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January 08
There’s so much great new alternative energy technology, but a lot of it’s not getting any coverage from the MSM. Instead of relying on those worthless do-nothings, let’s start our own compendium of lesser-know green solutions. Here we go…
Big Auto is nothing but lies, lies, lies. Working hard to reduce fuel consumption my ass. Here are two companies that have blown the mainstream auto industry’s attempts at fuel efficiency out of the water:
Aptera - Their kick-ass three-wheel hybrid-electric gets 120 mpg on a bad day, as in after the batteries are totally dead and you’re just running on gas. Under normal conditions, you should expect even better mileage. Way better.
Tesla Motors - Their all-electric roadster goes 0-60 in 4 seconds, can go 220 mi per charge, and costs less than $0.02/mi to charge.
While cruising the countryside in our green speed demons, why not turn our landfills into something useful? Check it:
Plasma gasification - Garbage goes in plasma torch. Resulting gas is a fuel to be used like natural gas to generate electricity. It’s got some environmental downsides, but then again, so do landfills. Time will tell if it’s a viable technology.
Garbage-to-oil - This one’s been around, but I think most people still haven’t heard about it. It’s also controversial, both in its claims and its benefits. This gist is this: a company called Changing World Technologies has a method to convert your junk into Texas light crude. Garbage goes in, oil comes out, plus some other goodies like water and inorganics. The process is not unlike an accelerated version of what goes on under the earth to make oil. What sucks: The company markets this as a way to replace foreign oil for use in cars/industry, which doesn’t do anything to help the greenhouse problem. What’s cool: Someday the planet will be out of oil. Ready to give up plastic? How about any of the products of modern organic chemistry, i.e., drugs, solvents? These things owe their existence in large part to oil. The bi-products of the oil refining process are important basic chemicals (benzene, etc.) used to synthesize all sorts of useful stuff. If you want better living through chemistry, then to some degree, you want oil. I’m not saying burn it. I’m saying make some useful things and put the rest back in the ground.
Oh, and why are we sitting on our asses waiting for maximum-efficiency photovoltaics to reach the market? We already have a totally rockin’ solar solution:
Solar troughs - It’s so freaking simple. You get a real long parabolic mirror and put it in the desert. Anything you put at the focus of that parabola is going to get hot as shit. So… put something in there that can take a lot of heat. Water? Think hotter. Try salt. Heat that stuff until its molten. Now it’s liquid so you can pipe it around. Send it circulating through a bunch of water, put a turbine over that stuff, and voila! Want to store your energy instead of spending it right away (after all, the sun don’t shine at night!)? Screw fuel cells! Heat’s easy to store! Run your pipes through some huge concrete blocks — yes, concrete! — they’ll stay hot all night.
Got any other “underground” alternative technologies we should know about?
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6 Responses to “Alternative Energy Technologies You Might Not Know About”
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setting saltwater on fire & making hydrogen: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/14/saltwater.fire/index.html
and badass electric cars. you just can’t buy them yet: http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/
Very, very cool. I had not heard of the salt water thing. It’s wonderful that people still stumble onto these sorts of discoveries. The electric car link reminded me of a company I found that’s pursuing hybrid big-rig commercial trucks. Wish I could remember the name. Little help?
I’m pretty positive that burning salt water isn’t a viable means of generating energy. You’ve got to keep running the RF generator, which takes more energy than you stand to gain from burning the hydrogen you get. (In other words, there’s no way that little Sterling engine in some of the YouTube videos could power the RF generator that’s driving the whole thing.) Certainly you can tweak the radio wave frequency, salt mixture, etc. to optimize efficiency, but there’s no way this gets you over the hump.
