> There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
Electricity comes out the wall.
You can run electrolysis from a cup.
I also have a gas bbq, yet couldn't fill up a LNG car at my house. Maybe there's something more to it than just making small amounts of room temperature / pressure H2.
I’m willing to give it a go.
I’ve got the excess solar from the rooftop solar panels, the electrical and electronic knowledge, and the gas fitter and metal fabrication experience.
I have an oil free air compressor, and anyone can by a helium based cryo-cooler. I have an account with an industrial gas supplier.
Just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
If Nile Red hasn’t blown his lab up by the time I publish this comment, I reckon I stand a chance.
Efficiency pumping your excess solar into the EV itself is more like 80-85%, most of which is loss in the electronics, not the battery - those typically have a coulombic efficiency of over 95%.
Hydrogen a boondoggle. It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Also, "gas fitter and metal fabrication" experience isn't worth anything unless it was hydrogen-specific. It is far leakier than natural gas/propane. One of the biggest hassles of a hydrogen fuel chain is that the stuff leaks through everything.
In fact, even this level of efficiency may be sufficient. Solar panels are so cheap that if we had affordable, long-term energy storage options, even with such efficiency, we would have completely abandoned fossil fuels. But, unfortunately, storing hydrogen is difficult and dangerous. It is not like natural gas.
> It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security. It's like a placeholder for real corn so that if there's a crop failure for a couple of years, the low-iq idiots who think it's stupid to make ethanol from corn don't starve to death.
Source? First time I read this, might make sense. Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
I believe the argument being made here is "we need to overproduce corn in order to get food security; what can we do with the spare capacity in the good years given we're already eating too much?"
I don't know if this argument is correct, but I believe that's what's being claimed.
Meat usually does that stabilizing. Fuel consumption not even is almost completely inelastic, but corn ethanol on the US is subsidized on every stage to the point that market forces become meaningless.
No, it's done to subsidize (bribe) farmers. Food security is merely the excuse used to sell it to the non-farmer voters.
If you had the knowledge necessary to do this, I would assume that would’ve surfaced reasonably early in the thought process.
Which unless you have solar, you are paying for. Even if you have solar, you are paying off the panels, batteries and inverter/chargers over a period of time.
Nothing is free.
That's just an extreme interpretation of the way it's not as extremely unsafe as it could be.
Plus at the rate it's being addressed by a few enthusiasts, it could be getting remarkably safer, maybe even in one person's lifetime someday.
Developments may be positive but it makes the most sense to be realistic and avoid the completely unfounded hype involved.
Plus when nuclear works best the high-skill jobs resulting have to be as non-countless as possible, that's one of the big factors which might someday allow the economics to be less unfavorable.
This is compared to, for example, a coal plant, which is quite unsafe to be near constantly, all the time.
Keep in mind an off-white swan can be pretty bad too :)
The main thing about such uncommon or even unlkely events, is that nobody knows what to do about them.
Prices of solar and battery are plummeting. If anything they are dropping faster than they were 5—10 years ago.
10 years from now I suspect the grid will largely be transitioning remaining fossil fuel base load to solar and wind backed with batteries, because the economics will be there to overbuild the solar and battery to the extent needed to provide reliable base load through the winter.
Nuclear will always be in the backseat for the foreseeable.
The challenges are going to be political, not spatial or geographic. China could put enough solar panels in its western deserts to power the whole country. The US could do the same in its southwest. It would take about 15% of the land area of Arizona to power the entire US.
That's physically achievable but politically difficult.
The numbers say that nothing is extremely safe, and experience has shown that having more maturity may not be necessary to recognize that, but it helps.
It just hurts the case for positive progress to mindlessly exaggerate. Especially to the absolute max.
Plus I'm not one of the ones who follow any boomer lunatic trends when I can come up with my own which people of many ages have adopted quite a bit.
Remember wacky lunatic science turns into regular science more often than you think once the dust settles.
But the advantage of that doesn't really depend on elderliness, mainly dedication to science.
Any age can do it if you try.
Well, maybe not if you're completely non-gifted in some way or another.
I like the idea of getting better at math every decade.