6.8 billion letters at 2.5 cents each? That's only $170 million. You're not a terribly GOOD engineer, are you? Also that bulk mail, which comes from the sender presorted (as part of qualifying for bulk mail rates), likely makes the USPS more profit than a typical personal letter.
The pension funding thing is ENTIRELY the problem. the USPS could be turning a very small profit if it weren't for that, but the mandate says they need to pack away $55 billion in pension plans by 2016 ($5.5bln/yr for 10 years). Their revenue is decreasing and that's still a long-term problem that needs addressing, but as of right now they could still have their heads above water is only just.
The $15.9 billion loss, per the article, is mostly the result of failing to make these required payments from 2010 and 2011, plus what's due for 2012 makes $16.5 billion in obligated spending that they just couldn't cover. =Smidge=
The flaw in your premise is that the contractor starts from the same point you do.
The reason a contractor might be cheaper is they have already laid out the costs of infrastructure and organization. As a real-world example, there are contractors who rent towels and aprons to restaurants and catering companies, beds and linens to hospitals and hotels, etc. These companies deliver clean articles and collect soiled articles on a regular basis for laundering. If you're trying to run a business, you can do your own laundry which requires space, personnel, energy and equipment... or you can contract it out to someone who can take advantage of scale to keep these costs low and distributed.
That said, there is no way any contractor would be able to do the USPS' job at any level for less money unless they really put the screws to their employees and reduce service. You only save money with contractors through economies of scale, and the USPS is the biggest in the business by far. =Smidge=
Now you're talking about growing fully functional organ systems without the rest of the body. That's even further away than a clone army, and you really haven't saved much on any front: Still takes time to grow, raise (a big part of it is mental development), and train these disembodied brains. You have increased your logistical load since now you need food AND fuel/energy. You decreased durability, sacrificed much of your ability to repair, decreased endurance (mental fatigue). It's actually the WORST of both worlds.
Cyborgs are going to start fully human and be augmented from there, not the other way around. =Smidge=
By the time you "make" the clones, raise them, educate them, train them, the cost would be astronomical for an army or any worthwhile force. Plus, new soldiers would be at least 16 years out, to be generous.
Meanwhile you can crank out robots by the truckload for a fraction of the cost. They have much simpler logistical requirements in terms of food, housing, and other amenities. More durable, better endurance, can be repaired. We're a lot closer to robot soldiers than clone soldiers too. =Smidge=
If you loved this country as much as you claim to, you would know - or would make the effort to learn - that the Executive Branch of the Federal Government has absolutely no authority to determine who is and is not a state or territory. Next time try talking to your Senators and Representatives.
Sincerely, President Barack Obama"
Maybe it would be worded a little less snarky, but that's how I'd do it. =Smidge=
16kWh nominal. But to maintain capacity over time, the actual usable capacity is limited. State of charge is kept close to the half-charged state to keep the chemistry happy. The result is a nominal pack capacity of 16kWh, but a usable capacity closer to 10-12 kWh.
Your math also assumes critical performance metrics - "size" is only one part of the puzzle. There's also efficiency, aerodynamics (related to size), weight, rolling resistance, etc. You can't just assume a simplistic correlation between battery capacity and range like you have... not if you want to be honest anyway. =Smidge=
If we just burned all the oil we pump out of the ground to make electricity, the gains in efficiency would reduce demand by something on the order of 10% or so. That's really how bad the gasoline infrastructure and average fuel economy is compared to centralized generation and distribution efficiency, along with charging and utilization efficiency of EVs. Gasoline is fucking horrible in terms of efficiency and the only reason it became so popular is because it's cheap and easy. Or was... not so much as of late, and getting more expensive and harder every day.
