You can cook meat perfectly well with radiation at 144 MHz; hams have done it.
The problem is interference. 2.45 GHz is smack in the middle of a band designated as a free-for-all, so anyone using it for communications has to accept whatever interference they get. Certifying a microwave to operate in a licensed band would cost far too much for no benefit.
I know someone who's been putting espresso into some of his homebrew for years (a bottle of it keeps you awake while you're working on a bender) but keeping the alcohol out is a new twist and might be worthy of a patent.
I wonder how many people are going to read this in the article and assume that LEDs are not just more efficient than other types of lamp, but 100% efficient?
I used to find glossy ad pages in the middle of some paperbacks at the library.
I started taking a razor blade and cutting them out before I returned the books. (Ads alone are bad enough, but they were usually tobacco ads. No way did I want MY taxes going to help circulate tobacco advertising.)
If you've read "Cryptonomicon" you may already have seen embedded advertising in a book.
At what point does the fertilized egg, which is life, become created solely because it can be sold as research or source material?
That's not even a grammatical sentence.
The ethical question is similar to that of harvesting "unused" organs.
It's no more difficult than the question of who gets to donate the organs of a brain-dead child for transplant, or the whole body for research: the parents.
If the donors want the blastocyst to go for research instead of down the drain, the government should not gain-say the decision with funding restrictions. If we allow research money for autopsies, cultures and other research on the bodies of babies, restricting it for embryonic cell research because it's "immoral" holds born children as LESS human than those small balls of cells.
"Morality" bans on fetal stem-cell research amount to saying "it's a human being... until it's born". My contempt for people who hold this POV knows no bounds.
... unlike the universal code, UGA codes for tryptophan instead of termination, AUA codes for methionine instead of isoleucine, and AGA and AGG are terminators instead of coding for arginine.
That's not so different, unless you mean that it lacks things like introns. I'm sure lots of small nuclear genes lack introns too, and mitochondria only have 37 genes total in 16568 base pairs.
There's DNA in the mitochrondria, which is defective in the nucleus-donor egg but (hopefully) good in the cytoplasm-donor egg. Think of it as trying to replace a chromosome with a defective gene, made easier because this chromosome isn't in the nucleus.
Curiously, the DNA in the mitochondria use a slightly different genetic code than our nuclear DNA does; genes have moved from the mitochondria to the nucleus over time, but the process is not complete. It's believed that mitochondria come from an ancient endosymbiosis event.
What happens is that your player can't fetch keys from the server any more, so it stops being able to play encrypted discs.
If the transactions are encrypted for each individual player, you wouldn't know from traffic analysis exactly what the player was retrieving. It might be pulling back an applet to test whether it was hacked or not. If the proper response does not come back, you never get another disc key ever again.
This is not to say that the manufacturers aren't likely to screw things up again (or even several more times), but after a few cycles of lockdown and hiring some decent crypto experts they're likely to wind up with something like that.
The current problem with these hybrids is that they are mostly more expensive than pure gas vehicles, and the costs can't be recouped unless you put in some insane driving time on them.
Perhaps at historical gasoline prices, but many indications are that those prices belong to history and will never be seen again. Look up what you can about the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. That field alone is producing about 5 million bbl/day out of total world consumption of ~84 million; it produces 6% of everything the world pumps. Now consider that years of water injection in Ghawar have contaminated each barrel of oil with about 2 barrels of water, and it won't take a huge shift in that ratio to make it uneconomical to pump. Even if geological considerations force the Saudis to slow the pumping rate, if Ghawar's production peaks, world production has peaked.
When world production falls by a few percent, American gasoline prices will jump to European levels and stay there. At that point the hybrid will pay off much faster (even ignoring lower maintenance and less time wasted at filling stations) and the resale value will make the owners look very shrewd.
From reading TFA it seems like all this guy did was rig in a bunch of extra batteries to gain some extra mileage, which doesn't really do anything worth a damn, since those batteries still have to be charged.
What do you mean, doesn't do anything worth a damn? Whatever he charges those batteries with, it's going to use only a trivial amount of oil (maybe hauling coal to a powerplant, or wind-turbine parts to a wind farm). He could charge them with a solar panel if he wanted to.
