NYT: Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In Rule

Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In Rule
By DANNY HAKIM

Published: April 2, 2005


DETROIT, April 1 - Ron Gremban and Felix Kramer have modified a Toyota Prius so it can be plugged into a wall outlet.

This does not make Toyota happy. The company has spent millions of dollars persuading people that hybrid electric cars like the Prius never need to be plugged in and work just like normal cars. So has Honda, which even ran a commercial that showed a guy wandering around his Civic hybrid fruitlessly searching for a plug.

But the idea of making hybrid cars that have the option of being plugged in is supported by a diverse group of interests, from neoconservatives who support greater fuel efficiency to utilities salivating at the chance to supplant oil with electricity. If you were able to plug a hybrid in overnight, you could potentially use a lot less gas by cruising for long stretches on battery power only. But unlike purely electric cars, which take hours to charge and need frequent recharging, you would not have to plug in if you did not want to....

***

Conventional hybrid electric cars already save gas. But if one looks at growth projections for oil consumption, hybrids will slow the growth rate of oil imports only marginally, at best, with the amount depending on how many hybrids are sold. To actually stop the growth of oil imports and potentially even reduce consumption, automakers have focused on developing cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

But fuel cells would require a complete reinvention of the automobile, not to mention the nation's gas stations, and the technology to put them on the road is still a long way from fruition. Advocates of plug-in hybrids say the technology for these vehicles is available now to the point that people are building them in garages....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02plug.html

Um... WHAAAAAAA???? :shrug:

We can make as much electricity as we want. Oil is a different matter.

some parts of the country still use oil plants and coal plants to produce electricity.

Here in Russellville, we have Arkansas Nuclear One, and also a hydro plant on the Arkansas River. But not all places have clean power.

Think about it. You plug your car in during LOW DEMAND periods. Nobody's running their air conditioner (much), dishwasher, or much of anything else at 2AM. This power is VERY, VERY CHEAP for the power company to produce.

one would not have that additional cost with the current hybrid.

Last time I checked you couldn't violate either of the laws of thermodynamics. (You need energy to power it coming from some source)

It's a hybrid - two power sources, gas and electric. I believe that is what hybrid means. I'm talking about plugging in a self-generating electric gas hybrid like a Prius.

Was the superfluous punctuation helpful?

just be paying more for gas, which actually costs more. You have to pay for your car's fuel somewhere.

In English the two laws of thermodynamics are:

1) The most energy you can get is the energy you already had
2) You can't even get what you already had

The first one states that energy is conserved; the second one states that any time you convert energy you loose the ability to do work.

What you said violated the first law; implying that the energy comes form nowhere. The second law has significance in the economics of alternative fuels. Most alternative fuels have to go through two or possibly even three transitions meaning they have to be much more efficient to even come close to being economically feasible.

I wasn't implying anything of the sort. Clearly, you can't see inside my head.

A current hybrid runs on gas and electricity, correct? You buy gas but you don't have to plug it in. If you modify it to plug it in, you will still be buying gas but you will have the ADDITIONAL cost of plugging it in, which you would pay on your home electric bill. That was my point. It increases the cost beyond the normal operating expense.

Thanks for the thermodynamics lesson. My college sciences were biologies and zoology.

and either gas or gas turned into electricity. (I’m not sure which one but it doesn’t really make a difference.) The energy has to come from either gas or electricity so when you plug it in and charge the battery it would likely run off the battery for as long as possible and switch to using gas when necessary. Because energy is coming from somewhere electricity it doesn’t come from gas. As a result you gas consumption decreases. As a result; depending on the cost of electricity and gas and the values of the efficiencies of each of the processes it may be much cheaper to power a car by plugging it in even though the expenses are being split between gas and electricity.

I have been looking into hybrid cars all week b/c I'm making it a goal to purchase one in the future. I was thinking in terms of a Prius getting 60 mpg vs how much my power bill is inflated with any extra power usage. Depending on the cost of gas vs power, it might be cheaper. Or it might not.

It is one of the few cars that have come out lately that have looked nice. I would suggest waiting a few years this price is likely to go down by about $2000 a year for the next little while.

There are a lot of hybrids scheduled to come out in the next few years and demand should increase, so it's my hope they'll be easier to get. Right now, I'm looking to temporarily downsize to a smaller used car. I've been driving a midsize SUV (got it used, cheap) b/c I do hauling with my business and I live in a really mountainous area, but I'm just going to have to compensate in other ways for that lost capacity. I don't like feeling like I'm devouring more than my share of natural resources and the price at the pumps is getting to me even if the SUV is functional for me.

to operate. I also live in Alberta (Canada) which is rich in oil and gas. This makes it so that the economy goes into a boom when gas prices go up, which of course, is the opposite of what ordinary economies do. It is good for me two fold; first the price of old trucks goes down substantially. Any increase in cost is also more then offset by having a better economy. I've been considering purchasing a small cheep car for the winter, but the cost and the reckless drivers makes this undesirable.

I run a feed/sporting good store so there are plenty of times I need to go pick up a load of feed to tide me over until the truck comes. Speaking of which, I just got a letter from the 2nd company so far to add a new fuel surcharge onto my deliveries. I can get 1,500 lbs in my Explorer and if I need to haul more, I can pull a trailer. My DH has a truck that stays parked, as his job provides a car. I'm trying to convince him that we need a car and that I can comandeer his truck when I need to haul something or when I'll be needing 4wd. He's being stingy about it, though.

There are still many diesel generators running in America and especially around the world. We need alternatives like harnessing the tides or geothermal or ???????????? Imagine the $$$$ that could be had from a good alternative source of energy. There is a clean energy company that has just developed a revolutionary new energy source called Heat Seeker. If you are into stocks at all it is ECLN and it's ready to soar...The company name is Encore

Parasitic neocons like Cheney.

edit to add: sorry, parasitic and neocon are redundant.

