If you think that our (US) wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are for oil, then the rest of the "first world" owes us those taxes to pay for the costs of the wars. The truth is that governments have been allowed to charge undue taxes on fuels, and have likely impeded economic growth with this corruption. This is bad for all of us.
What is practical is unlikely trains and public transport. Public transport is not always energy efficient. The best cases of public transport are slightly more efficient than an electric car (like a Tesla roadster or a Rav-4 EV). The worst cases are worse than Hummer H1 SUVs. Practical, in the event of undue fuel taxation, is to vote the bums out. Practical is a motorcycle with no emissions controls. Practical is a diesel pickup fuelled by Jim and Jill's BBQ, belching smoke as it drives. Practical is a nuclear powerplant, cranking out synthetic gasoline. Practical is a dead pickup truck full of lead-acid batteries with a generator in it.
Yes, and the worlds 16 largest cargo ships produce more pollution BY THEMSELVES than EVERY SINGLE AUTOMOBILE ON THE PLANET.
That isn't exactly true. Those 16 ships produce a lot more sulfur and other crap from their diesel engines than all the cars do. However, they emit less CO2 than those said cars, as far as I can tell. If you have a link on this, I'd love to read it.
If you believe the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were/are for oil, then Europe and all the other "first-world countries" should have to pay us all those fuel taxes, as we Americans paid (both in lives and in cash) for their oil. We pay, your corrupt governments tax you and get rich. Therefore, you should: 1. pay us the fuel taxes. or 2. stop believing our wars have anything to do with oil.
Trains and mass transit is a fake solution. Do not assume it to be more efficient, because most are bad. Some mass transit is slightly more efficient than an electric car. Most buses are similar to cars. Some poorly designed street car systems are less efficient than Hummer H1 SUVs. Practical isn't a train or a bike or a bus. Practical is a motorcycle with no emissions controls. Practical is an aging diesel pickup truck with fuel from Jim and Jill's BBQ, belching black smoke as it drives. Practical is a nuclear power plant cranking out synthetic gasoline. Practical is a revolution against high fuel taxes and the people that want them.
Your personal experience does not change the facts, that a great deal of transport in Europe is by car. If you go to Europe, public transport is available and you can ride it. In some US cities it is also available. It's just that people in Europe don't rid transit as much as you might think.
You're the uninformed stupid one. I never ever suggested an anyway that driving a car 0.5 miles is good. I'd probably walk it or scooter it even though I'm an American. I've never head any one say that social democracy does not work because of population. Agree or disagree, they say it does not work because it does not work at all. No one outside of the oil industry says renewable energy does not work here. Most people are excited about renewable energy here and would love to buy it if it was cheaper. Again, people here disagree with social benefits either in principle or in effectiveness - they believe Europe would be better off without social benefits. Not because we have too much immigration. Also, I don't watch TV or Fox Noise so that quip is out. Really, every time you people say this kind of stupid, uniformed stuff, or "Europeans/(Wherever you are from) hate Americans and don't care about the facts" meter just goes up another inch or two.
Now that we have the anti-americanism out of the way, lets get back to the facts. The facts are that in many scenarios, public transport is not significantly more efficient than cars of the same type. I.E. electric train == electric car. By throwing things in and taking others out you can move this up or down a bit but it still does not make public transport insanely green or insanely ungreen. Pick whatever transport system you want - car, train, motorbike, bike, or rollerblades. In the end, it will all have to be solar powered, and whether we have 1,000,000,000 solar panels or 1,500,000,000 solar panels is not that big of a deal.
In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.
In the US, transport takes about %28 of total energy use. In Europe, less than %10-%19 percent of all transport is public, and since they have a lot of buses, some fraction of that is rail. I could not find the numbers on percentage breakdown. All the rest is cars. In the USA, public transport is less than %3 of the total. All the rest is cars. Public transport is only as efficient as cars of the same type. For example, a diesel car is the same as a diesel train (in real operating scenarios).
The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption.
Yep. I used to think the sun was not a good source of power. I then looked at the data. Most solar panels suck but the sun does not.
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide.... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. - Thomas Edison
All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.
Actually, the oceans can last at least 500 years, and the Japanese are already working on technology to extract the uranium in the seawater. Of course, with crappy reactors burning only 0.7 percent of the energy in the uranium and dumping the rest, we have some major efficiency issues. If we fix it, we could look forward to 10,000 years plus. By that time, I'm sure will all by dead or cruising the galaxy. I think it is important to understand the paradoxes involved in energy conservation, as well as the actually effects of conservation measures. For example, public transport looks to be only a modest gain for a lot of investment, while say, upgrading your house's insulation is a much better idea with real, measurable (positive) economic consequences.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Actually, rail does not. Rail uses electricity when the driver wants it to. That often means peak times of electricity use. An electric car can get charged basically at any time - at night (or mid day in the case of solar) - whenever there is excess electricity in the grid. Rail also uses just as much electricity as an electric car. There's a slight difference but the time of use control makes up this difference. Public transport exposed (article is a graph with nice numbers from a bureau of transportation statistics report - numbers spot checked by me). If the electricity was cheap enough, you could use it to capture CO2, make hydrogen, and heat the mixture to produce gasoline and diesel. However, most renewable electricity is too expensive for this purpose.
Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.
