Hydrogen from a AAA cell?

You can't do any other. You *are* the lowest common denominator.

Slither away now.

That is really, really scary.

te:

Probably during the day, when photovoltaic solar power is available. Your p arking lot at work will be able to supply the power and charge you for it.

convenient way to store large amounts of energy, you also have a rather dangerous item.

make more sense to have reasonable storage at the user site (sort of like t he electric car solution, except we need something realistic, practical, lo ng-lasting, and cheap).

It doesn't have to be all that long-lasting - cars wear out - nor all that cheap since fossil carbon is getting progressively more expensive as we exh aust the easily accessible deposits and have to spend more on digging up th e less accessible deposits, not to mention the threat that the world will s tart charging a realistic price for the right to discharge CO2 into the atm osphere.

In the meantime, some start-up is claiming to have halved the cost and mass of Li-ion batteries (per kilowatt-hour stored) by eliminating the liquid e lectrolyte and replacing it with a deposited film ...

One of these "improvements" will eventually turn out to be real ...

fossil carbon, it will get to be more expensive, and it will eventually be cheaper to generate electricity from sunlight. Using renewable energy to e lectrolyse water to hydrogen (and oxygen) will then make more sense.

ght to generate electricity, and use that to split water to get hydrogen fo r later use in fuel cells. There are too many inefficiencies, too many dif ficulties with storage, and too many better ways to achieve a similar effec t.

bacteria to produce ethanol (or at least sugar) directly are the most promi sing direction at the moment. This gives you a simple and easily portable fuel with high energy density, high compatibility with existing usage (i.e. , car engines), and can be used in fuel cells. Ethanol has many advantages over hydrogen here.

directly for charging batteries), then atomic power is a better choice in many cases - it's the only technology that gives reliable continuous power generation with a high enough power-to-area ratio to compete with fossil fu els.

US power grid. Once it is in the grid no one cares where it comes from.

mainstream and coal, gas and nuclear are a thing of the past.

But not enough atmosphere to let us keep on dumping the CO2 there. You lack the education to appreciate why this is a bad idea, but climate change is making the defect of this approach progressively more obvious.

t rare. Fusion, thorium, lithium, like that. Concentrated, 24/7, bird-frien dly power.

And 100,000 years worth of dangerously radioactive waste. There are loads o f good ideas for getting rid of it, but none good enough to make it into pr actice, and we've got some fifty years worth of waste built up already.

Nuclear my be friendly to this generation of birds, but it's going to be to ugh on subsequent generations of everything, including us.

continuous

with

That is nice. Now where is the energy going to come from on a cold winter night? Storing energy in small amounts is ok, but for a small city for a cold winter night there is a BIG problem without any credible solution. Well maybe hydroelectric, but there is nowhere near enough of it.

Keep telling your self that. Then run the energy numbers carefully. It ain't really there and never was.

?-)

relay

Finally, something cogent.

Thanks.

?-)

directly for charging batteries), then atomic power is a better choice in many cases - it's the only technology that gives reliable continuous power generation with a high enough power-to-area ratio to compete with fossil fu els.

US power grid. Once it is in the grid no one cares where it comes from.

r night? Storing energy in small amounts is ok, but for a small city for a cold winter night there is a BIG problem without any credible solution.

There is a credible solution - well-insulated aka super-insulated houses an d apartments.

Thermal solar can store enough energy - as heat - to keep up supplies over- night.

Because you store the energy before you convert it to electricity, it's a w hole lot cheaper than the various sorts of pumped storage.

mainstream and coal, gas and nuclear are a thing of the past.

Photovoltaic won't hack it on it's own, but throw in about 20% thermal sola r and you've got a viable solution.

ain't really there and never was.

You clearly haven't seen the numbers run with thermal solar in the mix.

g with the waste from the nuclear plant. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of man, but we've been searching for a an acceptable solution for some fifty y ears now and still haven't come up with anything that anybody has turned in to a working repository that looks as if it might last the necessary thousa nds of years.

Alas, the feedstock (natural uranium) is toxic, so there's also toxic hazar d beyind thousands of years BEFORE any human intervention. Waste disposal is a difficult pol itical problem, but not a difficult technical problem (unless you want to bore into a subdu ction zone to get megayears of storage assurance).