It's much more efficent.

We don't know what to do with the tons we already have, and you're suggesting we make more?

:shrug:

but it's more likely it will just be stashed on site at various nuclear power stations, for years to come. Especially after this weekend's news that the scientists at Yucca Mountain have been fudging their data to keep the project at Yucca going. A recent study (MIT?) on the future of nuclear power came to the conclusion that we don't need to do reprocessing; it's not worth the trouble unless we really increase the amount of nuclear power in this country. That may be a good thing, actually, if it means less reliance on coal and less reliance on imported energy. However, I appreciate peoples' apprehension about increasing nuclear.

Our Boiling Water and Pressurized Water vessels only burn about 1/50 the fuel of what a Breeder does.

Besides, where you going to get the electricity to make hydrogen? Coal? That is dirtier than just using oil.

This sounds like a great idea - too bad nobody in the US has the spine to push it...

Solar Tower of Power Finds Home
By Stephen Leahy
02:00 AM Feb. 24, 2005 PT

The quest for a new form of green energy has taken a significant step with the purchase of a 25,000-acre sheep farm in the Australian outback. The huge alternative energy project isn't driven by manure, but by a 1-kilometer-high thermal power station called the Solar Tower.

Announced several years ago, the 3,280-foot Solar Tower is one of the most ambitious alternative energy projects on the planet: a renewable energy plant that pumps out the same power as a small reactor but is totally safe. If built, it will be nearly double the height of the world's tallest structure, the CN Tower in Canada.

The Solar Tower is hollow in the middle like a chimney. At its base is a solar collector -- a 25,000-acre, transparent circular skirt. The air under the collector is heated by the sun and funneled up the chimney by convection -- hot air rises. As it rises, the air accelerates to 35 mph, driving 32 wind turbines inside the tower, which generate electricity much like conventional wind farms.

<more>


EnviroMission Limited

And they only produce the same amount of electricity as a small nuclear reactor that occupies a dozen acres. Where exactly could we build these things? The Midwest is out, because we need that land to grow food. You could put it in the deserts of the Southwest, but you'll destroy the fragile desert ecosystem. I'd rather have conventional wind turbines or even nuclear reactors over this thing.

I'm sure they can be used somewhere in this country - hell, put them all over Texas - we're not using it for anything anyway (except Austin)...

only about 6 miles square. Plenty of room in the midwest or elsewhere considering the production of enough electricity to power 200,000 homes, at the same time keeping 830,000 tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere annually.

Solar power during the long, snowy winters of the Midwestern US? Ugh. At least in the winter we can depend on the wind blowing for wind turbines.

Like I said, they might work in areas in the South or Southwest, but they are not feasible in much of the country due to climate.

The land you put a windmill or solar plant on could still be used for farming or grazing, and here in California, we have a lot of land that is just dust and sagebrush. You don't have to put them all in one place, that's just for illustration sake.

a nuke plant takes up less space for the plant itself, but what about the space, location, and threat of waste? The downside of nukes is a lot higher.

Even if you don't care about the effect of waste on future generations, consider the ability to monopolize power and blackmail us NOW, as happened not so long ago in California. We need to pursue methods that get the corporate boot off our neck, not twist to an angle that gives boot a better grip.

Trust me, I've seen plenty of them here in MN, they're great! You can graze cattle between them, or even grow hay between them. However, not all areas can support wind turbines, so that's why I'm being a realist and considering nuclear power as well.

From the looks of that photo, the device sits in the middle of a 2km-square piece of land--about 1100 acres.

I think this is a neat but impractical idea.

It looks particularly useful in desert areas fairly near to populated areas -- OR as an alternative in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the use of cooking fuel has caused extreme environmental damage and allowed the desert to grow at unprecedented rates.

For example, there is a 3-country project to tap into a huge aquafer reserve (Libya, Algeria, Tunsia) -- this type of cheap electricity would power both water and electrical needs that might allow reclaiming some of the desert.

However, Mongolia's desertification is rapid and ongoing and the aquafer that underlays it has already been sucked dry by the needs of China. Although, this method of electrical supply would still benefit Mongolia.

I have believed for years that overpopulation remains the single biggest issue that faces the world. The world's population has tripled within five decades (1950-present from 2 billion to 6 billion). The recently-released Millennium Ecosystem Project reports pinpoints population as a major undercurrent of causes to much of the econological damage being done.

Until the world grapples with population issues, and we get the RW in the US out of meddling in UN and WHO issues, there is no long term solution to any energy needs that won't exacerbate the entire ecosystem's problems.

There is a very real reason that natural disasters such as the Tsunami in December wreaked as much havoc as it did -- overpopulation is pushing people onto the fringes and causing them to seek methods of earning a living that is causing grave environmental damage (removing the mangroves) for shrimping and fishing.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Ford Nucleon concept carThe Ford Nucleon was a nuclear-powered concept car developed by Ford Motor Company in 1958. The car did not have an internal-combustion engine, rather, it was powered by a small nuclear reactor in the trunk of the car. The nuclear reactor used fuel that could be swapped out, and one load of nuclear fuel could purportedly power the car for 5000 miles. The car never went into production, but it remains an icon of the Atomic Age in the 1950s.

==================================================================

Ahhh, the 50's ! Of course, I always wondered what would happen in the event of a fender-bender with one of these nuke-powered beauties: please use alternate roads...for the next 10,000 YEARS.

They are doing work on a system that turns radiation from halfnium into power without having it in a reactor (I think) Popular Mechanics put it in an issue a few months back talking about aircraft applications.

Leave it to corporate America to replace one expensive, dangerous, polluting technology with something worse.

and expensive to purchase and dispose or recycle.

