Perhaps linux will be stronger if it learns to acknowledge the existence proprietary software vs remaining a religious movement.
Unfortunately, trying to coerce Photoshop into running well on LInux is not exactly the right path to go down. While it may be good for a few people who absolutely positively need to use Photoshop in short term, Linux needs more NATIVE software if it is to be stronger in the long run.
That said, I think it is important for Linux users to always try to look towards free software first. Even if that means being "religious" about it. I think this is more important, at least in principle, than having applicaitons like Photoshop. I think we'd see the spirit of LInux slowly leeched away by commercial interests if LInux users weren't passionate about Open Source Software. I'd like to see Linux stay "fun." Proprietary software is not fun, IME. It may get the job done, but it sucks to be dragged along by some corporate support line when things don't work the way they should.
Yes, the universe was created, and the Earth was formless and desolate before God created light. I can't see how this relates to what I said though.
You said that the Biblical account of creation matches up perfectly with science. I wonder how you can say this when in the very first three verses of the Bible all current theories on how planets and stars are formed are totally contradicted. As far as I know there's no way you could have had a formless Earth (a smooth sphere?) before there was any light. Also, it is well established that the Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old where the rest of the universe (including stars that give off light) are much, much older.
Really, specific the "days: are the least of your problems when trying to reconcile the Bible with science.
Yeah, what can I say... I'm a sucker for a troll (good or bad) every now and then. I am particularly drawn in by trolls who really put in the effort as you seem to with your especially long winded (and often not even relevant) reply.
By the way, your relatively low user id on here (and the back to the future reference) suggests that you are actually old enough to know better.
I should.
Anyway, you seem to have it in for 'chemical fuel' that wouldn't happen to be down to personal experience with 'chemicals' would it?
I actually don't regret my personal experience with 'chemicals.' But thanks for the concern. Oh wait, was that some kind of veiled jab at my sanity or something? Hmm, I'll have to remember to be offended next time.
I would write more, but I've been petty enough already
There is no explicit statement of how long the days were.
When you see the words "evening" and "morning," it is reasonable to interpret that as a real human evening and morning. Unless you think that Creation was like some kind of slide show where you have a flash of dark between slides. But it would be kind of silly to refer to the period before you switch the slides as "evening" and the first few seconds of the next slide as "morning."
All the quote REALLY tells you, in fact, is that it got dark and then it got light, in between various tasks attributed to Yahweh.
Only if you are in denial when comes to the Bible conflicting with science.
Tell me, how do you wave away the very first three versus of the Bible which state that the Earth was created before there was any light? Do we have to use some more "flexible" interpretation of the word "light?"
The 6 days of Creation match up with science on the ball when they aren't literal days as we know them, but days of God, which are explained to be any length of time in two different places in the Bible.
Um, doesn't the Bible say that the Earth was here BEFORE there was light?
To me, it seems like one of the roots of the problem is that Comcast et al are using false advertising. If there are caps, they should say so up front, before you pay anything. If they're blocking some services, they should say so up front, before you pay anything.
How is this the "root" of the problem? Would you be any less upset about being capped or charged more if it was stated in the contract? I doubt it. You simply wouldn't have any reason to bitch and whine on sites like Slashdot about it.
The "root" of the problem is that the Internet is a shared resource and ISPs oversell their bandwidth to make money. The system isn't setup for users to utilize it full blast 24 hours a day. That is just the way it is.
That is not to say that false advertising isn't a problem. I most certainly is. But it isn't the root by any means.
When I pay for a service that claims 'unlimited' internet access, I'd say I've payed quite enough. Don't give me shit because *gasp* Comcast doesn't (or can't) give me what I payed for.
And I'm saying the solution is to not advertise unlimited and charge the bandwidth hogs more. Would that make you feel better? Either way, you're not going to get unlimited usage for a flat rate.
If you can't provide the speeds you advertise, then don't advertise them.
Or continue to advertise high speeds and put something in the contract that says you will pay for what you use. Really, I don't know why this solution isn't as obvious to everyone else as it is to me.
Take a step towards unrestricted bandwidth, build a new economy based on the innovative development of new business models using this bandwidth as a utility.
Utility... like electricity? You mean pay for what you use? *gasp*
Really, this is the only sane solution. Make the "hogs" pay for what they use. End of story (and mot of the hogs).
