http://www.microturbine.com/caseStudies/hevCase1.asp

Capstone microturbine generators power electric buses at a much higher efficiency than  conventional internal combustion onboard power plants.

But combined with high temperature direct fuel cells that run on various  fuels  (gasloine, diesel, methanol, ethanol, natural gas) 75% efficiency  is now possible.

http://www.fuelcelltoday.com/FuelCellToday/IndustryInformation/IndustryInformationExternal/IndustryInformationDisplayArticle/0,1588,287,00.html

So far this technology is bus and power plant size, but there is nothing preventing the development of a 60 kw version to power electric plugin cars except the will backed by capital investment.

75% efficiency instead of the typical 17% efficiency of a normal internal combustion vehicle.

Since most driving is trips under 100 miles between the possibility of plugging in for a recharge from the utility grid and battery technology has reduced that recharge time to minutes, very few vehicles would need the auxillary fuel cell/microturbine recharger. 

 And even  vehicles, such as long hall trucks or cabs, could be recharged for most of the miles they drive from the power grid (even cab and  truck drivers need a break every few hours), only a small percentage of miles driven would rely on the fuel cell/microturbine generator.

This could reduce  the percentage of fuel consumption for transportation to single digits of what is used now, if it replaced standard internal combustion transportation.

Will you soon drive an electric car with an auxillary fuel cell/microturbine that plugs into the trunk for cross country trips?  The dealer plugs it in for your vacation, just in case. 

With more plugin points that operate 24/7 on cards, at rest stops, restaraunts, convenience stores..as well as gas stations, even on longer trips recharging would be easy.  And only take minutes with the latest battery technology.

Recharging while driving

Of course the ultimate recharge solution is power strips right in the roadway, under the asphalt.  Pull into the recharge lane and a pickup coil under your vehicle picks up power from coils under the road surface...as you drive, no need to stop for "gas" (recharge).

This is a pefect electric solution for trucks, buses, (trains too)or long distance driving by car.  With the internet and card accounts the power received would be properly billed to the driver's account.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/12/153637/246#3

400 times http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-10/uou-bm9102603.php "Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon" "Dukes also calculated that the amount of fossil fuel burned in a single year - 1997 was used in the study - totals 97 million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent to more than 400 times "all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year," including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans." Just doesn't seem sustainable somehow.   Some intersections can be dangerous!

5 times And wind resources are 5 times energy used worldwide. http://www.ocean.udel.edu/windpower/ResourceMap/index-world.html "Archer and Jacobson use worldwide weather stations (more accurate than the above GEOS-1 data, but not covering the oceans) and estimate the worldwide land and near-shore wind resource. Their calculation of total wind resource is 72 TW. This is seven tiems the world's electricity demand and five times the world eneregy demand (all commercial fuels and carriers)." This on the other hand would seem sustainable.

How about a Prairie National Renewable Energy Conservation Park.  Where 1000s of huge wind plants spin over a renewed prairie filled with delicious free roaming organic buffalo?

Eat the healthy buffalo meat in lieu of cornfed, unhealthy, feedlot beef.  Use the wind electricity to stop greenhouse gas emmision.  

Enjoy the prairie.   Forever.

The wind plants will be dismatled, removed, and recycled after their useful life of  40 years. 

By then who knows what will provide power?  90% efficient solar panels?  Fusion?  

 At least we will hand off stewardship of a planet earth back in greenhouse gas balance by using wind (and solar, and hydrokinetic power)in the next 4 decades.  Rather than fossil fuel combustion based energy.

http://scientificactivist.blogspot.com/2006/02/nuclear-power-play.html

Well Nick there is a compromise that I have discovered, after many go arounds on nuclear power on various venues.

How about letting the nuclear industry build a few waste processing reactors at Yucca Mountain.  The waste needs to be dealt with anyway.

If they can operate safely, efficiently, and agree to real regulation instead of industry self regulation, then more plants can be considered.

The tradition  of contamination and corruption in the past government/industry operation needs to be eliminated before widespread nuclear power buildout occurs.  Trust must be restored.