Public transport is not any better than the automobile (see above). Let people choose between the automobile and public transport. Finally, the idea that public transport is big in Europe is a myth. The same article links to an Australian study (which is dead) that suggests that Europe uses 0.75 times as much energy per mile on average in transport. While %1 of trips in the US are based on public transport, less than 10-19 percent are public transport based in Europe. Even they have the automobile as the main mode of transportation. Japan is quite different, but even there the electric public transport is not much more efficient than electric cars.
Why li-ion? New nickel metal hydrides are better than lithium-ion. For example, an A123 18650 cell is 3.3 V * 1.1 amp hours = 3.63 watt*hours. A Sanyo Eneloop NiMH AA is 1.2 * 2.7 amp*hours = 3.24 watt*hours. The Sanyo is a smaller cell by about a factor of 2.14 in volume. So that means that the Sanyo is almost twice as good as the lithium-ion. It's also safer and easier to deal with. That particular model is happy with an hour charge. I'm sure you can find better models that will tolerate a faster charge. Tenergy, for example makes a 15 minute charge AA. That's insane.
Now, for the stations, let's go for vanadium redox and lead-acid, as you mentioned previously. The most exciting, IMO, vanadium redox stuff is this non-membrane based stuff that uses a semi-permeable (I.E. a clay pot) instead of an expensive ion-exchange membrane. Also cool are these membrane-less microfluidic vanadium redox cells. As for lead-acid, I'd say forklift batteries would be the way to go, because they are cheap and often come with longevity guarantees.
Molten salt is another, almost forgotten option. Some membraneless molten salts (not ZEBRAs) will dump over 40 AMPS per square centimeter (aqueous stuff is good if it gives 40 milliamps/cm^2). They might also be made from cheap materials, like magnesium.
Your faith in confuses me, since the current situation is that the world consumes more food than it produces
[Citation needed]. Especially given how many orders of magnitude you were off on ammonia consumption.
Or is it because increasing food production is *expensive* and therefore problematic, which is a sign that we're flirting with a Malthusian catastrophe?
No. Increasing prices occurred during a time of total insanity in the world market. This insanity was caused by the economic crash, which was in turn caused by fraud and dishonesty on the part of bankers.
Not sure where the 109 million tons of ammonia comes from... globally we use over a billion tons/yr of ammonia for fertilizer production.
Search for 109. That's the world total ammonia use in 2002. Looks like previous estimates were greatly exaggerated.
Plus we need the phosphates and potassium, eventually we'll need to recover those, as the mines will be depleted.
As phosphate prices rise, someone will find a solution. I don't know what it is yet. It might be method of farming that does not use phosphates. It might be a mining process. As for potassium, it makes up %1.1 percent of the salt in seawater. When we start large scale water desal, we'll get the potassium.
But we've also got to change inefficient consumption habits.
No we don't. That's exactly the point of the my post. My post was calculated using hydro. When you calculate that using solar, you get a tiny fraction of solar energy input, even when grotesquely inefficient methods of production are used. If that number went up ten, even a hundred times, in a solar world, nothing would happen. What will happen is that the market will sort it out. The price of meat will go up and people will stop eating it.
But in poorer countries? And what kind of political instability, and economic instability, will the global food shortages cause?
The shortages in those countries are caused not by high prices abroad, but by the difficulty of getting food to the people there. This is caused by dictators as well as the poor road ways (which is caused by a lack of economic freedom caused by dictators). If you want to solve these problems, you have to send a huge army of teachers and security guards. You have to pay for everyone in the whole country to go to school and college. Then the "food" crisis will be solved. But who would pay for that?
Or you could heat up the hydrogen with CO2 from the air to make carbon hydrides. These hydrides could then be pumped in to an engine. We could call these hydrides gas... gaso... oh it's right on the tip of my tongue.
We can provide what we have with the technology today.
It's just cheaper to use fossil fuel because renewable energy is not ready yet. Capitalists are very busy working on that problem right now. Back in the days when Ammonia (the root of all nitrogen based fertilizers - all the ones made from natural gas) was first made, it was not made from natural gas. It was made by running electrolyzing water inside of a hydroelectric powerplant. Right now, those powerplants are being diverted to aluminium production. If push came to shove, we'd stop the smelting and go back to Ammonia synthesis in the hydro plants. Interestingly, the reason Ammonia was made from electrolytic hydrogen was because of purity. Carbon oxides from the conversion of natural gas to hydrogen would get in to the Ammonia makers (Nitrogen + Hydrogen = Ammonia) and jam up the system. The electrolytic hydrogen did not contain any of these oxides and thus worked a lot better. Once purification processes were developed, natural gas took over. Total calculation gives (for 109 million tons of Ammonia/year) 75 Gigawatts/year of electricity. Double that due to process inefficiencies, and get 150 Gigawatts. Total hydropower production worldwide is 860 gigawatts.
As for water, it is an issue, but not an insurmountable one. If you do the math, in the use we use about 387,000,000 acre-feet of water here in the USA per year. If you run 2.5 kWh per m^3 (a good desal plant, like the one you'd get), we'd end up with 140 gigawatts of electricity or so. That's about %30 of the total electricity which sucks. That's what you'd need if there was no fresh water in the USA at all, and %48 of that water is "used" for thermoelectric power. That's another issue that is separate. This is a great application for offshore wind farms because they are right where the electricity is needed, and the wind farms can turn on and off all day without the desal plant caring.