Can you store 'electricity' as easily as chemical fuels?
No, but storage is becoming less and less important. And where it is important, batteries are getting much better. Only a relatively few applications will require stored energy in the foreseable future. Aviation for one. I can't imagine passenger jets running on electricity any time soon. But automobiles are getting pretty close.
I doubt it unless you happen to own a pumped storage power station. Batteries and other 'under development' technology are sucky.
You won't be saying that when the price of fossil fuels doubles.. and then triples... Like I said, chemical fuels seem nice now only because you're not paying to have them made. You're just paying to have them refined a bit and then shipped.
A Hydrogen fuel cell (or an internal/external combustion engine for that matter) can be made to run at full power until its fuel is exhausted. Not much room, but still need high power? Well, use a bigger fuel cell/motor and just refill your storage tank as often as is required. No need to wait for a recharge or to swap out heavy batteries
Oh please. You complain that batteries are 'under development' and you dare even mention fuel cells. At least batteries are practical now. Maybe not as convenient as your cheap fossil fuels, but they work now.
(ok, so Hydrogen fuel would require engines/turbines etc. to be modified - but very similar designs and/or tooling to hydrocarbon fuelled machines could still be used)
Give it up. Of all the possible chemical fuels, hydrogen is about as bad as you can get for consumer applications. It is difficult to store, difficult to transport, and has a poor energy density compared to other chemical fuels. And then on top of that you suggest burning it with 40% efficiency, at best. What a joke.
Try running your (currently ICE powered) car on electric power - you won't go very fast or get very far with just the started motor turning. Even if you did a conversion to an electric vehicle drive, ultimately the electrical power used to charge up its batteries has been generated (mostly) by the use of chemical fuels
Not where I live. Most of our power here is hydro. But even if it wasn't, once you get people using electric drive trains, it is much easier to upgrade the power source. You can use whatever is appropriate for a particular geographic area and people dont' have to change their cars to adapt. Electricity the same no matter how you generate. Chemical fuels, on the other hand, are all different and each requires a different motor configuration.
Chemical fuels are valuable because of their EASE OF USE and flexibility (in application)
Ease of use, maybe, in some specific situations, but not flexibility. There is no form of energy more flexible than electricity. Just about anything you can do with a chemical fuel, you can probably do with electricity better and with much higher efficiency. I wonder if you've ever tried to run your computer on natural gas....
People often refer to Hydrogen as a 'just means of energy distribution' (true enough, but on a long enough timescale, fossil fuels are too) and use that reasoning to completely dismiss any notion of a 'Hydrogen Economy' because 'Hydrogen is not a fuel'. Frankly, if any kind of 'energy' is not a 'fuel' then electrical power is THE prime example.
Electrical power is not a fuel. Electricity is what you want to be converting most of your fuel into... because electricity is more valuable in modern society.
Frankly, if Hydrogen can be generated (and stored - in a tank or whatever) with a 'cell' or even with a suitable a wind turbine then its use as a FUEL should not be discounted. Ever given any thought as to what you will power aircraft with in future? Something tells me that a
Which one doesn't scale? So far Butanol doesn't, but it doesn't have to. We could stop pumping our shit to a plant to be processed, for example, until after we run it through the ABE process. Biodiesel will, because it parallelizes nicely, and we have a lot of desert we're not using.
You'd be better off stripping the H2 from the resulting hydrocarbons and run it through a fuel cell to create electricity. Or hell, burn it in a power plant to generate electricity at much higher efficiencies than individual automobiles can muster. That way it can be used wherever and however it is needed rather than trying to adapt every car on the road to use the chemical fuel du jour. If cars are all electric, it doesn't matter where teh energy comes from. Everyone can automatically take advantage of it.
I do understand this, and I've gone out of my way to make that fact apparent. Are you going out of your way to be obtuse? However, a lot of energy goes to waste, and if we captured more of it, and did less senseless wasting, we would have more capacity for wasting that at least makes sense.
Right, and what I'm saying is that distributing energy as chemical fuel is a senseless waste.
That's true. But they can be improved dramatically, not least in the area of simply making them lighter in weight. The mass of the average vehicle could be reduced to half of what it is now without compromising safety (so long as we did it to ALL vehicles over time.)
Maybe, but if you're still burning chemical fuel, what's the point?
