The Hydrogen Economy – Energy and Economic Black Hole

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=105&Itemid=2#cont

On Edit: I have excerpted additional text because this is a scholarly report on an important issue that many "technofix" environmentalists are unaware about, and continually harp about, inaccurately, on DU.

The reality is that hybrids are not a stepping stone to a hydrogen-based automobile-dependent economy: They are simply a conservation measure for an increasingly scarce resource (oil) that must eventually be reserved for trucking. Single-point generated electricity -- mostly coal and the dreaded (as we are now seeing in southwest Asia) nuclear -- will become the only feasible energy source for all other forms of transportation -- an energy source (line electricity) that is far more efficiently used to power mass transit. In other words, when the oil runs out we will have to return to the 1920's energy model of line electricity powering cities, mostly powered by coal due to its quantity and cheapness.

The exurbs we are building now are planned obsolescent and will go the way of the 1960's-era inner-suburban slums which became fully depreciated in time to serve as engines for the current wave of mass immigration, much as the Harlem real estate "crash" turned a speculative luxury housing development built for the rich into the world's most populous ghetto.

This is an important issue, as folks who know why we are in Iraq --
and why senior Democrats such as Hillary Clinton are now advocating
a permanent US presence in Iraq -- will be aware.

is a dangerous falsehood. It serves more to give false hope than to actually solve energy shortfalls. Why it is considered viable is something I chalk up to the corporate media's desire to keep America uninformed.

Bill

although you must remember, people generally
prefer a comforting lie to an uncomfortable
truth.

Still, one must try.

K&R, and thanks for posting.

Both have inherent problems that will destroy our society. Think being bent over an oil barrel is bad, wait until you're bent over an uranium rod. Not to mention factors of pollution.

However we need not do this. Biodiesel, using algae as a feedstock, can supply all of our transportation fuel needs<http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html> Double benefit, algae can be used as first step in waste water treatment. Pollution from biodiesel is ninety percent less than burned gas. Pollution from biodiesel refining is negligible, since the waste products are glycerin and water.

A 1991 DOE inventory of our harvestable wind energy found that there is enough harvestable wind energy in Kansas, N. Dakota and Texas to power our entire electric infrastructure, including growth factor, through the year 2030. And this was with '91 tech, things have improved greatly since then.

We are not consigned to a coal or nuclear future, we have the means within our grasp to change over to a clean, renewable energy infrastructure that is sustainable and beneficial. All we are lacking is the will to implement it.

According to the report, the author is doing a study on biomass
and the problems of using biomass as transportation fuel, such as:

** It takes more energy to harvest crops (with trucks that can only
be powered by fossil fuels, not batteries) than is yielded by biomass,
once you subtract the portion needed to feed the population.

** The portion of biomass that is needed to produce ethanol is
the same portion that would otherwise be needed to renew the
soil, creating a dust bowl.

** The energy contained in the diesel/gas we have used over the past
150 years represents the combined concentrated energy of millions
of years of biomass, or hundreds of times the annual crop yield.

** It takes fertilizers derived from fossil fuels in order to renew
the soil under CURRENT intensive "green revolution" agriculture
schemes which are necessary to support 6 billion people (and counting) --

-- we are possibly 4 billion over the limit of what would be needed
if we did not have fossil fuels, and biomass is our only alternative
fertilizer feedstock, so if we use it to produce ethanol, we lose
the ability to renew the soil.

I'm also not talking about land based agriculture, I'm talking about aquaculture, which is a lot less labor and machine intensive. For instance to harvest the algae feedstock, all you need is a rowboat and skimming tools:shrug:

Diesel engines were originally designed to run on biodiesel. It is more efficient, better for the engine, and produces aprox. the same amount of energy as using dino diesel.

Biodiesel, not ethanol, big difference. Ethanol is a chimera solution, biodiesel isn't.

What happens if we run out of algae like in "Logan's Run" and "Soylent Green"? ;-)

"Biodiesel is... people!"

A teaser for the article is available at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=5BC51350-E7F2-99DF-3F0F8888F6E5406E

To read the whole thing, you will need a subscription to Scientific American Digital or the current newsstand print edition.

That's what they were doing ten years ago when I was reading up on the subject.

