Many of the responses on this and most discussion sites are mired in “more of the same”(MOTS) mentality. I am reminded of the colonial mind set when speak to a person from another language “if at first they don't understand (agree in OLO) repeat it LOUDER” or in some cases be rude.
I would suggest that MOTS is counter productive to both discussion and understanding.

In a recent article the author lamented that “plug in” vehicles were simply moving the emissions to the power grid and therefore coal power stations. Therefore in the MOTS mind set it unequivocally meant we need to go nuke. I ask why?

To me I wonder why some bright entrepreneur hasn't latched onto and designed a home alternatively powered power source to fill up the car. Imagine for a moment say $4000 for a cars lifetime of free vehicle fuel? The market would be immense! Talk about profit potential and captive market! The gov. could subside their research even sales for the poor. New endless industry.

In Qld that have a system of water monitoring and if a client uses beyond the acceptable limits they are progressively monitored until in extreme cases their pressure is reduced.

There are also meters that monitor your power usage prompting the client to turn off the unnecessary power. There was even a TV show on the topic where people SAVED heaps for a little thought.

I wonder why not combine this technologies to lower grid consumption and create 3-4 new sunrise industries these would clearly reduce our consumption of non renewable resources and who knows less CO2 and more jobs.

We need to stop looking for a single silver bullet solution particularly ones that require creating a trillion ton vampire (big is not necessarily the answer to everything.)

I guess my point for discussion is other issues that may be solved by small or local solutions.
Comment and suggest yours or improvements in mine.

You my friend are going to be taken out by a very expensive hitman, he will be jointly paid by several rather large corporations.

Did you watch "Who Killed The Electric Car"? I suspect these little local productive power saving industries make good television and always will but for these ideas to spread, to grow, to be nutured and to finally overtake our local money hungry producers of even more chronic material consuming and expensive products...

Well that just wont do. Wrong planet you see.

Part of the problem, examinator, is that the energy has to come from somewhere.

The typical home and car use an *awesome* amount of energy. Somewhere between 1 and 5 kW of solar cells may balance your household usage which may average 5 to 10kWh per day (ish). That means that the few hours of an evening you have your kids in front of the telly, the kitchen appliances on here and there, the lights, the computer etc, the fridge and the hot water, which easily add up to a couple of thousand watts, chew up in short order a whole days solar production from a reasonable installation (5kW is a big one for me to even attempt to afford).

Your car probably produces several hundred kilowatts. You possibly commute for half an hour a day. You just used a *hundred* kilowatt hours. To get the same from the grid is not cheap. Check your last power bill.

Thats a *lot* of solar cells or one *hell* of a big million dollar windmill.

Affordable home-based renewables that also cover personal transport require an absolute nation-wide adherence to commuting by electric MoPed.

Joe cannot expect to drive to work in his own Commodore. He cannot live further from work than he is willing to walk if his MoPed is broken. He does not have the (in my opinion conspicuously) extravagant luxury of sending his kids to a religious school 25 km away if a state school is around the corner.

Yes buses etc are more efficient, but still big-ticket. That 200 litre fuel tank (or equivalent) has to be covered by fares. That electric train needs a lot of power to be generated, not just when it is accelerating, but all the time. Economising helps too, but can you dispense with 90% of your consumption?

I agree with you, we need it, but there is no easy answer. Watts are Watts, WattHours are lots of Joules and Joules are a defined unit of energy that no smarty pants can make smaller. It is not just a case of innovation.

Dear examinator,

Nobody to date has discussed or analyzed
on this Forum the potential of hydrogen-powered
cars. They are experimental, they do work, by
extracting hydrogen from water and exhausting
oxygen into the atmosphere.

The question is,
how soon will the motor-car industry seriously
pursue this potential?

To date the oil companies have dictated what type
of energy will drive the car. Electric cars today
rely on coal/hydro powered energy which is proliferated
by hydro and coal industries. Hydrogen power would
come from water and does not appear to be of interest
to big business.

Interesting examinator.

I remember in 'Who Killed the Electric Car' that many people recharged their batteries from a solar panel mounted just for that purpose.

The problem back then with older technology was the limited distance EVs could run before needing recharging. I think it was only about 100km but the technology is improving all the time. Now I believe, but don't quote me, there was talk of going up to at least 300km on one charge-up.

There are some pretty resourceful people out there and I am sure as we become more renewable savvy we will design better and more efficient energy alternatives.

Domestically governments could encourage households to supplement with solar. Even 1000s of households using solar combined with smarter energy consumption can reduce dependency on coal. At the moment energy companies who pay for energy via feed-in from householders offset this cost by increasing fixed charges (Grrr..!!).

Foxy, the energy has to come from somewhere.

To power a car with hydrogen, the hydrogen has to be produced from water. To break the chemical bond in water takes energy. In a perfectly efficient system, the amount of energy to break water is the exact amount you get by using it as a fuel in a perfectly efficient engine/fuel cell/turbine. The only advantage in using hydrogen would be the saved weight of batteries, and only of you carry the hydrogen directly, rather than converting it on the run, which needs *at least* as many batteries as just running the car electrically in the first place. The saved weight of the batteries is probably exceeded by the actual inefficiencies of hydrolysis of water and of using the hydrogen as fuel.

There are absolutely no *magic* innovations that just make a car use far less fuel or to extract energy from thin air.

Please check the chemistry and thermodynamics textbooks in your library.

Rusty.

Here on IndoVision we are getting some great *Green Docs* coming thru on BBC Knowledge, Nat Geo and Discovery (the only 1 of the 3 without subtitles)

CNN also is pumping Green reports and *Bazza Obama* is allegedly going to have a lash at changing the rules to reign in the polluters and provide "fertile ground" for the freshly re-emerging and new technologies.

Here's a cool one for the water issue, fit for the house or on a larger scale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmzY8PcyKeY

There's lots of ways to spin a turbine and there's lots of ways to generate steam. We've got great waves, great hot rocks, great solar coverage - it's simply no longer a scientific challenge to solve the problem, other than how to get the industrial and political parasites off the populace.

*FoxY*

A sub mariner mate was a great fan of H2Fuel Cells. Murdoch Uni had a great program until j.howard et al trashed it.

Still, minaturising the block has been an issue. And of course,a big platinum block can be pricey. Otherwise they're deluxe. It appears that some of the big manufacturers are being encouraged to diversify into green solutions as part of their debt recovery programs though so time will tell I assume.

Pelican, anybody who wants an electric vehicle can have one.