The batteries he used were lead-acid units sold for electric bicycles. If you look at the price of batteries, it seems likely that a unit built in volume might cost only about $200 to $300 (quite a bit less than the NiMH battery which comes with the car). Lead-acid batteries do wear out, but they are the most-recycled product in the USA. If you can get off-peak rates for charging at night, you'll pay a small fraction of what gasoline would cost for the same driving and replace most of the first few mile's worth of gas with coal, natural gas, hydro, wind and nuclear. Natural gas is getting scarce, but the rest are 100% domestic and not about to go away.
Hybrids are just smart. The plug-in hybrid is insurance.
Retroviruses have to insert functonal DNA or they don't reproduce, and they have inserted DNA into the genome. Many species (including humans) have "fossilized" endogenous retroviruses. IIRC, one of the pieces of evidence which irrefutably clinches the case for common descent of apes and humans is that we share some endogenous retroviruses.
My favorite refutation of the bogus Second Law criticism is a seed in some soil in a terrarium. You add nothing but maximally-entropic hydrogen and oxygen in the form of water, maximally-entropic carbon and oxygen in the form of CO2, and sunlight. The seed will sprout and proceed to reduce the entropy of those raw materials in its own growth. The fundies who assert the 2nd Law don't realize that the system creates huge amounts of entropy; it's just leaving in the form of the ~300K waste heat that was once the 5700K solar blackbody spectrum.
all offspring have the same number of genes as their parents, and
all species on earth are evolved from one original life form,
shouldn't all creatures have the same number of genes?
Premise #1 is false. One common way for plants to speciate is to double their chromosome count (not individual genes, entire sets of chromosomes). Humans are diploid (two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent); some plants are quadruploid or hexaploid (SIX sets of chromosomes, three from each parent).
Are there any theories out there regarding how genes are added or subtracted over time?
Then you have crossover mutations. When chromosomes are duplicated in mitosis, the two new DNA strands are wound up with the originals and have to be untangled. This is done by enzymes which snip one strand pair, allow the other to pass through the gap and repair the bond afterwards. Sometimes this process isn't perfect, and a DNA strand pair gets part of the other's chromosome or loses a chunk. Entire genes can be lost or duplicated this way. Duplicated genes allow one of the pair to mutate and take up new functions, and it turns out that a whole lot of biological "inventions" come from genes which appear to have come from other, older genes.
Then you've got tandem sequence repeats... which is a whole 'nother story, but they are very susceptible to DNA copying errors and you can evolve e.g. a very different curve of a dog's snout in a century by selecting for different lengths of tandem repeats.
Yes, all this stuff is on the web. Everything you need to completely and authoritatively refute every argument made by creationists (the "intelligent design" brand or the traditional) is on the web.
(Okay, who's the Slashcode nitwit whose filter cancels the <i> tag when a list is started?)
Farmland in the US has remained relatively fixed in the past several decades
<raised eyebrow> Including the land that used to be in the former set-aside program?
We used to pay farmers not to produce more than could be reasonably consumed. Then a short harvest made consumers upset, so Congress decided to pull out all the stops and deal with the surpluses some other way. Only so much could be exported, so... ethanol. If we went back to the set-aside program we would not need export subsidies, ethanol subsidies, or any of the fuel and fertilizer used on that extra acreage. Nor would we have the nitrate-driven dead zone outside the mouth of the Mississippi river (or at least not as much of one), etc. etc.
We import the most fertilizers from Canada
The North American natural-gas market is one market. It doesn't matter where in North America the nitrate comes from, it's still competing for the same limited resource.
As far as nitrate production goes, they're going to do *something* with their natural gas.
And they'll do something else if it doesn't fetch a high enough price, like maybe leave it in the ground. This is an easier option with gas than with oil; you don't get paraffin crystallizing in rock pores and blocking gas wells.
I said *your* car. Does *your* car burn ag waste? 99.9% of cars out there don't.
My car can burn post-consumer ag waste (biodiesel from waste grease) as well as nearly-raw output from thermal depolymerization.
Pimental assumes that all corn is irrigated (only 16% is, and that corn is rarely used for ethanol production - and Pimental even notes this, but assumes all corn is irrigated anyways!).