Solar hydrogen:
http://www.hionsolar.com/n-hion96.htm
http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/adv/articles/2004/aug/Solar_hydrogen.html

We have a limited supply of fissionable material. Less than 30 years worth if we were to replace all of our existing plants with nuclear reactors right now.

Start reprocessing spent fuel rods, and start using thorium as a fissionable material as well (three times as abundant as uranium), and you have enough fissionable material to last for several centuries. It would buy us enough time to develop more efficient solar, wind and fusion power.

Sorry but Battery cars don't cut it. Batteries don't have a long enough range to be good for anything but a commuter car. Most people don't have enough money to buy a car that is so limited.

Battery cars are no good for traveling outside a distance less than half their charge from your house. And did I mention you must own a house to have a battery car. What are you going to do? Ask your apartment owner to install a car charger for you assumming you even have a parking space? I don't think so.

If you go on a trip you can't take a battery car unless you know you are going to spend each night in a hotel that has battery car hook-ups and those drives are going to be short.

You can't fill up a battery car at a station like you can with a hydrogen car. Imagine the lines if it took 6 hours to fill up each vehicle. Forget about it.

Hydrogen cars are not as efficient as a battery car, but they are more efficient than hybrid gasoline vehicles and they don't run on oil and they don't pollute.

Sorry that it will take so long to re-manufature cars to run on hydrogen, and re-build all gas stations as well.

Oh well. In the meantinme, we'll just have to keep using OIL.

On the surface it seems nice and clean, however it has one very major problem associated with it. Hydrogen power produces one byproduct, water vapor. Water vapor is the number ONE greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Just think of how fast global warming would accelerate with every vehicle pumping pure water vapor into the amosphere.

The article states that hydrogen power (which is supported by bushco) will take YEARS to develop.

That's why bush and neo-oilmen support it. It will take years before they figure out that it isn't usable, and in the meantime, we'll just keep using oil instead of looking into solar, hybreds, etc.

(guess my irony wasn't showing in my post!)

or natural gas, or something worse.

Why do enviro-concerened people oppose
the electric car?
their position seems to be, electric cars are bad
until electricity is renewable.
Of course, they don't say that, they say something
about hydrogen cars.
Honda built how many Honda FCX fuel cell cars?
Maybe twenty? What a fraud.

If there was a griddable h-car that could go:
ten miles, recharge, ten miles, recharge, ect, without
using the gas motor, that would lower my gasoline use
by 90 percent. Yes I know that electricity is not free,
I still want a griddable h-car.
Of course, oil companies, certain countries, certain
US states would go bankrupt, thats tough.

Can the 'rest of the world' help out any?
Why is it that?, only people in the US can do this.

Their message is that we are too dependent on foreign oil, particularly from the middle east, and this makes us vulnerable for a nation. Therefore, for geopolitical reasons, they are vigorously advocating energy conservation and alternative energy supplies. So people like Frank Gaffney and Tom Friedman are driving Priuses. So I'm thinking, these guys are just starting to get a clue. There might be some hope for us yet, however slender.

hastily cobbled together when they finally came to the realization that their Iraq plan was a total failure.

the term is Con-ser-va-tion-al-ist Conservationalist - A person concerned about concerving what we have to make it last longer.

Which means it's too late to do anything

:wtf:

prices and counting = blocking legislation to force automakers to boost fuel efficiency in their cars? I'm confused.

More conversions of energy form implies additional losses.

1. Pretend to go after Bin Who?
2. U-Turn to Iraq (Lot's of Oil)
3. Get there. No luv-in for Chimp and No Oil.
4. Lie to Ur-Mer-i-Kans about everything.
5. Make Ur-Mer-ikans hate each other and super-poor & needy.
6. Take IOU SS $$ and tons more under Patriot Acts.
7. Hold all Ur-Meri-Kans for $$ ransom, like Criditors, etc.
8. Turn Globe against Ur-Meri-Kans while Ur-Meri-kans turn against one another...

Moral of Story: Chimp and Gang have looted the till, while we're running 'round daily getting hit by every crazy BS coming down the pike, like chick's w/their heads cut off.

Awaiting the Wake-up of America. In the meantime, :banghead:

Do they think we will develop hydrogen mines? I am certain the majority do not understand it will be generated ultimately from coal.

The *ONLY* way hydrogen makes sense at all is if you use nuclear to produce it - everything else is grossly inefficient.

Use it to run electric generators that split the water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas.

I think hydroelectric is only 10% of our electrical power. Coal is between 50 and 60%, nuclear is 20%, natural gas is most of the rest.

Also, producing hydrogen by electrolysis is inefficient (I think it's twice the energy in for every energy unit of hydrogen out). Currently, hydrogen comes from natural gas. Of course, natural gas has become much more expensive; domestic production is dropping. Eventually, it may come from specially-designed nuclear reactors that use heat and electricity to produce hydrogen.

Replacing petroleum with hydrogen will be tough to do. I suspect plug-in hybrids or even pure battery-electric cars will be our future; there's no need for huge infrastructure investments.

Primarily, there's no percentage in it for energy companies like oil, coal, and nuclear.

All of those require a steady supply of fuel or high tech maintainence in the case of nuke.

Most forms of hydro, wind, and solar are set it and forget it--requires some maintainence now and then, but no fuel, so no continuing source of revenue.

which said that they were planning on building a working prototype by 2004 or 2005. But it looked like the company was still trying to find investors, still trying to convince people the idea was viable. They said they thought they would be able to design these things to be storm-proof, but they hadn't yet demonstrated this. In the software industry, they call this "vaporware".