Current prudent waste management is based on inspection, and that has unfor tunate long-term costs. It's already nearly unmanageable, but only because curren t practice is stupid, not because it's unsafe. Trying to pin down safety in a future (different) disposal regime, and assure safety as good as a heavily- inspected above-ground storage scheme, is a political hot-potato, because any and all parties can object on hundreds of (possibly frivolous) grounds, and tie up the permit process for decades. Ask me how I know this...

This is misleading: the containment vessel of a nuclear reactor is too strong for a hydrogen explosion to breach it (and such an explosion was not the issue, at Fukushima, but rather the inadequate cooling after backup equipment was inundated). Remember, the reaction delivers zero energy when the gas is pure hydrogen, and zero energy when the gas is pure air; there's a maximum energy somewhere in the middle, and you can plan for that!

I recently drove from one side of California to the other, 190 miles in about 3 hours, ascending over 7200 feet in the process, only stopping once for a few minutes to get snacks. Ran the a/c through the Central Valley. Try that in a Tesla or in a Leaf.

Den fredag den 29. august 2014 00.37.42 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

ion is

o augment your photovoltaic system, I'd say the time would be around sunse t.

ed near your work-place. You'd need a work-place charging system that bille d you for the current drawn by your car, but there's nothing particularly d ifficult about setting that up - it's just small scale remote metering...

that for yourself?

Its seems that when it comes to electric it must do everything. if it is no t a very fast nimble sportscar, that comfortable seats 8, can tow a yatch, do 800miles on a charge, comes with a charging station on every corner, has no parts that wear out, inexpensive, good looking, it is dismissed as an i dea that will never work

-Lasse

Absurd. Doing the job of the family sedan is a start, though.

Den fredag den 29. august 2014 01.05.00 UTC+2 skrev snipped-for-privacy@attt.bizz:

uction is

r to augment your photovoltaic system, I'd say the time would be around su nset.

arked near your work-place. You'd need a work-place charging system that bi lled you for the current drawn by your car, but there's nothing particularl y difficult about setting that up - it's just small scale remote metering.. .

of that for yourself?

not a very fast nimble sportscar, that comfortable seats 8, can tow a yatc h, do 800miles on a charge, comes with a charging station on every corner, has no parts that wear out, inexpensive, good looking, it is dismissed as a n idea that will never work

if you expect to take it on a cross country vacation range is a problem.

but for a small car to zip around the city is would work just fine

-Lasse

My Audi is a small car that zips around the city just fine. And it's a great highway car and a great ski car, which no electric car currently is.

Yes, I do expect to take the family sedan on a cross-country vacation

- 600mi at a crack, minimum. That's what they're for.

So I have to buy two? Yes, absurd!

I'm not sure why you are even discussing this with these guys. They know what an electric car can and can't do. They also know that most families have multiple cars and that cars in general are asked to do many, very different tasks. So even petroleum powered cars are designed with different purposes in mind. No car does 100%. There will always be some load that is too large or you will have one more person than your car holds or the trip will be a bit longer than a tank of fuel or you just won't want to take this vehicle on the trip because it uses too much fuel or...

Electric cars are very suitable for some 90% of the driving that most people do. The odd trip that is longer than the electric car's range or needs one more seat than the electric car has or requires you to carry something or tow something that is a bit more than your electric car can handle will mean that once or twice a year you will need to borrow or rent a vehicle designed for the larger load or more people or the longer range or use public transportation once in a while. (oh the horror!)

This country was ideal for the automobile. We have longer distances between population centers and very low cost fuel, so gas cars have been ideal for a long time... well, the first 50 years of autos anyway.... until they realized the pollution was choking our cities. We have improved that some, but it is still a problem. But the fuel issue is one we can deal with quite so easily. So electric cars are inevitable. Most of the people arguing about this won't really be affected... they won't be driving in another 10 or 20 years when electric dominates... lol

So, do you own an electric car? ...or are you just another lefty hypocrite? (no need to answer)

Maybe 90% could be done with a Tesla but then there's that 10%. No, I do want one (or two cars for two drivers) that do it all. That's what I have now. Buying a third is *not* an option.

Nothing has changed.

A lie.

Nonsense. Pollution is rarely a problem.

Yet another lie.

Stupid.

Yet another paragraph full of lies.

Not if they're behind an induction generator or DFIG. These operate like an automatic transmission and let the mechanical system slip wrt the electrical system.

Anything. A fault on the system, a brief lull in the wind that ends up triggering under frequency tripping if other wind/solar plants...

Everything is either an engineering problem or a financial problem. None of this stuff is unsolvable, but it will take time and money, and the basic architecture if the power system will have to change.