So? Fuel ethanol is not using the average bushel of corn, it's using the marginal bushel: the bushel that wouldn't be grown if there were not the subsidy programs to boost demand. (And his name is Pimentel.)
Pimental used energy calculations for fertilizer production from the UN's data for worldwide average costs, while the USDA and others use the energy cost of US fertilizer production (these are widely different numbers - a 2.5-fold difference).
Unfortunately, that's accurate now. Several US nitrate plants have shut down due to the N. American natural gas shortage, and the US is now a net importer of nitrate fertilizer (ammonium nitrate travels better than LNG). Without the demand due to fuel ethanol, the least efficient of those overseas plants might well shut down; the marginal impact is much worse than the average impact.
You can't burn ag waste in your car. You can't burn coal in your car. You can't burn nuclear in your car.
The folks at CalCars are doing just that. Have you looked at the Prius+?
*Furthermore*, almost all ethanol production plants utilize on-site heat production, using electricity only for things like the mashers. Heat is the big energy cost for ethanol production. Typically either coal, ag-waste, or both are burned (occasionally, natural gas is used).
Every fuel ethanol plant I've ever read about used natural gas to fire the distilleries. Do you have stats on what the various fuels are?
I've heard of exactly one proposed plant that uses coal and cogenerates electricity before using the spent steam to run distilleries. Just one. And I can't find the link, either.
there's good reason to call him "dishonest".
When the advocates deliberately confuse average and marginal impact, continue to use outdated information about fertilizer sources, and assume that highly exceptional (coal-fired, cogenerating) ethanol plants are the norm, there's good reason to call them dishonest too.
Even if you can take them at their word, the results aren't all that great. Some claim 1.34 BTU of ethanol out per BTU of fossil fuels in (with a large fraction of that BTU coming from petroleum). In other words, barely more than 25% of the energy in ethanol is actually grown; the rest comes from fossil sources. If we are going to spend tax money to encourage people to convert e.g. coal to motor fuel, we shouldn't discriminate against those who aren't corn farmers.
PS: Modern cars don't gain tailpipe emissions benefits from ethanol, and ethanol increases smog-forming evaporative emissions. To compensate for the high vapor pressure of ethanol, the petroleum fraction must be refined to remove high vapor-pressure components. I've never seen a listing of the energy costs of ethanol which accounted for the additional refining losses involved with meeting emissions standards.
Even at 0.75, your "true net" is only 1/4 of the gross production; if you had to run the process as a self-supporting system, 3/4 of the output fuel would have to go back into the system as inputs.
We should not be paying subsidies for such grossly inefficient schemes.
Once you have the salt close to saturation, dump a thin stream into a bath of some hot liquid that is not miscible with water. (If your salt is KNO3, something non-flammable would probably be good too. Maybe silicone oil?) The remaining water boils off and you're left with salt crystals in liquid.
This is still a handling problem, so you may be better off just concentrating the salt instead of drying it completely. This is what's done with lithium bromide chiller systems; the concentrated LiBr is used as a dessicant.
I've read about people using CaCl2 as an absorbent for ammonia and refrigerating things that way - the absorbent is heated to drive the ammonia into a tank (which is cooled with water during this process) and when the absorbent is cooled the ammonia tank gets very cold.
the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.
Which was clearly just completely made-up. I've already linked to the heaviest component in a production fuel-cell system, the cell, and it only weighed 212 pounds.
I not only gave you the figures, I cited you the source. The Focus FCV is 1150 pounds heavier than the standard Focus. And you realize how the makers trimmed the weight by 280 pounds? They added batteries!
Furthermore, you keep insisting on comparing "real cars" yet you can't even find one that has any of the mystical properties you attribute to lithium-ion electric cars, especially economic properties like price and lifetime.
Price of Li-ion batteries is here, on another branch of this thread. That's today's retail quantity 50, BTW. Prices appear to be falling on the order of 20% per year.
Now, since you're claiming I haven't answered questions that I have, you ignored the same question posed directly to you:
You also refused to acknowledge direct challenges and refutations:
Lead-acid is already cheaper than gasoline if you don't push your depth-of-discharge. (source)
diverting energy through hydrogen gives fossil supplies no advantage, but costs renewable energy sources a 50% penalty (here).