The truth of the matter is this: The major energy companies are heavily involved in renewables. The leading company for solar photovoltaics happens to be BP. Solar cells don't need refueling, but they have to be manufactured; if solar were to become a big part of our energy picture, they would have to be manufactured by the hundreds of millions (current price is something like $500 for a standard 100 Wp panel). A leading manufacturer of large wind turbines (1.5-3.6 MW) is General Electric. Again, you don't need to refuel wind turbines, but there will be large numbers of these built in the coming decades, and I doubt the large corporations will miss this opportunity.

The reason renewables haven't become dominant yet is mainly because of their intermittent nature; they will contribute to our energy but cannot serve as critical, reliable baseline capacity. Coal, gas and nuclear do that, and I'm afraid to say, will continue to do that for some time. But both you and I would agree, the more solar and wind energy, the better. Wind in particular is less expensive than nuclear. It should expand rapidly in the next decade or two.

Government incentives or mandates could have made them roll the windmills and solar sooner.

Wind is somewhat intermittent, but there are places where it's relatively constant, just as solar is here in SoCal.

I'd like to see the ratio of coal, gas, and nuke to solar, wind, and hydro flip.

Probably the large scale utilities won't bring it online until enough people get frustrated and go off grid or start at least doing home generation.

inefficient and inexplicable half step of creating hydrogen which is then turned into electricity by your car which becomes so complex you're forced into going to specialty shops for repair and maintenance. Rube Goldberg engineering in action. Why not instead create a infrastructure that supports good old lead acid batteries, completely recyclable, and instead of a gas fill up on long trips you could stop and have your battery pack swapped. For around town driving you'd simply charge your vehicle at home off the power grid. The technology is simple and already available.

They're starting to sell them all over the world EXCEPT North America.

Right now, they have the range limitations of electrics, about 120-180 miles, but this profoundly simple tech looks promising: no hydrogen to split and later explode, no batteries to leak or that need to be recycled, no pollution. You just have to generate the electricity somewhere to fill them up.

http://www.theaircar.com/

This would sound too good to be true if I







Videos:

http://www.motordeaire.com/video.html

We'd still need to build hundreds more nuclear reactors, but it could have potential.

keep some old coal, oil, and gas burning plants for off-peak and lulls in wind or sun.

Even the Dept. of Energy said North Dakota alone gets enough wind to power the whole country, and 100 square miles of solar panels in Nevada could do the same thing.

The bigger solution is to get away from large scale power generation and set up the energy equivalent of the internet--slap some solar panels on the roof of your house, and while you are at work, that electricity goes back into the grid. Some people are already doing this, and you can end up with the utility owing you at the end of the month instead of the other way around.

On the large scale stuff, instead of paying farmers subsidies to grow or not grow stuff, give them the same amount for putting up windmills and sell their crops for market value, which would be a big help to Third World farmers.

we haven't already done this.

At least make new houses easily convertable to solar, and in areas that don't get a lot of sun that are out in the boonies, have windmills. Not a large-scale windfarm, just a small windmill outside every farm house.

Every house having solar panels would virtually solve the energy "problem."

In the middle ages, everybody just ground their own with mortar and pestal until the nobles got the idea of of having the large mill and outlawing grinding your own. The mill is a natural monopoly. Just like nuke, coal, oil, etc. All of those things require a big business to process and deliver, and tech that consumers could use directly themselves is suppressed or at best neglected.

I'm in California, where we don't have coal plants, nuclear plants are very unpopular in part because of the earthquake hazard, every river that can be dammed has been, and our geothermal plants only produce a fraction of the needed energy.

We buy huge amounts of power from out of state (where coal plants are legal, natch) and we had rolling blackouts because the energy companies decided to take advantage of our vulnerability.

In most of the state it's sunny all summer, which is when peak usage is, because people in the valley and socal like to have the air conditioning on.

They said deregulation would bring down the cost of energy, and instead it went up. My understanding of economics is hazy, but if you greatly increase the supply, doesn't the cost drop for everyone?

Putting solar panels on new houses would cost a few thousand extra, but if you're already paying $200,000 for a house, what's an extra 5000? Especially if it partially pays for itself in energy savings every month.

the price will zoom up and also become volatile. And electricity is getting tight in this country.

Recently I priced solar. I believe it would cost more like $20,000 to power a typical house completely with solar. Not quite there yet financially if you're already on the grid. Not extremely implausible either; I gather many people are doing this simply because they don't want Enron screwing them over every summer (even if it costs somewhat more).

My power is pretty reliable and the price hasn't gone up. But I live in Indiana, and my power is coal. An old dirty coal plant, in fact. Sigh.

but I think the 20,000 is for rewiring an existing house and converting it to solar, but if you build a house from scratch and make it solar-capable, it's a lot less.

Anyone know for sure what the costs are?

if my arithmetic is right. (This figures the intermittent nature of sunlight.) I think this is only about 10% of our electricity. Please correct my numbers if I'm in error. The 100 square miles of panels would cost on the order of $100 billion. Comparable to nuclear, by the way. I gather wind turbines are already quite competitive however.

how much have we spent in iraq so far?

Wind and solar are a help - but just that, a help. Solar doesn't have the energy density to be practical as an industrial source (though by reducing the need for heating water in homes it can help). Wind has its problems. Wherever there are windmill farms (like those in SoCal along I8) the toll on bats is huge (Google "windmills and bats"). The problem of scale and distribution for wind power is there as well.

So that still leaves us with the need for centralized, high-density power sources. And nuclear is the best option from the point of view of climate forcing through greenhouse gas emmissions.

I agree with you, nuclear is worth our consideration, if we can trust the utilities and the government to make sound choices on reactor design and waste processing. But I think wind and solar should play an increasing role.

But I can't help teasing you: you should change your screen name to gammarayofreason.

...cosmicray

What's a few MeV and some rest mass between friends?

Burning coal produces greenhouse gases, so while it would provide energy independence (we have huge reserves of coal), we would still have the climate forcing problem.