For instance, the Blade Runner is an Australian retrofit of a Hyundai Getz: http://www.bev.com.au/

Now, the specs are pretty good. All that examinator would ask for surely. I'd be happy with one.

Obviously I was exaggerating about the Mopeds.

Joe Sixpack (mentioned earlier) uses a V6 or V8 commodore, expects a top speed of more than 200km/h, gets zero to 60 in five seconds flat, can tow a couple of tonnes and scorns the lesser luxury and elbow room. He pays at least $50 a week in fuel for that, probably more like $100 if he drives any significant distance.

Joe can't have what he expects as the bare minimum for his dignity without a *great* heap of solar cells.

But it is still not free. If everybody has one we will need more power stations and/or lots of solar.

Rusty,
I see your point sort of But last year on "the inventors" (great show nausiating presenter) a man demonstrated a verticle wind generator he claimed that 5 at 3 meters could power a small 3 story office building. Add to that the new technology in batteries a as per American Scientific and in a different context "Top Gear UK". They have a car that can go faster than a ferrari albeit for a short time. There are cars that are comparatively slow off the mark but can get over 300 miles and 5 hour charge and can extend the charge on the fly.
Given the The story of the Sony Walkman.... all he did was combine exiting technology and ....mega Pay dirt! Lateral thinking!
All the debates else where are looking for ONE BIG solution The Holy Grail frankly that's BS.
PS
I've change my name to John Howard. :-)

All new technology is expensive at the beginning.
And many experts believe that hydrogen powered cars
for the consumer are still 3 - 10 years away.

However the experts also believe, "The biggest challenge
is now developing not only less expensive technology but
also a refueling infrastructure to support consumers."

Hydrogen powered cars are the future.

Examinator asked for us to get away from the "Same Old
Mindsets," that's all I'm trying to do.

The following website may also be of interest:

http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com/hydrogen-powered-cars.htm

Foxy, why are you so keen on hydrogen, as a replacement transport fuel?

The production of hydrogen requires lots of hydrocarbons, [oil or gas], or lots of electricity. As such, it is a wasteful use of either, in the current context. Something of a blind ally in fuel development, I have always thought.

Is there something new, we don't know about?

More than likely there have been plenty of entrepreneurs that have dipped their toe in the water on renewable energy production. The problem is that they are all saplings trying to grow in the Sahara. There is not enough support or shelter for them to withstand the competition from the major fossil fuel companies. The other problem for them is that when they come up with a good idea, they are immediately bought out or knocked on the head by the bigger companies.

Re hydrogen power, as others have said, the problem is that hydrogen batteries have to be made using conventional fossil-fuel generated electricity. So there's no great advantage to reducing greenhouse gases unless carbon capture and storage can be made workable and the CO2 is pumped straight underground from one source (the power station) rather than having millions of pollution points (the exhaust pipes of every vehicle on the road) as currently.

To be honest, I'm not overly keen on the idea of thousands of cars running around with tanks full of Hydrogen, consider the road-toll, and think Zeppelin, get the picture?
It would seem to me to be we need a better "battery", some way to safely store large amounts of electricity with little weight, given THAT, the generation becomes incidental, we can do that already.

As I said in my previous post - hydrogen cars
are still at the experimental stage and to work
out all the hiccups will take time. As for electric-
generating source alternatives these are being investigated,
think of the perpetual-motion machine.

The website that I quoted previously - is an indication
that car manufacturers are interested in hydrogen
technology - and are pursuing it. Look up the site I
quoted.

Of course there's always other alternatives - mine
was merely one suggestion due to the TV programmes that
I've viewed recently.

At the moment hydrogen is a joke/scam technology. It takes far, far more electrical energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen than what you get back by burning the gases. It's far more efficient to just use the electricity directly to power whatever it is you're powering. The rules of thermodynamics can be a real bitch sometimes.

Unless someone can come up with a way of splitting water by use of solar heat and a catalyst that doesn't require huge amounts of energy to produce more efficiently than currently, hydrogen is a waist of time and junk technology!

The reason that people are interested in hydrogen is that it is an efficient store of energy derived from electricity which generates water vapour when burnt, and don't have tons of lead to dispose of later.

The negatives are that it requires a lot of electricity to make, can only be stored as a compressed gas, and is extremely explosive. (far more so than LPG)

However the potential is there to use green power which is generally generated off peak to make fuel.

Rusty is correct, the biggest saving is to be found in more efficient cars. I have a small 5 door (5 seater) petrol car that does 6.5litres/100km and if the public would accept smaller cars for getting around 3litres/100km for a small diesel engine is perfectly possible today.

For a large SUV at 18litres/100km the cost of fuel is still relatively low considering all other costs. Increasing fuel costs to $2/l would encourage savings available today.

I too have reservations regarding hydrogen as a fuel.
The point of what I was saying thatthe plug in car doesn't *necessarily* mean that the grid needs to be over burdoned nor does the base power stations need to be dramatically enlarged.
To follow my original thoughts consider that if every one was allocated ammount of power enough to run reasonable appliances(to be determined). Excess power would without permit would be progressively expensive and forced reductions be applied (simular water in Qld).
However , if you want more power you must generate it your self.
As suggested if We could combine existing technologies who amongst us wouldn't be prepared to accept say a $50 per week loan untill paid off in lui of petrol. Once paid off free fuel for the life of the home power generation suorce? After say 12-18 months free fuel.
No one has talked about that yet

Yes, Foxy, think of the perpetual motion machine. Glad You're on the problem.

There is thinking outside the box, but there are known real-world limitations and abandoning them is not constructive.

A windmill that works all day long is helpful. Better batteries are helpful. Innovations that assist economy are helpful. In my opinion, lifestyle changes that many will find draconian will be necessary.

I want to see fitness clubs with dynamos attached to their exercise machines. It might help power the lights and stuff.

Examinator: power pricing is a good place to start. Why should there be bulk *discounts*. Perhaps, as you say, the price should go up the more you use. Doesn't need to be a ration plus extra either. with modern computers doing the bills a formula could apply that makes each and every bit more a little bit more expensive, thereby eliminating people who nudge up to just under the next bracket (as with taxes).

I'm very dubious about underground sequestration of CO2 when it forms part of the most efficient energy capture systems to be found. Instead, sequester it in trees or other biomass grown in (say) long greenhouses, with more CO2 being injected near the seedlings and all the plants (in pots, say) gradually progressing to the far end as quite advanced plants, having grown very rapidly and captured a lot of CO2, now usable as fuel, furniture, advanced plantings etc.

Cheers,

Rusty.