If these things are wrong you should be able to refute them. All I hear from you is psychobabble that could come from a creationist; "No, that can't be right, it conflicts with the Revealed Truth of the One Element Number One!"
How about this. Instead of continuing to throw worthless links at me about $50,000 sports cars that need $3000 worth of batteries every year and a half, with no weight or mileage numbers, how about you pick a battery pack with a price, weight, lifetime, power output, and energy density.
You obviously didn't look at any of the numbers or links I posted, because none of those figures relate at all to what's there (not that figures from hand-built vehicles have anything to do with what things cost in volume). Who's making things up now?
I'll then be happy to crush every one of those specs with a hydrogen fuel-cell-based system.
You've had plenty of opportunity to do that pre-emptively, and failed.
I'm not estimating, I'm quoting. You're bloviating.
Let's compare apples to apples.
Yeah, let's. No shenanigans allowed.
From your Ford Focus example, the hybrid fuel-cell/li-ion car weighs 1,600 kg = 3,527 lb. We know that a 60 kWh li-ion battery (at 200 Wh/kg) is 660 lbs of that.
I call shenanigans! The FCV hybrid would not have a 60 kWh battery pack; it would have something more like a Prius pack, ~2.5 kWh of NiMH.
The rest of your analysis is worthless, derived from a faulty assumption.
The article also insinuates that the hydrogen storage capacity has been increased in the hybrid, by up to 40%, by increasing the pressure. This may also account for a good portion of the radical range differences between the two vehicles.
And for all that, it still isn't close to what you get with Li-ion batteries. 330 km is barely 200 miles.
Neglecting friction, 60 kWh at maximum speed (65 kW, 80 mph) gets you about an hour of driving, or an 80 mile range.
Maybe an Escalade needs 65 kW to cruise at 80 MPH, but your average car would need 20 kW. 3 hours, 240 miles. In an actual trip from LA to Las Vegas, the Li-ion tzero cruised 245 miles on its pack and had range to spare.
This means that... a li-ion-only system would have a range of about 140 miles.
You're bloviating again. You can get close to 140 miles range on NiMH cells; the Li-ion tzero has been tested at ~285 miles range in left-lane traffic and estimated at over 300 miles on standard driving cycles.
I'll admit this range is suprising to me
It ought to be, because it's low by better than a factor of 2 compared to real-world drives of real vehicles.
Hydrogen can do things that batteries cannot.
I'll say. It appears to induce delusions, denial and innumeracy. It should be administered only under supervision of a psychiatrist.
most electricty AFAIK is being produced at coal burning plants in the US.
Actually, it's a bit more than half. Check the eia.doe.gov figures. Note that it's much easier to change the mix of generation on the grid than it is to change the fuel source of a car once it's built.
Lithium-ion batteries are currently smaller, lighter
They can be, but not per unit of energy.
Let's consider whole (real) vehicles here:
2004 Focus: ~2650 lbs
Ford Focus FCV: 3808 lb (1727 kg)
Real-world fuel cell cars are much worse than I thought - the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.
The regenerative fuel cell, coupled with lightweight hydrogen storage, had by far the highest energy density
Great. How much does it cost, and how long does it last? (I understand that PEM fuel cells degrade fairly rapidly over time.)
[batteries] may be cheaper up front, but they need to be replaced regularly, and are not cheaper over their entire lifetime.
Lead-acid is already cheaper if you don't push your depth-of-discharge. Both Altair Nanomaterials and Toshiba's advanced Li-ion cathodes have pushed cycle lifetimes into the thousands; even if you only got 100 miles per cycle, 3000 cycles is longer than the rest of the car can be expected to last. Batteries out of scrapped vehicles would have considerable value for stationary storage; can you imagine how long your UPS would run with a 15 kWh battery?
[hydrogen] has the highest energy density of easily transportible non-fossil-fuels. But of course "fixing" on hydrogen doesn't prevent you from driving and promoting battery-powered cars instead.
Electrons have a far greater energy density than hydrogen molecules if you are measuring flows into the vehicle, and the overall energy density of the systems currently favors Li-ion batteries.
