Off-shore windmills also can pump water in reservoirs, such a way we can help them to get 3-4 times higher price, i.e. for reliable power.
Lot of losses in batteries, too. It's not chemical cell, albeit a lot more dense than hydrogen. Neither is terribly ideal as a storage medium, but what can you do?
Think commercial polysilicon solar cells are a bit higher than 10% (more like 13-18% iirc).
None of this energy stuff is technically easy, and then there's the regulatory/social side...
Think commercial polysilicon solar cells are a bit higher than 10% (more like 13-18% iirc).
None of this energy stuff is technically easy, and then there's the regulatory/social side...
Tidal power is better than wave, wind or solar... It's 100% predictable, reliable and it's always there 24/7 as long as you distribute your power plants sensibly...
Helium sale to the Axis was forbidden by the US by the time the Graf Zeppelin was launched.
There was a great documentary on how hard it actually was to shoot down a hydrogen balloon in WW1, very non-intuitive and in the end they had to invent a sequence of machinegun bullets to do it.
All the suggestions are very interesting, it is also interesting to apply conservation of energy to all of them. Such as the total energy of the solar flux on the surface of the earth.
The world wide energy consumption is now around 6 X 10**20 joules per year. As a first guess tidal energy would subtract from the earth's rotational angular momentum and as a side product reduce the rotational speed of the earth. This is around 2.7 X 10**33 joules, the energy in the earth orbiting the sun is 5 orders of magnitude larger. I would say figure out a way to harness these.
As I mentioned before converting solar directly to electricity changes the albedo. Admittedly the concept of 100% solar is far fetched, it would imply disastrous climate change.
Stemming all the tides I suppose is equally far fetched.
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There was a documentary on the Hindenburg, where an ex-NASA engineer used his retirement to get to the bottom of what caused the fire. Note that the Engineers working on these were well aware of what Hydrogen could do and were very careful. The problem was the powdered aluminium that the outer cloth panels were painted with. Same stuff is used in sold rocket boosters! They didn't earth all the panels properly, got a spark and the rest is history. Took the NASA guy years to work this out. Had he visited the Zeppelin museum first he would have found out they worked it out the day after the crash!
On poo as fuel. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-bristol-40850211
Apparantly the average adult annual dumpage will power a bus 37miles. Phooey.
This is the bottom line. Everything else is a denial. Even "cleanly" produced electricity is a lie. I quite like the idea of poo power though
Soooooo many of the posters on this very forum are running purely on poo power. 😉 Embrace the future!
I'm not claiming to be better than anyone else, but yes, lots of ____
(In general, not naming names)
(In general, not naming names)
https://www.clarin.com/autos/a-fond...on-000-kilometros-sola-carga_0_BJKMWEUPW.html
1000 kms in Italy with only one battery charge.
1000 kms in Italy with only one battery charge.
On the other hand if there is a leak hydrogen will drift upwards instead of pooling on the ground.
John
True. And if the leak is inside the car, you and the car will float 🙂 unless you are smoking in the car :-(
What if gasoline leaks, and you are smoking...
What if some metal rod punches through lithium batteries...
Any stored energy is dangerous.
Who knows.
An old professor in the UTN, once said that when the size of a something that is full of energy tend to zero volume (Say, more energy density), it becomes an explosive. This may be the case, like the S7 phones batteries.
In the other hand, I never own a car, nor I will; I don't know drive; and which is more important, I never smoked in my ******* life, nor I will.
An old professor in the UTN, once said that when the size of a something that is full of energy tend to zero volume (Say, more energy density), it becomes an explosive. This may be the case, like the S7 phones batteries.
In the other hand, I never own a car, nor I will; I don't know drive; and which is more important, I never smoked in my ******* life, nor I will.
Containing hydrogen is a big problem. Hydrogen has the smallest atoms of any element, and those tiny atoms leak through the tiniest porosity or crack. Liquid fuel (gasoline) will stay put for a long time even if you (very unwisely) pour it into a metal bucket and drape some aluminium cooking foil over it. By contrast, a tank that seals well enough to retain hydrogen for a long time, is challenging and expensive to manufacture. If the hydrogen is under pressure, it will also be very heavy (and even more expensive).
The other thing is energy density. Hydrogen gas has wonderful energy density - energy stored per kilogram. But hydrogen gas is about eight thousand times less dense than gasoline, so (for the same amount of stored energy) your hydrogen car needs a tank eight thousand time bigger (volume) than your current car's gasoline tank. 😱
This is obviously utterly impractical, so the people pushing the hydrogen car idea always resort to using magic pixie dust to solve this little problem. The pixies will somehow figure out how to reduce the volume of hydrogen by a factor of 8000. (Perhaps a quick trip to the vicinity of a black hole will do the trick?)
Its very easy to get lost thinking about all the engineering details - you can look at so many trees that you completely lose sight of the forest. That's why I think it's important, every now and then, to stand well away from the problem, and look at it from a really big-picture perspective, as both I and Scott Wurcer have tried to do in this thread. Sometimes things become much easier to see, when you stand well back!
-Gnobuddy
Hydrogen to be practical as fuel is usually liquified, but there are still problems. We sell it back as a byproduct of liquefying air to make LN2 which the semi industry uses in mass quantities. In fact it's practical to run a rather large liquefaction plant, I wondered for a while why all the gas delivery trucks still showed up.
The tidal energy stuff is interesting in fact they are still trying to figure where all the spent energy goes. The daily cycle is about +-40usec and the net loss is what NIST has to account for in the length of the day (~23usec a year).
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