How do I know? Well, you started with salt water, you put in some energy, you got some hydrogen and oxygen, you released some energy via combustion, and then you got salt and water vapor back out. Suppose you had gotten salt water in the end (as opposed to separated salt and water). That would be a complete cycle, requiring that energy input is equal to energy output. Typical combustion isn’t cyclic in this sense: e.g., when you burn wood, you get ash plus some gases. Gases + ashes is WAY more thermodynamically favorable than wood itself (i.e., the constituent matter has reached a lower energy state overall) — hence why a little match can set a yule log ablaze for hours, and all you did was flick your wrist to light the match. But this isn’t the case for the salt water experiment. In fact, it’s the opposite. Ashes won’t spontaneously form back into a log. However, salt DOES spontaneously dissolve into water. The end products of burning salt water — separate H2O and NaCl — are thermodynamically unfavorable compared to their initial state! It costs energy!
On the other hand, as you suggested, the salt water technique might lead to useful inovations for storing energy (i.e., extracting hydrogen) for later use in fuel cells or combustion. In generating energy, we obviously seek a net gain for our efforts; in storing energy, we’re always willing (forced, really) to settle for losses.
What appears to be happening is essentially an AC (alternating current) version of electrolysis, which, if you think back to high school chem lab, is just a ridiculously simple way to separate H & O from H2O. Maybe if you find just that right mix of frequency & salts, you can improve upon the efficiency of current electrolysis techniques. Far-fetched, to be sure, but I wouldn’t write it off entirely. Of course, since we want to store hydrogen gas, it’d better not be combusting prematurely. Perhaps you could inundate the surface of the salt water with a jet of inert gas to keep the H’s far enough away from the O’s, so that they don’t combust. Then some crafty apparatus could sort the gases into separate containers.
yeah, the saltwater thing isn’t at all cost-effective, but i thought it was pretty fascinating all the same.
no idea what car company you’re thinking of, but i’m blown away by the phoenix truck! 95 mph with 4 passengers & a full payload?!?! and the offboard charger does 95% in 10 minutes! no gas! ever!
Read about a new storage technology recently where solar energy is used to compress gas (air? I can’t remember) in underground caverns. Then released to turbines on demand. Elegant in its simplicity, I wonder if it is a more efficient transformation than electrolysis. Sure ain’t too portable though…
Also gets us away from the hydogenhype. One must understand that H is just a better battery, and hydrogen without renewables is just, well, worthless.
Colin, thanks for mentioning “hydrogenhype.” A very large portion of the public doesn’t really understand fuel cell technology. I think a lot of it has to do with the name “fuel cell” itself. When you think of “fuel,” like gas, the work’s already been done for us (by the sun, ultimately) of putting energy into oil for us to extract. Additionally, if you think of a “cell,” like a solar cell, you think of capturing energy for immediate use.
Here’s an example that drives me up the wall every time I fly and inevitably end up looking at those stupid Hammacher-Schlemmer catalogs:
http://www.hammacher.com/publish/64680.asp
“Decomposition of water in a fuel cell!” Oh my god, what a load! The person writing the description thinks the fuel cell runs backwards, and that the solar panel is just on there… for looks?!
I excuse folks of all sorts of ignorances — after all, there’s a lot of science out there, and none of it’s “easy.” But it’s really, truly crucial that the public realizes that hydrogen is, as you say, “just a ‘better’ battery” — one that you have to charge the first time (and every other time) you use it.
As for pneumatic energy storage, I sort of like the idea. Foremost, you can pump up a holding tank faster than you can charge up a battery (think of pneumatic power tools vs. battery operated). This would be sweet for cars, because you could re-charge in a fraction of the time. Unfortunately, energy density is a bitch (again, think of pneumatic vs. battery power tools). I’m thinking there’s no way you’d ever make a pneumatic car practical, just on account of size/weight constraints. But what about having energy on reserve for, say, a few thousand homes? We already have a big-ass underground cavern that currently holds almost all of the world’s helium (the Bush Dome). Soon, however, that thing’ll be empty. Why not pump it full of something else and cap it with a turbine?
(Bush Dome: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004012826_helium14.html)
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