I had another thought this morning. If some of you go to the time and expense of switching to hydrogen now, it will reduce the demand on gasoline, and the price of that fuel will not go up in price as fast.
Every new technology needs early adopters to iron out the bugs.
Eventuality even Windows Vista will become a widespread operating system.

 

Incase you didn't know, making aluminium requires lots of electricity. And gallium is not cheap at all.

 

Harnessing solar energy in some way is one that can have an enormous reward (financial) so there are lots of very promising research on it. Here's one as an example: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/green/item_59.html
My prediction for significantly cheaper, mass produced solar cells is 5 - 10 years, at most.

If gasoline were to cost, say, 8 - 10 bucks in today's dollars, quite a few people would change their opinion. France, for example, gets most of its electricity (~80%) from nuclear power.

 

There's quite a bit of research on it, and some people claim to start mass production soon. My other post has one such link.


Maybe for *some* of our energy need.
But definitely not much here: http://www.snopud.com/energy/pwrsource.ashx?p=1859

Enron price gouging, and because they could resell their allotted electricity for a big profit. But at least some have re-opened.

Where exactly in the Pacific Northwest? Verifiable facts please.

Excess water doesn't stay very long in the atmosphere; furthermore, almost half of the exhaust gasese from gasoline/diesel engines is already water.

 

I've been keeping an eye on those solar cells you linked to. I have high hopes for them. However the company, Nanosolar, has been somewhat reluctant to publish efficiency numbers. That's kind of a red flag.

Excellent point about the gasoline prices.

 

My opinion, here. Generally, most magazines exist for one reason, To make money. Most of the money they make is from advertising, and a portion on the money they make is from newsstand sales, and subscription sales.
I personally do not consider Popular Science a scienfific magazine. It is advertising. Just like women's fashion magazines try to convince women that they are ugly, and smell bad, so they buy a lot of overpriced expensive crap, there are magazines aimed at the male population to convince them that there are "miracle fuel line magnets" or "Tornado airflow boosters" that will increase your fuel mileage some impossible percent.
If there was some stamped metal device that could be put into the intake of your engine that worked, every car manufacture would already be doing it!
If there is really a way to make solar cells for a fraction of the price is currently costs, it would ot already been done! if somebody already knows how to do this, they are not going to give their secrets away in Popular Science.
Another thing you have to be aware of is that there some people, and companies who exist solely on getting research grants, and financial backers for their own benifit.
Follow the money trail. Many corporations and companies exist for this reason. THEY WANT TO GET YOUR MONEY IN THIER POCKET! For your own benifit, do not let then have it.
Before you get mad at me, remember this. I do not want to swindle or gyp you out of your money. I have nothing to gain from this, but if you are wise and look beyond the advertising, you will save yourself money.

 

Thing is, they aren't the only company. I'm sure there are quite a few other researchers/companies are working on the same thing, and someone will eventually succeed. But even with the current technology and energy prices, some people are putting solar cells on their roofs.

 

How shocking. Someone in the US is trying to make money.

In any case, your reply for all practical purposes is off topic, and has virtually nothing to do with what he had been discussing in this thread before. In retrospect, I should've just linked to nanosolar's site directly, but my guess is that you probably would've avoided answering any real question anyhow with some more diatribe while switching to another, non sequitur topic.

 

I just took a quick look at Nanosolar's site. They shipped their first panel on 12/18 so we should find out how efficient they are soon. They also said that they expect to be able to sell them for as little as $0.99/Watt.

Any idea how many Watts are needed in a basic solar setup? Somewhere around 2000 Watts maybe?

 

lets all hope that indeed that Nanosolar is on to something that works. A solar panel on the roof that could pay for itself in six months to a year would be great!
Approximately 1 horsepower = 746 watts.
There arel least two problems I see with Hydrogen in motor vehicles. One, it does not exist in nature in a form we can use to fuel a motor vehicle. It has to be extracted from a fossil fuel, or maybe some form of a biofuel. The other source of hydrogen is electrolysis conversion of water, and in order to do that, you have to consume more energy than it will yield when you burn it again. The second problem with hydrogen is that it is a gas, and it has to be compressed a lot to put a large enough quantity in a car so you do not have to stop frequently to refill. Compressed gas tanks are heavy. Part of the hydrogen used in a motor vehicle will be used just to move the weight of the tank. They have to be inspected on a regular basis. Never mind the slim possibility of a hydrogen tank leak or rupture in collision.
Here is the wikipedia entry on the pacific northwest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest
If you want to convert your motor vehicle to hydrogen, that is great! Please do it. the more people that do not use gasoline or diesel to fuel their cars, the less the demand for those fuels, and the less the tendency for the price to rise on them.