Meanwhile, we do again have other options for burning fuel, including fuel cells (a long way off from economic practicality - but so are full electrics from fully replacing current automotive use) and turbines. We don't have to use an ICE.
I think batteries are a lot closer to being practical than fuel cells. And with fuel cells you still have the problem of dealing with the chemical fuel du jour. WIll fuel cells require pure hydrogen (bad idea)? Will they reform biodiesel internally? Will they take butenol? Natural gas? Again, if electricity were the common denomonator, you could use whatever fuel you wanted in centralized (or even decentralized) power plants which are usually more efficient at extracting power than you car is.
Again, I've been hearing that supercaps will come in five years for about fifteen years now.
And I've been hearing that chemical fueled automobiles will get significantly more efficient for even longer. But there are cars from the early 90's that got as good gas mileage as many hybrids do now.
You don't need synthetic chemical fuels. That's why you're engaging in logical fallacy. There's also biodiesel and butanol; biodiesel is made from algae (at least, most economically) and butanol is made by allowing bacteria to consume organic matter.
Unfortunately it doesn't scale very well. And you're throwing a away a lot of energy by burning it.
You can also use hydrogen, I guess, if you can solve problems with storage and embrittlement. Efficiency for electrolysis of water is over 50% already and climbing. This is less inefficient than other current options for turning electricity into a storable fuel.
And then burn it at 30% efficiency and end up with a HUGE waste of electricity. Awesome. I'm not sure you undersatnd this, so let me reinforce this fact: Any process that converts electricity to chemical fuel is a gigantic waste. Even if you could do it at 100% efficiency, chemical fuels just don't have as much value per joule as electricity.
But my point is that we can do a number of things to dramatically enhance the efficiency of vehicles which use fuels. For one, we could replace the alloy engine block with steel-sleeved ceramic or carbon fiber, technologies which have been successfully tested in racing. And we could also use turbines, a technology Chrysler pioneered for automotive use back in the 1960s. New transmission designs, or the use of a series electric hybrid, would make their use in modern, lightweight vehicles (unlike the land yachts in which they originally installed their turbine engines) quite effective. Using a series hybrid provides the regenerative braking functionality that helps make electrics so desirable.
Oh please. The auto industry has had over 100 years to improve upon the internal combustion engine. And in that time there's only been marginal improvements. They're thermodynamically limited in how efficient they can be. They'll never match pure electric. Never.
I elect instead to consider worlds we might actually live in one day. You can convert solar energy to something useful without turning it into electricity.
You could. But doing so would be stupid.
As a stopgap measure, at best. There's no way it could possibly feed the appetite of modern combustion engines.
It's a good thing we're always moving into the future then, isn't it?
An electric future. Hybrids being the bridge to that future. Use the chemical fuels that we do have to power the electric drive trains of cars until they are perfected by economies of scale and then swap out the motors for high capacity batteries or super-caps and you're there.
You have presented a false dilemma. In fact there are many more choices. Also, the total energy consumption of the vehicle must be considered. It's possible to make engines which take far less energy to produce than current models (because they lack the huge castings.)
So you're saying that you could make an internal combustion based automobile so cheap that you could justify paying for sythentic chemical fuels to run it? Yeah right.
The only reason Hybrids are affordable at all is because their high production cost is subsidized by raising the prices of other vehicles. That's right, if you buy a new non-hybrid Camry, you're helping to subsidize someone else's Prius.
Hybrids still derive their power from chemical fuels. They're just a little (and I do mean a little) more efficient than traditional automobiles.
Now, I know that full-electrics eliminate the majority of the objections; parallel hybrids are just a bad boondoggle, but electrics have some promise. But currently only the most expensive models have acceptable range. It seems like THIS will continue to be true.
You're ignoring my hypothetical situation. Consider a world where we have to sythesize our chemical fuels rather than dig them out of the ground. This puts electricity and chemical energy on a level playing field.
Anyway, any organic matter can be recycled into Butanol, which is a direct substitute for gasoline. Hopefully that will start happening on some kind of useful scale soon.
As a stopgap measure, at best. There's no way it could possibly feed the appetite of modern combustion engines. The future is electric. You may want to push it off because batteries are not as convenient at the moment, but you can't deny that electric is teh future.
