All posts tagged Energy.

sds:

hilker:

“A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.”

this has always been my problem with electric cars: they simply rearrange the origin of pollution instead of reducing it. the article also mentions the problems with increased demand of lithium, a potentially more harmful pollutant.

hot air also notes:

” Obama wants the US to decrease its electrical demand over the next several years as a means of conservation as we switch away from coal and other fossil fuels as a source for power.  Transferring cars from gasoline to electricity would vastly increase demand for power at the outlet, which would conflict with the decrease Obama wants to mandate.  The result would be prices skyrocketing even higher, and people unable to use their vehicles from a lack of ability to pay for recharging them.”

The reason electric car development is important is not because of the impact it will have tomorrow, but the impact it will have after that. By switching to a centralized energy source (such as power plants) as opposed to portable ones (like gas or even hydrogen) we make the process of changing energy sources very easy.

Changing the infrastructure from gas to natural gas or hydrogen would be extraordinarily hard. We already have a grid in place to transport energy across the nation. Right now most of that energy is produced from coal, hardly an improvement on gas, but in the future high efficiency fuel cells, solar cells, or nuclear plants could replace coal. When these changes are made no infrastructure changes will have to follow. The infrastructure is already there in the grid. We could rapidly develop new technologies and roll them out simply.

Look at browsers and HTML5. Right now HTML5 has a lot of great features that would be beneficial to everyone but to get HTML5 into the public infrastructure changes must be made; everyone must upgrade their browsers. Think my concept as the changes being made on the server side rather than the client side.

The biggest problem with electric cars is still not the fact that carbon emissions are differed to a different point in the energy chain but where the energy is stored. We currently have no good energy storage technologies (batteries). Lithium ion based technologies are the best but they are expensive, toxic, and have short lifespans.

Electric cars are the future but that future cannot start until battery technology advances. One of my worries as an American is that the US is not devoting enough resources to battery development. That is the next great breakthrough. All solar, wind, and nuclear development will be evolutionary from now on. There’s no great aha moment to be had there. Battery technology still has the chance to be a game changer and that’s an opportunity for America to remain the leader in future technology.

Currently I fervently believe plug-in hybrids are by far the best solution to the problem. Fuel cells will never be appropriate for cars (although they can make a great power plant) and like I said electric isn’t there yet, I am confident we will be there before long though. Even solutions like natural gas are probably not viable due to what will probably be very small uptake from the consumer population.

Plug-in hybrids offer a great stop-gap solution until battery technology matures. It provides a situation where our underdeveloped batteries can function in an environment while still having a backup of gas (a great energy storage medium).

I’d love to hear feedback and more discussion on this topic because it’s extremely important and very sensationalized by the media.

saramcpherson:

“Nuclear power is safe, and it’s clean!“  - John McCain

Actually… it’s both safe and clean. The problem with nuclear is the cost. Nuclear power is almost as expensive as solar.

You can’t compare Chernobyl to any American nuclear facility. Three Mile Island is a good example of the system working as it should. There was an issue in the reactor and it was properly shut down and contained.

Nobody mentions France either, France has an incredibly prolific nuclear power industry and has never had an accident.

If nuclear power was cheaper then I’d say build as many as we can and I actually know quite a bit about how this stuff works.

This seems pretty self-explanatory to me. (via squashed)

While I haven’t yet read this article (I will soon) I have some experience in this subject from school. The problem with fuel cells is that the most efficient ones, solid-oxide, require very high operating temperatures, about 500C. This results in a long warm up time to get ready to produce power as well as an extremely hot device sitting inside of your car. Because of their nature SOFCs are more suited to be built in large blocks, for lack of a better term. This means that SFOCs are more suited to a more traditional power plant type setup. The other benefit of SFOCs is that you can use methane (CH₄) as fuel instead of pure hydrogen (H₂). Methane is much easier to produce, or mine, then pure hydrogen which often requires more energy to produce then is extractable.

The other issue with fuel cells in cars is infrastructure. In order to implement fuel cell vehicles you would have to come up with a safe containment system. Liquid hydrogen is the easiest way to transport large amounts but this is a volatile and dangerous substance. If we were to switch to electric vehicles with a centralized power system we could use existing infrastructure. In the situation where the infrastructure would need to be upgraded a central power plant could be enhanced rather then an entire network. This would allow for any type of fuel to generate electricity, be it nuclear, solar, fossil, bio, or some unknown energy producing process.

(via marco)