So you think wind power is the answer ...

Gato_Solo said:
Once again...so what? You still haven't said anything to dissuade me from considering wind power as something desirable.
Click to expand...

I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from anything. I merely present facts and figures that one may make up their own mind. You have obviously made up yours; and others will make up theirs as well. Whether that is due to anything that you or I have presented is wholly up to them.
 
jimpeel said:
I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from anything. I merely present facts and figures that one may make up their own mind. You have obviously made up yours; and others will make up theirs as well. Whether that is due to anything that you or I have presented is wholly up to them.
Click to expand...

Maybe. But that is not the way it 'sounds'. The way I see it is every bit helps. I would love to see my country doing a little more
than 'lip service' when it comes to energy independence. That means more energy based on alternative 'fuels', such as nuclear, solar, wind, geo-thermal, hydro, hell...even tidal. Use oil, coal, and/or natural gas as the backup. Every watt created by a wind farm, nuclear plant, geothermal plant, dam, etc is one less watt necessary from fossile fuel generators. As long as you give your 'facts and figures' that are heavily negative, then where is the impetus to even try the other ways? Add that to the fact that the grid is nationwide, so a lack of wind in California can be supplanted by a strong wind in Maine, and it becomes much more viable than your 'facts and figures' would show. So...yes...I have a vested interest in these technologies. Mostly from a financial standpoint. More money stays in my pocket after the initial investment is done with (ten to twenty years, depending upon your generation tech and/or weather) to your home. Not saying that you have to stay in said home for the entire mortgage, either. The person you sell to can benefit as well...
 
Gato_Solo said:
Maybe. But that is not the way it 'sounds'. The way I see it is every bit helps. I would love to see my country doing a little more
than 'lip service' when it comes to energy independence. That means more energy based on alternative 'fuels', such as nuclear, solar, wind, geo-thermal, hydro, hell...even tidal.
Click to expand...


Take this for an example. I have always been a great proponent of hydrogen power. Hydrogen could be the wave of the future. Air and hydrogen in, H2O out. Sounds simple enough ... right?

Wrong.

They -- the great ubiquitous "they" -- say that global warming gases are heating up the planet in dangerous ways. They say that CO2 is the main culprit but CO2 makes up but a tiny fraction of the global warming gases. Water vapor makes up 96%+ of the global warming gases.

So now imagine billions of cars, standing power plants, utilities, etc. run on hydrogen all spewing megatonnes of water vapor into the atmosphere 24/7/365.

So my unshakable faith in hydrogen as the wave of the future was -- shaken. Now, I have serious reservations as to whether hydrogen could be the end-all, be-all that I thought it was and, like you, I saw it as the answer even if it were only part of that answer. Now, I have more research to do on something that I had researched to death; and I had become convinced that it was the silver bullet and that it was a perfect solution.

If one closes one's eyes so tightly that not even the least hint of light can penetrate then one will spend their days in total darkness and miss all that is out there from which they might learn. I had my eyes pretty tightly shut on the hydrogen issue but there was enough room for some light to creep through.
 
jimpeel said:
Take this for an example. I have always been a great proponent of hydrogen power. Hydrogen could be the wave of the future. Air and hydrogen in, H2O out. Sounds simple enough ... right?

Wrong.

They -- the great ubiquitous "they" -- say that global warming gases are heating up the planet in dangerous ways. They say that CO2 is the main culprit but CO2 makes up but a tiny fraction of the global warming gases. Water vapor makes up 96%+ of the global warming gases.

So now imagine billions of cars, standing power plants, utilities, etc. run on hydrogen all spewing megatonnes of water vapor into the atmosphere 24/7/365.

So my unshakable faith in hydrogen as the wave of the future was -- shaken. Now, I have serious reservations as to whether hydrogen could be the end-all, be-all that I thought it was and, like you, I saw it as the answer even if it were only part of that answer. Now, I have more research to do on something that I had researched to death; and I had become convinced that it was the silver bullet and that it was a perfect solution.

If one closes one's eyes so tightly that not even the least hint of light can penetrate then one will spend their days in total darkness and miss all that is out there from which they might learn. I had my eyes pretty tightly shut on the hydrogen issue but there was enough room for some light to creep through.
Click to expand...