Also, for all the power they use, adding an EV to your home is less demanding than adding an electric water heater or central AC unit. Imagine the logistical nightmare of everyone running out and buying a couple of electric space heaters! On top of that, lots of utilities in California at least are offering rate structures to get users to charge their EVs during off-peak hours when the grid is underutilized anyway. So far so good. =Smidge=
Parallel hybrids have excellent potential in heavier vehicles, where lots of power is needed to get them going but relatively little is needed to keep them going. There's also more to recover from regenerative braking. Retrofitting heavy trucks into parallel hybrids is relatively straightforward and has huge fuel savings potential as well.
Didn't it have some quite obvious maths that showed that if all cars in the USA were converted to electric, it would require 7,000 GWh of electricity just to charge them every day?
7,200 billion watt-hours versus 134 billion gallons of gasoline per year, which is equivalent to 12,372 billion watt-hours of energy per day (33,700 watt-hours per gallon!). Not including all the processing, handling and transportation energy which the DOE figures is 83% efficient, so net energy expenditure is closer to 14,900 billion watt-hours daily.
Velomobiles have several significant drawbacks compared to full sized electric cars: Single person occupancy is the ONLY option, can't carry anything in the way of cargo, not suitable for many people (only able-bodied persons need apply), not suitable for a wide variety of weather and terrain conditions, etc etc... Nice idea but to seriously suggest that everyone should use them is a fucking joke.
what that velomobiles article didn't also cover is that it's highly unlikely that the world has enough lithium and neodymium to go round to supply all those vehicles.
There is 29.7 million tons of lithium on reserve (meaning readily extractable with current infrastructure), and the total quantity of lithium on the planet being something like 3 million billion tons (only a fraction is actually accessible, of course). Lithium is about as plentiful as nickel.
If you need 140 grams of lithium per kWh of battery then today's typical electric car will need 3.4 kg of the stuff, meaning you can make 588 million such cars per million tons. Right now there are only about 600 million cars in the entire world. Advances in technology notwithstanding, roughly 1/30th of our currently available lithium supply will satisfy the entire global automotive market.
Plus, you can recycle Lithium batteries if you need to - currently not economical, but you can do it.
As for neodymium and other rare-earths? You dno't actually need those materials to make electric motors. They're very useful at making good, cheap motors - but you can make good, slightly more costly motors without them. If by some happenstance we run out of "rare earth" elements (which are actually about as rare as dirt but economically viable deposits are what's rare) then we'll manage.
i've *done* the analysis and the designs (http://lkcl.net/ev) and if EVs are to be the success that people really really WANT them to be...
Nothing on your website supports the claim that such a design is required to be successful (if it is, you have hidden it very well). In fact, I'm pretty sure that such a design - while very efficient - has absolutely no market potential to speak of. This is mostly because efficiency and cost are not actually the primary reasons most people buy cars.
Your shitty Geocities throwback of a site also incorrectly links the Chevy Volt fire to the lithium content. The actual reason for the fire was the battery coolant system was not drained after a crash test, and a week later the concentrated glycol residue from the leaking coolant caused a short. A short which, incidentally, can (and often does) happen in any car's electrical system. Even your proposed design can burst into flames without warning.
The Nissan Leaf needs its gearbox oil changed every service interval. Again, right there in the service manual.
Really? What page? 'cause I got both the 2011 OEM manual and owner's service manual here and I can't find any reference to changing the gearbox oil as part of routine maintenance. Inspect, sure, but not change.
Can't speak for the Tesla Roadster but I'm willing to bet it's the same story. Electric cars need their gearbox oil changed as often as any rear-wheel-drive car needs the oil in the rear differential changed... which is essentially "never" except in a case of catastrophic failure. =Smidge=
So... "Do what I say or I'll beat you up" is coercive, but "Do what I say or my friend Bubba will beat you up" is not coercive because I won't be dealing the punishment personally?
Really? I thought your point was it's more efficient, not cheaper. I'm basing this on the time you said:
Biomass and Fischer-Tropsch is more efficient, both in energy, and in land use.
