Saving Energy Without Derision 698
George Maschke writes "Saving Energy Without Derision (5 mb PDF) is a new (and free) e-book by former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff. This book is intended to be a real-world, no-nonsense, thoroughly documented collection of easy-to-implement recommendations to help the average thoughtful person to pick the 'low-hanging fruit' of conservation and renewable energy. The author is after the easy 75% of actions we can all take (but almost uniformly ignore) that most certainly make a difference in energy costs (after all that's what most people care about) and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation). The author welcomes comments and intends to continuously update the book (consistent with readership interest) and address many new topics. For example, next on his list is an analysis of the economics and scientific basis of fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. (Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)"
5 mb PDF? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:5 mb PDF? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:5 mb PDF? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:5 mb PDF? (Score:5, Informative)
Plus I've mirrored it here, with the author's permission: http://s108450040.onlinehome.us/savingenergy.pdf.z ip [onlinehome.us]. Al asks that I should "let your mirror users know that substantive comments (that is,
science based as opposed to political ranting) also welcomed."
HTML Link from Google (Score:5, Informative)
Start the invasions... (Score:4, Funny)
It also might be time for a manned mision to the sun...
Re:Start the invasions... (Score:5, Informative)
Fuel cells will not provide us with energy. They will only help store it. If we had the perfect battery (long life, close to completely efficient, no leakage, no memory, high output, quick recharge) then the electric car would become a lot more feasible. The electric car is a good thing because your power plant can burn oil and coal at around 80% efficiency. Your car burns gas at, IIRC, a meager 20%-40%. Also, this would allow new forms of electricity generation to not only affect your home, but also your car, trains, trucks, and planes.
Re:Start the invasions... (Score:3, Informative)
Like the Post said, it's still a somewhat cruel joke because you still need Gas for the plan to work and only save 10-20% usage... NOw if they could use Alchol or methane.... grown from crops... powered by
Re:Start the invasions... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a common misconception but it's simply not true. The theoretical limit of efficiency is for an internal combustion engine like the one we use in our power plants is 35%. Internal combustion fossil fuel power plants operate at very near that theoretical limit but you have to factor in transmission loss, about 9%, which basically makes them equal to best-case car engine use (about 30%). The problem with today's cars is they often operate far from best-case (idling, downhill slopes, breaking, etc) bringing their efficiency down to 18-23%. This is why hybrid vehicles do so much better. They operate the engines much more intelligently and bring the efficiency up to about 30%. That means that an electric car powered by an fossil fuel power plant uses just about as much fuel as a hybrid car running on gasoline. This says nothing about pollution emissions which will be better from the power plant, but fuel use and CO2 emissions will be roughly the same.
The only way electric/fuel cell based cars are actually a benefit to the environment is if they are powered by nuclear power plants or some other non-poluting technology. Fuel cells in cars won't solve anything by themselves.
Good stats on fuel efficiency [iastate.edu]
Second law of thermodynamics wrt. internal combustion [uwinnipeg.ca]
Re:Start the invasions... (Score:5, Insightful)
I stick by non-polluting. Taking radioactive material out of the ground and returning less radioactive material to safer places in the ground, is something I can't consider pollution. I believe it makes the environment just ever so slightly safer and better. The radioactive radon gas that constantly seeps up into the room I'm in now is caused by uranium breaking down in the bedrock below me. Take it out and put it in Yucca Mountain and I get less cancer.
Everything anyone does has an impact on nature, right down to swatting mosquitoes. Just because it has an impact on the world, doesn't mean it is pollution. From what I understand, the mining of uranium ore is rough on the environment and could be considered pollution, but it's also my understanding that you could power the entire world for 20 years with what we already pulled out back in the post WW2/cold war era. Plus, mining coal is horrible for the environment, never mind the tons of mercury that comes out when you burn it that they are currently safely storing in the lungs of the general population not to mention fish and other wildlife everywhere. Overall, the switch to nuclear power would dramatically reduce the pollution created by generating power.
Heat is another byproduct of nuclear power generation but it's also a byproduct of every other heat-engine based power technology and is rapidly dissipated with little effect on anything so I don't consider it pollution.
for instance use a lot of chemicals in their manufaturing process more recent advances are allowing for organic solar panels but still a little pollution is generated
I agree that solar power technology currently can't be considered non-polluting. Lots of people consider solar to be the ultimate in low-impact living. This is naive. These are the same people who live on giant plots of land lamenting the high-impact living of people in cities. If you look carefully at it, someone living in downtown Manhattan shares a tiny footprint of land with everyone who lives above and below them whereas the big house in the country disturbs vast expanses of land. If everyone in the United States had a 5 acre plot of land they'd take up almost every bit of land in the continental US (all the mountains, forest, farm land, all of it.) The plain truth is that the Seinfeld lifestyle is much more environmentally friendly than the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle. These same people tend to praise the native American's for their low-impact lifestyle. Each native American required the resources of huge expanses of land to support them. They had a profound impact on the environment but, because their way of life, they couldn't sustain enough population to make a big impact. If you look on a per-person impact basis, native American's were awfully hard on their environment.
Just because it's quaint, simple, and peaceful doesn't mean it's low-impact or environmentally friendly. I'd reclassify most environmentalists as "my environment-ists" because what they really want is to have an environment that they can enjoy, play with and have fun in. They don't care that nuclear power is better for nature, their scared it's bad for them so they hate it.