I agree with you and others on this thread who think that nuclear is the way to go. No greenhouse gases. There may be controversy about waste management, but I think that the answers are there. For one thing, we have the example of the Oklo natural reactor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Natural_nuclear_reactors
http://geology.miningco.com/od/geophysics/a/aaoklo.htm

This implies that vitrification of waste, then storage in stable geological formations (like salt mines) could do the trick.

who owns most of the coal mining operations in Russia (and now the US?) was very happy about *'s push for hydrogen because the only practical way to produce it would be with coal (I think in light of all the bureaucratic/financial obstacles of working with nuclear).

generating capacity that is now going to waste.

Off-peak means late night-early morning and weekends. Anywhere from 20-50% of the base-load electricity generating capacity during those times, mostly coal and nuclear, could be used for transportation instead of waste. It would be a way of improving the efficiency of unfortunately dirty coal by using the coal fired electricity to replace gasoline.

This was discussed at length on the Yahoo group "EnergyResources" which is, in my opinion, a very high quality source of information on energy topics.

... isn't nearly the same thing as "energy used". Unless you are talking about nuclear, that excess generating capacity still requires fuel to create electricity, it just doesnt' require more plant and equipment.

I'm not for or against "plug in", that would depend on how much the electricity to charge the batteries costs vs the amount of gas consumption avoided costs.

One could make a case that it might not be a good deal now, but it will as gasoline costs continue to rise.

coal fired plants. They pretty much keep going all night no matter whether the generating capacity is used or not. So we might as well use it, IMHO.

I can't speak to the situation with the natural gas powered turbine-boiler type generators which provide more base power in some areas, though.

.. but it takes a lot more fuel to turn a generating turbine under load than under no load. I don't doubt that they keep the plants running all the time, but I seriously doubt that they are burning anywhere near the same amount of fuel at 3am as they are at 3pm.

I'll have to do some research on that and perhaps raise it on the various energy lists and groups where I lurk.

Edited to fix link.

Posted this on another thread - for those of you who ask the question "where do we get the hydrogen?" Um, perhaps water? There is a non-trivial body of evidence that hydrogen can be derived from water in a controlled chemical reaction suited for many types of energy.

http://www.blacklightpower.com

http://www.allnerdsandgeeks.com/index.EugeneMallove.html


(FYI Eugene Mallove was murdered in early 2004, perhaps by suspicuous circumstances)

Could Cold Fusion Be For Real?


An Interview with Dr. Eugene Mallove

By Bill Moore

17 March 2000 -- Imagine a battery that weighs just 10 pounds, yet can power an electric vehicle 1000 miles! One US company, Blacklight Power, is allegedly developing just such a battery based on the much debated and maligned theory popularly dubbed "cold fusion."

There have been few recent controversies in modern science as enduring and divisive as the debate over "cold fusion," a little understood process which purportedly creates "anomalous" excess heat from the interaction of heavy water, a catalyst and small amounts of electrical energy.

When the US Patent and Trademark Office recently awarded Blacklight Power a number of patents on its technology, EVWorld.Com decided to take a little closer look at the cold fusion controversy to see if any thing has changed since the 1989 furor that arose from the claims of two Utah researchers, Pons and Fleischman.

We contacted Dr. Eugene Mallove, the Editor In Chief of Infinite Energy magazine to find out what is the current status of cold fusion research. Is it still a fringe science or has it begun to achieve wider acceptability?

Other Hydrogen Chemistry?

Dr. Mallove, who holds two engineering degrees from MIT and a third from Harvard University, began our interview by stating that, indeed, hydrogen is most promising new fuel of the 21st century, but not the hydrogen talked about in discussions on fuel cells.

"The normal conception of hydrogen for use in vehicles, which is an admirable pursuit, considers using basically the normally understood chemical energy of hydrogen. Now what if you were to find one or more mechanisms associated with hydrogen, and I do believe there are more than one mechanism associate with this so-called 'cold fusion' phenomenon. What if you were to find something that would extract a thousand to a million times or beyond the normally understood chemical energy. That's what we're talking about in cold fusion energy."


More at link.

Seems to indicate the guy running it is a quack, and widely dismissed by the majority of physics researchers.

...actually give due consideration to any of the empirical evidence because they believe their assumptions cannot be challenged, it doesn't surprise me. You seem to forget that scientists are human and are also guilty of hubris and arrogance.

The US Department of Energy quietly agreed in early 2004 to reopen research into this phenomenon that has been observed and reproduced by credible scientists across the globe. FYI, scientific "experts" have been wrong before...and history does have a tendency to repeat itself.

I can't even tell if he's published any peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals; if he has, they've been few and far between.

If you had, you wouldn't be asking this question.

I read the links you provided...and have just stopped laughing long enough to write this post.

The Blacklight website say "...energy is released as the electrons of hydrogen atoms are induced by a catalyst to transition to lower-energy levels (i.e. drop to lower base orbits around each atom's nucleus) corresponding to fractional quantum numbers." What nonsense! It sounds scientific enough to fool folks who have no understanding of quantum mechanics, but it is just a modern physics version of a perpetual motion machine. There is no lower energy level lower than the ground state in a hydrogen atom.

Cold fusion is dead wrong, and part of the proof is that people who claimed to have done it in the lab are not dead - even though the neutron flux from the fusion rates they were claiming would have killed them. The whole business has been throughly debunked by the physics community

Absolutely not!

Your first impression, that Mallove is a quack and Blacklight Power is BS, was right on target.

Recycling vegetable cooking oil into fuel for diesel vehicle engines. Don't know how far along he is, but it suddenly seems a most timely effort, doesnt it? I think he's gotten a lot of his info off the internet. I'll have to ask him a little more about it.

saw an article recently here about a woman doing that. Pulls up weekly to her local Chinese place -- picks up used cooking oil. They're glad to dispose of it, and her car's been modified to run on it. Pretty cool.

