October 29, 2007

Green Car Nonsense

The lamestream media told you:
Hybrid gasoline/electric-battery cars promise a clean future and protection of the environment, according to leading scientists and environmentalists who have studied the issue. The government is being pressed to enact laws requiring development of the vehicles, which can be simply plugged in and recharged daily.

1. No "leading scientists" that I know of - a lot of political scientists, who are willing to play political games maybe. And the "environmentalists" are the environists: they've taken any mental effort out.

2. Hybrids are just that: they are not pure electric cars and cannot just be plugged in. In fact, most don't take electricity directly from power outlets: they use the gasoline or diesel engine to recharge their batteries.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:
Experts have failed to note, according to leading experts, that the electrical power grid in America is running near maximum, and tops out on hot days when people run air conditioners.

1. True BUT: electrical power production is just barely enough to provide all electricity currently used by people. Duh! It is called the market! Except for a "surplus" stored to protect against future crop failure, we only produce just barely enough food to provide all food needed by people! And you can't really store "electricity" the way you do wheat or corn. So supply just barely stays ahead of demand, just as it has for about 130 years now.

Being human and less than free (thanks to government regulations, in large part, and simply due to costs), they can't supply extremely high peak days, but this is a regulatory failure. If EVERYONE had to pay an adjustable rate based on demand, instead of just some industry, there would be no brownouts or as many peak shortage days. Why? Because if rates were based on daily or weekly demand, not fixed by government monopoly - "regulating" boards, instead of paying, say, 8 cents a Kw-hr year-round, you might pay only 4c/kW-hr in winter during the day, 6 in winter during the night, and 12 during the day/evening in the summer. If you are paying twice as much, you will reduce your demand during those periods. Markets work!

2. Also true BUT: electricity is very inefficient. There are always transmission losses and much of the complexity of the grids in this country is for the purpose of minimizing those losses. You don't have that kind of transmission loss with solid, liquid or gaseous fuels, although there is still energy consumed in transporting them (compressor costs, etc.) These are two major reasons that up until the 1960s or so, most electricity was produced in local power plants, especially in rural areas, where every county seat had its power plant.

This changed for three major reasons:
A. construction of the massive hydroelectric stations on the Columbia, Missouri, and Tennessee, where there was not enough population to consume the power produced but it could be transmitted to major urban areas. Transmission losses were high, but offset by (1) lack of fuel costs (water was free) and (2) government subsidies.

B. Rural Electrification Administration, providing low-interest loans to allow rural cooperatives (and some rural government power agencies, as in Nebraska) to extend and connect towns and farms and ranches.

Cc. Environmental regulations from 1975 on that were almost impossible for small, local power plants to meet, especially with local coal supplies. As usual, environmental regulations favor big organizations (private, cooperative, OR governmental) over small ones. However, if the fuel for the power production is cheap enough, you can afford the transmission losses. Hydroelectric, Wyoming coal and gas, solar, and wind all qualify. So would nuclear if people can get over it.

"Where is the extra power supposed to come from if we have to run every car in the country on electricity?!" asks one electric company spokesperson.

Wrong: Obviously the "spokesman" doesn't listen to his own company experts (Dilbert warning!). The extra power comes from, duh, new power plants, plants powered by solar, wind, nuclear, and coal or coal-bed methane, possibly tidal energy. Why? "Environmental protection" - one advantage that electricity has over either internal or external combustion engines is that it is not polluting AT THE POINT OF USE. Instead of having 10,000 vehicles running all over the place each putting out their small cloud of NOx, SOx, CO2, CO, and particulates, you have one big plant putting it out at a single location. At that single location you can install controls to remove most, if not all of that stuff instead of having to have 10,000 pollution control systems.

Is the cost due to transmission (and now, in the car batteries, storage losses) worth it? That should be the customers' decision, but unfortunately the State has made it already: Yes. And from the enviro-fascist point of view, it is easier to grab one entity by the neck than it is 10,000. And it gives the state more power in other ways. As I mentioned, "storage" of electricity can be very difficult; so when the State shuts down the power plant in the area, "ain't nobody goin' nowhere within a few hours if they has to plug-in ever' day to get their juice." You can't keep a five-gallon can, much less a 150-gallon tank, of electricity in your backyard or your garage.

According to research, environmentalists pushing for the electric cars are the same people pushing to ban any new form of electrical generating capacity in the country. The inconsistency has not been noticed by the lamestream media.

Actually, it HAS in some cases, but those are the stories buried back on page 6 of the "science and technology" section on alternate Fridays. However, he is right: it is the same environists: just as environists are pushing for windpower and backing up Teddy K in banning windmill generators off Cape Cod.

"If we run all our cars on electric," one expert notes, "we're going to have to burn an awful lot more oil and coal in plants we don't even have. Where is that supposed to come from?" he asks, on condition of anonymity.

Duh! You build them. Some expert - no wonder he wants to be anonymous. But you don't just fuel them with oil and coal: you use solar, biomass, wind, tidal, hydro, and - gasp - nuclear. What the "expert" should be pointing out is that although big power stations are more efficient than your automobile engine (as used) in getting energy from X amount of fuel, and direct pollutants are more easily controlled, due to transmission, storage, and stupidity losses you end up having to use X+Y amount of fuel to get the same work done moving people and goods down the highway. The overall efficiency probably drops - thus the "environmental penalty." Also, you tend to have to build BIGGER capacity plants, because everyone wants to recharge their cars overnight, when they can plug them in, so the fuel has to be burned in an 8-hour period instead of as the work is done.

Hydrogen-powered cars, believed by some to be the answer because they run on water, overlook the fact that water, which humans must drink to survive, is often in shorter supply than electricity. Some scientists have also noted that, because of the laws of physics, it takes more power in electricity to split water and get the hydrogen, than the hydrogen itself provides. Efforts to repeal the laws of physics have met with stiff resistance.