I'm sure that vehicular hydrogen FC's will one day pass the energy density of the best batteries. Some time later, they may become cheaper. But your example of the regenerative fuel cell argues against building a hydrogen fuel infrastructure, because those vehicles could "regenerate" using electricity and use the existing electric infrastructure. Instead of spending a trillion dollars to re-vamp the nation wholesale, you replace vehicles individually.
Like you've said, the infrastructure for electric cars has existed for decades.
But mass-market cars with drivetrains which can run on electricity alone did not. That had to wait for Toyota to ship the Prius. The hackers got their hands on it, the cat is out of the bag, and I'm enjoying the fireworks.
We shouldn't care if hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, even inefficiently, in the short term. Inefficient conversion will still be on par with internal combustion.
Yes, we should; anything which puts an unnecessary roadblock in the way of eliminating fossil fuels is to be avoided.
Let's take the coal-to-hydrogen angle. If you gasify coal with a chemical efficiency of 76% and then reform to hydrogen at 90% efficiency, you get about 69% out. Feed that to a fuel cell of 60% efficiency and your overall efficiency is about 41%. If you bought wind power to electrolyze water at 70% efficiency, you'd get 42% overall; about the same.
Now consider batteries. You convert the coal to electricity, either with a combined-cycle gas turbine or through stationary fuel cells; let's say you go with fuel cells and get up to 50% efficiency, or 45% after 10% battery losses in the vehicle. But wind or solar power gets 100% to the vehicle and yields 90% out, or twice as much. Why pick the systems design that gives renewables a 50% penalty, unless you are biased against them?
And how are people supposed to store this energy they create? Should they have two cars and leave one plugged in, or just hope that the sun is shining or wind is blowing when they need to recharge?
You were ragging on lead-acid batteries for being heavy.
Slashdot Mirror
- CowboyNeal is a science-illiterate and has no concept of conservation of energy (and should not be editting science stories).
- CowboyNeal is just stupid (ditto).
- CowboyNeal is taking payments to promote fraudulent products (and should be fired).
I can't think of any other possibilities here.The problem is interference. 2.45 GHz is smack in the middle of a band designated as a free-for-all, so anyone using it for communications has to accept whatever interference they get. Certifying a microwave to operate in a licensed band would cost far too much for no benefit.
Would you like some cheese to go with that whine?
Warranties on current production solar panels are typically 25 years.
I know someone who's been putting espresso into some of his homebrew for years (a bottle of it keeps you awake while you're working on a bender) but keeping the alcohol out is a new twist and might be worthy of a patent.
Microsoft is going through the courts and the criminal justice system. In neither case is there vigilantism involved, just vigilance.
(I hate scientifically-illiterate journalists.)
The next response has it right.
I started taking a razor blade and cutting them out before I returned the books. (Ads alone are bad enough, but they were usually tobacco ads. No way did I want MY taxes going to help circulate tobacco advertising.)
If you've read "Cryptonomicon" you may already have seen embedded advertising in a book.
If the donors want the blastocyst to go for research instead of down the drain, the government should not gain-say the decision with funding restrictions. If we allow research money for autopsies, cultures and other research on the bodies of babies, restricting it for embryonic cell research because it's "immoral" holds born children as LESS human than those small balls of cells.
"Morality" bans on fetal stem-cell research amount to saying "it's a human being... until it's born". My contempt for people who hold this POV knows no bounds.
(BTW: singular is mitochondrion, plural is mitochondria.)
Curiously, the DNA in the mitochondria use a slightly different genetic code than our nuclear DNA does; genes have moved from the mitochondria to the nucleus over time, but the process is not complete. It's believed that mitochondria come from an ancient endosymbiosis event.
If the transactions are encrypted for each individual player, you wouldn't know from traffic analysis exactly what the player was retrieving. It might be pulling back an applet to test whether it was hacked or not. If the proper response does not come back, you never get another disc key ever again.
This is not to say that the manufacturers aren't likely to screw things up again (or even several more times), but after a few cycles of lockdown and hiring some decent crypto experts they're likely to wind up with something like that.
When world production falls by a few percent, American gasoline prices will jump to European levels and stay there. At that point the hybrid will pay off much faster (even ignoring lower maintenance and less time wasted at filling stations) and the resale value will make the owners look very shrewd.