Dear Rusty,

I heard a scientist on a TV program recently -
suggesting an alternative to coal-fired
power generation, which produces substantial
pollution, to separate the coal into carbon and gas.
Use the carbon in industry and burn the gas
to produce power and drive cars with two-thirds
less pollution.

Can you/or anyone - contribute any more information?

Yup, Coal gasification/SynGas/Producer gas.

You take some coal (a good high energy fuel) or even wood, you heat it (which uses energy) or burn it (which uses energy) in an oxygen-starved environment and you release volatile highly reduced (hydrogenated) fractions: a lot of hydrogen and probably some lighter hydrocarbons like methane, methanol, ethane, ethanol etc.

The left over carbon is, yes, present in a lump, not in the atmosphere. I'm not sure how much "industry" wants it now that it is not a hydrocarbon.

Historically, to make the process energetically and economically efficient, to get the most fuel out for your heating energy budget, you also add steam to get more hydrogen, and to consume the carbon to carbon monoxide (also a fuel). You may recall "town gas" and similar potentially fatal mixtures. So now, post use, the carbon is in the air again. Not doing this is a considerably more wasteful enterprise. It *is* cleaner, but if the aim is to get the most out of any given power source, it does not achieve this. That reduced pollution cost up to half the energy. The inefficiencies further add up when you transport and retail the stuff, then attempt to efficiently run a high power fuel cell. Perhaps better to burn the coal in a very efficient coal power station with scrubbers.

I believe hydrogen will be a very expensive "premium" high performance fuel in vehicles that need to save weight in batteries. Joe sixpack attempting to convert his commodore will just about be willing to cram into a daihatsu instead.

The original post was about how to get a house and transport within an energy budget that can be achieved by home generation. I just don't think the typical house+car energy budget can, by a factor of five to ten (ish). A very frugal house+subcompact might (at considerable expense), but that isn't typical (though not unheard of) in our and particularly yank culture.

I like the wood option, its renewable. Anybody seen those pictures of wartime cars run on producer gas?

Cheers,

Rusty.

Whoops, been told by flatmate that I mixed a couple if steps there (been a long time since high school chem). Gasification produces hydrogen and carbon monoxide both, the steam addition allows more hydrogen and the removal of carbon monoxide as carbon dioxide. You still need a lot of energy to gasify. You still need a place to put the carbon dioxide.

How many hundreds or thousands of hectares of forest would be required to capture the carbon dioxide output of such a plant?

Reining in the Watts,

Rusty.

Foxy,

What you are suggesting has been built and running for decades in South Africa by Sasol producing fuel from gas. However, the gasification process is very energy wasteful, and the carbon emmissions are high.

The viability of the project is that it produces high value fuel from very poor quality coal, not that it is environmentally friendly.

Half the cars in Europe ran on brown gas during the second world war. I think there was a company in Finland commercially building units to fit to cars and trucks. It by no means is any cleaner than what we do now.

Heating and air conditioning is one area where technologies exist to save on huge amounts of power from the grid thereby allowing us to use that saving to run cars. But it would take a huge shift in government attitudes to implement it and they would actually have to grow a brain. Read up on Glauber's Salt(Sodium sulfate decahydrate) and heat energy stored in the phase change of certain salts. People could be keeping their homes warm in winter for nothing. The tech can also be used to keep homes cool reducing the need for aircon.

There's a lot more we can do with solar also, more than just PV cells and water warming.

The Mistubishi soon to be released can travel 160-180 kms. and takes 7 hours to recharge, making it a something of a toy. A high-powered sports car, very expensive, can travel up to 400kms, but there is still the problem recharging. Hydrogen-powered cars - too expensive and they don't know how to safetly store the fuel.

We are stuck with fossil fuels for the forseeable future, so there is not point in discussing the subject.

Leigh: "We are stuck with fossil fuels for the forseeable future, so there is not point in discussing the subject."

That is a problem, Leigh, because if you regard the forseeable future as something like 50 years, then it is almost certain we will run short of them. In fact I'd challenge you do find any OECD government organisation that says otherwise. That in itself makes it worth discussing, even if the only thing that comes of it is to raise awareness that we are going to make some very hard choices in the future. My guess is the "future" is something closer to 10 years, not 50.

Rusty Catheter: "Your car probably produces several hundred kilowatts. You possibly commute for half an hour a day. You just used a *hundred* kilowatt hours."

You back-of-the-envelope calculations are a little out. Yes, the engines can produce that amount of power. But when they do the wheels are spinning, chocking the neighbourhood with smoke and leaving a lot of rubber on the road. In reality a high Lexus travelling at 100Km/hr with the air-conditioning on chews 25kW, or so the power meter on a hybrid Lexus says. Thus 1/2 an hour of travelling uses 13kW Hr, not 100.

Foxy: "Nobody to date has discussed or analyzed on this Forum the potential of hydrogen-powered cars."

Hydrogen is an engineering nightmare Foxy. My rather embarrassing post directed to Judy Spence says why: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1957&page=0#40508 Embarrassing because it wasn't Judy Spence. I regard Hydrogen as a noisy distraction. George Bush's championing of it told me a lot about the man's understanding of science and engineering, and how much attention he was paying to his technical advisers.

Foxy;
Even if the ERoEI on hydrogen could be overcome there are
horrendous problems with hydrogen.
For instance you would not be allowed to use the Westfield car parks
or any of the underground car parks.
Why, because it is almost impossible to stop it leaking.
It would accumulate up on the ceiling and when someone turned on the
fluorescent lights BOOM !

Special enclosed parking spaces are needed with forced air ventilation.
Remember the old Leyland P77 cars with their enormous boots ?
Well you would need a tank about that size for reasonable range.
The problems then are the enormous cost of the fit out of all service
stations, and that about three times as many delivery tankers would
be needed as now deliver petrol.
The problems go on and on. They are playing with it in California but
sooner or later they will give up.
Another problem is the lifetime of the fuel cells, they get about
six months use and then fit new ones.

Hydrogen cars have been done to death a number of times in various
places on the internet web pages and it aleays comes down to it not
being really viable on the large scale.