As for population, it is a known fact that industrialized, educated countries have less children per capita then developing countries. This effect is striking in places like India. If we care about population growth, the best solution would be to help those developing countries develop as fast as possible. It would be very profitable for most people in the world if that happened. If we can develop alternative energy sources, we can stop CO2, increase energy use world wide, and everything will be good. We better do all that as fast as possible.
By volume, which is what matters, it is the worse. In the case of space, mass matters. There is some debate about aluminium fuelled rockets. Research was done on boron hydride fuelled rockets, but it was considered too toxic.
The zinc-ion system you linked to is very interesting. It is basically a zinc-air battery with an ionic liquid electrolyte. I want to do something similar for aluminium air. Zinc air is in general not rechargeable for two reasons. First is that it leads to the destruction of the carefully designed electrode that lets air into the cell. Second is that the zinc changes shape, and this leads to shorting in the battery. The second is trouble for all zinc based batteries. What I want to do is build a zinc-air system, and have robots recycle the burned zinc. This would let us have a zinc economy.
Oh, as for 1000 mile range, that really isn't all that useful, because of the huge amount of electricity required. This means that charging will be slow and most of the battery capacity is not used. It just rots. In a battery electric vehicle, the solution is always to put a little gas (or biofuel) generator in the car. Then give the car a 40 mile range. This means that you're safe from all the myriad of issues that could cause range to be shortened. The best batteries for this are lead-acid batteries, as well as Edison batteries.
Definitely. But they aren't very flashy or techy so people don't think about it. People are always excited about some system that might save 0.00001% of the energy used or "nano" batteries or solar panels. However, these are not the answer. History shows that simple mechanical systems will triumph. While the "nano" folks will be getting all the press, the engine builders will be getting all the cash.
I think this needs more fleshing out. Are you referring to the Jevons paradox? It appears as if that would depend on whether there are green taxes in place.
I'm not referring to the Jevons paradox. I'm referring to several things. First is basic market economics. Supply and demand. Demand goes down, supply goes up, price goes down, demand goes up. Second, I'm referring to the correlation between development and population growth. If we care about the environment, we must make people richer. The people dumping acid down the drain are the poor, not the rich. And it's not really there fault - they have to chose between eating and protecting the environment. Therefore we need to do to things at once. We must have economic growth in the developing world (which will increase energy use) and we must develop sources of energy that do not lead to CO2 production. If we fail at the first goal, population growth will not stop, and will blow up, and we will starve. If fail at the second, we will run out of gas, and starve. Let's not fail at either. In light of these facts, a green tax, which may succeed at reducing energy use, is not a good idea.
If hydrogen will lose out because it's an energy storage system and not a source, so will batteries. We have to think of hydrogen as a battery, not a source of energy. The hydrogen would have to come from the same place electricity came from. There's no theoretical reason a hydrogen fuel cell system can't be as efficient as a battery based system. Of course, this is not true in practice for a variety of reasons. Both batteries and hydrogen are electrical->chemical->electrical. Of course hydrogen is a loser because it is such a low energy density fuel. If you want fuel cells, metals like aluminium, iron and zinc are the "fuels" for the fuel cells.
If you really want to get rid of chemistry (which is not really needed), you have to look at superconducting energy storage.
Here is a link (PDF warning: 154 pages) to the ANL study. Skip to page 133 of the PDF.
If you really, really want to go crazy, then head on over to Argonne Nation Labs and check out this.
Testing has shown that the Tesla roadster is around 250 watt*hours of electricity per mile. The Rav4 EV (which uses a less efficient drive train) is around 300 watt*hours per mile. You can plug this in to the EPA Power Profiler and get CO2 per mile for various areas. But all in all, the real advantage of an electric car is that electricity comes from renewables and nukes and gas does not yet do so.
No. Hydrogen is the worst fuel in the world by energy density. If you are interested in having a fuel-cell based system, though, there is a much better fuel for you. It has been concluded that overall, the electricity->wheels efficiency of hydrogen (after 90 years of research) is 25 percent (batteries are around 80 percent). The overall efficiency of an aluminium fuel cell system with very little technology development is 30 percent. But, the aluminium system costs 100 times less than the hydrogen system. And I'm sure many improvements can be made that could get us up to 60-70 percent efficiency. Aluminium is also made on a giant scale today using renewable (hydro) power. In the future, I'm sure will have wind and solar aluminium smelting.
If you actually want a hydrogen system, the conclusion is that a plug-in biodiesel hybrid is the best way to go. This is because biomass is the best source of hydrogen, and oils are the best way to store it. Fuel cells are just too expensive to compete with diesel generators.
Finally, the material problem for batteries is much worse for fuel cells, which are often platinum infested. While many research and lithium batteries are based on unobtainium that could be a social issue, there are many system that do not depend on the unobtainium. For example, lead acid, nickel iron, and nicad all don't contain unobtainium. I think that in the battery chemistry race, nickel iron (Edision) is the dark horse candidate. Nicad is also a good fast-charging solution.
Uh huh. Neither which has been shown to be a serious problem.
Basic chemistry says that by burning oil, we have removed it from the ground and added it to the air. It also says that if no reaction is going back the other way we will eventually use up all the oil. This is reflected because the price of oil is rising. So that is what I mean by "fossil fuel use". By CO2, I don't care if you consider it a bad thing, it's just the only really thing we lead at.
My goal is to be the opposite reaction for oil, reversing its depletion.
Maybe they could have their own little sci-fi dystopialand, if it was located in the right area, natural climate effects and geological features could help contain the pollution and allow a safe buffer zone for stray ordnance and unregulated aircraft flights:)
Or utopia, as we would view it. We could call it Galt's Gulch...