Of course this will mean only a few new plants are built in the next decade.  It will be 10 years until they are proven to be safe and safely and economically operated.

Meanwhile that leaves nuclear fission out of the global climate change cure for awhile.  Hundreds of new plants would need to be built to have any signifigant effect.

After 10 years of power generation and waste processing, the lessons learned should be applied to new designs and new nuclear plants should then compete without subsidies with other clean power generatinmg technologies on long term cost, including any fuel requirements and future waste disposal costs.

This is a compromise that environmentalists may be able to  live with, providing subsidies now in place for coal, nuclear, and fossil fuel power are eliminated.

And a substantial portion  of those savings are put into temporary subsidies for wind, solar,and  wave power, large scale electrical energy storage, geothermal heat pump heating and cooling, and conversion from internal combustion transportation to battery electric vehicles.

 

Great Gristmill blog discussion:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/4/0241/31043/#2

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0407.jaffe.html

"The prospect of cheap cellulosic ethanol makes it possible to envision a very different energy landscape. Since it doesn't require fuel-intensive refining, Iogen's product would provide a net energy gain"

This is a bit misleading.  Actually the Iogen process requires more processing energy than ethanol from corn does.  Which is what it ought to be compared too. 

Sam is comparing it to the energy intensive process of breaking down the cellulose into fermentable starch and sugar using large industrial pressure cooking, similar to the process used to break down cellulose to make paper.

The Iogen process uses a bacteria that works like a natural organism in a wasp's digestive system to break down the cellulose.  That adds an extra  fermentation process which takes more energy than the single fermentation of corn mash.

The lower price of ethanol from  the Iogen process is due to the feedstock, crop waste, wood chips, or switchgrass is a lot cheaper than corn.

And the net energy gain from cellulosic ethanol is from the lack of chemical fertilizer needed to grow switchgrass and the fact that crop waste gets a free ride (so to speak) fertilizer wise, because the cost of the fertilizer is absorbed by the food portion of the crop, the grain or corn.

Monoculture switchgrass taking over the land now in conservation would further devestate the environment and burning more fossil fuel or using more nuclear power to process crop waste will cause more green house gas and other pollution and contamination related to nuclear power.

Only cellulosic ethanol from crop and food waste processed with wind, solar, and by using heat pumps to make fermentation and  distillation much more efficient will be an eco-friendly method.

And taking all that crop waste, normally tilled back in, out of the soil ecosystem will devestate the soil even further than chemical farming already has.  Use up the soil and we are sunk.

The costs, all heavily subsidized, for this cheap fuel could never compete with electric cars charged up with wind, solar, and wave power systems.

And where did anyone get the idea that burning ethanol is that much better than burning gasoline as far as global climate change is concerned?

The fuel cell/ethanol concept seems a good one as far as greenhouse gas goes, except that fuel cells are way too expensive and the catalytic converters to produce hydrogen from ethanol have not been perfected and still may emit a certain amount of CO2.

Wind, wave, and solar powered by the nuclear reactor in the sun is as close as we will ever get to perpetual free fueless non-polluting energy.  And run through electric vehicles and geothermal heat pumps it will beat these other schemes all hollow in every respect.

But that's in a real free market without  government subsidies, hidden as in the cost of war, global climate disaster, and nuclear waste; or  exposed in the form of pork barrel legislated corporate welfare for oil, nuclear, and agri-bizz interests.

Once again, I will repeat, the environmental movement needs to get unified behind the very best energy policy or the powerful interests behind these other subsidized corporate plans  WILL win.

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18976/article_detail.asp

This argument seems accurate and clearly proves the practicality of an alcohol based transportation economy.

He only misses two points, the improvements in battery technology that make electric vehicles (powered by wind and solar electric)even more cost effective, eliminate more greenhouse gases,and foster greater energy independence  than alcohol fueled internal combustion.

The second point he has missed, and this is huge, is that nuclear cogeneration to produce alcohol (from coal or biomass)would move the adoption of this technology  forward at a much faster rate due to the cost advantage from greater efficiency.