Now it's money. Huh. Except PV is essentially a one-time cost whereas farming is a continuous expense, so it's not at all clear how tilling the soil (or skimming te oceans) is a less expensive option. Now you have a whole new assertion you need to provide support for - and you haven't even supported your last assertion! =Smidge=
It MIGHT be more efficient in terms of net energy - which I don't necessarily accept since biomass tops out at ~6% efficiency under the best of conditions, but let's say that it is just for the sake of discussion. (I'm not sure how you can even make that assertion unless you know more about the process than the article gives.)
Biomass needs water. The easiest place to get bountiful, reliable sunlight is also the hardest place to get water: the desert. Plop an air-to-hydrocarbon machine in the middle of the Sahara with a bunch of solar PV and the whole thing will operate completely unmanned for months at a time. And unless you can get away with seawater, you are now using up fresh water resources that are more important that the oil you're trying to displace... you can't have a modern economy or industry without fuel, but you can't have life without water! =Smidge=
Tin foil? Everything now is ALUMINUM foil, which does nothing to block government waves! They haven't made TIN foil since WWII. Oh they SAY it was because they needed the tin for the war effort, but the truth is they discovered tin was the only effective shield against their new toys so they made sure nobody could get it anymore!
Electric cars have at least two batteries: One main battery for motion (the traction battery) which is the one everyone focuses on, and a traditional 12-volt lead-acid car battery that operates all the normal 12-volt lights and accessories that modern cars are fitted with. If the main traction battery is completely dead - which would be an extreme failure case but let's say it did - the charger controls are all fed from the 12V system so at worst you'd need a quick zap from a set of jumper cables to get things going. =Smidge=
The majority of hydrogen produced commercially is made from methane reformation - an energy intensive process that consumes fossil fuels and emits CO2. It also requires additional processing (compression and/or liquefaction) which itself is energy intensive. There is also very little infrastructure to transport and dispense and to use it you either need very expensive fuel cells (if you want decent efficiency anyway) or inefficient internal combustion.
I agree that CO2 feedstock derived gasoline is not a perfect solution, but you seem to have missed my broader point that a perfect solution doesn't even exist. What we have, and what we need, is a multitude of different approaches that can be evaluated and applied on a case by case basis.
I think you are going to see an energy conversion ratio that would make a SUV user cry and all the same polutants.
You are focusing entirely on the wrong thing here. Energy conversion ratio is pretty much irrelevant if you NEED to do it. It matters even less if the input energy is essentially free (eg sunlight). If you NEED gasoline - and you can't honestly tell me a 100% gasoline-free future is possible - then your options are 1) Use fossil petroleum, 2) Attempt to reform it from biofuels, and now 3) synthesize it from atmospheric CO2. =Smidge=
So I fail to see how this is converting a form of energy you can't use (what energy can't be used?) to a form you can.
You can't put sunshine, blowing wind or flowing water in your gas tank. Internal combustion engines are only capable of converting molecules with high energy atomic bonds to molecules of lower energy bonds, and extracting work from the resulting high kinetic energy of the resulting molecules.
In order to use sunlight in your internal combustion engine, you must first convert the electromagnetic energy of the photons into the bonding energy in a molecule. If you use fossil fuels, that conversion happened through photosynthesis tens-of-thousands to millions of years ago.
Again, I'm a strong advocate of electrification but we will never NOT need liquid hydrocarbons. It's too useful a substance. Having multiple sources for this substance is protection against any one of those sources failing, and sources that are renewable are preferable over sources that are not for a whole host of reasons. =Smidge=
You are converting a form of energy you can't use into a form you can use. As the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
I think electrified vehicles (EV and hybrids) are a more efficient use of that energy, but those have limitations that this method can potentially get around. The most important point, IMHO, is the promise of diversity in the new energy infrastructure which is never a bad thing. =Smidge=
Same thing can be said of Hydrogen, which I suspect you'd agree with.
Assuming it's real and works - and I can't think of any physical reason why it'd be impossible - what this could be is a way to store and transport energy. Gasoline is quite energy dense and easily transportable. There is a massive infrastructure already build out for it and it's something everyone is familiar with. There's no reason you couldn't use a renewable resource to power this process. Currently you can't put sunshine in your gas tank - but with this maybe you can.
