Your video, Armadillo Cargo Bike With Hydrogen Fuel Cell, 300 km range, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Hydrogen fuel cells show promise for our new AI drone overlords.

Also, with the militarization of police departments, I doubt it will be a decade before they stop sending out manned patrol cars and switch over to fully-armed air and land drones.

Heh, no, I said we are capped at 5 KW/h input, our product midsummer is around 35-40 KW/h @ 8 cents per, or $2.80 paid to us (assuming no rain/clouds, winter is closer to 5-12 KW/h per day). Then from 5pm-about 6am, we buy energy back at 36 cents an hour. And as the wife and I are both working during the day, we use the bulk of our energy between 5-12pm, meaning any profit we make during the day is completely overwhelmed (eg. 20 KW/h @ 36 cents = $7.20). I live in Australia where the days of 45 cent feed in tariff are long gone (and further, it's a false economy where non solar users are subsidising that tariff for the few fortunate enough to take advantage of it).

Even with the 4 grand gov. rebate (my system ended up costing ~$12,000 AUD for 6KW), it's not likely to make the money back prior to the end of life for the panels (25 years) if electricity prices keep rising without the feed in keeping pace. Add a battery system so you can load shift from daily production to cover nightly usage (where the real cost kicks in) means that you'll be running at a significant loss over the same period, as you'll probably have to replace lead batteries at least twice over the life time of the panels. Even if hydrogen fuel cells or some form of Li Ion battery becomes far cheaper, it's still loss making for the owner, subsidised to boot and the cheap manufacturing is because the panels are produced in China where even the most efficient of factories are utilising enormous amounts of carbon resourced energy, materials that are carbon intensive to make and manufacture etc.

I'm not saying solar is bad because I want it to be, I'm saying it's very easy to sell to people to make them feel better, but like any "too good to be true" story, there's a hell of a lot more beneath the surface than most people realise.

As for nuke and hydro, yep, they have downsides, but they are the most effective sources of energy in terms of return on energy invested that we have available to us at the moment. And the damage of hydro, if it replaces coal burning facilities, might be significantly less than the damage from allowing GW to continue to run unabated.

Great.. but they still use fossil fuels. 50% as much is awesome, but that might just be enough to keep the petroleum companies in control of the world for a few years longer.
...and I'm guessing that the claim they can use "solar" as fuel, means that they can use solar produced hydrogen, like any other fuel cell (not that this is neccesarilly a bad thing.. just not new).

I'm wondering how much their cobalt, phosphorous, oxygen, nickel, molybdenum, and zinc cost.
What does he mean "light harvesting infrastructure"? It seemed the whole idea was it removes the need for infrastructure and allows a small setup to make enough power for a small home.
The obvious issue seems to be the cost of a fuel cell that can power a home which probably means it will not ever be cost effective over solar cells/turbine/micro-hydro and batteries/flywheel/hydro storage.
Neat though.

The four mountain peaks on the corners of the fuel cell are where the lift pumps gather fuel and pump it into the central fuel collector... from there a high pressure pump feeds the engine.

http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/renault-technical-feature-fuel-systems-on-v8-era/

The 40kg of fuel in this simulation represents about 25% of the full fuel load at the start of a race, 58 litres, compared to a full fuel tank which has 160kg/230L

>> ^VoodooV:

It's less dirty coal, but it's still dirty, yet they get to call it CLEAN for some reason.
cold fusion, solar, hydrogen fuel cells or GTFO


Name 3 things that won't work in time for it to matter!

Go gen4 reactors, lots of them, and now! I recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" as to why I believe this. Available for free at http://www.withouthotair.com/

Video reference here:

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


But ya, coal needs to go, but you have to remember, 2 billion people live in abject poverty. They try to bridge the gap using as cheap a source of energy they can...like coal. Until you make energy cheaper than coal, your never going to displace the use of dino fuels around the world. The physics on fusion, solar, and hydrogen can't answer that call for quite awhile (we have been trying to make fusion work for decades, same with solar, and fuel cells are just terrible right now and only work for transportation fuels not baseload power generation). I do think we can answer a large number of these problems with new generations of nuclear power, with passive safety and no emissions, gen4 reactors have a lot of great points if people give them a chance!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

In relation to the direct content of the video, your NEVER going to get China and India on board with giving up cheap energy...they are BOTH x3 the population of the US, they have to care about cheap energy WAAAAY more than us, for population and standard of living issues. The only way to win this isn't through regulation, it is through technological innovation...and China has been buying up our AP1000 Gen3 for all the reasons I just mentioned.

To say that dino fuels are "Destroying us" is a little bit of a misnomer, you don't get food without hydrocarbons, you don't have refrigeration without hydrocarbons, you don't get heating and cooling without hydrocarbons. Energy isn't the enemy, any attempts to price out energy will only hurt the most reliant on its low price...if you doubled the price of gas via taxation, you aren't helping the little man. Cheap energy prices, even if they are oil based, aren't the devil, any attempts to make them so is a misunderstanding of the energy crisis. More oil drilling isn't even going to lower costs, at best, it will keep them the same, but peak oil in the US has already come, more drilling in more exotic places is just going to tow the line...and it isn't even going to do that.

Talking about clean coal is just so "we" can talk about how much we need cheap energy without talking about the health effects. Coal does kill, without a doubt, but so does electricity so costly you can't afford heating or cooling. You can't call for an elimination of coal without talking about what is going to replace it, and at what cost. This is even MORE relevant with the recent spout of weather, imagine if that area was packed full of solar and wind...it most likely be completely destroyed, and those are already very cost heavy forms of energy.