Heat pumps as the name implies aren't generating heat, they're moving it from one place to another and heat pumps using chemical fuels (like natural gas) also get more heat into your home than they use to do it.
I've never heard of a natural gas heat pump. But I'll take your word for it that they exist. How efficient are they?
I doubt converting electrical energy to heat via resistive heating is any more efficient than converting a chemical to heat via combustion.
Well of course converting electrical energy to heat via resistance isn't more efficient than other methods. Most people would consider that a waste of electricity. I know I do. My apartment is heated that way and it is expensive.
Certainly that's PART of the appeal but I think it's also significant that you can easily store chemicals but it's hard to store electricity.
But that's OK because electricity is in constant demand so it is usually enough to have it flowing through the grid rather than store it.
This is particularly relevant when what you want to do with the energy is transportation where you have to store the energy in the vehicle itself. (There are of course modes of transportation like trains which have set routes and it can be arranged that they can be plugged into the grid on those routes, but there are obvious limitations to such vehicles which vehicles that store their own energy don't face)
I'm going to make this point more time and then I won't mention it again, I swear.
The only significant reason chemical fuels seem valuable now is because we're only paying for the transportation, and perhaps some refining, of them. If we actually had to *synthesize* our chemical fuels and put the energy into them (as very uninformed hydrogen advocates suggest we do), we would quickly find that they are very inconvenient and uneconomical. Electricity is the ideal form of energy for most any application. The only reason we don't use it for everything is because fossil fuels are still such a readily available source of "free" energy.
Batteries are getting better. And as the price of fossil fuels rises, we'll see more and more things converted to electric... because it is better all around. You might not like only getting 150 miles on a charge at first, but I'll bet that you'd dislike paying $30/gallon for synthentic chemical fuel even more. In a world without fossil fuels, batteries start looking pretty damn good.
he ONLY reason that chemical fuels seem valuable now is because we essentially get them for free.
They also have substantially higher energy density today than the theoretical limit of chemical batteries. That counts for an awful lot.
True, but if the energy didn't come free with the fuel, the cost of making it would make the energy density moot.
Here's a little hypothetical. Which option would you choose:
1) Fill your gas tank with 10 gallons of gasoline at, say, $30/gallon (because it has to be synthesized rather than just dug up from the ground) and get 300 miles. Hydrogen would surely be more expensive because it is much more difficult to store and transport. That is $1 for every mile. A simple commute to work could cost you $20.
2) Charge your batteries with $4 of electricity and go 100 miles.
I don't know about you, but couldn't afford chemical fuels if they didn't happen to be sitting in the ground ready to burn. I'm not saying that gasoline cars are a bad idea now. I'm simply making a point about chemical fuels in general. If they happen to be just laying there ready to use, that is one thing. If you have to synthesize them (as you would with hydrogen), forget about it. Time to bite the bullet and focus on batteries.
My point was about the liquid fuels. I gave the example with the gasoline because I don't know how much hydrogen a hybrid car will need to run 250 miles.
I know your point was about liquid fuels in general. And I pointed out why it isn't valid. Yes, gasoline is very convenient and compact as far as energy storage. But that is only part of the equation. There's a cost associated with the energy itself and how it is collected or generated. My point was that if you had to actually make the gasoline or hydrogen, suddenly the range you can get on 10 gallons would be shadowed by cost to make and transport the stuff. Few people would be able to afford the luxury of getting 250 miles on on tank.
I calculated that a car with 52 hp power engine, will need approximately 500 kilograms of batteries to pass that distance, which in my opinion is far less than the weight of the needed hydrogen and its container (which for sure will be heavy).
The weight of the batteries is partially offset by the lightness of the drive train. Internal Combustion Engines and associated hardware are heavy. Electric motors are relatively light and don't require things like transmissions, flywheels, etc.
Besides, battery technology is improving. Gasoline is about as good as it will ever get.
Yes electricity is pure energy and has much more applications than hydrogen. But unlike liquid fuels, it is very difficult to store it. Imagine how much the batteries for a car would weight, if they have to provide energy for 250 miles long trip, and compare this number with 10 gallons of gasoline.
Wait, first you compare electricity and hydrogen, and then you swap in gasoline? How about this:
Imagine how much hydrogen you would need (and how you would store it) if it had to provide energy for 250 miles long trip, and compare this number with 10 gallons of gasoline.