Meanwhile, GM and GE sued the inventor of the flywheel battery,
a revolutionary energy storage technology, and deprived him of funding.

Hydrogen is an energy storage device,

as is the magnetically suspended 200-pound composite flywheel rotating at millions of rpm.

Yet one is dismissed as impractical, despite the fact that it could revolutionize mass transit, and so GE and GM buy up all the patents and gold-plate the prototypes in order to quash it.

While the other technology, far more energy intensive in its manufacture, is promoted on a tissue of lies. Advertised as an energy source. Nowhere in your post do you suggest that Hydrogen is worth talking about, much less writing an article in Scientific American about, unless it is an expose.

I became disillusioned with hydrogen when I learned about thermodynamics in Physics 101. Anyone who learned the laws of thermodynamics knows that Hydrogen will never do anything for the environment or fuel consumption.

I picked up the magazine only yesterday. I have found SA to be pretty conscientious and accurate, though.

The flywheels produce a gyroscope effect limiting handling performance, and has relatively low energy densities when compared to fossil fuels. A million rpm flywheel is also very dangerous if you are in an auto accident.

Hydrogen is just an energy storage device and there needs to be energy to make the hydrogen with electrolysis.

The reason the hydrogen is proposed as fuel is because it is more practical to transport to the gas stations and into the car and has high energy densities allowing the cars to have the same practibility as they do today.

The problem that has to be solved first is how to produce the energy to produce the hydrogen. If in the future, fusion power is harnessed, then hydrogen would be a viable energy storage device. If we are able to pull this feat off, then we will have limitless energy that is pollution free.

It's a possible solution for the long term, like 50 years in the future. There are better short terms solutions for now.

The flywheels produce a gyroscope effect limiting handling performance, and has relatively low energy densities when compared to fossil fuels. A million rpm flywheel is also very dangerous if you are in an auto accident.

Two identical flywheels rotating in opposite directions completely eliminate the gyroscopic effect.

Modern flywheels are made from composite materials which delaminate in case of accident, which absorbs most or all of the rotational energy.

Flywheels are a type of battery which is capable of maximizing energy conservation in a dynamic braking system.

Hydrogen is a MUCH less efficient and MUCH less energy-dense type of battery, not an energy source.

Hydrogen, according to the article in the OP (read it)
has the lowest energy density of just about any energy storage capacity.

That is why unconcentrated Hydrogen used to be used in blimps. Despite the Hindenburg disaster, it is highly explosive but generates very little power unless you compress it in order to increase the energy density -- which can't be done efficiently -- to compress any fluid is one of the most energy-intensive uses of electricity -- that is why refrigerators and air conditioners always consume so much power. Compressed Hydrogen has the added risk of catastrophic failure, since it is highly explosive -- imagine a tank of propane in the back seat of your car, a much heavier tank because Hydrogen would dissolve right through ordinary steel and make it brittle, and is so flammable that anything could set it off, producing an invisible cutting torch-like flame. One of the reasons gasoline is used and not other kinds of fossil fuel is because diesel and gasoline are very safe -- they are not easy to set alight, burn evenly, and they burn slow and hot.

Flywheels, on the other hand, are lighter than electric batteries that they replace, do not require toxic chemicals unlike the electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells, and they can power a car for an entire day because dynamic braking recycles energy back into the flywheel.

GM bought out Flywheel technology, quashed it, quashed the researchers who were working on it, challenged the patents, hired folks like you are doing to pooh-pooh it and talk up hydrogen,

and lobbied cities to replace LNG buses with hybrid electric buses, the crucial difference being hybrid buses use FOSSIL FUEL which they refuse to divorce themselves from their investment in the oil companies.

The interesting thing is, hybrid electric vehicles use the exact same dynamic braking technology to feed power to a battery, that folks like yourself claimed would be impractical for a flywheel car.

Indeed the dynamic braking system was the number one challenge.

Guess who owns the patents on dynamic braking and hybrids that are needed to make flywheel batteries work?? The same people who shut down the flywheel project and invested in the oil sector on the grounds that fuel conservation was more important than reducing demand for oil!!