Although, on second though you might want to be careful, a vast army of robot could pour out of it one day and force everyone to drive an SUV:).
I am indeed talking about about a world of America-esque (or really Europe-esque as well) consumers. It is not an illusion. There was a time when many products were made right here in the USA in good (or at least decent) working conditions. It just turns out that China is cheap. Also, a lot of metals are mined in the USA and Canada (nickel for example), and we get along just fine with them. Yes, we outsource pollution. But, dealing with it won't cost an extreme amount.
Sure, it may be possible that some day, a present-day-level or maybe even larger population may live with a large wealthy middle class in an environmentally sustainable way.
It will actually be possible in the near future. There will soon be exponential growth in the renewable sector. I hope to be one of the people who profits from it.
finally responsible people who maintain good leadership.
Libertarians definitely wouldn't like this future though, it would have to be more "socialist" than present-day Canada.
I wish you luck with that one. The idea of good leadership is a paradox, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The best way is to sue people who pour acid down the drain and make it not cost effective to pollute the system. Eventually, the people of Africa and China will demand it, and they will hopefully get their way with no blood spilled.
I'm not sure about the "trinket culture". We'll have to see on that one. All I know is that for now, more development == less children.
My problem with nuclear energy is that once used you can't make more of it.
That is true. However, sensible estimates for 15 billion Americans energy use ranges from 10,000 to a billion years of energy. By that time, the SUVs will be hyperspace capable and powered by ZPMs or we will have fusion or solar figured out. Nuclear is a technology that can stop oil and global warming RIGHT NOW. The problem is a social issue, but that is changing. It can't provide that energy forever and everyone knows that. But it can provide it for a long time. We can't predict what will happen in 10 years, let alone 10,000 years.
As for solar, the deserts of the world are the answer for solar generation. We can basically cover up the whole desert with out problems. As for the math, lets do it. My favorite solar energy company right now is E-solar (look em' up). They have a simple system. It is basically a steam engine and a bunch of mirrors (it is unobtainium free). They are getting 1 megawatt/4 acres. What does that mean? 15 billion Americans consume 1460*15 billion watts of electricity. Next, we multiply by 3 because that's about the amount a solar plant delivers when night and day are taken in to account and some other nonsense. How big is this plant? Well, it's about 72 miles on a side. It's big, but not uncontrollably huge. But now lets talk about storage. How do we store that electricity? We don't. Instead we store heat, by using molten salt storage.
Now let's talk about oil. We can do electricity to gasoline at surprisingly high efficiency. Doty energy, one hydrocarbon synthesis research company, is looking at around 60 percent efficiency as the first cut. Theoretical efficiency is in excess of 90 percent. What does that mean for our esolar system? Well, it is quite big, unfortunately. 800 miles on a side. It would fit but it would be big and annoying. However, it is a grotesquely inefficient process. Light->heat->mechanical->electrical->chemical->heat->mechanical. What those Sandia guys are working on is cutting out some of the trash. And when you do that you get areas of like 100-200 miles on the side. The Sandia guys need more funding, and if a VC asked me "what technology should I invest in right now?", I would say the Sandia tech. What they are doing is trying to develop a loop of chemicals to split the CO2. The way they are doing this is by using arrays of mirrors to heat up red iron oxide, break it down into a different (black) iron oxide, and then react it with water and CO2 to produce hydrogen and CO as well as the red iron oxide. React and get oil. This is what I call a thermochemical engine. This could be way, way more efficient then the previous process. Also, it would use up the high grade heat. After it runs, the excess heat could turn the steam engines to run the powerplants. The ultimate solar energy conversion technology would be a combination of thermochemical aluminum production engines, solar steam, and aluminum-air fuel cells. This system would have huge efficiencies, contain no unobtainium, and have energy densities that make gasoline look like a poor fuel. It would of course require lots of technology development.
Finally, I doubt any intelligent race has inhabited this planet, unless aliens came by for a picnic and left. There would be left over stuff, like some SUV parts or some teflon tape around, and we would have found it by now. In addition, it is incorrect to assume that the flying SUVs are incompatible with the off-world colonies. We will develop off world colonies, not because of popular will be because some rich genius realises that his or her view of the "perfect society" isn't happening on earth, and builds some spaceships. The economic powerhouse that would be the world at that point would easily be able to produce the ships and the colonies.
The fact is simply that there is a hell of a lot of iron around. A hell of a lot of copper. A hell of a lot of zinc. Ironically, titanium is an extremely abundant element (on the order of zinc), but it's a pain to work with, so making stuff with it is expensive. Just do googling to find where it is - look at the recent Afghanistan discovery as one example. Then there is also recycling. As a capitalist pig, I'm quite excited when I see a pile of scrap iron. It's essentially free concentrated iron.
The idea that people like me believe resources are infinite is a typical straw-man argument. The fact is that no one with half a brain believes that. And in reality, not many people ever did. Go search for some old Edison quotes about gasoline vs. electric cars. It's funny. Meanwhile your fantasies of poverty and doomsday have been debunked over and over and over again. It's tiring work debunking them.
I'm tried of the US being picked on over and over again. Europe uses similar amounts much resources per capita as us and they aren't in debt to the rest of the world. The reason we are in debt is because of some poor economic moves (subprime et. al). I laugh when I hear the complaints about the USA from Europe. Lets talk about the French empire, the British empire, the Spainish empire, etc. Before we talk about the USA.
