<VV> Hydrogen, was: Cold fusion news-no Corvair but potential sourceof power

[Alan and Clare Wesson]

> If cars become hydrogen/electric and we somehow increase the electric 
> power grid capacity (or go to solar/wind generators) THEN maybe it might 
> have a use.

I have just had a blinding realisation - nothing to do with hydrogen (except 
that it goes to the issue of where we are going to get the power to do the 
electrolysis necessary to produce it).

The reason electric cars won't work is simply because batteries contain so 
little potential energy compared with gasoline. The reason I thought of this 
was because I was mowing our lawn with our useless gasoline lawn mower, and 
I remembered how much more useless the electric one we once had was. It had 
no power at all (and that was a mains one, so it didn't even have the 
battery problem to contend with!). Batteries are a very poor and limited way 
of storing energy.

So I decided to find out how much more potential energy a tank of gas has 
than the batteries in a typical electric car, and although the information 
was hard to source, I managed in the end (info. courtesy of the British 
Royal Institution!).


A BATTERY WITH THE SAME AMOUNT OF POTENTIAL ENERGY AS A TYPICAL TANK OF 
GASOLINE WOULD WEIGH 24 TONS.

So battery-powered cars will never work, and we are wasting our time trying, 
because they will have NO range, NO air con, NO electric seats, NO sat navs, 
NO power mirrors, NO sound systems, NO heater fans, NO other electrical 
services, and NONE of the zillions of electric doodads no-one can live 
without nowadays. And when the batteries run down in the middle of the city 
(or the middle of nowhere) they will become traffic obstacles.



We (both UK and USA) would be better off investing in renewable electricity 
to produce the hydrogen we will need for our fuel cells, if we decide to go 
down that route (because we have got a BIG mountain to climb in that 
direction - a lot of electrolysis is going to have to be happening, and 
there is NO electricity to do it with at the moment!).

So far, Gordon Brown's response has been to commission three new gas-powered 
power stations. Not sure what Obama is doing, but he is going to have to do 
better than that.

On the same topic, while we were on the way to Italy last week there was a 
programme on the BBC radio about energy and the future. As usual with the 
BBC it was highly anti-car and heavily slanted towards saying how wonderful 
alternative energy was, and how it was going to Save Us All.


The first part of the programme was devoted to sycophantic adulation of 
electric cars, and there were interviews with BMW car company executives in 
which they were invited to support the thesis that we would all be driving 
electric MINIs in 50 years' time, and that this would Save The World. The 
executives, of course, agreed...

The second part of the programme was devoted (without any apparent sense of 
irony) to a very alarmist assessment of Britain's electricity producing 
needs and capabilities, and it concentrated particularly on the looming 
energy gap we face circa 2014-20 (because of the need to decommission 
existing power plants).

Not sure how they think we can increase our power consumption needs by circa 
100% while simultaneously experiencing a 40% energy gap, but this seems to 
be the kind of dream world politicians and the media live in nowadays.

Cheers

Alan