This article is also in the main a comment on Bert Bigelow's article Electric Cars? or Hydrogen Cars?
Bert the main problem you find with electric vehicle is the portability of sufficient power for extended range. Here hydrogen has the advantage because either sufficient fuel for a full days driving could be carried on the vehicle or 'recharging' would be a matter of minutes from an appropriately equipped station just as we use gasoline or diesel now. There is certainly a non-trivial problem of the chicken and egg nature in developing and placing infrastructure sufficiently widespread to make the system viable. But you and most comenters concentrated on the inefficiency of producing hydrogen through hydrocarbon gassification or coal or atomic powered electricity for hydrolysis. What is wrong with solar powered hydrolysis? It is virtually non-poluting (except maybe for what to do with all the oxygen gas) and who really cares about efficiency since, once the infrasturcture is in place, the energy is very nearly free. Using the sunlight from a square mile or two ( or 10 or 50 or two hundred) of the earths surface to seperate hydrogen out of the sea has got to be more efficient than using it to grow algae and plankton and then waiting for that algae and plankton to die, get burried, and turned into coal to be mined, crushed, and gassiffied into hydrogen and co2. Anyway you look at it when the energy is there nearly for free, actual efficiency isn't really an important consideration. ie. The fact that hydrogen enough to run my car three hundred miles costs more energy to produce than the gasoline to run my car three hundred miles is completely unimportant if the energy used to produce the hydrogen costs enough less than the energy needed to produce the gasoline.
I have read in a couple of places that the energy cost of a gallon of crude is now greater than the energy produced by a gallon of crude. Oil is an energy loser! It continues to be valuable soley because of its non-energy uses and its portability as energy. Solar power can never be an energy loser provided its infrastructure energy costs can be returned within the life of the infrastructure. Since the biggest thing keeping it from being more widely touted is the long life of the infrastructure which negates the 'continuing profit' motive, I think it safe to say that returning costs 'within the life of the infrastrucure' is not likely to be a problem.
True there is no free lunch and eventually even the sun will burn out but by the time that happens we will be elsewhere or non-existent and it will happen whether we use the energy or not, so for all practical purposes solar power has no cost except infrastructure and maintenance and I would find it incredible if that were truly significantly higher than any currently used form of electricity except perhaps hydro electric.
So my proposed solution to the 'energy problem'! Use solar energy to power all energy requirements directly where practical (nearly everywhere for stationary power loads) and use it to produce hydrogen from seawater for all portable power needs that are beyond the capability of portable batteries.
|
|
|
|
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 6
As for fixing electricity's transmission inefficiencies, I suggest avoiding most trasmission entirely by moving to solar power generated on location. Almost any single or two story building could generate enough electricity for even quite high usage in the space of its own roof top. TRue there is a fairly heavy infrastructure cost but the payback comes easily within the expected life of the building and equipment and since current electrical costs can only expect to go up, solar systems should move in the other direction as usage spreads the advantage would quickly swing conclusively toward solar power.
RE Solar micro generation; by the best figures I could find for solar power of a resicdences it would take approximately 525 square feet of todays relatively inefficient solar panels to power the relatively inefficient todays average household. I am quite sure that with some efficiencies of usage almost any house in America has enough roof space to totally supply its own power needs. That about 50,000 homes per square mile or about 6000 square miles to power a nice home for each and every American. In other words, 80 mile square of Arizona desert could easily power the whole country. Of course, if every place that could, would power itself, the big solar farm would not be necessary. The current powler sources would easily handle the excess requirements, including charging all those car batteries.