A non-gyroscopic flywheel with wheels turning in opposite directions
(we might need help from a first year physics student to master this)

with a subordinate gyroscopic magnetic flywheel steering mechanism
to actually increase automobile safety,

Or maybe we should use (as a BATTERY not an energy source) a giant,
extremely flammable invisible gas that escapes from every (extremely heavy) metal container it is put in by infusion, making the metal brittle, just as mercury dissolves into your skin?

And when it finally gets out, lights up like an invisible cutting torch, emitting super-concentrated superheated water vapor? Causing an eventual explosion, or else the tank merely boils off at 3-4% per DAY? Talk about Use it or lose it! People would be driving MORE miles, not less.

I'll take the million-rpm flywheel, which is confined in a steel cage and whose gyroscopic properties can be used by a computer to instantly INCREASE driver safety within milliseconds -- to prevent vehicles from sideswiping or turning over -- faster than an anti-lock brake, which cannot do those things.

Really every alternative has their drawbacks including hydrogen. Flywheels have their advantages like being able to recharge quickly, but lack the energy density to be able to utilize it for long trips.

While hydrogen obviously has their pitfalls, I believe it could be a viable solution if we can develop the energy for it in the future to replacing fossil fuels. And by future, I mean 2050 not 2010. There is still along ways to go before hydrogen can ever become practical.

Maybe they will develop some other technology that is even better by that time too.

and multi-kW systems are on the market today.

http://www.beaconpower.com/

K&R

Simple, effective and to the point.

If we ever develop fusion power by that time.

It's not a short term solution however.

because it produces an energy which can be used to make specially designed hydrogen engines operate. Biologically produced hydrogen energy is sweet because the biological product mixes with pollution and converts pollution in to an energy which will power hydrogen engines and the bi product is pure clean water. Biologically produced hydrogen energy is real and it is in the wings. The reason hydrogen energy is not fully developed is because of the fear it secretes will fall into the hands of comrade Little George and the Neocons and they will use it for evil and to make this planet their communi$t police state fiefdom.

The only problem is, there's no naturally occuring hydrogen sink on earth
other than natural gas.

The most famous place to get hydrogen from is water, but to do that,
you need to burn the same amount of energy that it releases when it
turns back into water. (Actually more because of entropy, the force
that is slowly breaking down the universe into tiny pieces. Everything
we do costs more energy than we get in return; we always have less than
we started out with.)

The reason oil works is because it is the result of millions of years
of energy storage, plant and animal matter compressed in the soil.

According to some scientists, the Earth stopped producing new oil
some millions of years ago because termites evolved to break down
woody plants before they could be fossilized into coal/oil.

It's all well and good to generate hydrogen biologically, but that does not address the issues of storage and transportation. Because hydrogen is a reactive gas, special pipelines are needed. Since it is so small compared to natural gas, the existing gas pipelines would leak like sieves if we attempted to pump hydrogen through them.

So let's say that you propose to transport the hydrogen to fueling stations in a manner similar to what we do now with gasoline. This avoids the necessity of building new pipelines. But it creates another problem.

Solar and wind generated electricity is intermittent - when output of electricity from these sources exceeds demand, that juice could be used to generate hydrogen at distribution/storage points.

These can be scaled and distributed to meet any demand.

I'm hardly an expert, just a lowly electrical helper, but...

Those are the only two energy storage mechanisms I'm familiar with
besides chemical batteries.

(whose limitations have been established for 100
years, which is why we are hooked on fossil fuel)

Now, if you get X amount of power on, say, a 4-gauge, 120/240 V
double-pole AC supply cable in your garage attached to a sub-breaker
feeding into a twistlock receptacle, which is what I assume you
would need to power a car, what does it make more sense to use
that power in your garage for?

** Revving up a magnetically levitated flywheel battery/motor
in an all-electric vehicle at 5% loss

** On-site electrolysis into a hydrogen storage tank at 25% loss

Admittedly, 25% loss is very good, much better than electrolysis
used to be.

But that's still a flat-out loss of 25% power with no gain

(no transportation of power from one place to another, just transubstantiation from electricity into potential chemical energy and then back into work needed to move the car, again at a large loss (25%? 60%?) due to the limits of internal combustion. So the actual loss
would be more than 50% versus flywheels, right?)