But as I said in my earlier comment, for some reason industry has blinders on when it comes to these sorts of inovations.  Even this expert, who has a vastly better understanding than most on these issues, has not mentioned it. 

His argument that americans only replace 17 million cars per year and that any new technology would not be adopted quickly enough to have any practical effect also applies to the FFVs (flexible fuel vehicles that run on any mixture of methanol, ethanol, and gasoline)that he is proposing to replace standard vehicles.

Lets face it, these series of oil wars, climate disaster, and economic ruin that are inevitable with dependence on imported oil are serious enough to justify manufacturing efforts on the scale of WW 2 war production.

And in that case it is possible to replace the vast majority of at least US vehicles within a decade.

If the nuclear industry combines with the biofuel agri-business sector the political and economic push behind it could crush any move towards wind, solar, and electric vehicles.

We could see the US and many other nations around the world knee deep in energy farming and nuclear power, and the resulting eco destruction from mono crop chemical agriculture and nuclear waste and pollution.  As well as vast new markets for coal converted to methanol.

Zubrin's argument is very powerful and very dangerous.  Moving forward as a unified environmental movement toward a green  electric powered transportation economy is more important than ever. 

The infighting and bickering over  issues like Cape Wind, nuclear power, and biofuel is handing victory to the industrial corporations of agri-bizz and nuclear that will benefit from Zubrin's plan.

 

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/2/52324/18981#3

I'm waiting for the big agri-chem-bizz and nuke you ler corporations  to announce that they are processing corn into ethanol using nuke-you-ler cogeneration.

 Waste heat from nukes heating the mash for fermentation and then distilling the ethanol off.  Triple distilling is used so it is a major cost of ethanol and a major energy input.

The industry will report the great news as unparralelled efficiency that lowers costs and greenhouse gas emmissions.

The process of turning cellulose to fuel is even more energy intensive, so that will benefit even more from cogeneration.  And cellulosic feed stock is much cheaper than corn, making this process even cheaper than corn to ethanol.

Say goodbye to a widespread trend towards wind, solar, and electric cars if/when this happens.

In other words, if big ag and nuke execs realize that this will make them the winners in the energy revolution, we could very well be looking at fields and forests turning into energy farms at an alarming rate.

And an excuse to build more and more nuke-you-ler cogeneration powered biofuel plants, that in turn provides an excuse to build more nuke-you-ler power plants.

Good thing few of these  energy execs  ever listen to the chemical engineers that work for them.  Corporations that depend upon technology used to be run by engineers, but now they are run by accountants.

That is the slim edge we have in this fight, but given the huge profits and political power at stake, how long will that be the case? 

Most accountants are technically illiterate petty tyrants it's true, but do they love money and power enough to sacrifice their egos this time around?  Let's hope not.

 

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/01/energy_independ.shtml

The oil mob got 15 billion in the last fiscal year in subsidies, take that away and buy 100,000 electric plugin hybrid cars for government replacement fleet vehicles on the local, state, and federal level. This creates mass production efficiency and cost reduction.

And pay 30% of the cost of small to medium solar and wind systems on homes and small businesses, and give the green energy credits to the owners to help pay for the systems also. More mass production.

Buy solar, wind, and geothermal heat pump systems to power government buildings. It saves taxpayers money on energy and creates mass production efficiencies.

Fund energy purchasing contracts for government electric power use from large wind and solar systems. Spurring more mass production.

Then the manufacturing revival created will in turn boost the tax base, paying the tacpayers back the 15 billion and more.

Apply this amount..saved by eliminating oil company subsidies for 10 years. Exponential demand will start up for these products in a few years. At the end of 10 years drop all the subsidies.

We arrive at the libertarian energy policy in the end. What could be more liberating than every home and business supplying it's own energy needs?

Especially once the systems are payed off, about 10 years, then the power is essentially free.

The (failed)promise of nuclear power? Electricity too cheap to meter?

Well no, because you will still be able to sell excess power back to the utility, maybe even negating the damnable property taxes on your home?