which future scientific breakthrough will save our nation's energy future?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

Poll question: which future scientific breakthrough will save our nation's energy future?

So long as big oil and the muddle east cloud our futures, we will be beholded to companies like Carlyle, Haliburton, Exxon, BP and other criminal organizations. Which of these technologies will offer the soonest, greatest hope for America, global warming and energy issues?

[Junkdrawer]

1. I voted for fusion, but wind power is also a good choice...n/t

[theophilus]

2. Other.....there must be a combination of solar, wind, geo-thermal,

wave generation, bio-fuel, etc. There might one day be a magic bullet (fusion) but it is at least twenty years in the future and we our global ecosystem does not have that much time, imo.

It is not so much what we will GET that will save billions of lives but what we will be willing to GIVE UP. This includes much of the electronic luxury we have. It also, probably, means that most will not be able to have kids until the earth is down to about three billion. This can be by choice or, down the road, by consequence (bad).

Let's do what we know will work NOW. The French, and others, are working on fusion. Our goal needs to be to leave petroleum if its use spews out CO2. We need to give up the "good life" and settle for life. I think that can be plenty good without a lot of "Americanized" foolishness.

[jobycom]

3. One piece of the equation might be better engines.

We need engines that run on less energy in general, whether they be generators, motors for vehicles, furnaces or air conditioners, or whatever. Make a more efficient means of transfering energy from a fuel source into what we need it for. I don't know how... some form of constant velocity machine, or materials with no friction, or better heat reclamation, or engines with multiple functions... I'm a liberal arts major, what do I know about engines?

[LiberalEsto]

10. There are more efficient engines

Engines with more copper in their windings run more efficiently than those that don't, but copper is expensive. For most companies replacing regular motors with premium-efficiency motors is a huge and often unaffordable investment, one that requires considering life-cycle costs in addition to the annual bottom line.

I wrote a major article on this topic for Energy Decisions magazine (now defunct) in 2002. Much of that information is available on the Copper Development Association's web site. Here is a link:
http://www.copper.org/applications/electrical/energy/homepage.html

Investment in more efficient motors will increase if the federal government provides subsidies and loans to encourage it. I don't see that happening in the current Misadministration.

PS I was an English major many years ago, but now work as a semi-technical writer

[DemoDemoCratCrat]

4. Hey, what about ethanol/agriculture?

or does that fall under solar?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. I am very confused about ethanol. I've seen

figures that show it takes as much or more energy (when you include processing, fertilizer, transport etc) to produce ethanol as you get out of it.
Then again, I have seen other figures that show it to be cost effective.

Who knows? I don't.

[TheFarseer]

41. two things to keep in mind on ethanol

1. Ethanol could be tweeked to be more efficient. I saw a study at Iowa St (sorry no link) where they came up with a simple process (I think it had something to do with blowing air over it) to increase efficiency by 30%. I'm confident there are alot of simple ways to make ethanol more efficient.

2. It has been said that a gallon of ethanol won't get your car as far down the road as a gallon of gasoline. That is because your car was not made to run on ethanol. If it was - and it's not much different to manufacture cars that are vs. cars that aren't - then your car would get farther on a gallon of ethanol. Why do you think the octane rating is higher on ethanol blends? Of course I'm no expert. I'm just going by things I've read.

[Mugu]

47. Ethanol has less heat potential per unit than gasoline,

which has less than diesel. Internal combustion engines work because of temperature differential. Less heat, less work. There's another problem with ethanol that I never hear discussed, the lifespan of the engine. The vast majority of wear on gasoline engines occurs during starting. The required rich mixture of gasoline washes the lubrication from the cylinder walls and it takes a few moments for the oil pump to replace it.

If you boil a container of gasoline down till nothing else comes off, there's a layer of oil left. So gasoline has some lubricative properties, but not much. Boil down a container of ethanol and the container will be empty, no lubricative value at all. Diesel is a light oil to begin with, so no problem.

Some argument can be made about the lack of solubility of engine oil in ethanol, but I asked some friends that are into drag racing and they claim that the engines that burn alcohol (not alcohol and nitro) have a much shorter lifespan that their gasoline counterparts. Not that any engine lasts very long under such extreme conditions.

I had never had much exposure to diesel other than driving an 18 wheeler for a brief time. When I bought my house I needed a garden tractor for mowing and general utility. Kubota makes a small 3 cylinder engine that is available in either gasoline or diesel. It's basically the same engine, but the gasoline version has a rated life of 1000 hours while the diesel version is rated for 3000 hours. Three times the life for about the same money. I'm so glad that I chose the diesel. What a hard working, dependable little fart. Over 1600 hours of use and showing no signs of slowing down. The enjoyment of use has remained long after the sting of paying for it subsided. Two of my neighbors were like me in as much as they had never even considered diesel. One of them now owns one and the other is looking.