There is no way that solar and wind can generate enough energy to do on-site electrolysis as you have suggested.

Think of it this way: You need X number of watts to drive an electric car, regardless of the fuel source. Now consider the maximum, sustained output of a large number of solar cells or wind turbines. And for the last part consider the vast number of vehicles you'll want to power. There simply is not enough generating capacity available to power all of those vehicles directly.

If we don't generate enough power directly, then adding electrolysis to the process will only reduce the final energy available.

One day we'll all wake up and really, fully appreciate what a wonderfully compact form of energy oil was. It really is a remarkable energy source. Too bad it's non-renewable.

Say you live out in the country in a quaint farmhouse next to a stream, powered by a mill-wheel. You've hooked the mill-wheel up to a generator and are re-selling the resulting power back to the grid using an AC separator / reverse meter in order to reduce your energy consumption.

Let's stipulate that the mill-wheel saves 80% on your electric bill.

One day you decide to remove the generator and replace it with on-site electrolysis in order to power your home with hydrogen fuel cells instead, turning water from the stream into clean-burning energy! You use the mill wheel to power the fuel cells.

Can someone tell me what is wrong with this picture?

How much energy would you save on your electric bill?

http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/transport.html

Furthermore, a grid connected 1000 MW wind farm or a 116 MW PV farm or a 500 MW solar thermal electric plant (all three currently under construction) can supply electricity for hydrogen production at remote grid connected electolyzers - they don't have to be co-located to work.

Will renewable hydrogen replace all the petroleum used by US automobiles???

Nope

But they will be used for mass/public transportation - and already are...

http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0501/14/autos-60181.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4173535.stm

http://www.dpi.wa.gov.au/ecobus/1206.asp

People are way to quick to dismiss hydrogen.

losing half the energy it took to send out over the wires.

If I'm investing in renewable energy, multi-billion dollar infrastructure that has variable output due to weather, etc.

I want to make sure as much of that energy as possible goes to the CONSUMER.

I can send it out over the wires at 35% loss.

----

Or I can take ALL renewable plants in the country, use all my renewable resources available (not that there is any need to distinguish, it might as well be coal or oil) to electrolyze hydrogen

(so there is no more renewable electricity on the market, just coal or oil power plants)

and the hydrogen will be electrolyzed at 25% loss,

then delivered to consumers at another 25% loss,

(no "free" oil with which to power the refinement and distribution, remember?)

then used in a fuel cell combustion engine at a maximally efficient 30% loss.

Do the math.

All of which is needed merely to sustain a chemical fuel-based economy
that is bus- and car-driven,

JUST LIKE WE HAVE NOW and JUST LIKE THE OIL INDUSTRY NEEDS

(because trains don't need combustion engines, they can use flywheel or all-electric!)

1J in gets 0.85 J of hydrogen out

CHP hydrogen fuel cells are equally efficient (~50% electricity + ~35% heat = 85% of hydrogen energy is used).

Fossil fuel and nuclear plants have thermal efficiencies of 30-45% - electrolysis hydrogen and H2 fuel cells beat them all to heck.

The Schatz PV H2 fuel cell system operated 24/7/365 for 7 years without human intervention. It was totally automatic, 100% available and maintenance-free. No other conventional power system can match that performance.

Also, line losses for electricity transmission are <10% - not 35%.

Hydrogen can and is being used to levelize variations in PV and wind power output.

It can be used to produce power at night or during periods of low wind speeds AND store renewable energy for seasonal use.

Again - people of way too quick to dismiss H2...

You would have to replace every gas station in America with a hydrogen station and that is not practical.

Biodiesel or ethanol can use the current gas station infrastructure.

Plug-in electrics can be charged up at home.

We're talking hydro-electric, solar, wind, biodiesel, wave power, some hydrogen in there, even nuclear power.

The key though is not just diversification of our energy portfolio but also the realization that we must cut back consumption and make some sacrifices for that to happen. We have to make some sacrifices like Jimmy Carter said when he, for instance, urged folks to wear sweaters more and run the heaters less in winter.

We might as well assert that oxygen is a form of energy, since it is highly flammable in pure form and could therefore be used as fuel.