What happens when you have 100 people fighting over the fry-vat dump at your local Burger King?

Just like what you could expect if the 2,500 people who live in my town decided to start "living off the land". There wouldn't be as much as a possum in the woods or a crawdad in the creek after 2 weeks.
After a winter's pestilence and starvation,(for the HUMANS) things might start to move towards stability....

Brasil has been using bio-diesel in part of full for years. When they came to the US to pitch this, they were basically laughed out of the county.

but in theory, if you only burn bio-diesel you're not contributing to CO2 increases.

although it seems like the number of greasy restuarants around here would support a whole lot of cars! J/K

I have also read that once our great oil spurg is over and humanity takes the big nose dive, a major die off will occur..

any guesses are to who many years in the future?? I say withing 30 years, we are going to witness a life changing event in this world..

"Bring out yer DEAD!"

You're southern? I don't see those words online much. It's almost refreshing. I'm in the rural south.

That's ALMOST Southern....:7
It's about time to start seeing those big crawdaddies (the ones as big as yo see on the buffet) out walking around.

The Possums are already saying "I don't see how that chicken does it" with their last breathes...

you mean those disgusting giant rat-like nocturnal rodents?? Do people in the south actually eat them? I found one of those big greasy rat tailed things in my back yard eating the cat's food a couple months back. It wasnt even scared of me. Cant imagine eating it. Like eating a skunk...

I think I'd be moved to cannibalism before I'd eat a possum...

http://www.greasel.com/



The idea behind it is that restaurants have to pay people to come get their spent vegetable oil. This provides a way that people can use their old oil. Diesel engines can be modified to burn like 5% diesel and 95% Veg. Oil. I think the diesel is used to start the vehicle and get the motor warm, and then there is a switch to change tanks, and the car starts burning oil.

They smell like french fries and fried chicken! Avoid the grease from the fish joints, though, unless you want to smell like Long John Silver's just shy of closing time!

that gives off the smell of tempura.

if I bought the Ford hybrid SUV, it would take me many many years to break even on the gas savings, if ever.

He did assure me that the smaller, more gas economical cars are on the way, but I know that the car companies still have their eyes on the $$$ in machismo . . . so the real savings will not likely materialize for a long time . . .

Add on three to five thoudand dollars to the sales price, and it'll take quite a while to make the money back. Most people are ready to sell their cars byt eh time that happens. Of course, there's less pollution, and gas prices are jumping so fast that three to five grand might make sense (the CR article was from a couple of years ago).

Can someone tell me what the title of this article refers to? I cannot find any mention in the article of a rule against plugging in a hybrid. Did I miss it?

"As it stands, though, modifying a hybrid like the Prius to enable it to plug in would add perhaps $2,000 to $3,000 to the cost of a car. . . ."

If tinkerers are already doing this, I'd like to know how much it cost them? Batteries are DC, right? What voltage? Do they need a special waveform for optimum charging? (spiking, intermittent square, etc.,?)

Why would it cost $2000 for a plug-in battery charger?

the cars, as produced? It is confusing --

.... I don't buy that number for a second.

We're talking a battery charger here. Even though it would need to be a pretty high-capacity charger, maybe as much as 100 amps, it wouldn't cost anywhere near that to do.

They are just using "cost" as a justification for their decision to never connect these cars to the grid.

including heat and electricity. closed systems.

jUST SHOVE A HOSE UP MY ASS AND MOVE ON DOWN THE ROAD!

We will figger it out and make it faster.

the concept of completely unlimited freedom of movement.

At least, I hope you did...

www.hempforfuel.com

Worth a look.

used it for that engine(he died suspiciously- surprise, surprise- must've been early *co family). Hemp has so many uses and it's been falsely tied to the drug trade(even marijuana legalization supporters continue this myth) ever since the early oil industry lobbied the government to do this. In spite of not using hemp for fuel- it has many purposes including food and fabric- the US is importing billions of $'s worth(mostly from China) because our idiotic government is so afraid of the truth coming out. It is such an earth friendly crop that it could replace many mineral stripping crops without the need for rotation and there's a potential for two harvests in the same year in parts of the US. The biggest hurdle is getting around the oil lobbyists/government puppets.

Sheer economic necessity will make it happen - just as it did during WWII with the "hemp for victory" campaign.

I would love to be able to re-charge the batteries on solar power while the car is parked somewhere.

It would also make it less likely that my battery will die if I leave the lights on.

...was omitted to save weight, all that roof is going to waste. I could swear I just read of some company promising nickel/kW-hr solar cells.

Nothing comes between me and my Prius!

Lights turn off automatically when the car is shut off.

Proper tire inflation is one of the keys with the Prius and milage.

the plug-into-the-cigarette-lighter chargers? Got a small one on my boat to keep the batts topped up. Would that help?

We get our Prius this month, and it looks great.

Just drove back from SoCal to Washington in a 26 mpg car. Fuel in SoCal is outrageous! The tiny community where we winter has tons of Prius'... and a surprising number of progressives.

As for the lights thing, as another poster reported, the Prius is smart enough to turn everything off when you shut it down.

But the idea of squeezing a few more watts by rooftop panels to add still more juice would be wonderful. Even if it just added a couple more MPG on sunny days.

1) they'll miss out on some sales; and 2) some freelancers will make some money modifying Toyotas so they can be plugged in.