Gasoline is only appealing because it is more or less free energy. All the hard work was done long ago. We just dig it up, refine it, and ship it. I can guarantee you that if, for some reason, we couldn't just dig up oil and had to actually make it ourselves, we'd quickly fall back on batteries and electricity for our cars and accept a 100 mile range (or whatever the state of the art is). Because at that point 10 gallons of gas would probably cost you orders of magnitude more than it does now.
I'm not going to waste my time digging up the numbers to refute this.
Go ahead and try. Electricity is far more valuable than chemical fuels. You can do so much more with it with much more efficiency. Electric cars, for example, run at, what, 90% efficiency? Electric heat pumps can actually get more heat in your home than they use to do it. You can produce light very efficiently as well. Ever try to light your home with natural gas? Electricity is the universal form of energy with the highest value, joule for joule.
I'm repeating myself in this thread, I know, but this point is very important:
The ONLY reason that chemical fuels seem valuable now is because we essentially get them for free. Or rather, all the work has already been done to store the energy. We just need to dig it up, refine it a bit, and get it where it is needed. If there ever came a time when there was no natural hydrocabons available, we'd very quickly realize just what a waste chemical fuels are.
Parent is first one to point out storage benefit... someone with points should mod up.
There is no storage benefit for hydrogen.
This is the biggest problem with solar/wind power, the power generated often needs to be supplemented with conventional generation technologies to ensure constant energy supply. Production of stored energy source like hydrogen solves this issue.
No, hydrogen sucks as a chemical fuel. You'd be a fool to waste electricity making potential on making hydrogen. Supplement your solar/wind energy with some other method of power generation if you have to, but for God's sake don't throw it away in the form of hydrogen. Unless, of course, your using the hydrogen in a battery to store electricity at high efficiency. But hydrogen as a general purpose fuel? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
I disagree. Lots of the best places for solar collection are a long way away from human habitation. If you can efficiently produce hydrogen (or, better, an energy-dense hydrocarbon) in these places then you can easily transport it to where it is needed.
Perhaps if you didn't have some other source of chemical fuel, absolutely had to have it, and already had enough electricity. But other than that I wouldn't waste the electricity making potential. You'd be a fool to do so. You can do a lot more with electricity than you can with a chemical fuel. Joule for joule, electricity is far more valuable. The only reason chemical fuels SEEM valuable now is because we essentially get them for free. All the work has aleady been done in creating hydrocarbons that we use. The only thing we have to do is move it to where it is needed and perhaps spend a little effort to refine it.
Trust me, if we were suddenly in a position where there was no natural hydrocarbons available and had to make them from scratch, we'd quickly realize just how dreadfully poor they are as an energy storage medium.
Step 4 is "put it outside in sunlight" I think the point is that they have bypassed using electrolysis, instead using the sunlight to stimlate a dye and catylist that splits the water directly. If so, it would be much more efficient than using a solar cell and electrolysis.
Depends on how efficient the solar cell is. Since 15% effciency is the maximum projected for this photolysis process and solar cells are already up to 40% efficient, I'd put my money of regular solar cells + electrolysis in the long run. That is, assuming you would ever bother with hydrogen production at all. Hydrogen just isn't valuable enough to waste any resource (sunlight or electricity) to make it. Electricity is far more valuable per joule. Generally you want to be making electricity from chemical fuels... not the other way around!
The only situations I can imagine where making hydrogen might make sense is where you can't otherwise make electricity. Say, for example, from the waste heat of a nuclear power plant.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, trying to coerce Photoshop into running well on LInux is not exactly the right path to go down. While it may be good for a few people who absolutely positively need to use Photoshop in short term, Linux needs more NATIVE software if it is to be stronger in the long run.
That said, I think it is important for Linux users to always try to look towards free software first. Even if that means being "religious" about it. I think this is more important, at least in principle, than having applicaitons like Photoshop. I think we'd see the spirit of LInux slowly leeched away by commercial interests if LInux users weren't passionate about Open Source Software. I'd like to see Linux stay "fun." Proprietary software is not fun, IME. It may get the job done, but it sucks to be dragged along by some corporate support line when things don't work the way they should.
You said that the Biblical account of creation matches up perfectly with science. I wonder how you can say this when in the very first three verses of the Bible all current theories on how planets and stars are formed are totally contradicted. As far as I know there's no way you could have had a formless Earth (a smooth sphere?) before there was any light. Also, it is well established that the Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old where the rest of the universe (including stars that give off light) are much, much older.
