*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, October 4th, 2010 11:11am PDT - promote requested by enoch.

*quality talk. Good stuff.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by LarsaruS.

Hydrogen and oxygen...a bond not easily broken. I like this idea of using photovoltaic cells to power a form of electrolysis...but it is just so darned slow to make energy. Unless he knows something that I don't, your rooftop doesn't generate enough electricity to convert enough hydrogen and oxygen to run real time. We share the same dream though, of homes being their own power sources. I hope this solution has more weight that solutions of similar natures gone by.

i like this energy idea

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl100550k

engineered bacteria that use Sunlight and CO2 to produce simple sugars that can be converted to ethanol using yeast. almost no waste products and uses waste products.

His research is specifically in catalyzing electrolysis. Its a big improvement over the old platinum catalysts (which were good at catalyzing the hydrogen formation, but not the oxygen), and has the added benefit of maintaining the same reaction rate for a long periods of time, using non-pure water sources.

Hey, here's an idea: Why not open source your technology so that any first-year chem student can do it and end all energy problems and all global warming issues overnight?

Damn, I really hope it's as easy as he says.

who do i give my wallet to? WAIT almost forgot my green card. please, DO MORE SCIENCE

For a professor he sure gets a lot of basic stuff wrong.
For starters he doesn't seem to know (or care) that energy and power is not the same thing. That makes it really difficult to figure out wtf he's talking about in the first half.
Then he proudly claims they discovered artificial photosynthesis only it's not photosynthesis but some kind of electrolysis (or it wouldn't need photovoltaic panels).
Sure, efficient super high density energy storage using water would be pretty awesome if it becomes widely available and cheap but it won't solve "The Energy Problem™" mostly because solar panels still suck. Even in the most sunny parts of the world covering your house with cheap-ish solar panels will probably not be enough to power everything in your house during the day without using part of the power to split water. Good luck if you live somewhere that doesn't get a lot of sunlight or if you don't own a house.
And no, water is not an energy source, energy storage maybe but not a source.

If you invent something good then talk about it, don't just make bullshit claims that you'll save the world and barely mention the actual invention/discovery like this guy does. "I'm not gonna tell you what it is." wtf?

>> ^DonanFear:

"I'm not gonna tell you what it is." wtf?


http://www.suncatalytix.com/
They patented the Cobalt, Oxygen and Phosphorus catalyst, started that company and got a DOE research contract ($4 mil).
Publication citations are on that site, too.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Really enjoyed this.

"You guys always screw it up"

Great point on education of impoverished women and it's impact on consumption. Here's a decent charity that aims to impact this issue in Africa:


http://www.africare.org/our-work/what-we-do/women/index.php
http://www.bbb.org/charity-reviews/national/relief-and-development/africare-in-washington-dc-2306

Please don't screw it up

I'm fairly sure splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen via solar power and storing the energy isn't a new idea for energy?

My dad's been mentioning it years, and i'm fairly sure he didn't work it out himself. In fact, i think i saw a program with a guy that built an 'energy efficient house' who had huge tanks storing both hydrogen and oxygen from this process.

Almost all energy consumed by households is avoidable waste:
* think about the way you fry eggs. 99% of the heat from the burner is going into the air, not into the eggs. This should be solved by using small device that is well insulated on all sides and has an internal heating coil.
* Ovens have a high heat capacity and shitty insulation. More energy is wasted on heating up the oven itself than actually goes into the food. This could be solved by lining the inside of the oven with silica aerogel instead of metal. If an oven is properly insulated it will not feel very warm to the touch on the outside, even after being on for an hour.
* Most of your heating and cooling energy leaks out the windows -- if their inside surface feels significantly above or below ambient during extreme weather, your heating and cooling energy is being wasted and hemorrhaging out the windows. It would literally save energy to have a webcam on the roof and display that image on an LCD inside instead of having windows, if you live in a climate with extreme temperatures (especially in cold climates, as the energy used for the LCD would contribute to heating the house). All ventilation needs can be accomplished through a small portal with a fan (and a heat exchanger, of course).
* Hot water is produced very wastefully by just dumping energy into it instead of using a thermodynamic cycle to transfer heat and produce something cold as a byproduct. Hot water could be co-produced with cold water for AC / Refrigeration much more efficiently than doing them all separately.
* Hot water goes down the drain. This should at least go through a heat exchanger, which would dramatically lessen the amount of work that has to be done to heat up new hot water. A 7 Liter per minute showerhead putting water 30 degrees F above ambient down the drain is wasting over 8135 watts as long as it is running. However, I don't know of any houses yet designed with a heat exchanger between the shower drain water and the intake of the water heater.
* Fluorescent lights. Duh. Incandescent bulbs should be banned.
* Freezers built with the door on the top will waste much less energy to the convection of air when opened, for obvious reasons.

Here ends the lifestyle-neutral list of suggestions. The following would involve sacrificing something:

* Reduce excessive lighting -- if people wouldn't fuck up their retinas by driving just after sunrise or just before sunset, or seeing specular reflections of the sun on shiny cars and buildings outdoors, they wouldn't need such bright lights indoors. A 1 watt LED is plenty for reading. Sunlight could be used in the daytime instead of artificial lights.

@jwray

That's all true for the most part, but I think you're ignoring the enormous cost of changing old houses over to these newer, efficient technologies. Being that I'm someone who has experience remodeling homes and installing these types of equipment/systems (and my roommate is a plumbing/heating guy who loves thinking/talking about this kind of stuff) I think most people see these sorts of numbers and say "oh, look what can be done"

The fact is (and this was mentioned in the video) efficiency is costly. Retrofitting an old house with everything you listed above would cost at least $100,000 for a small home and possibly $300k+ for a really big one, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as building it from scratch.

Technology, especially home technology has enormous momentum. Homes change very slowly over time, and only when investments are very sound. Things you install/change usually last for 30 years or more unless someone with a lot of money comes in and changes it again. You can't even imagine what technologies will be available in 10 years, let alone 30-100. I've been with people as they try to make these decisions. They'd really like to improve the efficiency of their home, but the reality is most people just don't have the money to do any of these types of changes (let alone all of them), and even when they do, they don't stay in the home long enough to see the return on their investment...and most people aren't willing to risk putting tons of money into their home unless they're relatively sure they're going to see it come back to them when they sell.

I don't mean to be a pessimist, but there's a reason this prof. is studying what he's studying. Worrying too much about efficiency can get you into trouble.

The cost of retrofitting old houses with more efficient systems will always be more than the difference between the cost of building a new efficient house and the cost of building a new inefficient house. Nearly everything I suggested will pay for itself in electricity savings in under 5 years in the latter case. Just ban the construction of new homes that don't meet very good efficiency standards -- new homes without e.g. wastewater heat exchangers aren't even saving the owners any money in the >1 year term. Most new homes are purchased on >=20 year mortgages anyway.

@jwray mortgage length means nothing as long as someone can sell the home. I'd like to see the math on that stuff...where are you getting your numbers from? Even if the home had free Gas/electricity, the bills for 5 years wouldn't add up to the installation cost of all these systems....maybe you're paying a lot more for energy than I am?

anyway to aid this taking off?

I didn't really follow all of that, but it was interesting. I hope that it is as simple as he makes it sound, as @Payback said. However, I tend to think that if it *was* that easy, he'd have the patent and be mass producing it as we speak, while rolling around in his vast piles of money.