I agree that using renewable electricity directly is better, but this could be (again, if it's real/works) yet another piece of the puzzle. It seems like it would be more efficient and direct that biofuels. It's presumably carbon neutral once you power it from renewable electricity. Only issue I'd have with it is, if we were to replace all fossil-petroleum derived fuels with this stuff, it would do relatively little to reduce pollution in population centers. Might eliminate sulfur contamination but NOx and particulates from poorly maintained engines would still be a problem. I'd still advocate electrification of vehicles over this by itself, but a hybrid running off of renewable gasoline seems like a terrific way to fill the "EV range" gap. =Smidge=
It removes cross-contamination (dirty side of a pair of gloves against a clean side of a pair of gloves)
My solution doesn't have that problem, though. The used side of pair #3 comes in contact with the unused side of pair #1, but the only thing to contact pair #1 after that is the used side of pair #2. Each sheep gets a clean set of fingers (and I think they deserve at least that much!) and at no point are your own hands unprotected.
Basically I'm using both sides of pairs #2 and #3, sacrificing one side of pair #1 (the other side is for your hand). You're using one side of pair #1, both sides of pair #2 and one side of pair #3.
Ah Slashdot, bringing meaningful conversation to the world! =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
6.8 billion letters at 2.5 cents each? That's only $170 million. You're not a terribly GOOD engineer, are you? Also that bulk mail, which comes from the sender presorted (as part of qualifying for bulk mail rates), likely makes the USPS more profit than a typical personal letter.
The pension funding thing is ENTIRELY the problem. the USPS could be turning a very small profit if it weren't for that, but the mandate says they need to pack away $55 billion in pension plans by 2016 ($5.5bln/yr for 10 years). Their revenue is decreasing and that's still a long-term problem that needs addressing, but as of right now they could still have their heads above water is only just.
The $15.9 billion loss, per the article, is mostly the result of failing to make these required payments from 2010 and 2011, plus what's due for 2012 makes $16.5 billion in obligated spending that they just couldn't cover.
=Smidge=
The flaw in your premise is that the contractor starts from the same point you do.
The reason a contractor might be cheaper is they have already laid out the costs of infrastructure and organization. As a real-world example, there are contractors who rent towels and aprons to restaurants and catering companies, beds and linens to hospitals and hotels, etc. These companies deliver clean articles and collect soiled articles on a regular basis for laundering. If you're trying to run a business, you can do your own laundry which requires space, personnel, energy and equipment... or you can contract it out to someone who can take advantage of scale to keep these costs low and distributed.
That said, there is no way any contractor would be able to do the USPS' job at any level for less money unless they really put the screws to their employees and reduce service. You only save money with contractors through economies of scale, and the USPS is the biggest in the business by far.
=Smidge=
Now you're talking about growing fully functional organ systems without the rest of the body. That's even further away than a clone army, and you really haven't saved much on any front: Still takes time to grow, raise (a big part of it is mental development), and train these disembodied brains. You have increased your logistical load since now you need food AND fuel/energy. You decreased durability, sacrificed much of your ability to repair, decreased endurance (mental fatigue). It's actually the WORST of both worlds.
Cyborgs are going to start fully human and be augmented from there, not the other way around.
=Smidge=
By the time you "make" the clones, raise them, educate them, train them, the cost would be astronomical for an army or any worthwhile force. Plus, new soldiers would be at least 16 years out, to be generous.
Meanwhile you can crank out robots by the truckload for a fraction of the cost. They have much simpler logistical requirements in terms of food, housing, and other amenities. More durable, better endurance, can be repaired. We're a lot closer to robot soldiers than clone soldiers too.
=Smidge=
Here's the proper response, IMHO:
"Dear Pertitioners;
If you loved this country as much as you claim to, you would know - or would make the effort to learn - that the Executive Branch of the Federal Government has absolutely no authority to determine who is and is not a state or territory. Next time try talking to your Senators and Representatives.
