Hybrid cars

I agree with that. Methane has more issues in the deployment end but can be
made from a wider variety of waste products and with less processing.
Ethanol comes only from diverting food for people or feed for livestock. It
just doesn't make sense to burn food to power cars. (Biodiesel has the same
problem - it is diverted foodstuff.)

Mike

 

Exactly so - that nasty Second Law of Thermodynamics (in the form of the
Carnot ratio) again.

Mike

 

Alcohol is a new energy source. The plants that are grown convert solar
energy into carbohydrates by photosynthesis. The problem is that
conventional farming uses fertilizers made from natural gas and that
farm machinery uses oil and that the distillery uses coal or oil or
natural gas. Ideally you want to grow plants that don't need much in
the way of fertilizer or cultivation and are easily converted into
alcohol or oil.

Serious production of alcohol or bio diesel would involve developing new
crops for this purpose. The crops grown today were developed to produce
food.

John Mara

 

The carbon dioxide released by burning alcohol came from the air by way
of photosynthesis and is being released back into the air where it will
again be converted into carbohydrates by photosynthesis.

The problem with fossil fuel is that the carbon dioxide released was
taken from the air by photosynthesis millions of years ago and is now
being released.

John Mara

 

Sadly, wind and solar fall into the category of the least desirable of all
forms of generation, "intermittent generation." Utility electricity as we
know it is entirely on-demand; we don't have to schedule when we turn lights
on and off. In contrast, public grids are a remarkably delicate real-time
balance of generation, loss and load. Some "peaking" generation must always
be held in reserve to maintain the balance, while "base" generation like
coal, nuclear and hydro provide the cheaper electricity to meet the expected
minimum demand. As used today, solar and wind do not fit into this at all.
If base generation is like public transportation and peaking generation is
like private cars, intermittent generation is like hitchhiking. Maybe it
will get you where you are going, but you can't count on it. Worse, factors
that affect one wind or solar site will likely affect all the neighboring
sites in the same way at about the same time.

(The following is specific to US regulations, where present-day FERC rules
demand energy producers and energy suppliers - the people who send you the
bill - must be entirely separate.) Wind farm operators in the US usually
sell only a small fraction of their expected capacity because a broken
promise in electricity delivery means huge penalties. The energy must be
replaced by energy suppliers and the shortfall must be replaced from the
expensive "spot market." By careful estimation of just how much they can
produce some wind farm operators are able to make a profit. Others are not.

In the end, intermittent generation has to be excluded from calculations of
capacity margin. That means that the same amount of peaking capacity has to
be present. Wind or solar may reduce the consumption of natural gas, the
fuel of choice for peaking plants. What it can't do is reduce the ultimate
cost of electricity, since the peaking plants have pretty much fixed
overhead and the costs are simply shifted to whatever power is ultimately
sold... and as long as we aren't scheduling our electricity usage, we need
peaking power. The effect is to increase the overall cost of electricity,
since the energy consumers - you and I - must pay for the construction and
maintenance of the intermittent generation sites in addition to the base and
peaking plants.

All this makes no more sense in an intuitive way than it does you, and I've
worked at an electric utility for two decades. When I started we had our own
generation and could at least coordinate intermittent generation into the
mix. Now leaking information between production and delivery that might
accomplish that means federal prison even for schlubs like me. My #2 son has
it right: "There are two types of 'sense.' There's 'common sense' and
there's 'business sense.'"

Mike

 

And an engine with low horsepower has to work much harder during hard
acceleration or going up steep hills, greatly reducing its efficiency. As I
said, horsepower doesn't have nearly as much to do with it as gearing,
aerodynamics (at speed) and the individual driver.

 

True. But my point is the viscous coupling causes less power going from the
flywheel to the wheels, resulting in worse performance and gas mileage.

 

It will only be a new energy source when those things happen, and even
then, if it becomes a source, it will contribute only a small portion of
the nation's needs. Even today, all of the alcohol produced from land
that can be turned over to energy production will only provide 2 percent
of so of the national need, and that is ignoring the energy used for
production.

 

You touch on an important and volatile point - although the atmospheric CO2
levels are up 37% over medieval levels and about half of that has occurred
since the '50s, C14 dilution from the Industrial Effect is holding around
2-3%. The inescapable conclusion is that 90% of the additional carbon is
from surface sources, not from fossil fuels. If every molecule of fossil
carbon we've released into the atmosphere since 1897 (the base year for the
Industrial Effect) were removed, our atmospheric CO2 levels would still be
higher than they were when the Kyoto Protocol was drafted. My own guess is
that feedlot ranching is responsible for much of the sharp increase, but I
am finding historical records of meat production to be too thin to support
that guess.