You noted the octane rating of ethanol. I get the impression that you (and many others) believe that octane rating is some kind of power rating, it's not. It is simply a number to denote the resistance to detonation. High performance engines require higher combustion chamber ratios, which results in higher temperatures causing low octane fuel to detonate before the spark plug tells it to. This premature detonation reduces power, mileage, and engine life.

If you haven't guessed I'm more of a fan of biodiesel crops. Plus, you'd think that after the oil is extracted, that the residual cellulose could be used to make ethanol. With the leftover material from that reaction used to provide at least some of the heat required to produce the ethanol.


Regards,

Mugu

[Warpy]

5. Other: the realization that centralized

power delivery systems are a thing of the past.

PBS had a show that featured a house that used solar panels to power it during the day plus use the surplus for electrolysis. At night, a fuel cell provided power stored during the day as hydrogen and oxygen. It was a tiny house but a beautiful system.

Wires and meters may not be in our future, in other words. We'll use repairmen and possibly equipment leases.

[LiberalEsto]

13. Only if pressure is put on the big utilities

They won't give up their obscene profits without a fight.

But yes, distributed generation -- meaning power generated on site of use or within a small area and shared by a few users -- is the wave of the future. DG is much less vulnerable to blackouts and potential terrorist attacks.

Many hospitals are investing in on-site generation and using the heat from the generating process for things like creating steam for cleaning and sterilizing, or for hot tap water. This secondary use of the energy is called cogeneration. It vastly increases the amount of benefit from each energy dollar that is spent.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

16. industrial cogeneration is used in Europe quite a bit.

especially in eastern europe in cities that have centralized heating and hot water systems.
it use has been growing here, too. Not sexy, but damned effective.

[Solon]

20. Nationalize the power grid and all companies related to it...

Set it up as a public, non-profit, corporation, and the profit motive goes bye bye, and the system can then be made more flexible under public control.

[MadHound]

6. Why are you talking future? Let's talk about the here and now.

And if you wish to talk about the here and now, then there are two solutions. For residential and industrial electricity needs, there is wind power. A 1991 DOE inventory of our current harvestable wind energy found that there was enough in Kansas, North Dakota and Texas to fulfill *all* of our current electrical needs, and could power us into the future, including factoring in growth, until the year 2030. Think about it, three states, 1991 tech, all of our electrical needs. Sure, we don't want to put all of those three states under wind turbines, but this simply goes to show you how vast the quantity of wind power we have readily available. More than one expert has described the US as the Saudi Arabia of wind.

For our transportation and other fuel needs, we can use biodiesel, grown from a feedstock of algae. Michael Briggs, a physicist from New Hampshire University has calculated that we would need to grow 15,000 square miles worth of algae. That is an area 1/10 the size of the Sonora Desert. And most of that water space is already available at wastwater treatment plants nationwide, where they use ponds covered with algae already to help with the cleaning process.

We have the tech we need, we can stop waiting on some miraculous future technical cure. We can do this now, all we need is the collective will in order to take the steps to implement these solutions.

[Gregorian]

7. Fusion. But once we create it, storage is the next hurdle.

The future is going to be fusion reactors dispersed around the country. It's too energy espensive to build solar cells for everyone. And wind isn't dense enough to solve our needs.

But how do the 18 wheelers get around without fuel? Batteries. In one form or another. That could be stored hydrogen, or other solid state energy storage. There are a lot of schemes, including flywheels. Our emphasis is on military, so we haven't had much help in energy research.

With 6 billion, and growing, energy is only a single facet of the problems we are going to face. But that's another subject.

[LongTomH]

8. I voted solar; but,..................

..........it's going to take a combination of renewable energy sources, plus breakthroughs in new technologies to use energy more efficiently to save us. The latter would include room temperature superconductors, plus real molecular nanotechnology (molecular manufacturing).

We really need a commitment to research & development across the board, and DON'T outsource it to China, India and the Former Soviet Union.

[The2ndWheel]

11. Technology to save us from technology

Technology gave us the ability to be controlled by the big energy corporations. Yet somehow technology will offer us hope in terms of escaping that hold.

No, seriously, that makes a ton of sense. Honest and true.

Saying that, I'm well aware that technology is our only possible solution. Which is funny, because I thought it was supposed to save us. We'll become more and more dependent on it. Then we'll be controlled by the big technology corporations.

The solution:

More technology.

[Odin2005]

19. Ah, yes, technology can be abused by the corporatists so technology is itself bad, great logic, NOT!

:eyes: I'm sick of the paranoid BS you luddites spew. Thank God my generation (people born in the 80's and 90's) isn't affraid of technology like many Boomers and GenXers are.