 

Basic setup for what?

 

See posts #12 and #13 on this -- I don't want to go around in circles and keep answering the same thing over and over again.


And other parts of most cars can be heavy, too. It all comes down to the amount of money needed to move the car and it's passangers to a given distance. If not for it's initial cost (estimated at a cool $300k!!) and the limited number of fueling stations, the Honda FCX would already be competitive with current technologies.


Says who?

If there's an accident big enough to rapture the tank, there are other things to worry than some hydrogen in there. And unlike gasoline that can pool and stay in one place, hydrogen will quickly escape, and so the chances of a latent fire should be a lot smaller.

And your point is?

I'll more than likely buy one if that makes financial sense, but I'm not going to "convert" anything.

 

You know I love how hydrogen is going to take over and be the power of the future in 5-15 yrs.. do you know when I first heard that? 1973 or 74 ok 30 yrs later and it's even more expensive and just as hard to do as it was back then. And using hydrogen fuel cell cars still has the major draw back of requiring platinum which is one of the most valuable of precious metals, and is limited in supply and there is not enough known platinum in the world to provide enough to build the fuel cells to replace just 50% of the cars in CA alone let alone ever be feasible. the ONLY reason that hydrogen keeps popping up is due to the holy grail of having a car powered by water (which can NOT be done contrary to those on here that thing it can) it's a wonderful fairytale that is about as likely as discovering an unlimited source of free economical clean power that no one will try an dmake a profit on. To convert water to hydrogen requires some rediculasly high amount of energy above and byond that amount the hydrogen can return.
Now to use hydrogen in a manner that doesn't require fuel cell technology and platinum you have to burn it in a traditional internal combustion engine in the traditional manner which guess what, produces the same exact pollution as burning CNG so why go through the expense and wasting electricity to convert cng to hydrogen to have actually less power potential, and hte same pollution?
Hydrogen after I became honestly informed is about the WORST possible alternative, I used to be the biggest believer that this was going to be a major answer, and we just needed a few more years to achieve the breakthrough. and I am still a major proponent that there is not any one single answer to get us off of fossil fuels (another one of those misleading words too BTW, been proven that oil doesn't and never did actually come from dinosaurs or fossils) but what i learned was just how bad and completely usless hydrogen honestly is. And at best hydrogen might possibly replace 1% of current fuel usage while increasing the need for electricity dramatically.

Here is a article by an alternative fuels website showing the downsides of hydrogen and contains some links to others, now remember this is a web site that is PROMOTING alternative fuels and even they claim that hydrogen won't be feasible for atleast another 25yrs at best so the 5-15yr mentioned in this thread is so far off base as to not even be considerable.

BTW the link doesn't actually contain much new material but just pointing out that even honest environmentalist admit that hydrogen is just the media darling due to the ability to fuel a car on water
http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/alt...wnside_of.html

and here is one of the links from that article that really gets into it
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dail...05/05_502.html

 

Wanna make a bet on it?

There are several reasons for that:
a) oil prices (and likely future prices)
b) increased awareness of global warming
c) the amount of research put into capturing solar energy
d) there are reasonably complete and good prototype cars

Please provide a reputable source to back up this information.

In any case, platinum is not the only catalyzer, there nare several others, even though platinum is the most widely used at this moment. But that will change because that's why the estimated pricetag on the Honda FCX is a cool $300k.

There is a a big difference between those "ever popular water engines" and what what real makers (Ford included) are working on.

It should be well understood that generating hydrogen onboard using electricity is pointless (unless it's part of a scam ), but real hydrogen vehicles won't work that way.

The Sun can and will supply all that free energy, we just need top provide the infrastructure.

You're messing things up. To make hydrogen from CNG, you don't need electricity.

"Most geologists view crude oil and natural gas as the product of compression and heating of ancient organic materials over geological time. Oil is formed from the preserved remains of prehistoric zooplankton and algae which have been settled to the sea (or lake) bottom in large quantities under anoxic conditions. " (full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum)

But here's an article on your side:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
I read it in its entirety, and I still believe the organic version. There's a good reason why most geologists don't believe this.

 

Oops! I was talking about a home solar setup. Like one that would power the light circuits and output power to the grid when not in use.