Mike

 

The last two cars I got rid of were dumped because they had persistent
electrical system problems; mechanically they were still perfect. The
moving parts in the engine will outlive anything else in the car. The
only weak point in terms of moving parts is the automatic transmission,
in my experience.

 

Your entire argument would be correct if there was no way to store
electricity. That is what makes Ethanol so attractive--you use this
otherwise wasted intermittent and off-peak power to produce Ethanol,
then use the Ethanol when needed. It isn't that Ethanol is cheaper
or more efficient than gasoline, but rather, it allows us to make
use of cheaper night time and seasonal hydro power that might
otherwise go unused.

There are other ways of storing electric power. For example, at the
Coolie Dam in Washington, they use unsubscribed power to pump water
from the dam up into a former river channel that is at a higher
elevation. When they need extra power, they use the force of water
falling from this lake to run generators. Plans for similar such
electric storage operations have been planned along the Mississippi
River.

-john-

 

No, the current one.

 

NEVER going to happen. Ask the folks in Mass what happened when they
wanted to install windpower out in the bay. Teddy Kennedy and his
friends stood up and shouted NO. Same thing happens all over the
country. Falls into the NIMBA category. I live less than 25 miles from a
wind farm now and there are folks who bitch about it every day. The best
ones are folks who are moving into the area and start complaining about
it. There is also a planned farm just about 2 miles away that I am in
support of, BUT again there are a bunch who are totally against it. Some
of those don't even live in the area or own land here. BUT they get a
LOT of press.

Much better long term is MODERN design nuke power. Yes I said NUKE. No
emissions and very safe and stable regardless of the HYPE the anti nuke
folks cry. Oh and before folks bring them up - Chernobyl CANNOT happen
with modern designs, and only happened there because of the poor design
of the plant and even after all is said and done there were still fewer
deaths than on 9/11. And Three Mile island? NO deaths, NO radiation
leak, and in reality no real danger.

 

You mean the ban on research like the Korean who was touted as being the
leader in the field of stem cell research, that turned out to be FAKE,

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech/200512/kt2005121523485211780.htm
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/opinion/200512/kt2005122521314954040.htm
http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-12-30/36347.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/23/ustem.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/12/23/ixportaltop.html

Yup we need to spend more money on that.....
Oh and could you show me in the constitution where it says I am required
to pay for it?

or the cancer researcher who also faked his data,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4617372.stm

Oh maybe you mean the ID folks who tried to get it instituted as a
course, even when Bush stated he thought it was wrong. Even though it is
NOT against the constitution to teach it.

As for big oil. SO WHAT at least the man has REAL experience in business
and how it actually works, as opposed to the former president who NEVER
HELD A JOB in his life but just sucked on the governments tit as a
public servant.

 

Your welcome to have your own opinions, but before you bash this
administration on stem-cell research, remember this is the first
administration to ever open the doors to do any research at all on stem
cells. And they only put limits form aborted babies.

 

Where in the Constitution does it give you the right to post on USENET?
That's right, the Constitution doesn't touch on things that weren't invented
when it was written.

And I don't like spending money on war, but I have no choice.

It is unconstitutional to teach religion as science.

Yeah, every company Dumbya ran went bankrupt or lost money. That's really
something to brag about.

 

If your talking about Halliburton, the VP sold all that stock long
before he ran for VP. I say a political talk show about this subject and
they basically said there is no company other than Halliburton that could
take on a job as big as Irag, and this is why they get the contracts not
because of the VP.

I'm a big out doors person, spend every chance I can hiking, fishing,
boating, camping and ATV riding so nobody gets upset at seeing trash or
pollution as I do, but at the same time I understand that many policies were
putting a strangle hold on some of are companies to compete with the world
market. If you close down are companies because of some minor things and
just move them to another country that has no environmental policies at all
then what's the bigger problem you created for the environment plus all the
jobs you lost. That's why I like this administration they look for right
balance. Stay cool and keep driving high MPG Honda's and maybe Detroit will
get the message one day.

 

You're spreading the liberals' lie. Stem cell research is encouraged and
government grants are available to researchers. The only limitation is that
research on embryonic stem cells outside 60 well-known genetically diverse
stem cell lines cannot be Federally funded; however, the states can pass
laws allowing the states to fund such research, and researchers are welcome
to seek grants from other sources.

16 out of 31 states, none of them governed by Bush, with laws regarding
funding of stem cell research, also prohibit FUNDING of research on cells
taken from aborted fetuses and/or embryos.

 

Because the states are having such a good time bleeding tobacco companies
to death.

 

Methane, anyone? <http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22944/>

Apparently we can get it from the plants without killing the plants. In
fact, if these guys are right we can get much more from the live plants;
they estimate 62 to 236 teragrams of methane from living plants, but only
1 to 7 teragrams from plant "litter".
<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7073/abs/nature04420.html>