Indeed, we might as well assert that water is a form of energy, since
all you have to do to produce 1 Joule of Hydrogen is to add 1.6 Joule
of electricity to water! You only lost .6 Joules per unit of Hydrogen.

Flywheels are a much more efficient (and energy dense) means of energy storage than Hydrogen! With a high upper limit on how much energy can
be stored in the form of kinetic energy (momentum) and a very low
lossage.

Yet pavlovian Scientific American readers and DUers do not compare the
two technologies one-to-one.

Why? Because GM is investing in Hydrogen and not flywheels, of course!
They know that Hydrogen actually increases demand for oil, while justifying higher fossil fuel costs by putting the blame on the cost of transitioning to the new "technology".

Let's put this in perspective -- there would be less lossage from powering all cars by plugging them in to an electrical outlet, then there would be from taking that electricity and using it to make hydrogen, storing the hydrogen, compressing the hydrogen, making fuel cells, etc.

Using "renewable energy" to make HYDROGEN is about as logical as using "renewable energy" to turn plastic bags into gasoline in order to power the cars of the future.

How the energy is produced is the tough question.

Mass produced solar tracking dishes with linear Stirling engines driving linear alternators could be used to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, the hydrogen can be either stored for later collection or transported immediately through a pipeline.

www.solarpaces.org/solar_dish.pdf

Mass production of such units could bring the price per unit down quite rapidly with the economies of scale inherent in mass production.

There are plenty of desert areas in the US where solar dishes could be set up without disturbing much of anything or anyone.

The hydrogen produced is collected and stored and then used where it is needed.

On electrolysis, which instantly consumes 40% of the solar power plant's energy output.

Really this is not rocket science people. If you're going to build renewable energy, use it to power cities, not waste it all to maintain and preserve the fossil fuel driven economy of unlimited automobile travel, acres of asphalt, etc. Hydrogen cannot "power" that! If renewable energy could power the automobile economy we would not NEED Hydrogen -- the lossage involved in powering your car with this manufactured fuel, is greater than line lossage of electricity from the grid! It is like burning $100 bills to power your car!

Currently, seventy percent of the energy we use for transportation is wasted as heat.


With fuel cells running on hydrogen and electric motors which are already being developed for hybrid cars, we could power as many vehicles as we do today..

The modern electric motor is about ninety percent efficient..

Fuel cells are fairly efficient already and getting more so all the time.


The limitations inherent in the Carnot cycle make it impossible to get a great deal more efficiency out of current Otto cyle and Diesel cycle Internal Combustions engines.

Electrolysis hydrogen is a perfectly viable storage medium that can (and is) being used to store energy produced by intermittent renewable energy systems (PV and wind).

It can be used to produce ammonia fertilizer when the natural gas runs out too.

...and when the oil runs out, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will be used for high priority transport needs (police cars, ambulances, etc.).

I don't buy into the Hydrogen Economy Hype - or the equally lame Anti-Hydrogen Economy Hype.

Hydrogen will be an essential part of our Post-Petroleum Economy despite what the naysayers say...

It doesn't make sense to convert electricity into hydrogen if the energy costs of electrolysis + storage + manufacture and distribution of the hydrogen storage vehicles, exceed the line lossage of simply running it over the wires, building more local renewable plants within 200 miles of a city, increasing the voltage (decreasing the power supply) over lossy long-distance wires, and running renewable electricity over existing wires to plug-in electric vehicles.

You can use flywheels or chemical batteries just as easily as hydrogen to store energy at the point of use. As for ammonia, sure, but that doesn't have to be distributed, it could just be a step on the manufacturing chain and you could build ammonia manufacturing plants that rely on water and electrolysis. I bet this would be a lot less toxic to the atmosphere, too. But I assume it would be a more expensive source of fertilizer, if they're not doing it already.

On Edit: You know what we should be doing? Find out a way to do hydroelectric that does not involve flooding 2/3 of the Colorado River canyon system and causing 1/2 (1/2!!!!) of all the water in the Colorado River to be lost to evaporation due to the surface area of Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

http://www.verdantpower.com/initiatives/currentinit.html

and similar systems are planned for tidal rivers in Maine and elsewhere...

http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/tidal-power/

Would it be possible to use aqueducts to reduce the need for large lakes and dams in hydroelectric plants?