Finally, your calling me a "psychopath" is childish and typical of someone who has passion in something that is wrong and/or worthless. It is also the incorrect use of the term, because the correct term would be "sociopath", as others have pointed out.
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If you think that our (US) wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are for oil, then the rest of the "first world" owes us those taxes to pay for the costs of the wars. The truth is that governments have been allowed to charge undue taxes on fuels, and have likely impeded economic growth with this corruption. This is bad for all of us.
What is practical is unlikely trains and public transport. Public transport is not always energy efficient. The best cases of public transport are slightly more efficient than an electric car (like a Tesla roadster or a Rav-4 EV). The worst cases are worse than Hummer H1 SUVs. Practical, in the event of undue fuel taxation, is to vote the bums out. Practical is a motorcycle with no emissions controls. Practical is a diesel pickup fuelled by Jim and Jill's BBQ, belching smoke as it drives. Practical is a nuclear powerplant, cranking out synthetic gasoline. Practical is a dead pickup truck full of lead-acid batteries with a generator in it.
Yes, and the worlds 16 largest cargo ships produce more pollution BY THEMSELVES than EVERY SINGLE AUTOMOBILE ON THE PLANET.
That isn't exactly true. Those 16 ships produce a lot more sulfur and other crap from their diesel engines than all the cars do. However, they emit less CO2 than those said cars, as far as I can tell. If you have a link on this, I'd love to read it.
If you believe the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were/are for oil, then Europe and all the other "first-world countries" should have to pay us all those fuel taxes, as we Americans paid (both in lives and in cash) for their oil. We pay, your corrupt governments tax you and get rich. Therefore, you should: 1. pay us the fuel taxes. or 2. stop believing our wars have anything to do with oil.
Trains and mass transit is a fake solution. Do not assume it to be more efficient, because most are bad. Some mass transit is slightly more efficient than an electric car. Most buses are similar to cars. Some poorly designed street car systems are less efficient than Hummer H1 SUVs. Practical isn't a train or a bike or a bus. Practical is a motorcycle with no emissions controls. Practical is an aging diesel pickup truck with fuel from Jim and Jill's BBQ, belching black smoke as it drives. Practical is a nuclear power plant cranking out synthetic gasoline. Practical is a revolution against high fuel taxes and the people that want them.
Your personal experience does not change the facts, that a great deal of transport in Europe is by car. If you go to Europe, public transport is available and you can ride it. In some US cities it is also available. It's just that people in Europe don't rid transit as much as you might think.
You're the uninformed stupid one. I never ever suggested an anyway that driving a car 0.5 miles is good. I'd probably walk it or scooter it even though I'm an American. I've never head any one say that social democracy does not work because of population. Agree or disagree, they say it does not work because it does not work at all. No one outside of the oil industry says renewable energy does not work here. Most people are excited about renewable energy here and would love to buy it if it was cheaper. Again, people here disagree with social benefits either in principle or in effectiveness - they believe Europe would be better off without social benefits. Not because we have too much immigration. Also, I don't watch TV or Fox Noise so that quip is out. Really, every time you people say this kind of stupid, uniformed stuff, or "Europeans/(Wherever you are from) hate Americans and don't care about the facts" meter just goes up another inch or two.
Now that we have the anti-americanism out of the way, lets get back to the facts. The facts are that in many scenarios, public transport is not significantly more efficient than cars of the same type. I.E. electric train == electric car. By throwing things in and taking others out you can move this up or down a bit but it still does not make public transport insanely green or insanely ungreen. Pick whatever transport system you want - car, train, motorbike, bike, or rollerblades. In the end, it will all have to be solar powered, and whether we have 1,000,000,000 solar panels or 1,500,000,000 solar panels is not that big of a deal.
In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.
In the US, transport takes about %28 of total energy use. In Europe, less than %10-%19 percent of all transport is public, and since they have a lot of buses, some fraction of that is rail. I could not find the numbers on percentage breakdown. All the rest is cars. In the USA, public transport is less than %3 of the total. All the rest is cars. Public transport is only as efficient as cars of the same type. For example, a diesel car is the same as a diesel train (in real operating scenarios).
The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption.
Yep. I used to think the sun was not a good source of power. I then looked at the data. Most solar panels suck but the sun does not.
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. - Thomas Edison
All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.
Actually, the oceans can last at least 500 years, and the Japanese are already working on technology to extract the uranium in the seawater. Of course, with crappy reactors burning only 0.7 percent of the energy in the uranium and dumping the rest, we have some major efficiency issues. If we fix it, we could look forward to 10,000 years plus. By that time, I'm sure will all by dead or cruising the galaxy. I think it is important to understand the paradoxes involved in energy conservation, as well as the actually effects of conservation measures. For example, public transport looks to be only a modest gain for a lot of investment, while say, upgrading your house's insulation is a much better idea with real, measurable (positive) economic consequences.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Actually, rail does not. Rail uses electricity when the driver wants it to. That often means peak times of electricity use. An electric car can get charged basically at any time - at night (or mid day in the case of solar) - whenever there is excess electricity in the grid. Rail also uses just as much electricity as an electric car. There's a slight difference but the time of use control makes up this difference. Public transport exposed (article is a graph with nice numbers from a bureau of transportation statistics report - numbers spot checked by me). If the electricity was cheap enough, you could use it to capture CO2, make hydrogen, and heat the mixture to produce gasoline and diesel. However, most renewable electricity is too expensive for this purpose.
Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.
Public transport is not any better than the automobile (see above). Let people choose between the automobile and public transport. Finally, the idea that public transport is big in Europe is a myth. The same article links to an Australian study (which is dead) that suggests that Europe uses 0.75 times as much energy per mile on average in transport. While %1 of trips in the US are based on public transport, less than 10-19 percent are public transport based in Europe. Even they have the automobile as the main mode of transportation. Japan is quite different, but even there the electric public transport is not much more efficient than electric cars.
Why li-ion? New nickel metal hydrides are better than lithium-ion. For example, an A123 18650 cell is 3.3 V * 1.1 amp hours = 3.63 watt*hours. A Sanyo Eneloop NiMH AA is 1.2 * 2.7 amp*hours = 3.24 watt*hours. The Sanyo is a smaller cell by about a factor of 2.14 in volume. So that means that the Sanyo is almost twice as good as the lithium-ion. It's also safer and easier to deal with. That particular model is happy with an hour charge. I'm sure you can find better models that will tolerate a faster charge. Tenergy, for example makes a 15 minute charge AA. That's insane.
Now, for the stations, let's go for vanadium redox and lead-acid, as you mentioned previously. The most exciting, IMO, vanadium redox stuff is this non-membrane based stuff that uses a semi-permeable (I.E. a clay pot) instead of an expensive ion-exchange membrane. Also cool are these membrane-less microfluidic vanadium redox cells. As for lead-acid, I'd say forklift batteries would be the way to go, because they are cheap and often come with longevity guarantees.
Molten salt is another, almost forgotten option. Some membraneless molten salts (not ZEBRAs) will dump over 40 AMPS per square centimeter (aqueous stuff is good if it gives 40 milliamps/cm^2). They might also be made from cheap materials, like magnesium.
Your faith in confuses me, since the current situation is that the world consumes more food than it produces
[Citation needed]. Especially given how many orders of magnitude you were off on ammonia consumption.
Or is it because increasing food production is *expensive* and therefore problematic, which is a sign that we're flirting with a Malthusian catastrophe?
No. Increasing prices occurred during a time of total insanity in the world market. This insanity was caused by the economic crash, which was in turn caused by fraud and dishonesty on the part of bankers.
Not sure where the 109 million tons of ammonia comes from... globally we use over a billion tons/yr of ammonia for fertilizer production.
Search for 109. That's the world total ammonia use in 2002. Looks like previous estimates were greatly exaggerated.
Plus we need the phosphates and potassium, eventually we'll need to recover those, as the mines will be depleted.
As phosphate prices rise, someone will find a solution. I don't know what it is yet. It might be method of farming that does not use phosphates. It might be a mining process. As for potassium, it makes up %1.1 percent of the salt in seawater. When we start large scale water desal, we'll get the potassium.
But we've also got to change inefficient consumption habits.
No we don't. That's exactly the point of the my post. My post was calculated using hydro. When you calculate that using solar, you get a tiny fraction of solar energy input, even when grotesquely inefficient methods of production are used. If that number went up ten, even a hundred times, in a solar world, nothing would happen. What will happen is that the market will sort it out. The price of meat will go up and people will stop eating it.
But in poorer countries? And what kind of political instability, and economic instability, will the global food shortages cause?
The shortages in those countries are caused not by high prices abroad, but by the difficulty of getting food to the people there. This is caused by dictators as well as the poor road ways (which is caused by a lack of economic freedom caused by dictators). If you want to solve these problems, you have to send a huge army of teachers and security guards. You have to pay for everyone in the whole country to go to school and college. Then the "food" crisis will be solved. But who would pay for that?
The ballot in NSW is NSFW.
Or you could heat up the hydrogen with CO2 from the air to make carbon hydrides. These hydrides could then be pumped in to an engine. We could call these hydrides gas... gaso... oh it's right on the tip of my tongue.
Oh well.
We can provide what we have with the technology today.
It's just cheaper to use fossil fuel because renewable energy is not ready yet. Capitalists are very busy working on that problem right now. Back in the days when Ammonia (the root of all nitrogen based fertilizers - all the ones made from natural gas) was first made, it was not made from natural gas. It was made by running electrolyzing water inside of a hydroelectric powerplant. Right now, those powerplants are being diverted to aluminium production. If push came to shove, we'd stop the smelting and go back to Ammonia synthesis in the hydro plants. Interestingly, the reason Ammonia was made from electrolytic hydrogen was because of purity. Carbon oxides from the conversion of natural gas to hydrogen would get in to the Ammonia makers (Nitrogen + Hydrogen = Ammonia) and jam up the system. The electrolytic hydrogen did not contain any of these oxides and thus worked a lot better. Once purification processes were developed, natural gas took over. Total calculation gives (for 109 million tons of Ammonia/year) 75 Gigawatts/year of electricity. Double that due to process inefficiencies, and get 150 Gigawatts. Total hydropower production worldwide is 860 gigawatts.
As for water, it is an issue, but not an insurmountable one. If you do the math, in the use we use about 387,000,000 acre-feet of water here in the USA per year. If you run 2.5 kWh per m^3 (a good desal plant, like the one you'd get), we'd end up with 140 gigawatts of electricity or so. That's about %30 of the total electricity which sucks. That's what you'd need if there was no fresh water in the USA at all, and %48 of that water is "used" for thermoelectric power. That's another issue that is separate. This is a great application for offshore wind farms because they are right where the electricity is needed, and the wind farms can turn on and off all day without the desal plant caring.
