, we've let ourselves become more and more dependant on satellite communications to guide our forces and control our weaponry. Yes, we have plenty of other means of communication, but satellite communications take up an increasing share of the traffic, and some systems only communicate through satellite. China being able to knock out our satellites during the opening salvo of any conflict wouldn't pose a fatal situation to our combat capabilities, but it would be a huge blow.
As an aside, one fun ASAT mechanism that a friend of mine who used to work in military intelligence told me about a while back: sand. You launch a missile full of sand into orbit, then detonate the missile with conventional explosives. You get sand moving at tens of thousands of meters per second crossing all sorts of different orbits, rendering space a no-go zone for decades. Of course, we know something like Starfish Prime would do a pretty good job on its own, as well as playing havoc with the electricity grid below where you detonate it.
The reactors distinctly do not reenter as a single chunk and leave a crater. Cosmos 954, for example, scattered its fuel over a 370 mile path in the Canadian wilderness, leading to a search that covered 48,000 square miles, and later an even larger one. They only recovered 1% of the fuel.
Tsar Bomba was the cleanest-burning nuclear explosion in human history, and it wasn't in the very sensitive upper atmosphere. Starfish Prime had massive effects, creating a brand new radiation belt for Earth that persisted for almost a decade. Its fallout was detected in lichens and fungi thousands of miles away. The russians did some high altitude tests as well but nothing as environmentally destructive as Starfish Prime.
It doesn't work that way. Nothing manmade reenters all in one place and leaves a "crater". Debris generally gets scattered along a trail across a thousand miles or two in chunks.
At least they never dared launch anything as crazy as Starfish Prime.
We are not the immaculate custodians of space that you seem to be picturing. Why, do you think, did we not shoot down the Delta II second stage that reentered in 1997 with a large amount of residual hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide onboard? We have stages with signficant amounts of toxic residual fuel reenter all the time. Why, in the same year, when we had a Delta II explode *full* on liftoff, did the Air Force tell people in the *immediate area* that the smoke posed no danger? This was a *full launch vehicle*, not just a satellite's orbital maneuvering system. Do you have any idea how much beryllium we've had reenter? We sit by as large amounts of toxic materials enter all the time. As for the hydrazine itself, what do you think happens *on its own* to pressurized tanks of highly flammable fluids on reentry? I can't think of a *single* sizable object that's survived reentry still pressuretight.
The argument is completely bogus.
I find it quaint, the notion that the real reason they have to shoot the satellite down is because it has a tank of hydrazine onboard. Meanwhile, the Russians have let *freaking nuclear reactors* reenter our atmosphere. It's pretty transparent that they're A) trying to upstage the Chinese, and B) prevent any tech from making it into the hands of hostile parties. Even more transparent than the whole thing with A.Q. Kahn:
1) Pakistan funds its bloody nuclear program via nuclear equipment sales.
2) The international community eventually can no longer look the other way.
3) Khan steps forward. "Whoops, it was me! My bad. Every sale we made to every single country, I arranged, negotiated, and shipped everything, all with government aircraft, all of my own. No Musharraf involvement, nosiree!"
4) Bush and Musharraf: "Bad Khan! Well, that case is solved."
5) "House arrest", of the kind that lets you travel across the country. No charges pressed. Everyone wins.
Any limit on bond energy would also apply to chemical fuels. You may limit a particular battery chemistry (although the limits they show aren't particularly constraining at all, and they didn't touch li-ion, which clearly isn't anywhere close to it's limits), but not all battery chemistries. Their info is also sorely dated (which would probably be why li-ion wasn't even mentioned); it's a bunch of references from the 1950s. 40Wh/lb for silver zinc? Try 80.
Care to try again?
They also have substantially higher energy density today than the theoretical limit of chemical batteries. That counts for an awful lot.