I.e. take the Hoover dam, why can't they divert the 50% of the river that is lost to evaporation in Lake Mead, eliminate the lake entirely, and divert that portion of the river water into an underground aqueduct in order to power the dam?

Then they could use the water for irrigation downstream instead of further subdividing the remaining water (if anyone cares about the fact that the Colorado doesn't reach the sea, I mean technically I guess it doesn't matter if it's just a trickle)

The ancient Saharans (African tribes) and ancient Afghans had enormous underground aqueduct systems thru hard rock to take advantage of gravity and higher water tables in order to irrigate their lands. Why can't we do the same and thereby open up portions of the Grand Canyon that are currently underwater? The dams could still be used for flood control.

Of course, the dams are silting up and the Colorado basin is entering a 500-year cycle of drought anyway so they may be forced to do this or lose the lake entirely.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x88703

"The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years."

So lets recap. Oil is peaking NOW. Coal will peak in 15 yrs or less. Natural gas has peaked in N. America, and will peak globally within the next 10 yrs. Biofuels can supply a few percent of our energy needs at most, so will likely only be usable to maintain shipping of vital goods like food. Renewables such as wind and solar are not baseload power, and would require massive energy storage systems that cost would cost trillions of dollars to build for days when the wind doesn't blow or the sun is blocked by clouds.

Anyone else feel like a drink or ten yet?

Makes solar baseline power if done correctly...

They are massively scalable, reproduceable, there is no theoretical upper limit on the amount of energy storage capacity like there is with hydrogen, the lossage is much lower than there is with hydrogen, the only problem is the companies that own the patents to both technologies are wasting the flywheel patent because it does not serve their purpose of maintaining demand for fossil fuels in "green" societies.

Hydrogen requires fossil fuels to be manufactured
precisely because, as an energy storage mechanism,
it is too "lossy" to waste on valuable and scarce
renewable power sources such as solar and wind.

If we're going to have a viable solar and wind grid, we need to convert from chemical batteries to flywheel batteries. This may not work for vehicles but the fact remains that fuel cells are not possible either.

The personal automobile of the future is destined to become a luxury item, like the chariot, or the speedboat, to be taken out on trips.

This is a strong statement which almost sounds anti-car but the reality is, I wish there was a way to move to an energy economy in which people would be encouraged to return to, say, 1960's levels of automobile use.

Instead, we will be faced with a steadily increasing, grinding competition between energy efficiency and high fuel prices, with perpetually INCREASING auto use (VMT) as people seek to maximize a valuable resource (their pricey hybrid cars) thereby offsetting any increase in efficiency (as can be seen by the number of "environmentally friendly" hybrids parked in exurban garages 30 miles from the workplace.)

The end stage of this scenario is a devastating war over scarce oil and steel, like we had in WWI, which might happen in Iran if things keep going the way they're going.

about fly wheel powered cars

Because the dynamic drive used in flywheel-battery powered cars are also needed to make hybrid cars,

and the auto companies (which owned many of the patents and funded the research) wanted to defund both flywheel, hydrogen, and Liquid natural gas in order to put all their energy into producing hybrids.

Thereby maintaining present levels of oil consumption, since the purchaser of an expensive hybrid car tends to drive more to justify the expense, because they have better gas mileage and often better handling than a cheapo US made gas guzzler. The end result seems to do anything and everything to avoid transitioning from an oil economy -- DC actually eliminated its LNG buses, replacing them with hybrid diesel electrics.

The best I can suggest is google "flywheel battery" or "flywheel power"

The flywheels operate on the same principle as the (also defunded) passive magnetic levitation system, which had the potential to revolutionize high-speed rail, which the Clinton-Bush administration sabotaged.

(No more need for supercooled superconductors: passive magnets housed in special arrays known as Halbach arrays hold both flywheels and high-speed rail cars afloat, enabling them to move at high speeds without friction.)

Electromagnetic coils are only needed for induction, i.e. to increase speed or extract energy (dynamic braking, which recycles kinetic energy back into electrical energy with next to no lossage.) This can be done at specific points, not continuously, so the flywheel / maglev train does not need continuous power to remain afloat.