I think the most elegant description of the problem of extracting hydrogen from water was: "water is the ashes of hydrogen already burnt".
Combustion is essentially oxidisation. You can't break up hydrogen and oxygen, then recombine hydrogen and oxygen, and hope to get usable energy in the process.
personally, I think the most exciting innovation is the compressed air car. Imagine a long off ramp from the highway to a refueling station, with speed humps all the way. Each speed hump could cover a simple piston pump, so you effectively supply your own compressed air simply by driving in.
the question about cars powering houses brought back memories. When I built my solar powered home, I couldn't afford solar panels straight away, so I powered the house with batteries in the boot of the car.
Each day I would charge the batteries driving to work and back, and plug the car into the house at night.
Of course, we hadn't been married long then, so we didn't watch as much TV...

rstuart:
Your example is overly simple, even for a sedate commute. I drive approx 100k per day on city roads. I am routinely overtaken by tradies in laden utes, commodores with all the fruit and twits in twenty-five year old whatevers. Repeatedly they accelerate hard, leap about like Baryshnikov on speed, brake harshly and do it again. They wind up within view at the next lights. Sadly including seniors, they would appear to have gotten their licence out of a box of corn flakes. (glad I got that off my chest)
Point is, They are not driving optimally, at a constant speed, getting peak efficiency out of an immaculately-tuned Lexus with a recent engine, economically optimised compression, engine management, fuel injection, water injection and super/turbocharging. The *vast* majority are not hybrids, even when not driven by the maniacs we see every day.

So, my estimate my be high, but I think yours is low by a factor of at least two, easily up to four.

Otherwise we are in agreement.

Your own estimate still confirms my basic position. Even such a half-optimal modern car under ideal test conditions uses more power in a half hour drive than my whole house did (daily average) with one aircon on 24/7 last summer.

This is an awkward amount of energy to produce from a home energy installation.

Grim: The problem is still the original energy source, but I do like pneumatics as storage.
The problem with the humps is they only recover the energy corresponding to the amount they slow you down.
How about some sort of regenerative braking for compressed air cars?
Some elctrics can, while slowing, convert kinetic energy back into electricity for the next start. Maybe slowing could drive a compressor to (partially) recharge your tank? The only pneumatic prototypes I saw were a few years ago, and the controlling valves were all electrical. Adding regenerative breaking may be a simple matter of software to control the same valves, using the pistons as compressors when slowing or on long downhill slopes.

Examinator: if only we could harvest keystrokes!

Cheers

Rusty

Speed humps recover energy corresponding to half the weight of a (four or two wheel) vehicle. Clearly, the best energy recovery would come from a truck lane, with humps all the way. Truckies may conceivably object to having to wear bras...
Since the 'humps' are actually hydraulic, I wonder how bad the drive would be?
Sadly, the MDI car is designed to be ultralite, for obvious performance reasons, so this particular airy fairy idea is self limiting.
http://business.theage.com.au/business/air-car-to-call-melbourne-home-20071202-1ee6.html
What ever happened to it?
I agree, braking energy is currently an enormous waste, which needs to be recovered.

Rusty Catheter: "So, my estimate my be high, but I think yours is low by a factor of at least two, easily up to four."

Actually I was being very conservative. I wasn't quoting theoretical figures for some highly optimised car. I was quoting an actual figure for a real live high end hybrid sedan on a real road with every electronic component imaginable and airconditioning on, in summer. This particular car generates 360 kW when the pedal is to the metal. I mention this only because if you find my figure low you are going to find this next one difficult to believe.

Wikipedia says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Energy_efficiency the Tesla uses 13 kW h per 100 km. This is an electric car with 185 kW motor, accelerates to 100 km/h in 4.2 seconds, has a top speed of 210 km/h, and a range of 350 km and an efficiency when cruising of 90%. But it gets worse. The EV1, which was more like your standard sedan, runs at 11 kW per 100 km.

Rusty Catheter: "Point is, They are not driving optimally, at a constant speed, getting peak efficiency"

The point is based on a misunderstanding. Unlike an internal combustion engine, an electric efficiency doesn't change much regardless of how it is driven. When cruising the Telsa gets 90% efficiency, but the absolute worst it gets is 80%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster

Just about every electric car has regenerative braking, meaning when they brake the motors are "put into reverse" and become generators, recovering of the energy that would normally be lost. The Tesla recovers 80% of it. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=58

Rusty Catheter: "Even such a half-optimal modern car under ideal test conditions uses more power in a half hour drive than my whole house did (daily average) with one aircon on 24/7 last summer."

You said your house used 5kW hr .. 10 kW hr in a day. The EV1 would use 5.5 kW hr for a 1/2 hour drive.

Yes, grim, in a way, we should recover it where we can, but the scenario you describe gets only that single last deceleration, over a few hundred meters. Your car (truck, whatever) had to output vastly more energy overall to get you there: Initial acceleration, maintaining speed against the resistance of the air, slow and speed up several times during the trip. Now, at the very end, one recovers a poofteenth assuming one either enters the extractor at normal speed or it is a downhill run to the filling station. You cannot recover more than it takes to get you back on to the freeway at speed, less inevitable losses.
(Yes the slowing truck might well launch your car, so it might be worth building)

The principal attraction of pneumatics is the same as for batteries etc. To make it work, one has to trim the vehicle down to fit the power source. We can already do that. Had a 800cc Suzuki with a top speed of eighty that would now be thirty years old. It is light enough to convert to battery, to pneumatic, or to just run economically on fuel. If all commodores, big fords, toorak tractors etc were so trimmed, there would be almost no need for this thread.

rstuart,
The misunderstanding is not entirely mine. You did not say the Lexus gave a net consumption of 13kWh over a typical journey, did you? You extrapolated from a constant speed, as indicated at 100km. I used your figure. I just bet the power indicator exceeds 25kW many times during a real journey, particularly when starting and accelerating. If you were actually quoting average consumption on typical journey say so.

The optimality I referred to is compared to the aged and heavy cars actually on our roads in great numbers. Steady driving at 100 is not what many do, even in a lexus. If regenerative braking is so good, then style is not the issue, speed is.

The EV gives better performance, but it was not your example, was it? The Tesla too, but it is not a lexus and not cheap. The consumption is still the same order of magnitude. Many if not most commute for more than half an hour. It still uses far too much energy to have transport of the standard we are used to on a home renewable source.

I don't doubt that such will get better and better. I want them to.

What I am pleased about is that the new electrics are better than I thought.

Cheers

Rusty

Thanks Everyone for your input.

I think you're right about hydrogen-powered cars.
Ah well, wishful thinking on my part as usual,
I suppose. I watch these TV programs, get all
excited about what I think is a new innovation -
and then someone comes along and sets me straight.
(Besides I'm trying to impress examinator).

Back to the drawing board.

I'll stick with scientific American mags. from now on -
rather than National Geographic. :)

I'm obviously out of my league here.
So I think I'll go - bake a chocoalte cake
instead...

