birdsabound

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  chevydog9 months, 2 weeks ago

  Saw your submission and wanted to write a reply. Apparently, I broke the magic 3000 word limit. So here it is. Lots of stuff of intererest in what you wrote. I have sort of an innate interest in energy, having spent much of my career in industrial energy conservation.
  
  birds -- Nice essay, though I got a little thrown by the caps. It was long enough that someone might think I wrote it.
  
  Just a few comments -- not in the spirit that what you say is wrong or that we shouldn't be doing anything; more like it's not all that easy.
  
  I blow hot and cold on whether behavior changes should be a necessary part of our energy policy. After all, it's partly because we didn't change behavior that we find ourselves where we are. Still don't know how much of it can or should be assumed.
  
  Personally, my antennae droop when someone says "They do this in Europe". Yes, we're familiar with it, and it gives us a frame of reference. But in terms of population density, distribution, and distances, it's not really the same game as the US.
  
  Not sure that you didn't get your chemistry garbled in the hydrides/adsorption section.
  
  Yes, hydrogen is relatively easy to make. But it does need electric for its making. To my knowledge, most of the current supply is as a by-product of caustic/chlorine operation. Assuming that we could technologically jiggle the cells that do that, I'm not sure how long it would be before a hydrogen contribution to our energy mix could be significant.
  
  Some gases are relatively easy to transport and store. Hydrogen is neither. It embrittles metals, doesn't stay in compressors well, and generally has poor cryological properties for using as fuel. Even if it's stored in hydrides, it has to be gotten from point A to point B in required volumes. The good news is that there's lots of room for available improvement. The flip side is that there's lots of room precisely because few people have taken hydrogen seriously.
  
  Im not sure of your attitude twoards global warming. You did mention once that CO2 is not a pollutant; then there was all sorts of maybe qualifying wordage. IMHO, counting CO2 as a pollutant is needlessly hindering our efforts in the energy area. A clarification would help, though that might bring some of the GW zealots down on you.
  
  You mentioned several types of exotic solar power generating stations. I guess I'm intrigued. But all of these require something to store generated electric. I'm (blissfully?) unaware of what kind of things those might be.
  
  Some of the generating stations you mentioned were 200 mW, 50 mW, and 25 MW. As I guess you know, most conventional stations being proposed now are in the 1000-1500 mW range. Yeah, the ones you mentioned were only planned to be demo or semi-works scale, so it's not completely fair to fault them for that. But faultless scale up still can't be assumed.
  
  Assuming for the moment that we could populate the landscape with 50 mW solar power stations, it remains true that these things still need care and feeding and ways to get electic to users. Which requires capital and organization. Nothing undoable ; but I think that this part hasn't been thought out enough. Maybe it's too early in the game.
  
  It's also a private bug with me that most of the solar generation demos are set in the West and/or Southwest. To me, it's sort of cherry-picking data. Believe we have to see demos in places like e.g. IL, OH and NY.
  
  I'm not totally averse to the term "energy" policy. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether our problems aren't fundamentally hydocarbon driven. We gripe about gasoline and home heating prices; electricity comes into the conversation mostly as a way to supplant fuels. So maybe effort ought to be biased toward improving transportation and building heating improvement.
  
  I've always wondered some how much economics ought to enter into this. Think I'm slowly coming to believe that economics should be a factor in the electric part of the problem; but maybe not in the fuels part.
  
  Lastly, any energy policy that depends on my typing accurately is doomed to miserable failure.