Right now, oil and coal cost much more than nuclear and pollute horribly yet they are still generating a majority of the world's power. This is silly. It's time to build a lot of nuclear power plants. Lets build them and buy us some time to generate good efficient non-polluting or low pollution methods of generating power that are economically more attractive than nuclear so eventually they shut down on their own because they cost too much.
Re:Start the invasions... (Score:3, Insightful)
But, yeah, I think that the "hydrogen" economy is a crock. By the time you add in all the inefficiencies, gasoline is actually more efficient.
Hydrogen is hard to produce, hard to store, hard to transfer, etc.
Now fuel cells, especially if they get it so that it can be used to burn ethanol or natural gas, will give you a fuel th
So much for saving energy... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So much for saving energy... (Score:3, Funny)
[insert obligatory joke about old people]
HTML version! (Score:5, Informative)
Google is your friend.
Good to see! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a proponent of... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, I like both method
sorry, saving money IS the botton line (Score:3, Insightful)
Money makes the world go round. We should not blame people for making decisions based on economics: rather, we must blame the government if they institute an economic and regulatory framework that fails to ensure that the good economic decision is the decision that's good for society (i.e. the environment) also. The current bad system actually subsidizes (encourages) poor decisions (dirty methods of energy convers
Re:Good to see! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good to see! (Score:3, Insightful)
Spending more money on an electric car doesn't necessarily mean you have to "work harder" to earn more money. It could mean that you spend less money buying other goods (which is how most people would accomplish it). And your equation of work with energy usage is a huge non sequitur; perhaps you've confused the physics term "work" with the colloquial job-market term?
As for your old car, if you sell it to someone, odds are they'll use it to replace an
Re:Good to see! (Score:3, Insightful)
You are making a critical error when you say that recycling at a higher cost is good for us.
That depends on how you figure the cost though. The real costs must include the cost of disposal, and the various negative effects of pollution that somebody, somewhere will eventually have to pay.
Unfortunatly, some of those costs (externalities) are more or less hidden, and end up being paid by others who may not even realize where the cost comes from.
A classic example is industrial pollution. The company '
Re:Totally disagree (Score:5, Informative)
Fuel cells, PVs, super-insulated passive solar houses...these get the press...or at least did at different times since the 70s. Turning down 10% of the water heaters in America by 5 degrees and installing a water heater blanket will save more energy than produced by all of the PVs ever produced. See, my argument is that it must be economically viable in order for Joe Average to bother with it. There are economically feasible efficiency ideas that are commonly overlooked because they are so boring.
Good example. I have a ground-source (aka geothermal) heat pump in my house. I had a hard time finding a dealer to install it. They just aren't that popular. During heating season, it operates at a coefficient of performance of about 4. Every watt of electricity I put in, I get 4 watts of heat out. My electric bills are only about $100/month, even in the winter (Southwestern PA)...compared to people who got $400 gas bills last year. That is an energy efficiency and an economic win. But, there was no promotion of geothermal heat pumps. There was no discussions of them in the press. Energy efficient ideas have been divorced from economic viability for far too long...lining them up right next to people wearing hemp clothing. This needs to change. It should not be "fringe" to be energy efficient.
Geothermal Heat Pumps (Score:4, Informative)
Housing makers tend to be traditional. Now I've been looking at the concrete dome houses. I wish we weren't still building places using the old hundred year old stick built homes that were built that way because it was cheap.
Blankets not always helpful. Go tankless! (Score:5, Interesting)
A quick reference on when to use or not use the blanket. [stretcher.com] Anybody reading this should note that the original poster's "warm to the touch test" is absolutely correct-- if it isn't warmer than the surroundings, it isn't losing much heat.
What you REALLY want to fix this "keeping a tank of water warm all the time" problem is an on-demand water heater. They're a little more expensive than normal water heaters, but they have a few key benefits:
1. No tank to take up space.
2. Never runs out of hot water.
3. Doesn't have to keep a tank of water warm when not in use, making them much more efficient.
I'm surprised that #2 alone hasn't made them the de-facto replacement for tank water heaters in America (I understand they're common in europe and japan). Energy efficiency aside-- you can't run out of hot water with a tankless, on-demand water heater!
If you're even *considering* a new unit in the near future, go tankless! Installing them isn't any different than anything else that needs plumbing for water and gas-- even if they've never heard of one, your local contractor will be able to install it.
Re:Blankets not always helpful. Go tankless! (Score:3, Informative)
Gas is still cheaper here for heat, so I don't see the heaters going away. It's harder to run an instant on gas heater.
Re:Totally disagree (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Calculations or Flawed for Canada (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Calculations or Flawed for Canada (Score:3, Insightful)
The original poster's word choice was poor, and it caused the predictable stream of responses.
What should have been said is that one watt of energy input can transfer four watts of heat from one place to another. This is what heat pumps, refrigerators, and air conditioners do. With eletric resistance heat, all you can do is move that one watt of energy into the room as a direct conversion of electric energy into heat energy.
There is a reason poorer people have electric resistence heat and everyone else
The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, if you use solar energy to create electricity to electrolyze water, and make hydrogen gas that way, you end up with less energy at the wheels of a car than you would just charging a battery from the same solar energy.
So you have to ask yourself, who benefits from multi-billion dollars of investment into a Hydrogen energy infrastructure?
You forget about nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
In spite of all the bad press, the fact is that nuclear is still the safest, cheapest, and most environemtally friendly energy source ever created. IMHO, it's bad wrap had far more to do with its threat to OPEC then it ever had to do with safety or radiation.