Yes Foxy it's really a great dilemma. People need to look past the length of their noses to see there's really no solution at the moment without some revolutionary scientific discovery. When looking at alternatives like hydrogen, compressed air and other such waky ideas, one need to ask a very simple question, where did the energy come from that creates these alternatives!

Rawmustard

"where did the energy come from that creates these alternatives!"

An excellent question and definitely something to be mindful of, however we will never make a move at all if we allow ourselves to be tangled by too many trees. We do need to focus on the big picture which is to attain a sustainable economy. There not being any magic bullets, all ideas deserve consideration. Where I get impatient, is that we do have some alternatives we could be implementing right now. Significant investment into public transport, being just one example.

And hydrogen should not be dismissed completely given that it is the most common element in the universe. However, ATM the electric car is holding much promise and I am confident we will find a way to create small high powered batteries. We have some great minds working on these issues. We are only limited (no I am not going to say 'imaginations') we are limited by a powerful minority who don't want or fear change.

Hydrogen may yet have a role for some high-performance applications.

What rstuart has been trying to approach (repeatedly with me, unfortunately) is that with regenerative braking the electrics are way ahead of the competition. A motor that worked just as excellently as a dynamo, and batteries with minimal cycling losses starts to approach the energetic simplicity of a ballistic path. Suddenly the only losses are resistive (engine friction, battery and electrical resistance, and the resistance of the air). These are all reducible to some extent, including by going slower as resistance is proportional to the square(or such) of speed.

We still need to feed these less hungry beasts. If all cars were suddenly electric, the grid would have to deliver considerably more power. I had thought several times more, rstuart has convinced me that maybe as little as twice (though I think more is likely) - so long as everybody drives some limited distance such as 25km or less.

That is within the realm of possibility. The fuel the cars would have burnt will burn better in large fixed generators, the cars being considerably more efficient will use less overall. This might serve as a stop gap till enough alternatives could be added to double the supply to the grid.

And that could be done with no new technology.

where next?

Power and the glory, are there for the brave. There is a brave young man in Queensland, putting gas generators that generate Brown’s gas, or Hydrogen hydroxide, on the side of Kenworth trucks, and these trucks are increasing there mileage. Put Stanley Meyer in Google, and ogle the results. There is a Korean company making these things and claiming huge results on the net. There are people running generators with only a cupful of petrol to get going , that run all day.

http://brownsgas.com/brownsfuelsaver.html is one of the sites. There is a bit of very interesting research being done in this field. Go look at htttp://aquareactor.com/ for a report on a Korean site.

An Australian called Yull Brown did a lot of this work in the last 30 years, but when fuel was cheap, it did not really take off. There are videos, and all sorts of advertisements for these things, but I don’t have time to chase them up.

There is a bloke at Buderim in Queensland I have been talking to who has fitted this type of unit to 235 heavy duty diesel trucks hauling interstate. He tells me that one company alone is saving one million dollars a month in fuel costs, and that the federal Government is missing out on $450,000 a month in excise. He has them for cars and has them fitted to Falcons, and is working on one for smaller cars.

The usual fuel saving is 35% so that is substantial. Imagine every farmer with a unit fitted to his tractor, how much Greenhouse Gas he would save.

Another idea is to set up a 30 megawatt Base Load Wood fired Power Station using what is currently useless eucalyptus forests in Far North Queensland where they get an annual rainfall over 35 inches a year. Eucalyptus grows at an enormous rate, and every ton burned would be taken back up by the forest in the next twelve months so it would be carbon neutral. Water, a powerline plus about $40 million dollars: a carbon neutral source of energy from the sun

@ Fractelle
** Where I get impatient, is that we do have some alternatives we could be implementing right now. Significant investment into public transport, being just one example. **

Exactly Fractelle, this is our only means of creating better efficiency at the moment, but alas that would mean less super money and wages for the pollies or more taxes for the public. Getting government to spend for the people on behalf of the people is like pulling teeth these days :(

** And hydrogen should not be dismissed completely given that it is the most common element in the universe. **

I didn't mean to sound like I was dismissive of Hydrogen, just that all the ideas presently being thrown around are just pipe dreams. Nano tech' may one day provide a means of storing it successfully and science may provide a way of mining it cleanly and abundantly. But until such time, they should stfu about it IMHO.

** we are limited by a powerful minority who don't want or fear change. **

Ah the old government is corrupt again. All they need to do is tell the oil industry to go suck eggs, but will they have the cajoolies to do it?

lets just for arguments sake say I have a solid state generator capable of producing all the power a person needs and is the size of a shoe box. This device can be manufactured with current tech for around fifty bucks and produces no pollution other than the pollution created when making a current day TV set. What would happen to the worlds economy and how would government react to such a device?

Truthfully, this device is currently being researched by thousands of independent researchers around the world and is not beyond possibility. Do you think they, the PTB would let us have one?

That's the problem I have with all this talk of alternatives. If there truly was a means for us to create energy cheaply, efficiently and non polluting, I don't think they would let us have it!

@ Peter the Believer

Stanley Meyer was a fraud and the reason we use coal is because if we burnt trees, we'd have no trees left. We burn them much faster than they grow!

** There is a brave young man in Queensland, putting gas generators that generate Brown’s gas, or Hydrogen hydroxide **

Ah the old electrolyzer in the Nescafe tin under the bonnet trick. 3rd time I fell for it this week! What a scam tech that is. Please read back through the posts to understand that a rubber ball will never bounce higher than the height it was dropped from!

It is called the magic pudding !

Flubber? :D

Rawmustard

You are preaching to the converted - agree with all your points.

As for your cheap source of energy, if you did possess such a device you'd be a dead man walking.

I have no doubt that many inventions - strike that....

Somewhere in an undeveloped country is a huge warehouse full of inventions that would solve all our problems, bring peace on earth and create a utopia. How could this heinous subterfuge occur? Because there is not enough money & power in peace and happiness.

Foxy, Fractelle, fully agree hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and thus is a desirable source of energy, but...
the bad news is almost all hydrogen on this planet is already combusted.
Good news is, combusted hydrogen is good stuff... in fact we could use more of it -at least in pure, unsalted form.
There is some interesting research happening at the moment, using aluminium/selenium alloys as a catalyst to separate H2O. Question will be, how much energy required to produce the alloy? There ain't no such thing as a free lunch... unless of course you own a bank...
Sorry, can't help myself.

RawMustard: "where did the energy come from that creates these alternatives!"

This is pure speculation on my part, but I don't think that is the right question.