What "theoretical limit" do you speak of? I've never heard of any sort of "battery limit". So far, it's all seemed to be due to engineering and materials challenges -- for example, like the recent silicon nanowire anode to replace graphite anodes in li-ion batteries, which allows 8x (10x on the first charge) higher lithium density. Get a corresponding cathode improvement, and you've increased the energy density of li-ion batteries 8-fold. Which would easily make EVs have longer range than gasoline cars, let alone hydrogen cars (which are only minimally longer range than EVs currently, at the cost of having half the energy efficiency, a lot more containment problems, and no real cost savings (thanks to how expensive fuel cells are))
Interestingly enough, everyone's favorite new solar technology, CIGS (the tech Nanosolar uses), is not only ubercheap to produce (profitable selling at $0.50/W to $1.50/W), but it's also amazingly tolerant of radiation.
Hydrogen is a lousy source of potential energy. It's bulky, corrosive, explosive, leaks *very* easily, is very inefficient, and in general is an expensive pain to work with. It's no surprise that most of the energy storage mechanisms being looked into for bulk storage of electricity are not hydrogen but "pumped" storage, either water or air. The largest in the world is a pumped water storage system in China.
As for battery/capacitor breakthroughs, there are now no fewer than three of them trying to make their way to market that promise 2-3x energy density and reduction in costs (barium titanate supercaps, and for lithium ion batteries, lithium vanadium oxide and silicon nanowires).
Indeed. Water alone is bad enough for corrosion, let alone water containing free hydrogen and oxygen. Some of their cells have operated only for days. On top of this, the cells use an expensive "special glass" (haven't seen anywhere that goes into more detail than that) to pull off the trick. Really, the tech looks to be at about the point that solar cells were in the '60s.
Not that hydrogen cars are a realistic solution to our current problems anyways.
Well, we in the US try to do our part. For example, just last week, I got opposition to the DMCA, restoration of the public domain, and other similar planks added to the Johnson County Democratic Party platform (we're the fifth largest county in the state, out of 99 counties). It's not much, but it's a start; in a couple months we'll be trying to carry it over to the state platform.
Ordinary people can do their part, however small it may be.
Yes, but the Canadians have wisely avoided killing their queens or destroying their habitat. As a consequence, the queen population has remained relatively constant over the years, while our eagle populations fell dramatically.
When was the last time you saw a queen breeding center make releases into the wild to help restore local royalty populations?
If you want full calcs, I've got those too.
We don't have gobs of spare generating capacity just laying around.
Yes, we do.
I don't see the electric motor being a factor of two better in efficiency.
The factor of two is the combination of electrolysis and the fuel cells, especially the latter.
And again hydrogen has much higher energy density than any electricity storage. Googling around, I'm seeing at least a factor of 5 better just for pressurized hydrogen (over supercaps).
First off, blanket statements like that don't work; you have to indicate a hydrogen pressure. Secondly, "supercaps" vary a lot; are you talking about traditional double-layer supercaps, next-gen double-layer supercaps, or barium titanate supercaps (which are really just regular caps on steroids)? Third, energy density statements can relate to either volume or mass, and yes, it does matter. Fourth, hydrogen has a tank to wheel efficiency of 30-40%, while electricity has a battery to wheel efficiency of 85-90%, so a joule of stored electricity takes you 2-3 times further than a joule of stored hydrogen energy.
The FCX is a somewhat light but standard 4 passenger car while the Tesla is a 2 person convertible.
With enough horsepower to do 0-60 in 4 seconds.
The Tesla is also in excess of $80,000 while the FCX will be competing with mundane gas powered cars and has to be a lot cheaper.
The FCX has cost Honda $1,000,000-$2,000,000 per vehicle.
----
"Honda hasn't publicly disclosed its investment in hydrogen technology, but General Motors has committed more than $1 billion and produced only a handful of cars. When vehicles are hand-made by Ph.D.'s as part of blue-sky research projects, can you even speculate on how much they are "worth"? A Honda spokesman, Andy Boyd, says the FCX's estimated expense ($1 million to $2 million) is based on "the cost of body and powertrain, and also the experimental nature of some key components, like the fuel cell itself."
The pricing of hydrogen remains fluid. The Department of Energy has estimated that the cost of a kilogram of hydrogen (with roughly the energy content of a gallon of gasoline) could fall to $3 by 2008, but that assumes certain economies of scale that have not yet been established.