Then I'd also have solar panels to power the pump for my oil-fired heater in case we have a black-out.

it would not work for a fuel pump on an oil burner. I would need a generator. BUT apparently bio-deisel can be used in combination with #2 home heating oil without requiring retrofitting! Look into it- Greg Pahl's "Biodiesel:Growng a New Energy Economy"(Chelsea Green 2005). If I win the lottery I'm converting to a system that pumps water via multiple wells to both heat and cool- very efficient but very expensive. I attempted to have solar panels put on my roof but I live in a historic district and they need to be tilted at too high an angle to not be visible. At least my house doesn't need air conditioning- it stays cool naturally from the brick and mature trees.

but when he died the oil industry co-opted the engine to run on a petroleum byproduct...

http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=B7C4440C-BA5E-A142-3B3BEF1795D08992

http://www.calcars.org/priusplus.html

I'd sure love to be able to plug in my Prius!

seems to point to the glaring fact that there are hundreds of people with ideas on how we might just get ourselves out of the impending energy disaster. It also points to the glaring lack of action from anyone in government or mainstream corporate America. What a bunch of myopic ignoramus's we have for leaders.:banghead:

Why should they care what happens to those of us who will be left behind?

At least, that is how THEY see it.

I'm in a crappy mood. My stomach aches over some in-laws fighting.

The Depalma website is full of pseudoscientific nonsense. It is an excellent example of "voodoo science"

http://www.bobpark.com/Articles/SevenSigns.htm

I guess you missed the most important part of my post?
The part where I am a witness and saw the "N" machine work.

I have kept Bruce De Palma's work on a web site for the public as a memorial since he died in 1997. No commercials, no advertising, and profit free for anyone to see. No gain except that the truth about free energy gets told.

Call it pseudosientific nonsense if you like, call it anything you like it doesn't matter? The blue prints to build an "N" generator from Bruce De Palma's working model are on the web site for free. His parting gift to the world. Try building one. I guarantee you won't be wasting your time.

Our government was right there with all the tests and investment money for the lab work.

Chenny's people love it when you see the answers in front of your face and scream "voodoo science". Not that you would ever get a working model into the mass production stage.....You have no idea of the problems Bruce encountered...Yeah, it works. I can't blame you for being negative though who would believe it? I just happen to have been there. Me and a lot of other people.....
<http://www.depalma.pair.com>

I think that was a new record of time reading a website before I laughed.

"If you can imagine it, it's imaginable -
if it's imaginable, it must be real."

I am imagining a 50-ft Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man destroying New York City. Someone call the Ghostbusters, because it must be real!

I'm curious though, what school did DePalma go to to get his Masters or PhD?

You claim that

"Bruce was a graduate PHD from MIT. He was a professor at MIT
for over 15 years heading the department of Nuclear Physics."

What nonsense.

One laudatory article on the net about this bogus "N" machine states -

"While his brother Brian has spun a Hollywood career directing films such as Carrie, Scarface, and The Untouchables, it looked like Bruce DePalma would live a secure life in academia, wrapped in the respect accorded an MIT faculty member. After receiving an electrical engineering degree from MIT in 1958, he worked in both government and industry before going to Harvard in 1961 for graduate work in applied physics. He became an MIT lecturer in the late 1960s."

So according to this author, DePalma did not have a Ph.D. and at best he was a lecturer at MIT (if that is to be believed). The difference between a lecturer and a faculty member is vast, and obviously the author of this paragraph has no clue about that. And a department Chair? Give me a break.

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/project117.html


A second article written by a UFO tin-foil-hatter, relates a (credulous, of course) conversation with DePalma

"Later, I drove to the address in Santa Barbara. I arrived at the home of Bruce dePalma, a former Polaroid engineer (and brother of film director Brian), who had a lab in his house designed solely to build what he called an N-Machine. This was a new kind of generator that operated without fuel."

So now DePalma is a former Polaroid engineer? A far cry from a Dept Chair at MIT.

http://archive.alienzoo.com/roswell/etinventions.html


Let's look at something written by DePalma himself.

" As is well known, Lenz's Law applies to the forces which are
generated between a current carrying wire moving in the vicinity of
a magnetic pole wherein the current through the wire is the
resultant of the electrical potential generated by the motion of
said wire being applied to an external load."

http://www.sumeria.net/free/dpalma1.html

Wrong. The author of this has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Lenz's law simply gives the direction of the induced EMF cause by a change in magnetic flux.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz%27s_law

Looking at the other stuff on the DePalma website makes it clear that his understanding of physics beyond Lenz's Law is at an equally abysmal level.

I suspect that DePalma never graduated from MIT, never went to Harvard, never taught at MIT, and invented these details later to provide himself a respectable pedigree. Sells better with investors, don't you know.


And regarding your statement "He designed and invented the Marantz Tube amp." - it also highly suspect. It seems that Marantz was selling amps (with tubes!) in 1956, before DePalma allegedly graduated in 1958. He would have had to have been a 20-yr old undergrad, going to school in Boston and working on the side in New York, designing what was then the most cutting edge audio there was.

http://www.classic-audio.com/marantz/0002.html

In fact, Marantz started his company in the early 50's, when DePalma was a teenager.

http://www.quarter-a.netfirms.com/history.htm

Nope, I bet DePalma invented the Marantz thing as well. There have been several examples of cranks who are also pathological liars, hawking free energy machines to gullible investors. Looks like DePalma might be in this category, not just the well-meaning, but deluded, group.



By the way, your own message contains one of the warning signs of voodoo science, specifically-

"2) A powerful "establishment" is said to be suppressing the discovery"

http://www.bobpark.com/Articles/SevenSigns.htm


Sorry to be so harsh, but I cannot abide frauds and charlatans who claim the mantle of science and use it to fool the naive.

Whew, you have so many misconceptions. I am not surprised because a lot of money has been spent to make him seem like a quack. You are now in communication with someone who knew him and was there.

Bruce was a genius, yes, I am talking "state of the art" audio, whatever he did was the cutting edge, he invented the Marantz Tube one of his works. That's what drew my attention to him.