[The2ndWheel]

36. I said it's our only solution today

What more do you want? We have no choice. Your generation won(I was born in 78). What I think doesn't matter. We're going to use technology, there is no question of that. We have to, since the larger the scale, the more technology we need to keep order. Stop being so worried. You won.

We'll just simply become completely dependent on technology, and the big techno corporations. We'll just trade one overlord for another. We've bee doing it for thousands of years, why stop now?

Are luddites winning? Have they ever? No. What do you care what we spew? Why get sick? You won. Thank God for that(mass production, large scale technology, specialization, whichever god it happens to be).

[grizmaster]

12. the cure for the common bush

[IDemo]

14. You left out the most likely choice: none

Always forgotten in energy discussions is the concept of a radical downsizing in the way humans live and consume resources. Conservation may not be as sexy as fusion or solar power, but it will be far and away the most evident energy solution in the decades to come.

[rman]

33. We can't downsize to the point

were current alternative energy supply would be sufficient, and still have a reasonable standard of living for everyone. By far most people now don't have access to any amounts of energy at all.

We can and should increase efficiency and eliminate wastefulness - a lot, but we can't downsize that much.
We will need more energy from alternative sources, and there's still a lot of room for improvement there, especially in solar-electric. We aren't going to get wind generators that are ten times as efficient as the ones we have now, but we will see solar cells that are ten times as efficient as the ones we have now - if time permits.

[porphyrian]

15. All of those, and biodiesel, and probably a few things we haven't thought of yet. - n/t

[Xithras]

17. Orbital solar.

Massive spaceborn solar thermal arrays orbiting roughly halfway between Venus and Mercury would generate far more solar energy than we could ever hope to create here on Earth. That energy could then be either beamed directly back to Earth (current energy beaming technology is only about .5% efficient, but could become far more so if people were willing to invest in it), or be used to run orbital production facilities generating Hydrogen, Helium3, or whatever other kind of transferrable fuel we can think of.

[Odin2005]

23. The "beaming back to earth" port sounds dangerous.

I remember orbital solar being an option in the computer game SimCity 2000, but if you built an orbital solar station in your city there is a small chance that the infrared beam would miss the ground station and cause huge damage.

[Xithras]

40. Lol, only in a videogame.

Avoiding that sort of thing would be trivial in real life. Imagine an optical laser in the middle of the ground target, aimed at a tiny receiver in the middle of the orbital transmitter. If the orbiter drifts, the targeting laser loses its lock, and the whole thing shuts down in a few milliseconds.

[depakid]

18. None of the above

You cannot run this wasteful, inefficient and petroleum dependent society on ANY combination of the above. People who think so are going to be in for a very rude awakening in the coming decade(s).

[Odin2005]

21. Fusion.

Once we have fusion we will have more energy that people have ever dreamed of, and all of it clean (the waste product of husion is harmless helium). Worry about some supposed inheirent dichotomy between the enviroment and enegy use will be rendered nonsensical.

[trotsky]

25. Where will all the hydrogen come from?

That's the knock on hydrogen cars - Big Oil was OK with Bushie mentioning them, because the plan was to extract hydrogen from... what else... oil. I suppose the net result of fusion is so much energy, that you could use some to extract hydrogen from water - do you know if that's part of it?

[Odin2005]

27. Once the fusion infrastructure is up the energy from fusion plants themselves could be used

Of course, as you pointed out, the old infrastructure will have to be used to get the initial hydrogen.

[trotsky]

29. Oh yeah, Mr. Smartypants?

What happens when there's so much helium in the atmosphere we all start sounding like Alvin & the Chipmunks? What will your precious technology do THEN, huh? ;-)

[Porcupine]

32. Wrong. Energy is not the restraint on population. Biomass is.

Assuming that the human race could each and every one command as much energy as a small nuclear sub we still have limit to growth right now.

We require services from the ecology that cannot be provided by machines in any combination. These services include air and water purification, fiber, food, entertainment, biological control of viruses and bacteria and probably a few others I can't think of.

Remember the build time of environmental resources to support a human life must be less than 1/8 of a human lifespan. This is why cities on the oceans and other such crap is all still science fiction.

Currently we are slamming the biosphere hard in an effort to maintain the population that we have today. By reducing the energy limiter and allowing more unchecked population growth we just bring the inevitable crash closer.

Read "The Mote in God's Eye."

[Ganja Ninja]

22. We will more than likely use solar and wind power as ...

a supplement to our current technology.

If only we had spent the money we are spending in Iraq to build wind farms across America. At the rate of $2 billion a week think where we'd be right now and where we would be by the time we are out of this mess.

[Chemical Bill]

24. Do you mean save the average Joe...

or save the corporate asses?

Bill

[ChairmanAgnostic]

26. Joe. and Joe-anne, I hope. Corpserations have too much legal

life and protections to begin with. Comparing individual rights with corporate rights is now a skewed equation. The little guy always loses.