Really, specific the "days: are the least of your problems when trying to reconcile the Bible with science.
Yeah, what can I say... I'm a sucker for a troll (good or bad) every now and then. I am particularly drawn in by trolls who really put in the effort as you seem to with your especially long winded (and often not even relevant) reply.
I should.
I actually don't regret my personal experience with 'chemicals.' But thanks for the concern. Oh wait, was that some kind of veiled jab at my sanity or something? Hmm, I'll have to remember to be offended next time.
Admitting you have a problem is half the battle.
When you see the words "evening" and "morning," it is reasonable to interpret that as a real human evening and morning. Unless you think that Creation was like some kind of slide show where you have a flash of dark between slides. But it would be kind of silly to refer to the period before you switch the slides as "evening" and the first few seconds of the next slide as "morning."
Only if you are in denial when comes to the Bible conflicting with science.
Tell me, how do you wave away the very first three versus of the Bible which state that the Earth was created before there was any light? Do we have to use some more "flexible" interpretation of the word "light?"
Um, doesn't the Bible say that the Earth was here BEFORE there was light?
How is this the "root" of the problem? Would you be any less upset about being capped or charged more if it was stated in the contract? I doubt it. You simply wouldn't have any reason to bitch and whine on sites like Slashdot about it.
The "root" of the problem is that the Internet is a shared resource and ISPs oversell their bandwidth to make money. The system isn't setup for users to utilize it full blast 24 hours a day. That is just the way it is.
That is not to say that false advertising isn't a problem. I most certainly is. But it isn't the root by any means.
-matthew
And I'm suggesting that they change their advertising and charge the heavy users more. Why you gotta be so defensive?
Right, change the advertising and charge for usage.
And I'm saying the solution is to not advertise unlimited and charge the bandwidth hogs more. Would that make you feel better? Either way, you're not going to get unlimited usage for a flat rate.
Or continue to advertise high speeds and put something in the contract that says you will pay for what you use. Really, I don't know why this solution isn't as obvious to everyone else as it is to me.
-matthew
Utility... like electricity? You mean pay for what you use? *gasp*
Really, this is the only sane solution. Make the "hogs" pay for what they use. End of story (and mot of the hogs).
-matthew
No, but storage is becoming less and less important. And where it is important, batteries are getting much better. Only a relatively few applications will require stored energy in the foreseable future. Aviation for one. I can't imagine passenger jets running on electricity any time soon. But automobiles are getting pretty close.
You won't be saying that when the price of fossil fuels doubles.. and then triples... Like I said, chemical fuels seem nice now only because you're not paying to have them made. You're just paying to have them refined a bit and then shipped.
Oh please. You complain that batteries are 'under development' and you dare even mention fuel cells. At least batteries are practical now. Maybe not as convenient as your cheap fossil fuels, but they work now.
Give it up. Of all the possible chemical fuels, hydrogen is about as bad as you can get for consumer applications. It is difficult to store, difficult to transport, and has a poor energy density compared to other chemical fuels. And then on top of that you suggest burning it with 40% efficiency, at best. What a joke.
Try running your (currently ICE powered) car on electric power - you won't go very fast or get very far with just the started motor turning. Even if you did a conversion to an electric vehicle drive, ultimately the electrical power used to charge up its batteries has been generated (mostly) by the use of chemical fuels
Not where I live. Most of our power here is hydro. But even if it wasn't, once you get people using electric drive trains, it is much easier to upgrade the power source. You can use whatever is appropriate for a particular geographic area and people dont' have to change their cars to adapt. Electricity the same no matter how you generate. Chemical fuels, on the other hand, are all different and each requires a different motor configuration.
Ease of use, maybe, in some specific situations, but not flexibility. There is no form of energy more flexible than electricity. Just about anything you can do with a chemical fuel, you can probably do with electricity better and with much higher efficiency. I wonder if you've ever tried to run your computer on natural gas....
Electrical power is not a fuel. Electricity is what you want to be converting most of your fuel into... because electricity is more valuable in modern society.
