Bob Cook <frobertc...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> The idea of making the device good for a car to justify its rapid > introduction commercially was just a pipe dream for gullible investors in > my mind. > Yes. Cold fusion researchers, "over unity" energy researchers and others are mesmerized by the automobile market. They have good reasons. The automobile internal combustion engine (ICE) is probably the second most widely used machine on earth. Probably space heaters (furnaces) are number one. People manufacture 60 million cars a year. The ICE market is unified. If you can find a way to make a good replacement for an ICE, the whole automotive market falls into your lap. Other major energy markets are split up among many different machines, such as low temperature ovens, blast furnaces, aerospace engines, marine engines, generators of vastly different sizes, and so on. Only the automobile market calls for basically one machine at one power level. The other reason people are attracted to this is because transportation is the largest energy sector. People spend more money on transportation energy so they would flock to a cheaper alternative. See: Estimated U.S. Energy Use in 2014: ~98.4 quads https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/Energy_US_2014.png If you look carefully, however, you see that transportation is large only because it is hugely inefficient. Compare transportation to the residential sector. The residential energy sector consumes 11.8 quads, converting 7.66 of them into useful energy, wasting 4.12. That's 65% efficiency. The transportation sector consumes 27.1 quads, converting 5.68 into useful energy, 21% efficiency. Actually, as shown in the text at the bottom of the page, that 21% is an estimate made by the authors of this chart. It is accurate as far as I know. There are many reasons for this low efficiency, such as the fact that electric cars are far more efficient than gasoline ones. Transportation could be made as efficient as other sectors with existing technology such as electric cars. In this case it would consume 8.7 quads, making it the smallest of the four sectors. So perhaps it is not such as lucrative target for cold fusion as it first appears. It is interesting to compare this Lawrence Livermore chart to the 2000 version, on the last page here: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/NRELenergyover.pdf Overall estimated energy use is down slightly, from ~98.5 quads. Actual use in the four sectors has increased slightly from 70 to 73 quads. The overall reduction of ~3.3 quads is in changes to electricity generation, and in increased efficiency throughout the system with things like CFL and LED lighting. Electricity Generation consumed 40.4 quads in 2000, and it now takes 38.4 quads. It was 30% efficient in 2000 and it is now 32% efficient. This is partly because wind, solar and hydroelectricity are considered 100% efficient, I believe. There is no wasted fuel associated with them. That is not say that wind turbines convert 100% of wind into electricity. Coal has fallen from 20.5 quads to 17.9 quads. On this table, nuclear contributes 8.33 quads to electricity. Nuclear power produces roughly 20% of US electricity, which is 2.48 quads. So this table shows nuclear power being 30% efficient, which is correct. The 25.8 quads of "rejected energy" (waste heat) show here must include 5.85 quads of steam blowing into the sky from nuclear plant cooling towers. Hydro is shown contributing 2.47 quads to electricity. That would be 20% of the total 12.4 quads of electricity. That is way too much. Hydro contributes only about 6%. See: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_1 This shows hydro contributed 259,367,000 MWh in 2014. That is a little less than 1 quad, I believe. I cannot find the discrepancy. The text at the bottom of the Lawrence Livermore chart says that "distributed electricity represents only retail electricity sales and does not include self generation." But I still think the numbers are off. Here is data for worldwide energy consumption. It has interesting comparisons between 1973 in 2013 (40 years). https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld_Statistics_2015.pdf - Jed