We are surrounded by energy and in a decade or three we will have no trouble collecting it economically. An average household roof is 250 sq meters http://www.savemygarden.com.au/how_much_rain.html it you covered it with solar panels, it would collect an average 30 kW hr per day. (Based figures crunched from http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=performance&climate=536526513&town=South%20Brisbane&state=QLD&country=Australia&solarpanel=31 ). An average household consumes 23 kW hr per day.
http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/la/qala.nsf/0/CA25708400173F67CA25704600244D7C That is photovoltaic's, at todays efficiencies. They will get more efficient, and there is also solar thermal, wind, geo thermal, wave energy.

There are two things preventing us from using this energy right now. The obvious one is the price. But price is a disappearing problem. The price of photovoltaic's is halving every decade, and that is what we expect to happen given the economies of scale. In 3 decades photovoltaic's will be cheaper than coal is now. Wind has a lower starting price, so will reach parity faster. http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm

The other problem is storage. Sure we can generate the power, but natural sources are intermittent, so it are near useless we can store it until needed. In fact when it comes to transport, or farming, or thousands of other applications the collected energy, be it coal, nuclear or renewables, isn't useful unless to can "bottle it" and use it later. The "bottles" we have now are batteries, hydrogen, compressed air and lots of other esoteric ideas. Unlike the energy collection problem, it is not obvious to me how or even if any of these solutions can scale to be a replacement for petrol.

Thus RawMustard, I think you have the question arse-about. We have the energy, we just need the "alternative" to store it in.

I did not realise this was a branch of the Sceptic Society,and had so many closed minds in it. How do you think they created those images on the plateau in South America at Nazca? How did they build the great Pyramid in Egypt? We dont know to this day how they did these things.

What if gravity coud be turned on and off? What if there is a perpetual motion machine, present in every atom in the world. What if the posit that energy can be neither created nor destroyed were substituted for matter? Some of the comments about Brown's gas are the comments of overeducated university brainwashed individuals, with minds befuddled,by preconcieved truth's that may not be truths after all.

They can make big bangs, by liberating the energy in a kilo or so of plutonium. If the minds of some people were dynamite, they would not even blow their hats off.

If you got off your ample derriere and went and saw the work this bloke is doing before you rubbished him, you would be a lot more use to both this forum, and yourselves. I once heard a sermon entitled I was there and I saw it. If Brown's gas is a scam, go and see for yourself, dont just have a cheap shot on the net.

There will be a demo at the Greenfest, 5th to 7th June in Brisbane. Go and have a look for yourself, but dont rubbish me until you have.

Peter,
I am rather ignorant on chemistry so I cannot really make a
knowledgeable criticism of brown's gas.
However I did notice that energy has to be used to break up the water
molecule. Fuel from water has been the holy grail for many a year.

Is the energy needed to breakdown the water the catch 22 ?

Bazz,

It is good to see a mind like Peter the believer's, untainted by education, can see the truth when hundreds of thousands of engineers (their minds clouded by facts) can only see a fat con job.

This link might reflect the opinions of us skeptics.

http://www.alternative-energy-resources.net/browns-gas-the-reality.html

As for most industries, energy is one of the largest cost items, the money that could be made from a super efficient source would far outstrip any profits the oil industries etc could protect. And the patent alone would probably exceed in value the net work of say Exxon, Shell etc together.

It would also be a very difficult secret to protect without shooting the designers. The patent laws require that the details of the technology are available for all to see, but the holder of the patent has the exclusive rights.

To protect the secret, the technology cannot be patented, and the technology owners risk that someone else will patent it and exclude them from using it. This scenario could only be seriously considered by someone with the experience and knowledge of the field such as PTB.

Bazz: "I am rather ignorant on chemistry so I cannot really make a knowledgeable criticism of brown's gas."

I think are being too kind to Brown gas. It is when it comes to the link Shadow posted above a deep understanding of the chemistry involved is required, but not here.

The energy released when you burn hydrogen is fixed. Since the oxygen is available in the air, the only thing the matters is the amount of hydrogen you can bring to the party. Dilute the hydrogen with something like oxygen and you _reduce_ the amount of energy available. It is that simple.

As an added bonus since oxygen is a gas you are still left with all the problems you had before - like Hydrogen's Houdini like behaviour, and it is still just as expensive to compress. And now since it is pre-mixed, it doesn't need to leak to explode, just a 20 microjoule spark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyhydrogen This is why most torch systems like oxy-acetylene store the oxygen and fuel separately, producing the potentially explosive mixture at the last possible moment.

Peter the Believer: "I did not realise this was a branch of the Sceptic Society"

You are doing the equivalent of saying you get more mileage out of a tank petrol by leaving a air gap at the top, filling it with oxygen, and using the oxygen instead of the oxygen in the air. This is so obviously wrong I don't think disbelieving it could be called being sceptical. It is just applying common sense.

You can do tricky things with hydrogen, like storing it as a metal hydride. It is a solid in that form, and the bonds are weak so it is easy to convert it back to a gas. Unfortunately even doing that gets you nowhere near the density required, nor does it solve the problem finding enough platinum to make the fuel cells needed to use it.

rstuart,
There may well be a lot of bottles floating around soon if electric cars (and hybrids) become plentiful. If they are largely plugged in when not driving, the batteries would represent an enormous reservoir of the same order of magnitude as "peak" consumption. So long as they are otherwise kept charged, it will hurt the commute not at all for the battery to supplement either the grid or just the home (or office) during peak loads (morning, evening and daytime aircon).
I imagine a far more advanced version of the old off-peak "ripple" controllers. Modern integrated circuitry allows the population of connected car batteries to be accessed and drained far more progressively (signals to specific ranges of serial nunbers, serial numbers ending in particular digit etc) to closely match load, to not deplete the cells past anticipated requirements for the rest of the day, to use more batteries in hi-load areas, thereby reducing peak load on main feeders and switchyards and tranformer losses, as well as on generation.

I think a national power grid helps this even more. The staggering from time zones plus power grid helps existing generators to supplement each other, so too such reservoirs as the cars.

One non-esoteric bottle you didn't list was dams and hydroelectric. There is the small one at Wivenhoe, that I know of, but surely many others store excess off-peak power by pumping back up, then generate peak power from this water. Admittedly, dams and hydro aren't cheap. The losses are greater than you specified earlier for regenerative braking, but then I don't imagine a forty year old hydro setup would be as efficient as a new one. Better magnetic fields and electronic control of power factor and eddy currents could help a lot.

Maybe one could use two tanks and a pocket hydro setup (and say an off peak or solar pump to pump back up) to act as a home-sized power storage.

Lets hope the new non-silicon solar cells keep coming. I'm not so sure there will be enough silicon for all the cells we might need.