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:3, Interesting)
Like wind, nuclear power is cheap to produce once you've spent insane amounts of capital building a plant. And it takes a long while to start producing energy, never mind producing more than it actually cost to get the plant up and extract its fuel.
Oh, and did I mention that before you actually build the first plant, you need socialism to pay for the R&D for the
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, I would much prefer a fusion economy to a fission one, since that would solve our energy production problems in short order.
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear power is environmentally friendly because the amounts of waste you're talking about are incredibly low for all the energy you're getting out. You're looking at around 23 tons of high-level waste per megawatt of plant per year, at a 91% duty cycle. And this is dense stuff, by the way, so volumetrically it's a very small amount. It's also in a relatively convenient-to-handle form; it's not discharged into the air or the water.
Compare that to a coal plant, where you're generating 1.5 million tons of ash per megawatt of plant per year, which is vastly more polluting, and that's not even considering the CO2. For every single kilowatt-hour of energy you get fro burning coal, you produce a kilogram of CO2. So if you run your megawatt coal plant on a 70% duty cycle, generating 8800 megawatt-hours,you dump 4400 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
And that fly-ash you're making is toxic forever. It's caustic. It's filled with heavy metals. Both in terms of mass and volume you've got orders of magnitude more of it to deal with than you would if you went nuclear. And if you're concerned about radiation, well, burning coal releases uranium and thorium isotopes right into the atmosphere; coal has up to 10ppm of uranium in it. Since 1937, burning coal in the United States alone has dumped 145,000 tons of uranium and 357,000 tons of thorium into the air; that radiation's just as real as the stuff in nuclear waste, and the cancers it causes and the people it kills are just as real.
Let's pick a random small country, like the UK. From what I can find, they have a generation capacity of 361 terawatt-hours per year. 8765 hours in a year, 91% duty cycle, so 8000 hours. To produce 361 terawatt-hours in 8000 hours, you need 4500 megawatts of plant. So if the UK went all-nuclear, they'd generate just a bit over 100 tons of high-level waste per year.
They could take that, put it in thin-walled steel drums, and dump it right to the bottom of the North Sea, and they'd be doing vastly less environmental damage than they're doing now, by getting 74% of the electricy from burning fossil fuels and dumping 614 billion pounds of CO2 into the air every year.
That 145,000 tons of uranium the US has dumped into the air just by burning coal, since 1937? Well, that's 10440 tons of U235, which if you fission it (okay, with perfect effiency. This is just to illustrate a point) produces 17.6 kilotons of energy per kilogram. If you fission 10440 tons of it, you end up with 193 petawatt-hours. That right there's the electrical needs of the entire UK for 500 years, at present rates of consumption.
By all those metrics is nuclear power environmentally friendly. It's utterly ridiculous that we're not embracing the technology and making our electricity the right way.
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:4, Interesting)
Chemical:
One pound of coal = 926 watt-hours = 3.36 megajoules.
Nuclear
One pound of coal = 5-millionths of a pound of uranium (median value) = 0.000000036 pounds U235 = 1.20 megajoules.
In other words, you'd get almost one-third the energy you get from burning coal from fissioning the uranium that's in the coal you burn.
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:5, Informative)
Until we change our outlook, the growing energy needs of our planet will be met primarily with toxic, dirty coal, and we will be suffering the consequences for a very long time.
Credible links with more information:
http://www.pbs.org/now/science/merc
http://www.epa.gov/ost/fishadvice/
Half-life versus stable (Score:5, Insightful)
Some industrial waste is stable. Arsenic waste from tin mining, mercury waste from gold mining, cadmium from discarded rechargable batteries, beryllium from heat transfer uses.
None of this stuff decays at all. Waste that just goes away if you wait long enough looks good by comparison.
More significantly, there is an inverse relationship between half-life and activity. When you take out your spent fuel rods there is some U235 left, with a half-life of 700 million years, and also Strontium 90 with a half-life of 29 years. The Strontium 90 with its short half-life is releasing its energy quickly. This contributes to making the spent reactor very radio-active and very dangerous. But 290 years later 99.9% of the Strontium has decayed. Meanwhile the Uranium, which is releasing its energy too slowly to be dangerous, clouds the issue of how long reactor waste lasts. Long after the waste has ceased to be dangerous, it remains slighty radioactive.
One mind boggling point is that Uranium used as reator fuel supplies about a million times as much energy per unit weight as coal. Coal is a fairly pure product and contains only about 1.5 parts per million Uranium as a contaminant. So about 50% more Uranium goes up the chimney of a coal fired power station as goes into the reactor of a nuclear power station.
That is amusing in a way, but not very important, because the Uranium that goes into a reactor isn't dangerous anyway. The worry with nuclear power is the transmutation of Uranium into short lived, highly radioactive isotopes of other elements. However the point remains that the quantities of waste involved in nuclear power are very much smaller than the quantities involved in producing power from chemical sources.
Why do I care? I was six years old at the time of the Aberfan Disaster [ox.ac.uk], the same age as many of the 116 children who died, suffocated under a slurry of waste from a coal mine after the collapse of a waste tip. The TV pictures of the time showed the gable end of the children's school. It was just like the one I attended and this upset me.
I have never forgotten that quantity is a quality of waste. The waste from the coal mine might as well have been composed of perfectly safe, inert materials. It would not have made any difference. The children were buried and suffocated because there was so much of it, not because it was "dangerous" in the sense that the word is used today.
