Same place everyone seems to think the electricity will come from for all the battery manufacturing plants, and for all the battery powered cars.

There are many ways to get the hydrogen necessary with no methods exceeding the challenges already faced in bringing oil to the pumps. And there are future methods around the corner that will become more efficient, such as using photosynthesis.

As for the power issue on either side, it's a step forward to eliminate the pollution from billions of tiny internal combustion engines, and concentrate the problem to thousands of power generation centers. The energy problems can't be solved overnight, but steps can be taken to continue our independence from oil based solutions. Tossing out an idea just because it's going to require a coal plant here or there is simply refusing to address the problem now, and once again going back to the "well, someone in the future will figure it out" mentality.

Coal plants? I guess someone went and made nuclear power illegal while I was sleeping?

Yes, I know there are issues with safety and waste, but newer designs are almost impossible to meltdown, and any waste issues pale in comparison, IMHO, to the air pollution caused by coal. To simply ignore the existence of a key component of most industrialized nations' energy portfolio is a bit disingenuous, especially when we're talking about air pollution.

Good luck having an adult discussion about nuclear power with the general public.

A while back, Iceland was talking about using geothermal energy to extract hydrogen, and then ship it, similarly to Liquified Gas tankers.

Uhhh.... pretty much, yeah. There has not been a new nuclear power plant put online in the U.S. in, oh, I don't know, thirty years? And not for lack of trying. The regulatory hurdles are pretty much impossible to overcome, and the general public is so unreasonably opposed that there is virtually no chance of getting approval for a new one.

tanstaafl.

Nah, all you need is a fold-up exercise bike and a dynamo. It may take a while though...

Other than that, I'd expect it would be easy to get a jump start; hmmmm, there's a patent idea: a device that you carry in your car, set to 'X joules' and it allows that much energy to flow from one EESU to another. Frankly I guess that running out of juice would be easier to deal with than running out of petrol.

Thankfully no. I was mostly pointing out to Doug that even is we did have no choice other then a few more coal power plants to get some oil burning cars off the road, it would probably be worth it in the long run.

My local utility company keeps a power plant listing showing where my power comes from. Only ~22% of it comes from coal, with ~53% coming from natural gas burning, ~15% from nuclear, ~8% from wind, and 0.4% from landfill methane.

The South Texas plant was brought online in 1988, so only 20 years ago. And with the Nuclear Power 2010 Program, regulations have been eased enough to allow Bellefonte to resume construction and come online sometime after 2017. Other projects on the table since 2005 are listed here.

Well, that is a glimmmer of good news. I was only trying to point out that hydrogen isn't a "free" solution. With current technology it takes more energy to produce the hydrogen to fuel the cars than the hydrogen in the cars can produce, and that power has to come from somewhere. The people looking at the world through rose-colored glasses frequently conclude that "...if only we could convert all our cars to run on hydrogen our pollution problems would be solved" when in truth, again given current technology and state of the infrastructure, the problem would be exacerbated because newer cars (i.e., any car manufactured in the 21st Century) burn cleaner than coal-fired power plants which, in most of the country, provide significant amounts of our electrical power. Coal plants are the fastest and cheapest to build and if there were a sudden upsurge in demand for electrical power, that's what we'd see.

tanstaafl.

Actually, you're right. An electric car doesn't just die when it runs out of juice, it just gets slower and slower.

Sure would help out those idiots that run outta gas in the fast lane and end up stopping there.

I suppose hydrogen fuel would have one advantage over alternatives: it can be "created" nearly pollution-free using desert sunshine, and then efficiently shipped (the pollution part) to where/when it's actually needed.

No coal, no atom-splitting, no peak-hour electric grid expansion, etc.. and a good use for the quarter of the USA (rough guesstimate) that is mostly hot (or cold) sunny desert.

Cheers

I doubt it, what happens when the only car you manage to flag down is a Hydrogen one? Or the other EESU doesn't enough charge to give away.

This device is a capacitor and not a battery. It'll just stop.

The Tesla they were testing on Top Gear 'just stopped' when it ran out as well.

The Tesla on Top Gear didn't actually run out of power. Top Gear pretended that it did to show what you'd have to do.

The discharge curve for most rechargeable battery technologies is pretty flat and then steep right at the end. You don't want to keep trying to drain your batteries more at this point anyway because you'll end up damaging them.

Hydrogen fuel cells are rechargeable batteries. Period. Efficient, light batteries, yes. But just batteries.