Sincerely,
President Barack Obama"
Maybe it would be worded a little less snarky, but that's how I'd do it.
=Smidge=
16kWh nominal. But to maintain capacity over time, the actual usable capacity is limited. State of charge is kept close to the half-charged state to keep the chemistry happy. The result is a nominal pack capacity of 16kWh, but a usable capacity closer to 10-12 kWh.
Your math also assumes critical performance metrics - "size" is only one part of the puzzle. There's also efficiency, aerodynamics (related to size), weight, rolling resistance, etc. You can't just assume a simplistic correlation between battery capacity and range like you have... not if you want to be honest anyway.
=Smidge=
I already pay more than 16c/kWh, but whatever...
If we just burned all the oil we pump out of the ground to make electricity, the gains in efficiency would reduce demand by something on the order of 10% or so. That's really how bad the gasoline infrastructure and average fuel economy is compared to centralized generation and distribution efficiency, along with charging and utilization efficiency of EVs. Gasoline is fucking horrible in terms of efficiency and the only reason it became so popular is because it's cheap and easy. Or was... not so much as of late, and getting more expensive and harder every day.
Also, for all the power they use, adding an EV to your home is less demanding than adding an electric water heater or central AC unit. Imagine the logistical nightmare of everyone running out and buying a couple of electric space heaters! On top of that, lots of utilities in California at least are offering rate structures to get users to charge their EVs during off-peak hours when the grid is underutilized anyway. So far so good.
=Smidge=
Parallel hybrids have excellent potential in heavier vehicles, where lots of power is needed to get them going but relatively little is needed to keep them going. There's also more to recover from regenerative braking. Retrofitting heavy trucks into parallel hybrids is relatively straightforward and has huge fuel savings potential as well.
=Smidge=
One step at a time...
Didn't it have some quite obvious maths that showed that if all cars in the USA were converted to electric, it would require 7,000 GWh of electricity just to charge them every day?
7,200 billion watt-hours versus 134 billion gallons of gasoline per year, which is equivalent to 12,372 billion watt-hours of energy per day (33,700 watt-hours per gallon!). Not including all the processing, handling and transportation energy which the DOE figures is 83% efficient, so net energy expenditure is closer to 14,900 billion watt-hours daily.
Velomobiles have several significant drawbacks compared to full sized electric cars: Single person occupancy is the ONLY option, can't carry anything in the way of cargo, not suitable for many people (only able-bodied persons need apply), not suitable for a wide variety of weather and terrain conditions, etc etc... Nice idea but to seriously suggest that everyone should use them is a fucking joke.
what that velomobiles article didn't also cover is that it's highly unlikely that the world has enough lithium and neodymium to go round to supply all those vehicles.
There is 29.7 million tons of lithium on reserve (meaning readily extractable with current infrastructure), and the total quantity of lithium on the planet being something like 3 million billion tons (only a fraction is actually accessible, of course). Lithium is about as plentiful as nickel.
If you need 140 grams of lithium per kWh of battery then today's typical electric car will need 3.4 kg of the stuff, meaning you can make 588 million such cars per million tons. Right now there are only about 600 million cars in the entire world. Advances in technology notwithstanding, roughly 1/30th of our currently available lithium supply will satisfy the entire global automotive market.
Plus, you can recycle Lithium batteries if you need to - currently not economical, but you can do it.
As for neodymium and other rare-earths? You dno't actually need those materials to make electric motors. They're very useful at making good, cheap motors - but you can make good, slightly more costly motors without them. If by some happenstance we run out of "rare earth" elements (which are actually about as rare as dirt but economically viable deposits are what's rare) then we'll manage.
i've *done* the analysis and the designs (http://lkcl.net/ev) and if EVs are to be the success that people really really WANT them to be...