Quantity.Count the cost of free energy... (Score:4, Insightful)
The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.
Okay, now you have to enrich it. Now you have to use the fuel without meltdowns. Pebble beds solve that problem - it's really not the big problem with nuclear power plants.
Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of. Where do you put it? And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive stuff, and you can't just haul it off and dump it in a salt mine because in order to haul it off, you have to cut it up, and cutting it up releases a giant plume of radioactive dust into the environment.
Pretty much any energy generation system has costs associated with it. I think the cost/benefit analysis for nuclear really sucks, and the story for some other forms of energy is much better, but let's take off our rose-colored glasses and look at all the costs, not just the costs of the energy generation systems we don't like.
Re:Count the cost of free energy... (Score:3, Insightful)
This doesn't contradict what I was saying. When bui
Re:You forget about nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Monty Burns got mod points (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that nuclear power does not work should be hinted by the other fact that, doh, nobody wants to build them anymore.
Except China, which plans to build quite a few brand new nuclear reactors to try and keep up with the energy requirements of their increasingly metropolitan way of life. I think they are or planning on damming the Yangtze for hydroelectric as well. I know it's easy to overlook China, as it contains the largest population of humans on Earth.
Re:Monty Burns got mod points (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Breed the stuff, don't worry about digging it out of the ground.
Nobody wants to build them anymore because of the ridiculous liability concerns, which is hardly fair. Coal plants kill way more people than nuclear plants do, by crudding up the air. They cause respiratory problems, they shorten lifespans, and the radiation they spew into the air causes cancers. But people have this notion that if you distribute a problem widely enough, it suddenly becomes not a problem anymore, and so you can't sue coal plants when they thorium they emit as a waste product gives you cancer.
That's just silly, no matter how you look at it.
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:5, Interesting)
The best solution for transportable, stable, environmentally friendly fuel is probably methane. Compressed natural gas vehicles are very common. We can make methane about as easily as we can make hydrogen or oil or even from coal, via gasification. All fuel cell manufactures are also looking at reforming mechanisms to make methane useful in fuel cells. As engineer who has worked on fuel cell technology for the last five years, I think it is pretty clear that for future of transportation applications of fuel cells...particularly hydrogen-only systems...is very bleak.
Fuel cells will be used (eventually) in stationary power systems and very soon in portable electronics that will use liquid methanol as a fuel. Everything else is just a pipe dream, IMO.
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, come on.
Gasoline has an energy content of 45 megajoules per kilogram, or 56 MJ per liter. Energy density of hydrogen is about 11 kilojoules per liter.
My car gets about 325 miles on a 16-gallon tank, so that's 60 liters of gas, or about 3400 megajoules. To get that same amount of energy from hydrogen, I'd need 309100 liters of the stuff, at STP. To fit that into a 16-gallon tank, I'd need to pressurize it to about 5000psi, or about 340 atmospheres.
Not particularly difficult to build a tank that can hold that. Not even particularly difficult to build a tank that can hold that and still have a huge safety margin. HY80 steel, ferinstance, has a yield strength of (surprise!) 80,000psi on a one-inch thickness. Even aluminum might do the job; 5083 H-116 plate has a yield strength of 34,000 psi. Sure, you're carrying around a tank of highly-compressed hydrogen, but making a tank that's strong enough not to rupture in approachingly-normal circumstances, and connecting it to the car with a strong enough leakage that it won't break itself free and go flying into the next county if it *does* happen to rupture is hardly a game-breaker. Hell, cars today carry around tanks of a highly-flammable liquid in a tank of thin sheet steel, and those rarely rupture, and people aren't concerned about the safety of it.
No, the key issue with hydrogen is that there's no good way to produce it. Until you go all-nuclear, electrolysis is ridiculously expensive, and steam-reformation of hydrocarbons doesn't really help you.
Leaks? Get the production cost low enough and nobody'll care about leaks, anymore than they care about the trickle of water leaking from a car's exhaust pipe.
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:4, Interesting)
My math shows that the pressure will be 41.6 kPa per mole of hydrogen using a 60 litre tank at 300 Kelvins (around room temperature). The heat of reaction of H2 + 1/2O2 = H20 is 241.8 kJ/mol, so to store 3.4 GJ of energy, you would need 14,060 moles of hydrogen, and the pressure would be about 584 MPa, or about 5,800 atmospheres assuming hydrogen is an ideal gas.
Hydrogen ceases to be like an ideal gas far before 5,800 atmospheres are reached. In fact, no amount of compression short of squeezing the hydrogen into a ball of neutrons (trillions of atmospheres required at a minimum) will fit the hydrogen into that tank. Well, there would be an intermediate point (after a few billion atmospheres) where the carbon and leftover hydrogen could be combined into hydrocarbons and those should fit into the tank.
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:5, Informative)
it isn't an energy *source*
Umm, that is the whole *point* of using hydrogen: to provide an efficient storage mechanism for energy, which can then be extracted cleanly using fuel cells, combustion, etc.
And *why* do we want this? Because then we can generate large quantities of energy in central locations using methods not normally available to vehicles (hydroelectric, solar, wind), as well as benefiting from economies of scale with traditional technologies (traditional, large scale power plants are *far* more efficient than a standard internal combustion engine in a car).
Moreover, centralized generation makes it easier to move to new generation technologies (geothermal, tidal, etc), and to upgrade existing plants (since you only have thousands of plants to upgrade, rather than hundreds of millions of cars).
So, in the end, I'd say we all benefit from a multi-billion dollar investment in Hydrogen energy.