The California Fuel Cell Partnership puts the average capital cost to add low-volume hydrogen refueling to gas stations in that state at $450,000. The cost of the Latham station - opened by Honda and a locally based engineering company, Plug Power, aided by a $735,000 state grant - is proprietary.
At my daughters' school, the youngsters were happy to squeeze into the back seat like college students in a phone booth. Their questions about fuel cells were simple.
"Is this the car of the future?" they asked. "Maybe," I said.
----
Why so expensive? Partly because they're low production -- but then again, so are automotive li-ion batteries. But also because, quite simply, fuel cells are inherently expensive beasts. They require nanoscale perfection on the membranes. They involve the use of precious metals like platinum. There's no way that something like that can ever become "cheap". Even when you consider the highly subsidized price -- a $600/mo vehicle lease -- that equates to something like $50k per car. That's more expensive than the EV1's subsidized price, which was something like $350-$520/mo (I'd have to look up the exact numbers) (the EV1 actually cost GM $80k per car, which doesn't include liability risk or profit).
But they are severely hindered by energy storage.
The range statistics on production electricity vehicles speak otherwise -- and EVs have a 2-3x increase on their horizon from three different techs, while hydrogen cars only have different, even more energy wasteful storage mediums that offer only incremental improvement on the horizon.
Neither of the above options has the infrastructure in place for mass use.
Yeah, when will we get some of this "electric infrast
No. At best your going to have an average of different locations at certain temperatures but that has no real reflection of the situation.climate zones depend on climate falling within a given statistical range or anything, or that changing that range would be a change to a completely different zone. What was I thinking?
First, A feedback can have a forcing effect.
Look, you can argue against definitions all you want. Feedback is, by definition, not forcing.
That is to say that a feedback can raise temperatures which under the Co2 model would generally be a forcing.
No! That is feedback. It occurs in response to a long-lasting stimulus, and only in response to that stimulus. Feedback can be positive or negative. What you described is known as "positive feedback".
Water vapor is a feedback and a forcing though, I though I made that clear.
You made it clear that you're wrong.
But under the Co2 models, they aren't prepared to account for water vapor as a variable which is why you see explanations using it as a constant.
In *NO* model is water vapor a constant.
And no, water doesn't average 10 days in the atmosphere because the saturation points differ.
Wow, do we need to go all the way back to the definition of the word average?
I suggest you quite getting your information from loaded sites designed to convince you regardless of the truth. Real science and at least one of the scientist contributing to it is one of them.
I suggest you get your data from somewhere other than your a**^H^H^Himagination.
They're talking about onboard reformation of hydrocarbon fuels
Which is even worse. The longer the chains of hydrocarbons, the less efficient reformation is, and methane reformation is only ~65-75% efficient in industrial scales. Make a reformer smaller, and you can't recover as much of the lost heat. I'd be surprised if they get more than 30% efficiency or so on the reformation. Then you have 40-60% efficiency on the fuel cell, then factor in an electric motor, for a grand total of something like 12% efficiency, *not counting the energy used to make the biodiesel*. Might as well just burn gasoline if you're going to waste energy like that.
So are you negative about this because it's Georgia Tech? Hate greenies? Or are you an Ubergreen of the "all we need is solar and cannabis" variety
Yes, let's not talk numbers -- let's insinuate motives for disagreement and degenerate to insults.
Eh, while electric engines are somewhat more efficient than internal combustion or hydrogen fuel cell
Huh? What planet are you from?
* ICE: 30-35% efficiency for the engine, but due to internal losses, only about 20% efficient to the wheel well
* Fuel cell: 40-60% efficient *before* the power goes to the electric motor.
* Electric motor: 85-90% efficient in typical driving conditions (in optimal conditions, with an optimal engine, you can near 95% efficiency).
They have the same power generation inefficiency and higher transmission losses than hydrogen.
Huh? In the US, there's only an average 7.2% efficiency loss in electricity transmission. That doesn't even compare to the energy costs of making and pressurizing/pumping hydrogen.