Nothing on your website supports the claim that such a design is required to be successful (if it is, you have hidden it very well). In fact, I'm pretty sure that such a design - while very efficient - has absolutely no market potential to speak of. This is mostly because efficiency and cost are not actually the primary reasons most people buy cars.
Your shitty Geocities throwback of a site also incorrectly links the Chevy Volt fire to the lithium content. The actual reason for the fire was the battery coolant system was not drained after a crash test, and a week later the concentrated glycol residue from the leaking coolant caused a short. A short which, incidentally, can (and often does) happen in any car's electrical system. Even your proposed design can burst into flames without warning.
or am i missing something here?
Facts, mostly... facts and perspective.
=Smidge=
The Nissan Leaf needs its gearbox oil changed every service interval. Again, right there in the service manual.
Really? What page? 'cause I got both the 2011 OEM manual and owner's service manual here and I can't find any reference to changing the gearbox oil as part of routine maintenance. Inspect, sure, but not change.
Can't speak for the Tesla Roadster but I'm willing to bet it's the same story. Electric cars need their gearbox oil changed as often as any rear-wheel-drive car needs the oil in the rear differential changed... which is essentially "never" except in a case of catastrophic failure.
=Smidge=
So... "Do what I say or I'll beat you up" is coercive, but "Do what I say or my friend Bubba will beat you up" is not coercive because I won't be dealing the punishment personally?
=Smidge=
Concede or defend your comment about efficiency before moving on. I'm not chasing after your goalposts.
=Smidge=
My point is weakened, but stands
Really? I thought your point was it's more efficient, not cheaper. I'm basing this on the time you said:
Biomass and Fischer-Tropsch is more efficient, both in energy, and in land use.
Now it's money. Huh. Except PV is essentially a one-time cost whereas farming is a continuous expense, so it's not at all clear how tilling the soil (or skimming te oceans) is a less expensive option. Now you have a whole new assertion you need to provide support for - and you haven't even supported your last assertion!
=Smidge=
Sugar cane makes 14% photochemical efficiency
Bullshit. We're not going any farther until you demonstrate that.
"One of the most efficient crop plants is sugar cane, which has been shown to store up to 1% of the incident visible radiation over a period of one year."
I support biofuels as well but don't confuse theoretical limits or lab experiments with practical reality. Give your source.
=Smidge=
It MIGHT be more efficient in terms of net energy - which I don't necessarily accept since biomass tops out at ~6% efficiency under the best of conditions, but let's say that it is just for the sake of discussion. (I'm not sure how you can even make that assertion unless you know more about the process than the article gives.)
Biomass needs water. The easiest place to get bountiful, reliable sunlight is also the hardest place to get water: the desert. Plop an air-to-hydrocarbon machine in the middle of the Sahara with a bunch of solar PV and the whole thing will operate completely unmanned for months at a time. And unless you can get away with seawater, you are now using up fresh water resources that are more important that the oil you're trying to displace... you can't have a modern economy or industry without fuel, but you can't have life without water!
=Smidge=
Tin foil? Everything now is ALUMINUM foil, which does nothing to block government waves! They haven't made TIN foil since WWII. Oh they SAY it was because they needed the tin for the war effort, but the truth is they discovered tin was the only effective shield against their new toys so they made sure nobody could get it anymore!
=Smidge=
I have no idea what you're talking about, so here's a video clip of a 1972 Datsun burying a 485hp Nissan GT-R in the quarter mile.
=Smidge=
You presumably only work on conversions or kit cars, then? I know of no commercially produced EVs that use less than 300V nominal pack voltage.
=Smidge=
Electric cars have at least two batteries: One main battery for motion (the traction battery) which is the one everyone focuses on, and a traditional 12-volt lead-acid car battery that operates all the normal 12-volt lights and accessories that modern cars are fitted with. If the main traction battery is completely dead - which would be an extreme failure case but let's say it did - the charger controls are all fed from the 12V system so at worst you'd need a quick zap from a set of jumper cables to get things going.