Cheers,

Rusty.

The interesting thing about all the hydrogen generators I have investigated is that they all recommend using bicarb soda in the water as an electrolyte.
Salt water would work perfectly well, and when you apply a charge, you can see all the lovely bubbles of hydrogen.
If you use bicarb, you get heaps more bubbles, but when bicarb soda bubbles in water, guess what gas the bubbles consist of?
Hydrogen generators do produce some hydrogen, no doubt, but the gas produced does not come close to the power required to produce it.
In my solar powered home, I had a 13 hp backup generator. I fitted a 24volt, 80 amp alternator to it to charge the batteries on rainy days.
Watts = volts * amps. 24 * 80 =1920 watts. I horsepower is (roughly) 750 watts, so the alternator pulled 2.56 Hp. BUT, to get the necessary revs, I had to gear it 4 to 1. so it pulled more than 10 hp.
I had to fit an isolating switch, so I could start the motor and get it up to full revs before I switched on the alternator, otherwise the 13 hp motor would just stall.
Sorry to get so technical, but I wanted to stress the point that the electricity generated by your car isn't free.

Rusty Catheter,

As you have probably gathered, I do love crunching numbers. I crunched some here (second comment from the top):

http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/002874.html

Batteries are expensive. Lets assume we have to store 1 weeks worth of power for a typical household & car which would be approx 300 kW hr. So look at the prices at http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Battery-Energy.html For the sort of highly efficient batters these cars use, that is $1 per watt hour, or $300,000 total. But they only last a decade at most. There are batteries that last much longer, but they are currently 2 to 3 times more expensive.

Yes, dams like Splityard Creek are fantastic - 80% efficient. But as I understand it there are stuff all places you can put these things.

Rusty Catheter: "I'm not so sure there will be enough silicon for all the cells we might need."

There are some things that will never be an issue. Silicon is the 2nd most common solid element in the earth's crust. The most common is oxygen. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/tables/elabund.html

rstuart: Thanks for crunching the numbers. For electric cars to do the job (as you have already argued they will), they will have the capacity already paid for at whatever price, just for moving the cars around. Having already paid for the cells, getting more use out of them seems a reasonable thing. Yes they have a service life which is a function of both age, number of cycles, depth of cycle, heat during peak current, and time spent at low charge states. Even barely used cells will degrade with time, so using them is prudent. We all reasonably anticipate better cells. Existing electrics and other applications will retrofit rather well with perhaps only software revisions to accomodate optimal management.

Perhaps we need to find more dam sites? They don't have to be huge. There are some small commercial hydro operations from quite small dams. A proliferation of such is not at odds with the original topic of this thread, and more small dams and waterholdings may have other local benefits.

rstuart, planetary composition is not the sole criterion for shortage.
Both silicon and numbers are plentiful, crunching them takes effort. Producing the clear quill in crytalline form is a star achievment. Sources of suitable silicon for producing semiconductors are becoming scarcer, and waste from the electronics industry was until recently the major source for solar. Solar cells don't need anywhere near the same purity as microprocessors, but they are a lot bigger, and a *lot* purer than in nature. The limiting factor is crystal growth rate, so more production means more individual production units, not just flogging existing ones harder. No one will build a factory just to supply a brief period of high demand, so there will be "shortage" and correspondingly high market prices. The silanes used to make the crystals are energetically expensive to produce. The energy of production is about 5% or more of the expected total output over the service life for even the best new cells.
Thin film will help and alternative materials are a major focus of research, with considerable success but...

I believe the Snowy scheme can pump up from Jyndabyne to Eucombene dams.
I don't know how much it is used.

I once suggested a storage system using a motor to raise a heavy weight
and then when power out is needed, let the weight run down using the
motor as an alternator. The efficiency would not be brilliant but
then no other like storage systems are too good.
If really good quality motors/alternator were used, say 80% that would
be 80% of 80% would be 64% efficiency, not real good but usable.
To be of much use it would have to be a very large machine.

The use of floating car batteries would probably be OK if the rate
paid for power fed back into the mains was high enough to enable
a profit sufficient to make up for the loss of life from charge cycles
plus a profit. If not why bother ?

Bazz: "The use of floating car batteries would probably be OK if the rate paid for power fed back into the mains was high enough to enable a profit sufficient to make up for the loss of life from charge cycles plus a profit."

Yes. Obviously. It is not difficult to express this numerically. Perhaps illustrating it will drive home how poor current battery technology is. By crunching the battery price, capacity and number of cycles the batter is good for, we can figure out how much it costs to store a kW hour in the battery.

Existing:

Chemistry - cycles/$ per Whr - $/kW hr
=-=-=-=-=___=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=___=-=-=-=
Lead Acid - 800/$0.17 - $0.21/kW hr [1]
Ni Cad - 1500/%1.50 - $1.00/kW hr [1]
Ni MH - 1000/$1.00 - $1.00/kW hr [1]
Li Ion - 1200/$4.17 - $3.48/kW hr [1]
LiFePO4 - 3000/$0.80 - $0.26/kW hr [2]

Future?

Li Ti - 25000/$2.00 - $0.08 [3] ($2 sounds too cheap)
Li Thin Film - 40000/Big - Big [4]

By way of comparison, in a car that gets 10 km/litre, petrol currently costs roughly $0.10/km. I always use 0.2 kW hr per km for electric cars, so divide the above by 5 to get cost of paying for the the battery to drive a car for a km. That is before you pay for the electricity to put into it. In case it isn't obvious, Lead Acid doesn't work in cars - too heavy and too bulky.

Li Thin Film is I believe used in pacemakers. Its about the only application that can withstand their cost. But if you could make them for $1/Whr the world would be your oyster.

Cycles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery
Costs per W hr:
[1] http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Battery-Energy.html
[2] http://www.zeva.com.au/tech/LiFePO4.php
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altairnano
[4] http://www.excellatron.com/advantage.htm

Rsstuart;
When I said car batteries I did not mean the usual meaning
of the term. I meant whatever batteries were in electric cars.

A friend of mine has lead acid cells in his car.
He does about a 40 Km trip to work each day and recharges at work.
He normally only lets them discharge to about 50%.
He does that to increase the lifetime of the cells.
That is two discharge recharge cycles a day.
My question is does two half cycles = one full cycle ?
When they pack it in he is going to replace them with lithium.

The thin film cells sound promising, they would be life of vehicle cells.
I believe the Mitsubishi car will be on the market here next year.

Bazz: "My question is does two half cycles = one full cycle?"