Not hydrogen. Hydro-electric. There's not enough research to do a sustainable hydrogen reaction...yet. Get it to work on a continuous basis...with a stable magnetic field that doesn't consume all of its power, and you'd have something. As for "global warming', I do not buy into that myth. Never have. I do know the impact of energy dependence, however, and have been aware since the 1970s...you know. That whole 'embargo' thing?
 
Gato_Solo said:
Not hydrogen. Hydro-electric. There's not enough research to do a sustainable hydrogen reaction...yet. Get it to work on a continuous basis...with a stable magnetic field that doesn't consume all of its power, and you'd have something. As for "global warming', I do not buy into that myth. Never have. I do know the impact of energy dependence, however, and have been aware since the 1970s...you know. That whole 'embargo' thing?
Click to expand...

Don't know what you are thinking of but hydro-electric kinda looks like this:

w14.jpg


I believe you are thinking of sustained fusion reaction.

The biggest problem with hydrogen is finding a reliably safe way of storing it. Hydrides look like the most promising way yet.

Hydrogen fuel cells for electrical power go up on the space shuttle every flight. There are plenty of prototype cars and other vehicles which run on hydrogen.
 
jimpeel said:
Don't know what you are thinking of but hydro-electric kinda looks like this:
Click to expand...

Thats exactly what I was thinking. You brought up hydrogen, not me, which is why I segued into nuclear fusion. I do know the difference. ;)

jimpeel said:
The biggest problem with hydrogen is finding a reliably safe way of storing it. Hydrides look like the most promising way yet.

Hydrogen fuel cells for electrical power go up on the space shuttle every flight. There are plenty of prototype cars and other vehicles which run on hydrogen.
Click to expand...

Hydrogen has gotten a bad rap since the Hindenberg. Its not the storage thats the problem. Its the dispensing. Once in a pressurized cylinder, its pretty benign. Then again, so is gasoline. Hydrogen is more explosive, but neither is truly safe. It all comes down to the level of safety each person desires. If hydrogen and gasoline availability were reversed, we'd be having this discussion about gasoline. :shrug:
 
Do you have data that hydrogen is more explosive than gasoline, Gato? I'm not so sure about that. I do know that natural gas and gasoline are two of the best (and cheapest) sources of hydrogen, which makes it a bit of a self-defeating proposition.
 
Gato_Solo said:
Thats exactly what I was thinking. You brought up hydrogen, not me, which is why I segued into nuclear fusion. I do know the difference. ;)
Click to expand...

I'm confused. Other than having the same first five letters; how are hydrogen and hydro-electric, in even the most remote way, related -- unless you are willing to take the discussion to the molecular level?

Hydrogen cells BURN hydrogen and the resulting output is water.

Fusion causes a reaction at the elemental level. ie: Hydrogen in, helium out.

There is no relation whatsoever other than the media, hydrogen, which is used.
 
chcr said:
Do you have data that hydrogen is more explosive than gasoline, Gato? I'm not so sure about that. I do know that natural gas and gasoline are two of the best (and cheapest) sources of hydrogen, which makes it a bit of a self-defeating proposition.
Click to expand...

Actually, the best source of hydrogen is the ocean. Getting it out of the ocean is the problem.
 
A great read on hydrogen. There are numerous links at the bottom of the article as well.

http://mb-soft.com/public2/hydrogen.html

You can look up something called the Electrochemical Equivalent of Hydrogen in many Reference books. It is the amount of electrical energy that exists in the chemical bonding of Hydrogen atoms inside of the molecules it exists in, such as water, H2O. Those Reference books show that 12,062.183 ampere-hours of electrical energy is required to release a single pound of Hydrogen from any chemical compound. It turns out that there are no "perfect" devices to do this, and the best tend to be around 20% efficient at getting the Hydrogen released, regarding the electricity used. So we actually need to use up around 60,000 ampere-hours of electrical energy in order to get one pound of Hydrogen released (and therefore available as a fuel). That is a LOT of electricity! Your kitchen toaster uses around 15 amps of electricity, for maybe 30 seconds. Here, we are talking about 100 amperes of electricity being used continuously for 600 hours or 25 days!