What do you mean, doesn't do anything worth a damn? Whatever he charges those batteries with, it's going to use only a trivial amount of oil (maybe hauling coal to a powerplant, or wind-turbine parts to a wind farm). He could charge them with a solar panel if he wanted to.The batteries he used were lead-acid units sold for electric bicycles. If you look at the price of batteries, it seems likely that a unit built in volume might cost only about $200 to $300 (quite a bit less than the NiMH battery which comes with the car). Lead-acid batteries do wear out, but they are the most-recycled product in the USA. If you can get off-peak rates for charging at night, you'll pay a small fraction of what gasoline would cost for the same driving and replace most of the first few mile's worth of gas with coal, natural gas, hydro, wind and nuclear. Natural gas is getting scarce, but the rest are 100% domestic and not about to go away.
Hybrids are just smart. The plug-in hybrid is insurance.
My favorite refutation of the bogus Second Law criticism is a seed in some soil in a terrarium. You add nothing but maximally-entropic hydrogen and oxygen in the form of water, maximally-entropic carbon and oxygen in the form of CO2, and sunlight. The seed will sprout and proceed to reduce the entropy of those raw materials in its own growth. The fundies who assert the 2nd Law don't realize that the system creates huge amounts of entropy; it's just leaving in the form of the ~300K waste heat that was once the 5700K solar blackbody spectrum.
Then you've got tandem sequence repeats... which is a whole 'nother story, but they are very susceptible to DNA copying errors and you can evolve e.g. a very different curve of a dog's snout in a century by selecting for different lengths of tandem repeats.
Yes, all this stuff is on the web. Everything you need to completely and authoritatively refute every argument made by creationists (the "intelligent design" brand or the traditional) is on the web.
(Okay, who's the Slashcode nitwit whose filter cancels the <i> tag when a list is started?)
We used to pay farmers not to produce more than could be reasonably consumed. Then a short harvest made consumers upset, so Congress decided to pull out all the stops and deal with the surpluses some other way. Only so much could be exported, so... ethanol. If we went back to the set-aside program we would not need export subsidies, ethanol subsidies, or any of the fuel and fertilizer used on that extra acreage. Nor would we have the nitrate-driven dead zone outside the mouth of the Mississippi river (or at least not as much of one), etc. etc.
The North American natural-gas market is one market. It doesn't matter where in North America the nitrate comes from, it's still competing for the same limited resource. And they'll do something else if it doesn't fetch a high enough price, like maybe leave it in the ground. This is an easier option with gas than with oil; you don't get paraffin crystallizing in rock pores and blocking gas wells. My car can burn post-consumer ag waste (biodiesel from waste grease) as well as nearly-raw output from thermal depolymerization.There appears to be a relatively simple method to make ethanol and electricity from ag waste, but it doesn't involve corn.
Every fuel ethanol plant I've ever read about used natural gas to fire the distilleries. Do you have stats on what the various fuels are?I've heard of exactly one proposed plant that uses coal and cogenerates electricity before using the spent steam to run distilleries. Just one. And I can't find the link, either.
When the advocates deliberately confuse average and marginal impact, continue to use outdated information about fertilizer sources, and assume that highly exceptional (coal-fired, cogenerating) ethanol plants are the norm, there's good reason to call them dishonest too.Even if you can take them at their word, the results aren't all that great. Some claim 1.34 BTU of ethanol out per BTU of fossil fuels in (with a large fraction of that BTU coming from petroleum). In other words, barely more than 25% of the energy in ethanol is actually grown; the rest comes from fossil sources. If we are going to spend tax money to encourage people to convert e.g. coal to motor fuel, we shouldn't discriminate against those who aren't corn farmers.
PS: Modern cars don't gain tailpipe emissions benefits from ethanol, and ethanol increases smog-forming evaporative emissions. To compensate for the high vapor pressure of ethanol, the petroleum fraction must be refined to remove high vapor-pressure components. I've never seen a listing of the energy costs of ethanol which accounted for the additional refining losses involved with meeting emissions standards.
We should not be paying subsidies for such grossly inefficient schemes.
This is still a handling problem, so you may be better off just concentrating the salt instead of drying it completely. This is what's done with lithium bromide chiller systems; the concentrated LiBr is used as a dessicant.