False: This is probably his single biggest stupid remark. First, there is NO way that water is in shorter supply than electricity, one being energy and the second being matter; one requiring man's inventions to produce and the other just... here. Second, water is not CONSUMED in being converted to hydrogen: when you burn the hydrogen, it doesn't burn with nitrogen in the air to produce ammonia (NH3), but with the oxygen to produce... water. The only loss is due to releases of unburned hydrogen, and much of that will be able to combine in the relatively high-energy environment of the upper atmosphere to produce water. Yeah, the water comes out of the engine as steam, but that condenses back into clouds, rain, and snow, and so the cycle continues.

Of course, he is also ignoring the fact that right now, the primary source of hydrogen for industrial use is methane (CH4)- but he is probably right in not discussing that, as it won't be a adequate source of producing hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in vehicles.

Yes, it takes more power to get hydrogen than the hydrogen provides. So what? That is called inefficiency. Hydrogen isn't an energy source any more than electricity is: it is a way of transmitting energy. Yes, it takes more energy to produce electricity than the electricity provides because of entropy and laws of conservation of matter and energy, and inefficiency. What matters is how much the energy costs and how usable it is. Just like it takes more energy to produce 1000 Kcal of meat than 1000 Kcal of corn, or than 1000 Kcal of grass. Even gasoline is like that: you only get about 20-25 gallons of oil from a 42-gallon barrel of oil: a lot of that is consumed in the refining process.

Fortunately, that is why God made engineers, because scientists have hardly ANY common sense - engineers know how to get things done without breaking the laws (of physics). The key is, hydrogen is more efficient than electricity in TRANSMITTING energy.

Oh, and there are lots of ways to get hydrogen out of water besides using electricity: it is just that electrolysis is the simplest way to do so. In some processes, you can use heat energy (i.e., solar), or certain catalysts.

Undrinkable sea water, sometimes mentioned as an alternative, unfortunately requires more electric power to desalinate than is currently available, and it would then still have to be split to get the hydrogen. No one has recommended where you might stockpile all the highly corrosive salt left behind. The effect of desalinating significant portions of the world's oceans is unknown.

False. Now he is just getting ridiculous. Again, you find ways to desalinate that use less electricity OR you make more electricity. You do not need to have drinking-quality water to make hydrogen from - in fact, you need electrolytes in it to disassociate water into hydrogen and oxygen: I know that you CAN do electrolysis of sea water, although you do start to build up deposits of mineral pretty quickly. The "highly corrosive salt" business is just plain silly. For one thing, we deliberately evaporate billions of tons of sea water each year in order to produce millions of tons of salt - it is a commodity, not a waste.

Secondly, even if we had to haul it some place and bury it, no big deal: we are talking very small amounts compared to, say, tailings from mining operations, or household solid waste. Third, "desalinating significant portions of the earth's oceans"? In his dreams! Really, the salt could be dumped right back in the ocean and, except for possible local effects, (easily countered by spreading it out) as the burned hydrogen (i.e., water) flows back to the sea it all balances out. Again, water is not CONSUMED in the process, looked at in the whole. And the ocean has 1.3x10^9 cubic KILOmeters of water in it. Let's go through the calculations really quickly, and see.

We use 4 billion tons of oil a year, worldwide, or roughly 2 billion tons of gasoline. Hydrogen stores 2.6 times as much energy, per pound, as gasoline, which means that every pound of gasoline could be replaced by 0.38 lbs of hydrogen, so we would only need 791 million tons of hydrogen. A liter of water weighs 2.2 lbs, a thousand liters (a cubic meter) weighs 2200 lbs, or 1.1 tons; a cubic km has a BILLION cubic meters, or 1.1 BILLION tons of water: water has an atomic weight of 18, so each unit of water is 1/9 hydrogen (by weight): 1.1 billion tons of water produces 0.12 BILLION (120 million) tons of hydrogen: therefore (791/120=) 6.6 cubic kilometers of water are needed to replace gasoline for the entire world. Therefore, each year, we would use (not consume) 0.0000005077% of the water in the ocean - 1/507,692,309th of it. Flushing salt back into the sea isn't going to matter a single bit. Nor would taking out ("desalinizing") the salt make a difference, at least not for a few million years.

The guy makes some good - no, excellent - points, but he needs to go back and take some basic high school science and math, and stop coming up with exaggerations and outright fantasies. In checking my calculations, I found a lot of sites with equally exaggerated claims or threats, so he is not alone.

To summarize:

1. Hybrid electric cars are NOT the answer, except to statists and other thugs.
2. The best substitute for gasoline is - gasoline.
3. Hydrogen is a good replacement for gasoline IF we take into account its limitations: density, production cost, etc.
4. Hydrogen is a very good replacement for natural gas AND a good replacement for transmission of electricity over long distances.
5. If we have to replace gasoline as a mobile fuel, hydrogen (or as I prefer, "water-plus") is a very good candidate, and certainly better than electricity either directly or indirectly.
6. Hydrogen isn't going to destroy the world or the environment any more than gasoline and diesel, and probably is a whole lot more benign.
7. Politically, from a libertarian point of view, hydrogen is far superior to gasoline or electricity, and might be the same or better than ethanol and bio-diesel

Nathan Barton is writing this from a wonderful place in the West, which might be in the Black Hills of South Dakota or Wyoming, or might be in one of the Four Corners States. Exactly where it is, the breezes blow with the scent of liberty, and the sound of the pines or the pinions is the sound of freedom. For thousands of years, people have fought and died for the liberty that Americans in the great spaces of the West enjoy, and he writes these commentaries in the hopes that continued generations will be able to do so, until the end of Time.

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