So, proponents of "the coming Hydrogen economy" brag about the fact that Hydrogen CAN be produced by electrolyzing water to separate it into Hydrogen and Oxygen gases. Then they brag about the fact that when Hydrogen burns, it combines with Oxygen to create "lots of power, and just water vapor". Those statements are totally true, and nearly everyone seems to totally trust the people pushing Hydrogen and Fuel Cells, without asking the next, VERY IMPORTANT, question! Didn't Newton prove to us that we cannot have energy simply appear? That there is a Conservation of Energy? So, if we have to SEPARATE the Hydrogen from the water to start with, doesn't it seem obvious that it has to require AT LEAST AS MUCH energy as will later be released when the Hydrogen again winds up as part of water? How come nobody asks this really obvious question???

...

Logistics

Hydrogen does have some more significant drawbacks. One of the most difficult to deal with is that it is such a light gas! A pound of Hydrogen contains around 61,000 Btus of latent energy in it, which seems like a lot! For comparison, a pound of regular gasoline only contains around 20,500 Btus in it! Sounds good!

However, a pound of Hydrogen is HUGE! At standard atmospheric pressure and temperature, it takes up around 190 cubic feet of space. In contrast, that pound of gasoline only takes up about 1/50 of a cubic foot. Hydrogen gas takes up around 10,000 times the space that gasoline does!

For the record, we are NOT suggesting that gasoline is any great fuel source. It IS convenient, and compact, true. But it causes pollution of many sorts, including adding large amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which directly contributes to global warming. So this is NOT a fan letter for gasoline! It is instead intended to present an accurate scientific discussion of Hydrogen as a fuel, where all the press reports we hear in the news seem to always leave some really important stuff out!

Consider a mid-sized car, traveling at 60 mph down an Interstate Highway. It is well known (and easy to calculate) that roughly 40 actual horsepower is needed to maintain a constant speed. A horsepower is equal to 2544 Btu/hr, so we are talking about 102,000 Btu/hr of "actual" energy/work. For an hour's driving, we would therefore need 102,000 Btu of output energy. (A gasoline engine would use maybe 3 gallons of gasoline during that hour's driving (20 miles/gallon) which actually contained about 378,000 Btu of energy, but the engine/car efficiency is only around 25% to create the 102,000 Btu of output work.) Consider now that a cubic foot of Hydrogen (not compressed) only contains 319 Btu per cubic foot. That hour of driving would therefore require over 1,000 cubic feet of the Hydrogen.

We can say this same thing in terms of "gallons". A gallon of gasoline contains around 6 pounds, and has 126,000 Btus of energy in it. A gallon of hydrogen (gas) only contains around 40 Btus in it. Quite a difference! Instead of a two cubic foot gasoline tank (15 gallons) in your car, you would need a tank more than 3,000 times bigger, over 6,000 cubic feet, for the equivalent Hydrogen! That's a little more than TWO standard semi trailers (8'wide x 8'high x 45' long or 2900 cubic feet each). Pretty big gas tank!

Well, that is obviously not going to happen! So, the many ongoing explorations into using Hydrogen as a fuel always involve carrying HIGHLY COMPRESSED Hydrogen in very thick, heavy tanks. If you have ever seen the kinds of tanks used for the Oxygen for a worker's oxyacetylene cutting torch, that's the kind. Such tanks can hold Hydrogen at around 100 times atmospheric pressure, or 1500 PSI, an extremely high pressure (or even higher) (We will later mention even higher pressure hydrogen tanks at 3000 PSI).

Well, at 100 times atmospheric pressure, the Ideal Gas Law tells us that the Hydrogen would now only take up 2900/100 or 29 cubic feet. That works out to around 60 of those (fairly large) high pressure storage tanks (to match the effective capacity of the 15 gallon gasoline tank.). Each tank is very massive to withstand the very high pressure, and each weighs nearly 100 pounds empty. (And around 1/4 pound more when filled with Hydrogen!) So the normal American car which presently weighs around 2800 pounds would have around an extra 6,000 pounds added, so the vehicle would now weigh more than three times as much as current cars! (This tremendously affects acceleration, handling and other performance, and it would be like that car pulling a huge 6,000 pound trailer behind it.