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with centralized generation is distribution losses. Upgrading thousands of plants is just not going to happen. The plants out there will run
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:3, Informative)
Then again, nothing is, second law of thermodynamics and all that.
But it's easier to switch from energy converted from oil to energy converted from, say, solar energy by settling on an intermediary carrier - like electricity or hydrogen. The technologies for both of which aren't fully worked out yet (fully electrical cars are way off, and the intricacies of a hydrogen infrastructure are as yet untested except for some busses running on the stuff).
Another promising
Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and most diesel engines today require no conv
Battery is worse (Score:4, Informative)
Powering cars by rechargable batteries has MANY more problems... If 50% power loss is assumed at each step (optimistic), how much power is really needed to charge a battery, after 1) Generation 2) Transmission 3) Step down to battery V in garage 4)Recharge loss 5) Storage loss
You want leaks? Battery drains faster than hydrogen can escape
Let's not even talk about the unchanging (heavy) weight of batteries (whereas fuel weight decreases at is consumed). You are still hauling 500 lbs of battery full or empty.
What about practicality? It takes several hours to recharge a battery vehicle. They are only practical in closed loops e.g. golf courses, where usage is more or less constant. Though admittedly a setup with chargers at home +and+ at place of employment would be useful for the 9-5'ers.
What about the environment? Lead and elecrtolyte will have to be replaced regularly. And accidents will get really ugly as acid is spilled all over the place.
I have noted many times... (Score:4, Informative)
Cracking water/steam using solar furnaces - use the power-tower or similar concepts to first heat water to super-heated steam, then run the steam over red-hot iron (heated by the sun as well).
As I have noted before, I don't know why this couldn't work - or why it works. All I know is that this was a major method of hydrogen production back in the 1800's for ballooning (aerostat racing and exhibitions) - super heated steam was passed over red-hot iron and cracked into hydrogen (and one assumes oxygen - it binds with the iron to make rust?) at fast enough rates to fill a balloon envelope. If it worked then it would work now. In fact, a variation of this is how we crack hydrocarbons into hydrogen at a refinery.
I have proposed that a plant be built in Barstow/Daggett in California, near Boron. There used to be a technology marketed to bind the hydrogen to borax (similar to hydrate storage?) - making these "solid fuel" tablets of hydrogen - reacted in water (IIRC), the tablets would release hydrogen gas to run an engine, and heat (exothermic reaction) - and the water/precipitate (don't remember what the reaction created) could be recycled to create more "solid hydrogen" tablets (bonded hydrogen would be a better term).
How many times do I need to post this idea - and when will I get an answer of why it won't work (I have a theory that there may be a practical reason - but I have yet to hear it)? Such a system of generating hydrogen would be mostly eco-safe: solar, water, and iron (scrap cars?) would be all that is needed, and a source of borax (hence the location for the plant - plenty of nearby borax, location on a fairly major trucking route to ship the resulting fuel, and plenty of sun year round for generation!).
BTW - the test plants that were built in Barstow/Daggett - they routinely output 10+ megawatts, and used very little ground area for a solar plant (less than an airport - possibly even less than a conventional power plant)...
Damn - why aren't we doing this!?
It's a nice thought.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't rtfa as it's
OK, I'm being harsh, but it's fair. I take all sorts of precautions to leave a fair planet for my (currently) 5 week old daughter, but I frequently wonder what the "£$%ing point is if the guy at the next desk drives 500 miles weekly in his V8 5litre penis extension because he's got no self esteem what-so-ever?
Re:It's a nice thought.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's a nice thought.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Multiple polls in the USA have shown that women largely prefer SUVs over other vehicles. According to industry research, FORTY PERCENT of suv buyers are female:
source [about.com]
It has also been found that, all other things being equal, the average female will find the male with the SUV more attractive than with any other vehicle. (source is Men's Health magazine).
So please, this is not about "male inferiority", women are a HUGE part of this probl
74 Buick? death trap (Score:4, Informative)
Re:tiny little cars (Score:3, Interesting)
Nowadays though, this might be different as the chances I die in my WRX are probably greater since every day it becomes more likely that in an accident I'll an have obnoxiously-sized tank rolling over me instead of a car merely hitting me.
At any rate, the nation as a whole would be better off without SUVs (excluding those that are actually used as workhorses).
Diesel with or without Biodiesel is a good start (Score:3, Interesting)
My 2003 Jetta TDI has 40862 miles on it and I've used 832.7 gallons of diesel (and 56.9 gallons of biodiesel) thus far. For those of you keeping score at home, that's about 45.93 mpg over the life of the car. Not too shabby.
Why wait 15-20 years for hydrogen when we can start reducing our dependence on foreign oil NOW?
Re:Diesel with or without Biodiesel is a good star (Score:3, Informative)
Using biodiesel, even on our current diesel passenger cars, lowers the emmissions significantly. All modern diesel engines should be capable of ope
I've never understand electric cars (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of the U.S. gets its electricity from coal and other non-replaceable fuels that damamge the environment.
Everytime you drive it you have to plug in and get more electric charge from the above environment destroying power plant.
Where's the bonus?
Re:I've never understand electric cars (Score:3, Insightful)
In theory, a power plant's pollution is "localized" and thus more easily controlled.