HEY, no one voted for Boy George's GREAT HYDROGEN ENERGY plan! Why is that?

[mtnester]

28. Replicators

no seriously...solar and wind are where I am going...with fusion right behind

[slackmaster]

30. Have you heard about the car that can go 200 miles on a cup of water?

Neither have I.

:evilgrin:

Seriously, I think all of the poll answers will have some place in the future.

[davepc]

31. Pray tell, whats so "dirty" about current Nuclear power?

The only emissions are steam and warm water.

[rman]

34. Yeah, there's no such thing as nuclear waste

Perhaps it's not emission, but who said emission is the only thing that matters?

[davepc]

37. There is waste, but countries like France have found effective soluitions to deal with it

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

French technocrats had never thought that the waste issue would be much of a problem. From the beginning the French had been recycling their nuclear waste, reclaiming the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricating new fuel elements. This not only gave energy, it reduced the volume and longevity of French radioactive waste. The volume of the ultimate high-level waste was indeed very small: the contribution of a family of four using electricity for 20 years is a glass cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter. It was assumed that this high-level waste would be buried in underground geological storage and in the 80s French engineers began digging exploratory holes in France's rural regions.

To the astonishment of France's technocrats, the populations in these regions were extremely unhappy. There were riots. The same rural regions that had actively lobbied to become nuclear power plant sites were openly hostile to the idea of being selected as France's nuclear waste dump. In retrospect, Mandil says, it's not surprising. It's not the risk of a waste site, so much as the lack of any perceived benefit. "People in France can be proud of their nuclear plants, but nobody wants to be proud of having a nuclear dustbin under its feet." In 1990, all activity was stopped and the matter was turned over to the French parliament, who appointed a politician, Monsieur Bataille, to look into the matter.

...


Bataille began working on a new law that he presented to parliament in 1991. It laid plans to build 3-4 research laboratories at various sites. These laboratories would be charged with investigating various options, including deep geological storage, above ground stocking and transmutation and detoxification of waste. The law calls for the labs to be built in the next few years and then, based on the research they yield, parliament will decide its final decision. Bataille's law specifies 2006 as the year in which parliament must decide which laboratory will become the national stocking center

Bataille's plan seems to be working. Several regions have applied to host underground laboratories hoping the labs will bring in money and high prestige scientific jobs. But ultimate success is by no means certain. One of these laboratories will, in effect, become the stocking center for the nation and the local people may find that unacceptable. If protesters organize, they can block shipments on the roads and rail. The situation could quickly get out of hand.

Nuclear waste is an enormously difficult political problem which to date no country has solved. It is, in a sense, the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry. Could this issue strike down France's uniquely successful nuclear program? France's politicians and technocrats are in no doubt. If France is unable to solve this issue, says Mandil, then "I do not see how we can continue our nuclear program."

For starters, we don't even recycle nuclear waste like the French do. For some reason in March 1977 Jimmy Carter halted nuclear material recycling in the United States.

France is the only country in Europe who is a net EXPORTER of energy in Western Europe. They get almost 80% of their energy from Nuclear Power. (and another 10% or so from Hydro-eletric and the rest from various other sources...wind/solar/coal/oil etc).

The figured out in 1973 that Energy independence was a good thing, and took steps to achieve it.

Whens the last time France created a sham excuse to invade a sovereign country to seize control of its oil resources?

[rman]

43. Doesn't make it any cheaper,

unless you persist in only counting steam and warm water.
Nor does it mean that nuclear fuel is any less finite a resource than fossil fuels are. Large scale use of nuclear power would buy us only another ten years or so.

[Pyrzqxgl]

35. how about the fourth Barsoomian ray?

[greenman3610]

38. Hydrogen production via solar photolysis

unlimited hydrogen.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

39. you even get clean drinking water as a byproduct.

but, I suspect that bush's approach to hydrogen is based on corporatism to the max.

[OxQQme]

42. I'd like to recomend this site

http://oupower.com/
and if any of y'all got a like-ing to that
theres a yahoo group of folks who are electrolizing
plain water into hydroxy gas and supplementing the
gasoline in their cars and pickups and diesels for
less than a couple hundred bucks and improving mileage.
Eloctrolize water from the car battery while engine is
running in a device no bigger than the cars battery.
Plans. Build it yourself.
Zero toxicity exhaust is their goal.
Ecotopia revisited.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

45. thanks! that is very interesting.

[rman]

44. a good solution in principal,

but the question is if we can obtain the required production rate in time to make a smooth transition from fossil fuel to hydrogen. I think a lot a hard work needs to be done to achieve that.

[Mr Rabble]

46. Other- There will be no "save".

Sorry to sound so negative, but there will be no saving of our energy future, but rather a series of, well you know the rest.