...

Flame Speed

Even if all the other hurdles are overcome regarding using Hydrogen as a fuel, it seems to have yet another disadvantage, one that it shares with most other gaseous fuels: the speed at which a flame front travels is rather slow for the purposes of conventional engines. With an ideal Hydrogen-air mixture, a flame front can travel at around 8 feet/second. Mark's Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, Section 7, Gaseous Fuels, graph For comparison, a gasoline-air mixture creates a flame front speed that ranges from around 70 feet/second up to around 170 feet/second in normal engines. Mark's Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, Section 9, Internal Combustion Engines, Flame Speed.

Consider the inside of an engine cylinder in a normal car engine traveling down the highway. The engine may be rotating at 2,000 rpm, or 33 revolutions per second. The piston must therefore move upward and downward 33 times every second, and its speed in the middle of its stroke is around 45 feet/second. If a fuel burning in the cylinder is to actually push down on the piston, in order to do actual work in propelling the vehicle, the fuel-air mixture needs to burn at a speed faster than the piston is moving! Otherwise, the slow-burning mixture would actually act to SLOW DOWN the piston! It would not only not do productive work, but it would require work FROM the piston.

The fact that a Hydrogen-air mixture has a flame-front speed of around 1/10 that of a gasoline-air mixture seems to indicate that only a very slowly moving mechanism could be used. That might be possible, but it suggests that yet another hurdle might lie in front of Hydrogen ever becoming a common motor fuel.
Click to expand...
 
jimpeel said:
Actually, the best source of hydrogen is the ocean. Getting it out of the ocean is the problem.
Click to expand...

The ocean is the most plentiful source. As you say, getting hydrogen from seawater is the problem. It's relatively easy to extract it from gasoline and natural gas.

Actually, the "best" source may be the gas giants. They're mostly hydrogen already. Once again, getting it will be the problem. There's even more on (in?) the sun, but getting that is problematic at best. ;)
 
jimpeel said:
I'm confused. Other than having the same first five letters; how are hydrogen and hydro-electric, in even the most remote way, related -- unless you are willing to take the discussion to the molecular level?

Hydrogen cells BURN hydrogen and the resulting output is water.

Fusion causes a reaction at the elemental level. ie: Hydrogen in, helium out.

There is no relation whatsoever other than the media, hydrogen, which is used.
Click to expand...

Okay...Everything I mentioned originally has one common theme. If you stop trying to read into it, and just read it, I'm sure it'll click. Once again...Solar, Wind, and Hydro all have one thing in common.
 
Gato_Solo said:
Okay...Everything I mentioned originally has one common theme. If you stop trying to read into it, and just read it, I'm sure it'll click. Once again...Solar, Wind, and Hydro all have one thing in common.
Click to expand...

The common theme is lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits.

Just try to build a solar farm, wind farm, or hydro-electric dam and see how long it takes, and how much you will spend, fighting the proponents of the Tortoise, the Eagle, and the Snail Darter.
 
jimpeel said:
The common theme is lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits.

Just try to build a solar farm, wind farm, or hydro-electric dam and see how long it takes, and how much you will spend, fighting the proponents of the Tortoise, the Eagle, and the Snail Darter.
Click to expand...

Nope. There are lawsuits for new coal-fired and NG plants as well.
 
my though on solar is,,,,
we already have pretty much enough electricity in most places,
we first need to supplement new establishments with solar, and give
more option s for it for the consumer.
Just like the new lights....I've already cut my consumption in half.

I couldn't care about global warming ATM, but I do like 200 less dollars on my bill.
 
jimpeel said:
I thought that went without saying.
Click to expand...

My main point is this...there are clean, safe energy sources. That we do not use them speaks of a fundamental flaw in human thinking. Even the fanatics have a problem with clean energy, or they wouldn't protest hydro, wind farms, or, yes, solar farms. This is mirrored on the far right by the "NIMBY" crowd. If every house in the US had a wind generator, given the room, how much would we be polluting through the use of fossile fuels? Please spare me the "The wind ain't always blowing" speech. It is always blowing. Just not in the same places at the same times.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top