Anyway, I will end the rant. I really recommend the book above if you wish to delve down the rabbit hole of energy solutions. It isn't as easy as you think, it is why we are still using dino fuels. Any path you choose is challenging, and VERY capital and R&D intensive. Were are talking multiple trillion dollars to role out replacements on a national scale. Now, oil does a trillion a year, so this isn't outside the realm of possibility, but it is going to take a technical answer to solve, not a political one.

It's less dirty coal, but it's still dirty, yet they get to call it CLEAN for some reason.

cold fusion, solar, hydrogen fuel cells or GTFO

Most fuel cell vehicles get hydrogen from natural gas = emissions (though less than gasoline vehicles).

However, another problem is that fuel cell vehicles are incredibly inefficient, in the ways of 47%. As a comparison, gasoline vehicles are about 37% efficient while electric vehicles are 99% efficient.

It's certainly no magic bullet, but it's better than the shit we have now, that's for sure.

You can see the snorkel just behind the cabin in the last few seconds of the video.

>> ^conan:

>> ^BoneRemake:
Where is the snorkel ? ?

I also wondered. How the hell does this thing work without air? Or is Isuzu pioneering fuel cell fire trucks? :-)

>> ^BoneRemake:

Where is the snorkel ? ?


I also wondered. How the hell does this thing work without air? Or is Isuzu pioneering fuel cell fire trucks? :-)

It's never been any other way, robo-homey. Just make sure position #2 blankfist's goop spells out 'STATIST IDIOTS'.


>> ^siftbot:




Congratulations. You have attained position #1 in the post-singularity carbohydrate liquification list. Human fatty tissue can be made into an effective fuel cell. Thank you in advance for your contribution.>> ^quantumushroom:
I'd like to play an RPG where they had a "douchey good" alignment.
You mean, like Siftbot?

>> ^dag:
To be honest, as much as I agree with Grayson - they're both a shade on the douchey side. Kind of the difference between chaotic good and chaotic evil alignments.
I'd like to play an RPG where they had a "douchey good" alignment.

Congratulations. You have attained position #1 in the post-singularity carbohydrate liquification list. Human fatty tissue can be made into an effective fuel cell. Thank you in advance for your contribution.>> ^quantumushroom:

I'd like to play an RPG where they had a "douchey good" alignment.

You mean, like Siftbot?


>> ^dag:

To be honest, as much as I agree with Grayson - they're both a shade on the douchey side. Kind of the difference between chaotic good and chaotic evil alignments.

I'd like to play an RPG where they had a "douchey good" alignment.

>> ^coolhund:

I agree completely with visionep. Milkmans points are just not true or avoidable.
Theres also the point of engines not being able to run Ethanol at all. Vintage cars for example.
In the end this bio ethanol is just another farce to make money, at a very high cost to... as always... the poor.
What this guy says in the video is just not true. Even with only E10, a higher priced gasoline will still give you better mileage (up to 10%). This is happening in Germany right now. Nobody is buying this ethanol crap because it simply isnt worth it. Not to mention because of the detrimental effects on people and cars.


Yes, some older cars do not run well with an ethanol blend, and some might take that to a point where they wouldn't run at all.

You say bio ethanol is a farce to make money (aren't all businesses?) and the cost targets the poor. That makes a good soundtext-bite but I don't see how ethanol production is particularly detrimental to the poor, at least not in any way that isn't heavily outweighed by other competitors. Care to elaborate?

About mileage: yes, any blend of ethanol will give lower gas mileage than pure gasoline. The point that I would suggest is that when you burn that gallon of gasoline, it isn't coming back. At least not for a few million years. We can/will keep on burning through oil for a while, but as we do so the prices will go up.

Right now, today, the market settles out so that in Brazil the cost per unit of distance traveled may actually favor gasoline; car owners "vote" at the pump. But I'm talking about the long term, in the future. Corn, or better yet switchgrass, grows back. Not in millions of years, *next* year. We're just a few years down the line from the initial introduction of ethanol and ethanol blends as a fuel. And yet already it is making a bit of competition with big oil.

If better alternative fuels come along (hydrogen fuel cells or whatever), I'll be open to them. But at this point ethanol seems like one that actually works, and has been working, in spite of the fact that it doesn't have a fully stable infrastructure yet.

>> ^quantumushroom:

You have nothing to worry about, unless you're part of the one-third of the populace paying for the other two-thirds who take more than they give.


Oh, come off it QM.

In 2009 the top 5% of households received 20.7% of National Income.

20.7% of 14.5 TRILLION dollars.

That's more money that the bottom 40% of households earned COMBINED.

3.9% + 9.4% = 13.3% of 14.5 Trillion dollars.

[http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/inequality/f02AR.xls]

~~~
So go ahead, pretend like the Upper Class is being victimized by other lazy selfish citizens too dumb to have been born into wealthy families.

Plus, i mean.. do you even make $250,000+ a year? No? Then WHY THE FUCK are you such a willfully ignorant brown-noser for anything labeled "conservatism"?!

I swear to god you're just some pervy troll who get boners from sadomasochistic politics.

"Yes, Master Plutocracy. May I have another?"
~~~

p.s. - cognitive dissonance. it powers your fuel cells.