Yes, he had a private lab and funding from Dr. Land from Kodak he made several inventions while working there. He pioneered the most fantastic 3-D film system I have ever seen. I wouldn't be surprised if the new 3-D cinema Lucas, Spielberg and Cameron Mitchell are promoting are based on the Kodak patents that Bruce invented.

Bruce was surrounded by ex-students and assistants who had followed him from MIT. Oh Yeah, they knew him at MIT as a "wonder kin" a Professor and teacher for 15 years.

Think about this, DePalma has donated his work. No one is asking for backers, donations, or profit..It's free get it? Free Energy not just a concept but reality.

Funny thing how you can invent a Free Energy electrical generator and all of a sudden your official history and records start changing in
the files and computers. <http://www.depalma.pair.com> is his own words left intact.

Bruce talked a lot about Nickolaus Tesla, another Voodoo Science guy you can add to your list...

As I said before, download the "N" machine blueprints from the patent form. Then build one..I have seen men in absolute shock and revelation when they witness free energy....

Calling cutting edge tech "Voodoo Science" is just a way to debunk and keep the ignorance about it continuing

Got any evidence for any of your claims? Post the link.

And as far as misconceptions go, the writings of DePalma speak for themselves - he was a crank with no real understanding of physics. If you want to argue the point, start with DePalma's ludicurous description of Lenz's Law that I quoted in the post above. If you can't do that, then how can you defend his other, even more silly statements?

One other thing - the timeline shows DePalma's pedigree was a fraud. He allegedly finished a BS from MIT in 1958, then went to grad school in the early 60's. If he then spent 15 years at MIT after getting a Ph.D. (say 1965?) that means he left MIT around 1980 - but he had been in CA from the early 70's develping his "N" (for nonsense?) machine. And when did he work for Polaroid? Not much room in the timeline for that.

Nope, the whole story is a fraud, pure and simple.

O.K., I don't want to turn this into a "VooDoo" forum defending Bruce De Palma's resume and theories. I only wish to say I knew him and that the (SPG) space power generator is a working device that solves our current energy problems, and that I saw it work. I am not a scientist.

One of Bruce' s associates who is still living Mr.Paramahamsa Tewari who is a PHD and head of the India Atomic Energy Commission is proceeding with Bruce's work. India will have this invention first.

Here is a link to some of Tewari's VooDoo science work <http://www.tewari.org/Test_Results/test_results.html>

Maybe when the last barrel of oil is being fought over OPEC will start selling us Bruce DePalma's "N" machine and or God knows how many energy inventions that are being suppressed because they threaten the oil, atomic, and power moguls..

Tewari has found a method of reducing the effect of Lenz's law. His next model will be a substantial improvement over the current unit. The current unit was funded for 3 years by the GE of India, Crompton Greaves Ltd. CGL admitted in an email to me from the a Manager, who is an electrical engineer with a background in motor and generator efficiency measurements, that the SPG was over unity.

<http://www.tewari.org/Theory_Papers/FROM%20THE%20ELECTRON%20TO%20A%20PERPETUAL%20SYSTEM%20OF%20MOTION.htm>

Let me clear up what induction is all about.

Faraday's Law-
A change in the magnetic flux through an area will produce an electric field whose line integral along the curve bounding the area is equal to the time rate of change of the flux.

Lenz's Law-
The direction of the induced electric field will be such as to drive a current that produces a magnetic field that opposes the change in the magnetic flux.

These things are immutable - you cannot "lessen" them, any more that you can "lessen" the acceleration, a, produced by a net force, F, on a mass, m. F=ma no matter what you do.

BTW, would that Crompton Greaves Ltd. be the same company that sent an engineer who debunked the device? Boy, they got taken big time!

The link to Tewari's site turned up more gobbledygook masquerading as physics.

Here is a report from a Vasanth D Kamath who looked at the machine and found that it didn't work, which of course it can't since the underlying principle is hogwash.

http://www.phact.org/e/z/teware.htm.back

Tewari, by the way, does not claim to have a Ph.D. - for example in one of his papers the author list is "Paramhamasa Tewari, B.Sc. Engg." So once again you have some dude who might know a little (a BS degree in engineering!), then gets dreams of grandure, thinks that he has somehow unlocked a great secret all by himself and develops an all-encompasing "theory" of the universe. It reminds me of the guy in grad school who spent all his first year trying to find a flaw in Einstein's Special Relativity ("It just can't be right!"). He flunked out.

If you think you saw this thing produce more energy than was put into it, you were fooled. I hope you didn't sink any money into the venture.

Take a look for yourself

http://www.dae.gov.in/aec.htm

And Tewari can't tell fact from fiction, and what he presents as physics is nonsense - he is a fraud, as are all the others hawking "free energy", "perpetual motion machines", "zero point energy", and "hydrinos". It is all just bogus.

Paramahamsa Tewari

Yeah, right only us "bogus types" believe in "Free Energy"
<http://www.tewari.org/index.html>
<http://www.depalma.pair.com>


Paramahamsa Tewari was born on January 6, 1937, and graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1958 from Banaras Engineering College, India, and held responsible positions in large engineering construction organizations, mostly in Nuclear Projects of the Department of Atomic Energy, India. He was also deputed abroad for a year at Douglas Point Nuclear Project, Canada. He retired in 1997 from his position as Executive Nuclear Director, Nuclear Power Corporation, Department of Atomic Energy, India, and is the former Project Director of the Kaiga Atomic Power Project.

I do apologize about saying Tawari has a PHD. I never met him in person and my memory was wrong. He was a collaborator with Bruce DePalma and still active today in developing "Free Energy".

The only thing that can convince a guy like you or like me is, "seeing is believing" When I saw the "N" machine working I knew what it felt like to say be at Kitty Hawk the day the Wright Brothers flew!

If I had not experienced I would be as skeptical as you....

Best of Luck to you....