I've read about people using CaCl2 as an absorbent for ammonia and refrigerating things that way - the absorbent is heated to drive the ammonia into a tank (which is cooled with water during this process) and when the absorbent is cooled the ammonia tank gets very cold.
Now, since you're claiming I haven't answered questions that I have, you ignored the same question posed directly to you:
- How much does [a PEM FC] cost, and how long does it last?
You also refused to acknowledge direct challenges and refutations:- Lead-acid is already cheaper than gasoline if you don't push your depth-of-discharge. (source)
- diverting energy through hydrogen gives fossil supplies no advantage, but costs renewable energy sources a 50% penalty (here).
If these things are wrong you should be able to refute them. All I hear from you is psychobabble that could come from a creationist; "No, that can't be right, it conflicts with the Revealed Truth of the One Element Number One!" You obviously didn't look at any of the numbers or links I posted, because none of those figures relate at all to what's there (not that figures from hand-built vehicles have anything to do with what things cost in volume). Who's making things up now? You've had plenty of opportunity to do that pre-emptively, and failed.The rest of your analysis is worthless, derived from a faulty assumption.
And for all that, it still isn't close to what you get with Li-ion batteries. 330 km is barely 200 miles. Maybe an Escalade needs 65 kW to cruise at 80 MPH, but your average car would need 20 kW. 3 hours, 240 miles. In an actual trip from LA to Las Vegas, the Li-ion tzero cruised 245 miles on its pack and had range to spare. You're bloviating again. You can get close to 140 miles range on NiMH cells; the Li-ion tzero has been tested at ~285 miles range in left-lane traffic and estimated at over 300 miles on standard driving cycles. It ought to be, because it's low by better than a factor of 2 compared to real-world drives of real vehicles. I'll say. It appears to induce delusions, denial and innumeracy. It should be administered only under supervision of a psychiatrist.For the rest, see my reply to benjamindees.
Let's consider whole (real) vehicles here:
2004 Focus: ~2650 lbs
Ford Focus FCV: 3808 lb (1727 kg)
Real-world fuel cell cars are much worse than I thought - the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.
Great. How much does it cost, and how long does it last? (I understand that PEM fuel cells degrade fairly rapidly over time.)
Lead-acid is already cheaper if you don't push your depth-of-discharge. Both Altair Nanomaterials and Toshiba's advanced Li-ion cathodes have pushed cycle lifetimes into the thousands; even if you only got 100 miles per cycle, 3000 cycles is longer than the rest of the car can be expected to last. Batteries out of scrapped vehicles would have considerable value for stationary storage; can you imagine how long your UPS would run with a 15 kWh battery?
Electrons have a far greater energy density than hydrogen molecules if you are measuring flows into the vehicle, and the overall energy density of the systems currently favors Li-ion batteries.
I'm sure that vehicular hydrogen FC's will one day pass the energy density of the best batteries. Some time later, they may become cheaper. But your example of the regenerative fuel cell argues against building a hydrogen fuel infrastructure, because those vehicles could "regenerate" using electricity and use the existing electric infrastructure. Instead of spending a trillion dollars to re-vamp the nation wholesale, you replace vehicles individually.
But mass-market cars with drivetrains which can run on electricity alone did not. That had to wait for Toyota to ship the Prius. The hackers got their hands on it, the cat is out of the bag, and I'm enjoying the fireworks.
Yes, we should; anything which puts an unnecessary roadblock in the way of eliminating fossil fuels is to be avoided.
Let's take the coal-to-hydrogen angle. If you gasify coal with a chemical efficiency of 76% and then reform to hydrogen at 90% efficiency, you get about 69% out. Feed that to a fuel cell of 60% efficiency and your overall efficiency is about 41%. If you bought wind power to electrolyze water at 70% efficiency, you'd get 42% overall; about the same.
Now consider batteries. You convert the coal to electricity, either with a combined-cycle gas turbine or through stationary fuel cells; let's say you go with fuel cells and get up to 50% efficiency, or 45% after 10% battery losses in the vehicle. But wind or solar power gets 100% to the vehicle and yields 90% out, or twice as much. Why pick the systems design that gives renewables a 50% penalty, unless you are biased against them?
You were ragging on lead-acid batteries for being heavy.