I don't know, Bazz. The question depends very much on the chemistry. Batteries seem to like spending the bulk of the their time at a particular charge level. Lead Acid likes to be kept at 100%. A good solar installation never takes them below 80%, and under those conditions they last 20 years. Definitely in their case 2 x 0.5 doesn't equal 1. Li-Ion prefers 50%. Store them at 100% or 0% and you reduce their shelf life by a factor of 5 or so, from memory (look it up on Wikipedia). The closer you take Li-Ion to the limits, the more damage you do the electrodes. The stress the lithium ions entering the anode and cathode literally tears the crystalline structure apart. Cars extend the lifetime of Ni MH to 10 years by similarly careful management.

By the by, we often here of the effect nano particles and nano engineering will have on us. Nowhere does this appear to be more true than batteries. If you look at the recent breakthroughs in batteries they all appear to be ultimately be brought about by designing the electrodes so they are not torn apart by the ions as they move about while the battery is charged and discharged. Silicon wires, carbon nano-tubes, tiny particles coated with single atom layers - these are all weird mechanical structures that can take the strain of ions entering and leaving without breaking up.

There seems to be a lot of these being discovered, and each year brings more. We are finally moving engineering to the level nature does it - molecule by molecule, and the payback as in thin film Li batteries that have basically unlimited charge cycles and three times the capacity of normal Li-Ion batteries is enormous. As in they are the magic bullet that will solve our energy problems.

However, we can't mass produce cheaply them. Yet. It seems inevitable we will be able to one day. But I have absolutely no idea when that day will come.

By the by, someone posted this site:

http://www.withouthotair.com/

Maybe it was someone here. If so sorry for the repitition.

It is a free online book that is just a whole pile of back-of-the-envelop calculations - that I am so fond of, but he canvases the entire energy outlook. With references to every figure he uses, and he makes the error limits clear.

Like my calculations here it is not particular useful for seeing where we will end up, but is a very useful sanity check - pointing out what is just an absolute waste of time. After reading it, I can't but think Australia is uniquely placed to take advantage of looming energy shortages. We are indeed the lucky country.

I would like to thank all the people who contributed to this topic so far for enlightening a lesser electronics/engineering based individual like me it was utterly fascinating.. Rusty, bazz, grim, raw and others Thank you all

For those like me had only an armchair understanding I think the general issues were:

The real problem impediment seems to be as many alluded to but was finally stated by rstuart the question is simply how do we store the energy to use when and how we need it.

I'm a little despondent as a result of some of the realities of storage methods set out in the detail submitted

In varying forms including but not exclusively Jewely, Fractelle and others“if the answer(s) did exist the powers that be or wanna be would fight it until they can figure out to profit most from the solution”. This of course raised even more questions but are off topic and maybe subject to other discussion topics.
I thank ALL who contributed for helping to clear up a lot of questions.

BTW This discussion thus far has been conducted the way ALL should be conducted and thanks for that too.

An appreciative examinator.

Foxy I'm always impressed

Rusty Catheter: "Sources of suitable silicon for producing semiconductors are becoming scarcer"

Not as far as I am aware. Some of the rare earth materials used for doping are running short, but there are less efficient substitutes.

The point I was trying to make is that this means they should be subject to the "Experience curve". This curve is based on the long standing observation that very roughly, every time the manufactured volume of an item doubles, the price drops by 20%. The price of solar cells show every sign of being subject to this experience curve, just like just about every other mass produced item on the planet. See http://www.iea-pvps.org/products/download/rep1_16.pdf figure 8, page 27, or http://hdgc.epp.cmu.edu/mailinglists/hdgcctml/mail/ppt00010.ppt slide 39.

Production of solar cells is growing by 15%/yr, or 35%/yr depending on who you believe. At 15%/yr (http://www.iea-pvps.org/products/download/rep1_16.pdf page 4 para 1) production doubles every 5 years, which means that after 30 years production we will be producing 64 times more solar cells each year than we do now. At that production level price will have dropped by a factor of 3. Sanity check: PV electricity generation worldwide is now 5.7GW, (page 3 para 1 http://www.iea-pvps.org/products/download/rep1_16.pdf ), world wide electricity production is now 20,000 GW (and growing) http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/xx.html, so there does seem to be room for such growth. There are no obvious resource limitations (silicon being the 2nd most common element on the planet), so hitting that price seems pretty likely.

So after 30 years solar at the cell should be cheaper than fossil fuels are now. Storage costs may well blow that out of the water - but the electricity itself could end up too cheap to meter here in Oz, by the end of this century. Batteries are subject to resource limitations (Lithium), and we don't know how to mass produce a battery that can withstand a lot of cycles, so the Experience curve doesn't apply to them, yet.

rstuart, my understanding is that most silicon production is from high purity silica or quartzite. The West Australian plant trucks theirs more than 300km to the plant. They don't just shovel in any old sand. While there are no doubt many large deposits, not all are likely to be economical at current low prices. The preparation of metallurgical silicon from this source consumes about 12Mwh per tonne of production. The output of this process is not suitable for semiconductors, but must be digested by organic acids, distilled and crystallised by a variety of means. The energetics of this whole process are not conveniently reduced. Though innovation will no doubt shave a few percent here or there, the chemical state of a bulk material must be changed and said material must be purified considerably.

Were the basic raw material to be available in any volume, and if energy costs were to remain static, plus the availablity of high grade wood chip used in the primary reduction process, then maybe the cost scaling you propose is reasonable. It was for steel in an era of stable energy prices.

I suggest that as suitable silica deposits are depleted, then smaller, more remote ones will be exploited at greater cost and processed using much the same energy expenditure as present at greater cost per unit of energy, using an increasingly depleted supply of high quality woodchip itself shipped further, or dirtier alternatives that result in greater costs in production of chemical grade silicon.

I fully expect the "experience curve" to change for a number of items depending on increasingly expensive raw materials, intractably high energy inputs and a market that hopes to install an order of magnitude more units than presently stretch production.

New types of PV cells may not endure these constraints, of course, so let us hope that that is what the curve predicts.

Terrific posts, have been learning much.

Would just like to add this point:

Part of our developing technology must include the ability to recycle to a level of at least 99%. We can't make something from nothing. There is no point in discovering new uses for existing resources, if we just wind up depleting them again.

Therefore, we need a duel process of research and development - not only finding alternatives to our existing energy but to reuse the final products.

In a lighter vein: The Beginning of The Duel...

"My Research-Fu is the best! You merely copy our best moves."

"You cowboys have not the discipline of Development-Fu, be on your guard!"

Cheers,

Rusty.