As for population, it is a known fact that industrialized, educated countries have less children per capita then developing countries. This effect is striking in places like India. If we care about population growth, the best solution would be to help those developing countries develop as fast as possible. It would be very profitable for most people in the world if that happened. If we can develop alternative energy sources, we can stop CO2, increase energy use world wide, and everything will be good. We better do all that as fast as possible.
By volume, which is what matters, it is the worse. In the case of space, mass matters. There is some debate about aluminium fuelled rockets. Research was done on boron hydride fuelled rockets, but it was considered too toxic.
The zinc-ion system you linked to is very interesting. It is basically a zinc-air battery with an ionic liquid electrolyte. I want to do something similar for aluminium air. Zinc air is in general not rechargeable for two reasons. First is that it leads to the destruction of the carefully designed electrode that lets air into the cell. Second is that the zinc changes shape, and this leads to shorting in the battery. The second is trouble for all zinc based batteries. What I want to do is build a zinc-air system, and have robots recycle the burned zinc. This would let us have a zinc economy.
Oh, as for 1000 mile range, that really isn't all that useful, because of the huge amount of electricity required. This means that charging will be slow and most of the battery capacity is not used. It just rots. In a battery electric vehicle, the solution is always to put a little gas (or biofuel) generator in the car. Then give the car a 40 mile range. This means that you're safe from all the myriad of issues that could cause range to be shortened. The best batteries for this are lead-acid batteries, as well as Edison batteries.
But on the whole it is very promising.
Definitely. But they aren't very flashy or techy so people don't think about it. People are always excited about some system that might save 0.00001% of the energy used or "nano" batteries or solar panels. However, these are not the answer. History shows that simple mechanical systems will triumph. While the "nano" folks will be getting all the press, the engine builders will be getting all the cash.
I think this needs more fleshing out. Are you referring to the Jevons paradox? It appears as if that would depend on whether there are green taxes in place.
I'm not referring to the Jevons paradox. I'm referring to several things. First is basic market economics. Supply and demand. Demand goes down, supply goes up, price goes down, demand goes up. Second, I'm referring to the correlation between development and population growth. If we care about the environment, we must make people richer. The people dumping acid down the drain are the poor, not the rich. And it's not really there fault - they have to chose between eating and protecting the environment. Therefore we need to do to things at once. We must have economic growth in the developing world (which will increase energy use) and we must develop sources of energy that do not lead to CO2 production. If we fail at the first goal, population growth will not stop, and will blow up, and we will starve. If fail at the second, we will run out of gas, and starve. Let's not fail at either. In light of these facts, a green tax, which may succeed at reducing energy use, is not a good idea.
If hydrogen will lose out because it's an energy storage system and not a source, so will batteries. We have to think of hydrogen as a battery, not a source of energy. The hydrogen would have to come from the same place electricity came from. There's no theoretical reason a hydrogen fuel cell system can't be as efficient as a battery based system. Of course, this is not true in practice for a variety of reasons. Both batteries and hydrogen are electrical->chemical->electrical. Of course hydrogen is a loser because it is such a low energy density fuel. If you want fuel cells, metals like aluminium, iron and zinc are the "fuels" for the fuel cells.
If you really want to get rid of chemistry (which is not really needed), you have to look at superconducting energy storage.
Here is a link (PDF warning: 154 pages) to the ANL study. Skip to page 133 of the PDF.
If you really, really want to go crazy, then head on over to Argonne Nation Labs and check out this.
Testing has shown that the Tesla roadster is around 250 watt*hours of electricity per mile. The Rav4 EV (which uses a less efficient drive train) is around 300 watt*hours per mile. You can plug this in to the EPA Power Profiler and get CO2 per mile for various areas. But all in all, the real advantage of an electric car is that electricity comes from renewables and nukes and gas does not yet do so.
hydrogen car viable.
No. Hydrogen is the worst fuel in the world by energy density. If you are interested in having a fuel-cell based system, though, there is a much better fuel for you. It has been concluded that overall, the electricity->wheels efficiency of hydrogen (after 90 years of research) is 25 percent (batteries are around 80 percent). The overall efficiency of an aluminium fuel cell system with very little technology development is 30 percent. But, the aluminium system costs 100 times less than the hydrogen system. And I'm sure many improvements can be made that could get us up to 60-70 percent efficiency. Aluminium is also made on a giant scale today using renewable (hydro) power. In the future, I'm sure will have wind and solar aluminium smelting.
If you actually want a hydrogen system, the conclusion is that a plug-in biodiesel hybrid is the best way to go. This is because biomass is the best source of hydrogen, and oils are the best way to store it. Fuel cells are just too expensive to compete with diesel generators.
Finally, the material problem for batteries is much worse for fuel cells, which are often platinum infested. While many research and lithium batteries are based on unobtainium that could be a social issue, there are many system that do not depend on the unobtainium. For example, lead acid, nickel iron, and nicad all don't contain unobtainium. I think that in the battery chemistry race, nickel iron (Edision) is the dark horse candidate. Nicad is also a good fast-charging solution.
The burning of oil is non-reversable. Once used it is gone for good.
Incorrect.
Actually, I've got a better plan. It will save both the economy and the environment. I call it bankerdiesel.
Uh huh. Neither which has been shown to be a serious problem.