Perhaps you can think of it as a mainframe/supercomputer vs. workstations/beowulf clusters... car pollution is distributed (which might be good, because then one place doesn't get polluted "too much"), whereas powerplant pollution is highly localized (initially -- yes, it gets distributed by wind patt
Re:I've never understand electric cars (Score:3, Interesting)
Nuclear power really seems to be the way to go here. The "elephant in the room" with electric power right now is the pollution produced by it and the crumbing infrastructure used to conduct it from the generator to the load.
I don't get it... (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of investing billions in pipe dreams, we should focus on excellent technology that can be implemented in the next few years for a reasonable cost. Renewable cellulose-derived ethanol could reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels and is neutral in net carbon impact (the carbon emissions from burning the fuel are offset by growing more low cost fuel crops that take CO2 out of the environment). And current gasoline engines run with minimal modifications on E85, an 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline mix. Making FFV engines (flexible fuel vehicles - compatible with ethanol and gasoline in various mixtures) can be done for at most 100-200 dollars of extra cost at vehicle build time, and many FFVs are already on the road in the US (in many cases, people don't even know they have them, the manufacturers build them for tax breaks then don't market the features outside of certain areas of the midwest where corn-derived ethanol is available at the gas station).
At current gas prices, cellulose-derived ethanol is actually more than competitive, it is cheaper than gas - the problem is the long term instability of gas prices makes investing in infrastructure to produce cellulosic ethanol as a fuel substitute too risky - it's hard to compete with something pumped out of the ground, where most of the costs are transportation, and political/defense issues. Please note that we're NOT talking about corn ethanol, which a highly subsidized and environmentally contentious product due to high energy costs of growing and harvesting corn.
Re:I don't get it... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, even corn-ethanol has a positive energy balance these days. Much of the confusion dates back to some old calculation's by Pimental at Cornell that found corn-ethanol had a negative energy balance when in fact more recent USDA numbers show that corn-ethanol produces 67% more energy that it takes to produce it.
Still, biodiesel blows ethanol out of the water in terms of energy balance. And that's making B100 from soy. Imagine the energy return if we made it from dual use crops like mustard or better yet from algae.
Algae source biodiesel grown on 15,000 sq. miles could completely displace petroleum transporation fuels in the US. Don't believe me? Read Mike Briggs' analysis for yourself:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.ht
Re:I don't get it... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for your claims about biodiesel, based on my research about a year and a half ago, the production cost gap between B100 and fossil fuel diesel
Re:I don't get it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course grandparent's original sentence is kind of wrong - of course there's not more energy "inside" corn-ethanol than it took to produce it, but most of the energy used to "produce" it comes from the sun, and wasn't "invested" when the corn is planted. (Sorry for all the quotes.)
Sadly, we've built a North American wasteland... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sadly, we've built a North American wasteland.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Until there's more demand for high-density urban housing, sprawl is the answer. People can choose to live in cities. Some -- like Seattle, Boston, New York and Portland -- are especially viable for a car-less lifestyle. But that requires people who want to live there. Most people, including you, probably don't.
This has
Re:Sadly, we've built a North American wasteland.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm amazed that anyone thinks suburbia is a good place to raise kids. I was a prisoner in my home until I was 16 and allowed to drive a car. After-school options until that age were curtailed by the lack of transportation. It would have been good to have some kind of after-school clubs to go to, but who's gonna drive us home? Our school was 7 miles away. If you wonder why
Re:Sadly, we've built a North American wasteland.. (Score:4, Informative)
Studies [smartgrowthamerica.org] find that suburban sprawl may bad for your health [usatoday.com] due to it's probable link to obesity [netscape.com]. Not terribly surprising since you're driving most places instead of walking.
If you don't want to use your car, you should have picked the area you live in better
Fair argument, but you assume there was better choices to make near where the parent poster works.
...or make sacrifices so you can afford to live downtown somewhere with everything packed together.
Nonsense and balderdash. This assumes that the only downtown spaces can be person (versus car) friendly. Space-gulping pedestrian unfriendly suburban planning (or lack thereof) is *not* a given. Alternative block design [carfree.com] and the new trend of "traditional neighborhood development (TND) [housingzone.com] bring up alternatives to cul-de-sacs, mega-mall fortresses, and strip-mall hell.
Besides, we're smart slash-dot readers, why should be feel compelled to be stuck with inferior choices when there's a possibility of smart design [1000fom.org] for our living and working communities?
thinks that can be done (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:thinks that can be done (Score:4, Insightful)
The wise choice this election would in fact be to vote for a third party candidate, but nobody can seem to motivate themselves to do that.
Re:thinks that can be done (Score:4, Insightful)
"Cruel Hoax" (Score:4, Insightful)
It warms my heart to see a expert saying what I already thought.
5mb!!! (Score:3, Funny)
hydrogen (Score:4, Interesting)
(Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's [hydrogen] a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)
What is also sad from my viewpoint is that hydrogen, technically, isn't really a "fuel". You need a lot of energy to make it. Now, if one uses solar power to make electricity to crack water to make H, then you've sort of solved part of the problem, but solar panels have a shelf life, and are dependent on local weather conditions.
I don't see Hydrogen as much of a solution for transportation. But I do think it could be used for home heating and local electrical generation in adverse environments. Still, the generation of Hydrogen is the big nut to crack. I think one nation on earth could become the Saudi Arabia of Hydrogen: Iceland.
1. They're an island, so they have all the water they need.
2.The whole freakin' island is basically a lava slick.