Frankly, if Hydrogen can be generated (and stored - in a tank or whatever) with a 'cell' or even with a suitable a wind turbine then its use as a FUEL should not be discounted. Ever given any thought as to what you will power aircraft with in future? Something tells me that a
'spain yourself. I don't have time to decipher your abuse of hyperlinks.
You'd be better off stripping the H2 from the resulting hydrocarbons and run it through a fuel cell to create electricity. Or hell, burn it in a power plant to generate electricity at much higher efficiencies than individual automobiles can muster. That way it can be used wherever and however it is needed rather than trying to adapt every car on the road to use the chemical fuel du jour. If cars are all electric, it doesn't matter where teh energy comes from. Everyone can automatically take advantage of it.
Right, and what I'm saying is that distributing energy as chemical fuel is a senseless waste.
Maybe, but if you're still burning chemical fuel, what's the point?
I think batteries are a lot closer to being practical than fuel cells. And with fuel cells you still have the problem of dealing with the chemical fuel du jour. WIll fuel cells require pure hydrogen (bad idea)? Will they reform biodiesel internally? Will they take butenol? Natural gas? Again, if electricity were the common denomonator, you could use whatever fuel you wanted in centralized (or even decentralized) power plants which are usually more efficient at extracting power than you car is.
And I've been hearing that chemical fueled automobiles will get significantly more efficient for even longer. But there are cars from the early 90's that got as good gas mileage as many hybrids do now.
-matthew
Unfortunately it doesn't scale very well. And you're throwing a away a lot of energy by burning it.
And then burn it at 30% efficiency and end up with a HUGE waste of electricity. Awesome. I'm not sure you undersatnd this, so let me reinforce this fact: Any process that converts electricity to chemical fuel is a gigantic waste. Even if you could do it at 100% efficiency, chemical fuels just don't have as much value per joule as electricity.
Oh please. The auto industry has had over 100 years to improve upon the internal combustion engine. And in that time there's only been marginal improvements. They're thermodynamically limited in how efficient they can be. They'll never match pure electric. Never.
You could. But doing so would be stupid.
An electric future. Hybrids being the bridge to that future. Use the chemical fuels that we do have to power the electric drive trains of cars until they are perfected by economies of scale and then swap out the motors for high capacity batteries or super-caps and you're there.
So you're saying that you could make an internal combustion based automobile so cheap that you could justify paying for sythentic chemical fuels to run it? Yeah right.
Hybrids still derive their power from chemical fuels. They're just a little (and I do mean a little) more efficient than traditional automobiles.
You're ignoring my hypothetical situation. Consider a world where we have to sythesize our chemical fuels rather than dig them out of the ground. This puts electricity and chemical energy on a level playing field.
As a stopgap measure, at best. There's no way it could possibly feed the appetite of modern combustion engines. The future is electric. You may want to push it off because batteries are not as convenient at the moment, but you can't deny that electric is teh future.
-matthew
I've never heard of a natural gas heat pump. But I'll take your word for it that they exist. How efficient are they?
Well of course converting electrical energy to heat via resistance isn't more efficient than other methods. Most people would consider that a waste of electricity. I know I do. My apartment is heated that way and it is expensive.
But that's OK because electricity is in constant demand so it is usually enough to have it flowing through the grid rather than store it.
I'm going to make this point more time and then I won't mention it again, I swear.
The only significant reason chemical fuels seem valuable now is because we're only paying for the transportation, and perhaps some refining, of them. If we actually had to *synthesize* our chemical fuels and put the energy into them (as very uninformed hydrogen advocates suggest we do), we would quickly find that they are very inconvenient and uneconomical. Electricity is the ideal form of energy for most any application. The only reason we don't use it for everything is because fossil fuels are still such a readily available source of "free" energy.
Batteries are getting better. And as the price of fossil fuels rises, we'll see more and more things converted to electric... because it is better all around. You might not like only getting 150 miles on a charge at first, but I'll bet that you'd dislike paying $30/gallon for synthentic chemical fuel even more. In a world without fossil fuels, batteries start looking pretty damn good.
-matthew
Real or imaginary?
True, but if the energy didn't come free with the fuel, the cost of making it would make the energy density moot.
Here's a little hypothetical. Which option would you choose:
1) Fill your gas tank with 10 gallons of gasoline at, say, $30/gallon (because it has to be synthesized rather than just dug up from the ground) and get 300 miles. Hydrogen would surely be more expensive because it is much more difficult to store and transport. That is $1 for every mile. A simple commute to work could cost you $20.
