----- Original Message -----
From: "Chad Cooper" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 1:02 PM
Subject: New energy sources was >RE: Bill Moyers Reports: Earth on Edge
>
> Wired Mag this month had as its feature article
> (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/juice.html) informational look at
> the future of energy. There is some real positive stuff being developed to
> be used in the next 50 years.
> For instance, they cite that 95% of ALL electrical generation, including
all
> power plants, machinery, solar, wind, etc occurs from internal combustion
> engines - our cars.
Actually, that's not what the article says. It says "you find that 95
percent of the power capacity in our country resides in automobiles"
That means that if every car engine were putting out maximum horsepower
simultaneiously, and every other power source were running full out, cars
would produce 95% of the total output.
This doesn't take into account the loss in the small car generator, or the
need to put in a larger, higher power generator.
But, let us assume that cars will really be dual powered, and have good
generators and battery units. If one wants to sell power at peak demand,
then one needs to run the car. If one carefully goes over the language of
the article, one will see that.
>They talk about installing large batteries into cars to
> store some of this excess electricity for dumping into the power grid
>later.
What excess energy? Cars use energy. It is true that an electric car could
have the advantage of reclaiming some of the energy while braking, and it is
true that the batteries will have some storage capacity. But, the power
isn't excess, its the power that would have been used to drive away from the
mall.
> Imagine getting paid to drive your fuel efficient car, where a car would
>be an investment into the power commodity market!
You do realize that a small mobile power source is usually not as efficient
a unit as a larger stationary source. In addition, pollution control on
automobiles is not as efficient as the pollution control on a major power
plant. Imagine a parking lot of 1000 cars all plugged in, and all running
their engines at high speed. Imagine finding out you used 5 gallons of gas
generating power while you were at the office.
But, one might argue that hydrogen power is in our future. Well it could
be. But, typically, that hydrogen is produced through the use of
electricity. So, one needs to use electricity to generate electricity.
What automobiles could be is a means of storing electricity generated at
night and resold at peak demand. The transmission and storage efficiencies
would have to be pretty darn good for this to be effective though.
Remember, presently 2/3rds of home electricity usage is line loss.
You do mention some of that later. You also mention human waste as a source
of methane. Yes it is, but I think we can say that there are obvious health
problems that have to be overcome in the use of human waste.
One thing about being my age and having lived around environmentally
conscious people for years (our high biology class did stuff back in the
'60s before the first earth day) is that we've heard of many of these new
possibilities that are just around the corner for years now. More on that
in a response to Jeroene's post.
Dan M.