[quote]Then toss in the considerably lower energy density of electricity storage[/quote]
Once again, huh? Hydrogen not in a storage medium will get you 250 miles, perhaps 300 at best. Li-ion present-day typically gets 200-250, but there are three different techs being worked on which each individually can 2x-3x that range (lithium vanadium oxide, silicon nanowires, and barium titanate caps). To get the range on hydrogen up, you need to either increase the pressure (which nobody wants to do), use liquid hydrogen (whole host of major, major problems that nobody wants to deal with), or use a storage medium. With a storage medium, you can get up to 300-350x (the reported range of the upcoming all-electric ZAP-X is 350mi, might I add -- and 300-350x is still way below the upcoming battery techs), but you lose even more efficiency in the process. The more hydrogen dense a storage medium, in general, the more inefficient it becomes. So, you take something that's already less efficient than an ICE, and you're making it *even worse*.
and even though you might get more wheel torque from the original source, the vehicle is going to be heavier than a fuel cell driven vehicle (even though the latter will probably have some sort of electricity storage as well).
Since when are fuel cell vehicles any lighter than electrics? The FCX weighs in at almost two tons. The Tesla Roadster's not even 1 1/2 tons.
We already have one better than that: RV parks. RV receptacles are 240V/50A, and you can even find them in the boonies. That's enough to charge an Aptera Typ-1e's batteries from dead to full in 50 minutes. One step up from there, three-phase power sources are nationwide, so any charger that runs on three phase power could easily bring that time down to the low double digits. And obviously, installing an extra fast discharge battery pack in a given location means that you can rapid charge even big vehicles in minutes.
The problem with this is that there is no normal X. It varies due to temperature and numerous other factors,?I>
At a given point in time in a given location? No.
Statistically, across the entire planet, over years? There most definitely is. And this is what we know as "global climate".
Once again, something that averages 10 days in the atmosphere simply cannot be forcing, by the very definition of forcing. It can only be feedback. Any water thrown "out of whack" will simply be rebalanced in short order.
Really, though, you think they're studying shopping mall attacks? They studied "12,000 terrorist attacks". Bet you didn't know there had been 12,000 terrorist attacks in Iraq in the past four years, did you, let alone 12,000 well documented enough to study? Assuming an average of 20 people killed per attack, that'd mean ~250k people had been killed in well-documented terrorist attacks without the media catching on to the overwhelming majority of it. With that many people being killed by terrorists, who needs insurgents?
Here's a wild notion: they're doing what the US government usually does and calling any insurgent attack a "terrorist attack". Which is why this research is being carried out for the DoD instead of the Department of Homeland Security.
No, well. yes and no. It would be a feedback no matter how you looked at it because it isn't a driving source. Solar energy being the most common alternative to Co2. But water vapor can stay in the atmosphere quite a bit longer then a couple days.
The average is about ten days. Remember the word "average" in my post? That word has meaning.
"To demonstrate how quickly water reacts, I did a GCM experiment where I removed all the water in the atmosphere and waited to see how quickly it would fill up again (through evaporation from the ocean) . The result is shown in the figure. It's not a very exciting graph because the atmosphere fills up very quickly. At Day 0 there is zero water, but after only 14 days, the water is back to 90% of its normal value, and after 50 days it's back to within 1%. That's less than 3 months. Compared to the residence time for perturbations to CO2 (decades to centuries) or CH4 (a decade), this is a really short time."
Do realize that those batteries don't provide a 10x increase in energy density. After the first charge, the capacity drops to only 8x. Furthermore, it's only an anode advancement, so it would only provide a 2-3x increase in battery density. Of course, in pure electric vehicles, that's good enough to put them on range-parity with gasoline. Other techs that have the potential to do the same are lithium vanadium oxide and barium titaniate ultracapacitors.
Also, two neat things happen as you increase the energy density. Unless they cost a lot more to manufacture, you lower the cost per stored watt at the same time. Also, you reduce the number of charge/discharge cycles they need to be able to tolerate, since a single charge/discharge cycle takes you further. Then factor in mass production on top of that all...
Yeah, the future for EVs looks pretty good right now.