I think that that is the best way to explain the situation to the greenwashed.

is there truly any green energy?

i guess the truest green energy harps back to days of windmills and water wheels, where all the pats wee made from trees,

surely everything in the modern 'green' age is a trade off?

even if a car was capable of converting gases from the atmosphere what would it acheive? no doubt 1 billion cars, or however many there are, will one make a huge dent in the some gas or other and cause another global scare.

lets face it, we can all do our little bits, but unless there's some huge catastrophy that takes the world population to that of a few thousand years ago, and we all live in mud huts with no electric, no fossil fuels, etc, the planet will never again attain a level of true self sufficiency.

re the topic, this fuel cell thing, one thing i see no-one has mentioned is the cost of charging such a cell, the average fuel costs are high enough, but imagine dumping megawatts of electricity every year into a car, would it be any cheaper than filling up with petrol / gas every few hundred miles?

while it's an interesting subject, i don't think i'll be truly impressed until someone comes up with a vehicle which utilises perpetual motion / charging, ie, some kind of alternator which generates more power than the car uses.

Solar power comes to mind.

i thought about that as i was thinking my post, but... you still need to build the panels, how green is the manufacturing process? then you need batteries to store power, etc etc.

anyway, with only 3 official days of sunshine in the uk, i'm not sure loar would work!

my father-in-law has a 15m (height) wind turbine on his farm which is pretty pokey. cost is about £20k, 25% grant from the green energy people brought that down a bit. what he doesn't use on the farm goes back into the national grid, which in it's first 1/4 earned him £2k ! paid for in two years barring any major catastrophy. i think it's probably more green than most other options.

Not all solar power is photovoltaic.

The first thing that comes to mind is solar tower technology, where an array of mirrors reflect sunlight to a common collection point at the top of a tower where the heat melts a storage medium, frequently saltpeter. The environmental costs here involve building a tall tower, a (large) number of (large) mirrors with electronically controlled servos, and a mass of saltpeter, plus the workings of a steam turbine. Once it is built, there is no fuel needed.

The US has had one of these in operation (as a test) since '78, Spain recently constructed one that is providing 11MW, and South Africa has a plan for a 100MW tower. (In comparison, a typical nuclear reactor or coal-fired plant provides about 1000 MW.)

I recently watched this meeting of The Commonwealth Club and found the panel members to have many valid points.
The topic is 'Offshore Oil Drilling', but the panel members go after a broad spectrum of energy issues.
If you've got an hour to spend, have a look.

Yeah. But that is because it is at the top of a 15m pole.

There are small wind turbines that you can buy to fit onto your house. They're pretty useless however. One company make one that they quote as being able to generate 1.25KW but once you dig through the specifications you find out that you need around 15m/s windspeed to generate that. 15m/s is gale force 7. At the average wind speeds they quote it will generate less than 100W.

The unit costs around £2000 as well so it will take a long time to recoup that.

Ah! I see where you are coming from. I was thinking of hydrogen as a replacement for petrol in an internal combustion engine. Even so, with a closed-system hydrogen fuel cell, the electricity to recharge the fuel cell has to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is very likely to be more polluting than the gasoline engines it replaces.

tanstaafl.

Well, refining petroleum is in itself not particularly clean, and ICEs are about as efficient as they're going to get. Electricity production, on the other hand, can get a lot cleaner in a variety of ways and not link you to a specific technology.

It's important to note that using hydrogen as a combustion fuel sounds like a good idea, as the immediate conclusion is that it just produces water, but if the oxygen supply is air, it ends up creating a variety of nitrous oxides, most of which are toxic at various levels.

Based on this site, they broke down the CO2 and NOx output per mile of an average gas car, and an electric vehicle powered off the grid. Their summary is:

They have a full breakdown, and a link to the government reports on pollution output to back it up. It was the only thing I found in google, beyond a bunch of opinion pieces with no hard facts arguing either side.

Maybe there should be a reserve battery permanently installed with a switch operating like the reserve fuel tap on most motorbikes?

Finland is working on its next nuclear plant, Croatia has one or two in its long-term plans, and elsewhere in Europe public opinion is slowly turning...

Have I already linked this (I cannot find it)? Anyway, an article with good subsequent discussion in SciAm on "Solar Grand Plan". The guys claim that, with 400-500 G$ of subsidies over twenty-ish years (sounds like peanuts now, no?), US could get 90% of its electicity and 70% of total energy from solar plants. There are similar proposals for Euro-African cooperation.

The US already has its money tied up in bailing out the auto industry. It's would be a conflict of interest to back renewable energy.