What's new is linear motors with a thrust-to-mass ratio high enough to make them attractive replacements for screw drives in milling tools. That, coupled with sensors and control systems good enough and cheap enough to support the necessary closed-loop operation.
This is, indeed, significant news for geeks. You're just not the right type of geek to apppreciate it.
> Currently, solar panels produce less energy over their lifetime than it takes to produce them.
Not so. Energy breakeven time, I believe, is currently on the order of a year, and getting shorter.
I won't get into the issue of what does and does not deserve subsidy. But you're wrong about it being a "half-assed solution". From a technical point of view, hybrids currently are a sounder option than fuel cells, and I expect them to remain so. Fuel cells themselves may become cheap, but there is just no good solution to the hydrogen storage problem.
Metal hydride storage is the best of a lousy set of choices, and it's barely competetive with batteries. The "hydrogen economy" has been oversold as the road to a green future. Hell, even sending the stuff through a pipeline takes something like three times the pumping energy per delivered kilojoule, as compared to natural gas. If we somehow had access to an infinite supply of free hydrogen, the most practical way we could exploit it would be to react it with CO2 and synthesize gasoline!
I'm no friend of big oil. If it were up to me, we'd tax gasoline at European levels (or higher), to reflect its true environmental cost and to encourage conservation. Hydrogen will have its place, but the hype around it is a distraction from the real need to change our lifestyles.
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What's new is linear motors with a thrust-to-mass ratio high enough to make them attractive replacements for screw drives in milling tools. That, coupled with sensors and control systems good enough and cheap enough to support the necessary closed-loop operation.
This is, indeed, significant news for geeks. You're just not the right type of geek to apppreciate it.
> Currently, solar panels produce less energy over their lifetime than it takes to produce them. Not so. Energy breakeven time, I believe, is currently on the order of a year, and getting shorter.
I won't get into the issue of what does and does not deserve subsidy. But you're wrong about it being a "half-assed solution". From a technical point of view, hybrids currently are a sounder option than fuel cells, and I expect them to remain so. Fuel cells themselves may become cheap, but there is just no good solution to the hydrogen storage problem. Metal hydride storage is the best of a lousy set of choices, and it's barely competetive with batteries. The "hydrogen economy" has been oversold as the road to a green future. Hell, even sending the stuff through a pipeline takes something like three times the pumping energy per delivered kilojoule, as compared to natural gas. If we somehow had access to an infinite supply of free hydrogen, the most practical way we could exploit it would be to react it with CO2 and synthesize gasoline! I'm no friend of big oil. If it were up to me, we'd tax gasoline at European levels (or higher), to reflect its true environmental cost and to encourage conservation. Hydrogen will have its place, but the hype around it is a distraction from the real need to change our lifestyles.