=Smidge=
The majority of hydrogen produced commercially is made from methane reformation - an energy intensive process that consumes fossil fuels and emits CO2. It also requires additional processing (compression and/or liquefaction) which itself is energy intensive. There is also very little infrastructure to transport and dispense and to use it you either need very expensive fuel cells (if you want decent efficiency anyway) or inefficient internal combustion.
I agree that CO2 feedstock derived gasoline is not a perfect solution, but you seem to have missed my broader point that a perfect solution doesn't even exist. What we have, and what we need, is a multitude of different approaches that can be evaluated and applied on a case by case basis.
I think you are going to see an energy conversion ratio that would make a SUV user cry and all the same polutants.
You are focusing entirely on the wrong thing here. Energy conversion ratio is pretty much irrelevant if you NEED to do it. It matters even less if the input energy is essentially free (eg sunlight). If you NEED gasoline - and you can't honestly tell me a 100% gasoline-free future is possible - then your options are 1) Use fossil petroleum, 2) Attempt to reform it from biofuels, and now 3) synthesize it from atmospheric CO2.
=Smidge=
So I fail to see how this is converting a form of energy you can't use (what energy can't be used?) to a form you can.
You can't put sunshine, blowing wind or flowing water in your gas tank. Internal combustion engines are only capable of converting molecules with high energy atomic bonds to molecules of lower energy bonds, and extracting work from the resulting high kinetic energy of the resulting molecules.
In order to use sunlight in your internal combustion engine, you must first convert the electromagnetic energy of the photons into the bonding energy in a molecule. If you use fossil fuels, that conversion happened through photosynthesis tens-of-thousands to millions of years ago.
Again, I'm a strong advocate of electrification but we will never NOT need liquid hydrocarbons. It's too useful a substance. Having multiple sources for this substance is protection against any one of those sources failing, and sources that are renewable are preferable over sources that are not for a whole host of reasons.
=Smidge=
You are converting a form of energy you can't use into a form you can use. As the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
I think electrified vehicles (EV and hybrids) are a more efficient use of that energy, but those have limitations that this method can potentially get around. The most important point, IMHO, is the promise of diversity in the new energy infrastructure which is never a bad thing.
=Smidge=
Same thing can be said of Hydrogen, which I suspect you'd agree with.
Assuming it's real and works - and I can't think of any physical reason why it'd be impossible - what this could be is a way to store and transport energy. Gasoline is quite energy dense and easily transportable. There is a massive infrastructure already build out for it and it's something everyone is familiar with. There's no reason you couldn't use a renewable resource to power this process. Currently you can't put sunshine in your gas tank - but with this maybe you can.
I agree that using renewable electricity directly is better, but this could be (again, if it's real/works) yet another piece of the puzzle. It seems like it would be more efficient and direct that biofuels. It's presumably carbon neutral once you power it from renewable electricity. Only issue I'd have with it is, if we were to replace all fossil-petroleum derived fuels with this stuff, it would do relatively little to reduce pollution in population centers. Might eliminate sulfur contamination but NOx and particulates from poorly maintained engines would still be a problem. I'd still advocate electrification of vehicles over this by itself, but a hybrid running off of renewable gasoline seems like a terrific way to fill the "EV range" gap.
=Smidge=
It removes cross-contamination (dirty side of a pair of gloves against a clean side of a pair of gloves)
My solution doesn't have that problem, though. The used side of pair #3 comes in contact with the unused side of pair #1, but the only thing to contact pair #1 after that is the used side of pair #2. Each sheep gets a clean set of fingers (and I think they deserve at least that much!) and at no point are your own hands unprotected.
Basically I'm using both sides of pairs #2 and #3, sacrificing one side of pair #1 (the other side is for your hand). You're using one side of pair #1, both sides of pair #2 and one side of pair #3.
Ah Slashdot, bringing meaningful conversation to the world!
=Smidge=
It's not clear how that's any better, you're just wearing all three gloves at once instead of having a clean pair off to the side.
=Smidge=