You don't have to drill very far down to get Enormous Amounts of geothermal energy, which they are already tapping for island electrical needs. All they have to do is build extra geothermal plants and crack the Atlantic Ocean. Geothermal s steady and continuous power (the earth isn't going to cool off anytime in the near future, and as Iceland is part of the Atlantic Spread, I don't think anything we can do will slow plate tectonics or cool Iceland off).
Hawaii and Vanuatu could be the Pacific Equivalents. Steady energy, lots of water. With that kind of a set up, we'll have a situation more like petroleum, where we'd have a real "fuel" i.e., lots of stored energy for very little energy expenditure in its creation.
I used to be all into Hydrogen - thikning - Hey - it turns into WATER when you burn it! KEWL!
But when I found out that the easiest hydrogen to get is out of petroleum, and that getting it out of either water or petroleum takes a lot of energy (which we get from either petroleum or fission - neither of which is renewable, except for the politically suicidal option of breeder reactors) my enthusiasm faded.
The first thing is conservation, and the article provides a lot of great ideas (many of which I am already doing, and had pointers for some that I will be dong!) for that. But I'm afraid that the next several decades will be warfare over water and energy, and we really need to find solutions to both problems.
I've stated before that the real problem is demographic - there are simply too many people. We need to *gradually* reduce populations to a sustainable level (I would estimate a global population of 250 - 300 million could be made sustainable indefinitely) and then develop long term energy, water, and metal recycling solutions.
If we don't the not so distant future will be one of horrifying catastrophe: disease, continuous war over ever dimishing resources, no power, crushing poverty and crowding, and a long term future best described as a paleolithic extinction event.
So, these are simple little choices we can make now, so we can plan for the future. OR, we can be our typical shortsighted green eyed greedy guts eat the world up everything for me and mine, and fuck the rest of you losers and simply watch the most precious of things in the universe - sentience - disappear.
It WILL eventually disappear, but it doesn't have to go this way - so stupidly, and so preventably.
Your every decision has far reaching effects.
RS
Cool, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cool, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me that it's only the rather well-off, getting SUVs despite high vehicle and gas prices, that don't care.
I'd say most people do care that their electric and natural gas bills are through the roof.
Re:Cool, but... (Score:3)
I'd say most people do care that their electric and natural gas bills are through the roof.
I'd agree with you, but the extent of most people's "caring" is merely complaining about the cost instead of trying to cut down on the excess. My SUV driving friends look at the high prices th
Cutting the electric bill down (Score:3, Interesting)
I also saw something cool on the web. Some guy had a small solar panel and battery kit which could hold enough of a charge to run a small air conditioner for most of the day (when there was sunlight). I think that is a cool idea, as most friends who must use window air conditioners always complain how much more their electricity bill is in the summer.
Comments on the draft... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mind you, this is good background information that seems really thought out, but you really have to WANT to read this thing in order to get it done.
I'm just hoping the end of this is better than a standard energy saving pamphlet, or I'll feel like I was bait-and-switched to read some environmentalist's propaganda.
My $0.02 (Score:5, Informative)
If this was not the case, my monthly utility bill (in California) would easily hit $500-$600/mo. As it is, we're lucky to have bills typically in the $200-$300 range. (I have two mini-servers for my business that are never off)
Often, these kinds of things provide clear advantages beyond merely saving money.
Recently, the water-saving shower head in the downstairs bathroom broke, and I screwed on the original shower head, which I still had in the shed, thinking this would "get us by" until I could get in for another one.
Boy, was I wrong! With the old shower head, we could shower everybody in the household, one right after another in about one or two hours, including dressing.
But, with the new shower head, we ran out of hot water within 20 minutes, making showering everybody nearly an all-day venture while we waited for the hot-water heater to catch up.
Once, my son left the shower running hot water all night long, and in the morning, we found the shower going, and there was still plenty of hot water!
Another example: Flourescent bulbs not only use far less energy than incandescent, they also last much longer (who wants to replace light bulbs once a month?) and don't heat up the house.
I noticed the difference when I changed out the three 60-watt bulbs on the living room fam with three 15-watt flourescent! The room was, if anything, brighter, and, previously, when the fan was on low, you could FEEL the heat coming off those three 60-watt bulbs!
Double-paned windows mean that my teen children can blare their punk music as loud as they want to without pissing off the neighbors. Also, we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
Also, in the winter time, you can sit next to the windows and not feel cold. That adds much to my sense of well-being on a cold winter morning...
Embrace conservation. It doesn't *have* to be a hassle!
The answer for cars is plug-in hybrids (Score:5, Interesting)
The normal Prius uses its battery pack to help acceleration, hill climbing, and to power accessories. The battery pack is recharged by the gas engine and by regenerative braking. Every place except North America, the Prius has an EV button, which turns the car into a pure electric car -- but only for a mile or two before the battery reaches a state-of-charge (SOC) that is too low. The Prius battery back is designed to last an extremely long time (warranteed for 150,000 miles), and one way Toyota assures that is by limiting the SOC to a small range, from about 25% full to 80% full.
Priusplus is adding a separate "traction" battery, that works with the normal Prius drivetrain, to provide a long-distance EV mode. In their first proof-of-concept car (which should be finished this weekend) it uses 12 motorcycle Lead-Acid batteries, and it should go about 20 or 30 miles on an overnight (or overday) charge. Using far superiour Lithium Ion batteries, they should get about 80 miles for a battery pack that costs about $5,000 or so (although current Lithium cells are quite small indeed, requiring a rediculous number of batteries wired into a large pack)
If I could go, say, even 40 miles on a charge, I wouldn't use the gas motor in my Prius except to climb very steep hills during the week. I'd effectively get well over 100 mpg (Electricity costs, even in California, give a price-per-mile of about 2 cents. Unfortunately, at this point, the cost for the traction battery (because it is more deeply cycled it doesn't last as long) probably adds another few cents/mile.