Basic chemistry says that by burning oil, we have removed it from the ground and added it to the air. It also says that if no reaction is going back the other way we will eventually use up all the oil. This is reflected because the price of oil is rising. So that is what I mean by "fossil fuel use". By CO2, I don't care if you consider it a bad thing, it's just the only really thing we lead at.
My goal is to be the opposite reaction for oil, reversing its depletion.
Maybe they could have their own little sci-fi dystopialand, if it was located in the right area, natural climate effects and geological features could help contain the pollution and allow a safe buffer zone for stray ordnance and unregulated aircraft flights :)
Or utopia, as we would view it. We could call it Galt's Gulch...
:).
Although, on second though you might want to be careful, a vast army of robot could pour out of it one day and force everyone to drive an SUV
Sure, it may be possible that some day, a present-day-level or maybe even larger population may live with a large wealthy middle class in an environmentally sustainable way.
It will actually be possible in the near future. There will soon be exponential growth in the renewable sector. I hope to be one of the people who profits from it.
finally responsible people who maintain good leadership.
Libertarians definitely wouldn't like this future though, it would have to be more "socialist" than present-day Canada.
I wish you luck with that one. The idea of good leadership is a paradox, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The best way is to sue people who pour acid down the drain and make it not cost effective to pollute the system. Eventually, the people of Africa and China will demand it, and they will hopefully get their way with no blood spilled.
My problem with nuclear energy is that once used you can't make more of it.
That is true. However, sensible estimates for 15 billion Americans energy use ranges from 10,000 to a billion years of energy. By that time, the SUVs will be hyperspace capable and powered by ZPMs or we will have fusion or solar figured out. Nuclear is a technology that can stop oil and global warming RIGHT NOW. The problem is a social issue, but that is changing. It can't provide that energy forever and everyone knows that. But it can provide it for a long time. We can't predict what will happen in 10 years, let alone 10,000 years.
As for solar, the deserts of the world are the answer for solar generation. We can basically cover up the whole desert with out problems. As for the math, lets do it. My favorite solar energy company right now is E-solar (look em' up). They have a simple system. It is basically a steam engine and a bunch of mirrors (it is unobtainium free). They are getting 1 megawatt/4 acres. What does that mean? 15 billion Americans consume 1460*15 billion watts of electricity. Next, we multiply by 3 because that's about the amount a solar plant delivers when night and day are taken in to account and some other nonsense. How big is this plant? Well, it's about 72 miles on a side. It's big, but not uncontrollably huge. But now lets talk about storage. How do we store that electricity? We don't. Instead we store heat, by using molten salt storage.
Now let's talk about oil. We can do electricity to gasoline at surprisingly high efficiency. Doty energy, one hydrocarbon synthesis research company, is looking at around 60 percent efficiency as the first cut. Theoretical efficiency is in excess of 90 percent. What does that mean for our esolar system? Well, it is quite big, unfortunately. 800 miles on a side. It would fit but it would be big and annoying. However, it is a grotesquely inefficient process. Light->heat->mechanical->electrical->chemical->heat->mechanical. What those Sandia guys are working on is cutting out some of the trash. And when you do that you get areas of like 100-200 miles on the side. The Sandia guys need more funding, and if a VC asked me "what technology should I invest in right now?", I would say the Sandia tech. What they are doing is trying to develop a loop of chemicals to split the CO2. The way they are doing this is by using arrays of mirrors to heat up red iron oxide, break it down into a different (black) iron oxide, and then react it with water and CO2 to produce hydrogen and CO as well as the red iron oxide. React and get oil. This is what I call a thermochemical engine. This could be way, way more efficient then the previous process. Also, it would use up the high grade heat. After it runs, the excess heat could turn the steam engines to run the powerplants. The ultimate solar energy conversion technology would be a combination of thermochemical aluminum production engines, solar steam, and aluminum-air fuel cells. This system would have huge efficiencies, contain no unobtainium, and have energy densities that make gasoline look like a poor fuel. It would of course require lots of technology development.
Finally, I doubt any intelligent race has inhabited this planet, unless aliens came by for a picnic and left. There would be left over stuff, like some SUV parts or some teflon tape around, and we would have found it by now. In addition, it is incorrect to assume that the flying SUVs are incompatible with the off-world colonies. We will develop off world colonies, not because of popular will be because some rich genius realises that his or her view of the "perfect society" isn't happening on earth, and builds some spaceships. The economic powerhouse that would be the world at that point would easily be able to produce the ships and the colonies.
I agree that we should save the
The idea that people like me believe resources are infinite is a typical straw-man argument. The fact is that no one with half a brain believes that. And in reality, not many people ever did. Go search for some old Edison quotes about gasoline vs. electric cars. It's funny. Meanwhile your fantasies of poverty and doomsday have been debunked over and over and over again. It's tiring work debunking them.
I'm tried of the US being picked on over and over again. Europe uses similar amounts much resources per capita as us and they aren't in debt to the rest of the world. The reason we are in debt is because of some poor economic moves (subprime et. al). I laugh when I hear the complaints about the USA from Europe. Lets talk about the French empire, the British empire, the Spainish empire, etc. Before we talk about the USA.
Finally, your calling me a "psychopath" is childish and typical of someone who has passion in something that is wrong and/or worthless. It is also the incorrect use of the term, because the correct term would be "sociopath", as others have pointed out.
The psychopathic lying liar lies, so what's new.
Yes they do. This one wears your face.