2) Charge your batteries with $4 of electricity and go 100 miles.
(http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=373)
I don't know about you, but couldn't afford chemical fuels if they didn't happen to be sitting in the ground ready to burn. I'm not saying that gasoline cars are a bad idea now. I'm simply making a point about chemical fuels in general. If they happen to be just laying there ready to use, that is one thing. If you have to synthesize them (as you would with hydrogen), forget about it. Time to bite the bullet and focus on batteries.
-matthew
I know your point was about liquid fuels in general. And I pointed out why it isn't valid. Yes, gasoline is very convenient and compact as far as energy storage. But that is only part of the equation. There's a cost associated with the energy itself and how it is collected or generated. My point was that if you had to actually make the gasoline or hydrogen, suddenly the range you can get on 10 gallons would be shadowed by cost to make and transport the stuff. Few people would be able to afford the luxury of getting 250 miles on on tank.
The weight of the batteries is partially offset by the lightness of the drive train. Internal Combustion Engines and associated hardware are heavy. Electric motors are relatively light and don't require things like transmissions, flywheels, etc.
Besides, battery technology is improving. Gasoline is about as good as it will ever get.
-matthew
Wait, first you compare electricity and hydrogen, and then you swap in gasoline? How about this:
Imagine how much hydrogen you would need (and how you would store it) if it had to provide energy for 250 miles long trip, and compare this number with 10 gallons of gasoline.
Gasoline is only appealing because it is more or less free energy. All the hard work was done long ago. We just dig it up, refine it, and ship it. I can guarantee you that if, for some reason, we couldn't just dig up oil and had to actually make it ourselves, we'd quickly fall back on batteries and electricity for our cars and accept a 100 mile range (or whatever the state of the art is). Because at that point 10 gallons of gas would probably cost you orders of magnitude more than it does now.
-matthew
Go ahead and try. Electricity is far more valuable than chemical fuels. You can do so much more with it with much more efficiency. Electric cars, for example, run at, what, 90% efficiency? Electric heat pumps can actually get more heat in your home than they use to do it. You can produce light very efficiently as well. Ever try to light your home with natural gas? Electricity is the universal form of energy with the highest value, joule for joule.
I'm repeating myself in this thread, I know, but this point is very important:
The ONLY reason that chemical fuels seem valuable now is because we essentially get them for free. Or rather, all the work has already been done to store the energy. We just need to dig it up, refine it a bit, and get it where it is needed. If there ever came a time when there was no natural hydrocabons available, we'd very quickly realize just what a waste chemical fuels are.
There is no storage benefit for hydrogen.
No, hydrogen sucks as a chemical fuel. You'd be a fool to waste electricity making potential on making hydrogen. Supplement your solar/wind energy with some other method of power generation if you have to, but for God's sake don't throw it away in the form of hydrogen. Unless, of course, your using the hydrogen in a battery to store electricity at high efficiency. But hydrogen as a general purpose fuel? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
-matthew
Perhaps if you didn't have some other source of chemical fuel, absolutely had to have it, and already had enough electricity. But other than that I wouldn't waste the electricity making potential. You'd be a fool to do so. You can do a lot more with electricity than you can with a chemical fuel. Joule for joule, electricity is far more valuable. The only reason chemical fuels SEEM valuable now is because we essentially get them for free. All the work has aleady been done in creating hydrocarbons that we use. The only thing we have to do is move it to where it is needed and perhaps spend a little effort to refine it.
Trust me, if we were suddenly in a position where there was no natural hydrocarbons available and had to make them from scratch, we'd quickly realize just how dreadfully poor they are as an energy storage medium.
-matthew
Depends on how efficient the solar cell is. Since 15% effciency is the maximum projected for this photolysis process and solar cells are already up to 40% efficient, I'd put my money of regular solar cells + electrolysis in the long run. That is, assuming you would ever bother with hydrogen production at all. Hydrogen just isn't valuable enough to waste any resource (sunlight or electricity) to make it. Electricity is far more valuable per joule. Generally you want to be making electricity from chemical fuels... not the other way around!
The only situations I can imagine where making hydrogen might make sense is where you can't otherwise make electricity. Say, for example, from the waste heat of a nuclear power plant.