PriusPlus is hoping to display there car at a show here in Los Angeles at the end of the month, and is attempting to persuade Toyota that this is a car they should build. Once people are educated about the benefits of hybrid technology, it should be a small step to show them the further benefits of plugging them in.
I fervently hope that PriusPlus will succeed!
Thad
Insulate..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Friends who live in a 2000 sq. ft. home built by a volume builder pay about $300 right now, and I have heard of people that have $600/month power bills.
We spent a few $1000 extra to get a more efficient house:
- blow-in insulation was used everywhere. There's more than a foot of the stuff under the roof, and 6 inches in the walls, packed tight.
- most windows are dual-pane Low-E2, tinted to reduce glare
- we limited the number of skylights
- the A/C is a high-efficiency, dual-compressor model (18 SEER)
- we use fluorescent lights where possible
- we keep shades drawn in rooms we don't use, such as a guest room, and my office on weekends.
It looks like we'll recover the extra cost in about 5-7 years.
Re:No comments? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people use PDFs when HTML works perfectly fine? Do you REALLY need to control the layout that much?
Why it's so big. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why it's so big. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No comments? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Diodes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Diodes (Score:4, Interesting)
The watt-hour meters used by electric companies are supprisingly accurate, and resiliant to many types of 'cheats'. I've heard of several schemes to fool meters, such as drawing lots of power in very short bursts, in hopes that the meter can't keep up, etc. The results I heard were the same: The meter will do a reasonably good job of measuring your energy usage, reagardless of how you choose to use that energy.
Sure, the the diode you suggest will make your meter run slower... at the mere expense of a bulb that's not as bright as it was before. (Standard light dimmers work in much the same way: By reducing the % of the cycle the bulb is powered.) Aside from the time you spent, you'll simply come out even in the end.
What he's doing is fudging his power factor. (Score:5, Informative)
He's also right that it doesn't save any power. And he omits the fact that screwing up your Power Factor is not good for the efficiency of the grid, and probably ends up costing the grid more power than just running normally in the end.
I have heard that other countries measure the PF for residential users-- which is why you see computer power supplies marketed with "active PF correction" to keep your 600W gaming machine's PSU from fucking up the power grid.
Here's an article [gsu.edu] (and another) [wikipedia.org] that explains the basics of AC Power Factor-- an excess of capacitive or inductive loads will result in a leading or lagging power factor, which results in you getting more current delivered for the same amount of power used, and they eat it as line loss in their grid. Industrial facilities in the US *are* charged for having a leading or lagging (ie, not 1) Power Factor, so for factories with lots of electric motors (big inductors), they'll often have a big capacitor bank to pull the PF back in the other direction.
His trick is to use the fact that light bulbs could care less about PF, AC, or DC to run them roughly DC. The diode clips off the bottom half of the 120V sine wave. The capacitor (charged during the "up" cycle) will supply power during the "down" half of the cycle (which is now off, thanks to the diode), with side effect of giving him a leading power factor.
My EE classes are getting rusty, so if anybody wants to post a more thorough analysis or point out any mistakes, feel free.
Re:Enviro guilt (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as I can remember, people were doing this. So at least since the mid-80s. Almost all those things he says (except the hybrid car) could be practiced before, and the cost savings were real then as they are today.
In what does his position differ from those people?
mostly true, but with exceptions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stop telling us what we want (Score:3, Informative)
I've always wondered why the current crop of hybrids don't let you plug them in. I bet you'd be able to pick up a few MPG just by topping off the batteries every night.
Re: "Derision" felt for the "Anti-Consumer" (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.
I don't care about anyone being an 'anit-consumer'.
Consume less all you want I really don't mind, in fact since less demand = lower prices I'm all for it.
The problem that I personally have (and I think that most anti-green/socialist types have) is that the only way they (enbormentalists/socialists) can force their utopian agenda on the rest of the world is by government action (people with guns forcing me to do stuff I don't want to do).
In other words it is a freedom issue. I think we all want clean air/water, good health care, nice work environments, etc. The argument is how to get there not on what the goals are.
The way I see it enviromentalists/socialists are objects of derision (at least in my mind) because they either truely don't understand how the world works (they want stuff for free as in free beer with no thought on who pays the bill) or they do know the cost and are more than happy for me to pay it for them even though I don't agree with their plan.
Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.
All of this is my opinion but perhaps you will find it usefull to understand how the 'oposition' thinks. It isn't that we don't want those things it is that the price of the system that you are advocating (my freedom) is too high.
Re: "Derision" felt for the "Anti-Consumer" (Score:3, Insightful)
The new buzzword is 'sustainable' because that actually is the g
Re:110v - 220v? (Score:3, Informative)
Home distribution to the end user in the US is 240 V single phase, which is actually is two pairs of a three phase system. This is then split into two 120 V circuits in the home by a step down transformer. Large businesses may have full three-phase feeds at somewhat higher voltages (typically up to 500-1200 V), and often get rate discounts if they "load balance" their impedance as seen by the electric company connection to match the feed source for maximum throughput, or if they agree to scale back their
Re:Turn off your displays (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does anyone actually have the PDF? (Score:3, Informative)
(And as soon as I find an existing torrent for it, I'll join the stream.)