On edit: if Halbach arrays are used, you can maximize safety because halbach arrays simulate a magnetic monopole, an entity which theoretically cannot exist.

Halbach arrays used in experimental maglev -- not Bechtel-funded maglev, mind you, this technology is not being funded by the big boys because it challenges their gold-plated systems which are designed primarily for graft -- induce magnetic force in passive copper coils,

which increases geometrically the closer a moving object gets to the coil, meaning that a passive magnet is the only technology that is not metastable, and is also the cheapest -- which is why it is not being funded by the design-build corporations.

A recent rail project in the DC area, a subway tunnel, was vetoed by the for-profit corporation assigned to build it for the STATED reason that "it would be too expensive, because our profits would have to increase commensurate with the increased cost of construction."

It is also the only maglev that powers itself, the magnetic force increases with velocity relative to the opposing coil and decreases to zero otherwise.

Flywheels fit in with this sort of maglev technology because they are a form of maglev that can be used in private, all-electric automobiles -- which are the only non-fossil fuel automobiles.

A five-station light-rail line that has parking lots at the outer stations is a parking displacement scheme. Similarly, using hydrogen in cars is a fossil-fuel displacement scheme. You are merely displacing the negative effects of the fossil fuel economy to an earlier stage in the production chain. To actually decrease demand for fossil fuel, you need to go whole hog. And that requires newer, more efficient energy storage devices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus

The concept of a flywheel powered bus was developed and brought to fruition during the 1940s by Oerlikon (of Switzerland), with the intention of creating an alternative to battery-electric buses for quieter, lower-frequency routes, where full overhead-wire electrification could not be justified.

Rather than carrying an internal combustion engine or batteries, or connecting to overhead powerlines, a gyrobus carries a large flywheel that is spun at speeds of up to 3,000 rpm by an electric motor. Power for charging the flywheel was sourced by means of three booms mounted on the vehicle's roof, which contacted charging points located as required / felt desirable (eg: bus stops en route, at termini, etc). To obtain tractive power, condensers would excite the flywheel's charging motor so that it become a generator, in this way transforming the energy stored in the flywheel back into electricity. Vehicle braking was electric, and some of the energy was recycled back into the flywheel, thereby extending its range.

More:

Using passive magnets. This would allow them to be much less lossy than conventional flywheels. You could keep them running for days with maybe the loss of 1% per day. The notion is, they would float in a vacuum and their motion would keep them suspended. Prototypes have been made out of
carbon fibers, that met pretty good standards for a prototype, but because the auto companies control the research, they get to keep many of the patents and I think they shut down the research and diverted many of the technologies needed to make flywheels work, were also needed to make hybrid cars with conventional batteries work. So instead of flywheel cars powered by conventional batteries we are still chained to fossil fuel hybrid cars with the same conventional batteries in the trunk, using the same dynamic drive systems that were pioneered in an effort to make flywheels work.

Also, mag-lev allows flywheels to have much more energy density because they can go faster with no friction. And to the best of my knowledge, losses do not increase proportional to the amount of energy stored, so massive, factory-sized magnetic flywheel generators would actually be a more efficient means of energy storage than small car-size units.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

Flywheel Energy Storage (FES) works by accelerating a rotor to a very high speed and maintaining the energy in the system as rotational kinetic energy.

Commercially available FES systems are used for small uninterruptible power systems and for maintaining power quality in renewable energy systems. The rotors normally operate at 4000 rpm or less and are made of metal.

Advanced flywheels are made of high strength carbon-composite filaments that spin at speeds from 20,000 to 100,000 rpm in a vacuum enclosure. Magnetic bearings are necessary; in conventional mechanical bearings, friction is directly proportional to speed, and at such speeds, too much energy would be lost to friction.

Quick charging is done in less than 15 minutes.

Most flywheels have long lifetimes, high energy densities (~ 130 W·h/kg), and large maximum power outputs. The energy efficiency (ratio of energy out per energy in) of flywheels can be as high as 90%. Since FES can store and release power quickly, they have found a niche providing pulsed power (see compulsator).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

A typical system consists of rotor suspended by bearings inside a vacuum chamber to reduce friction, connected to a combination electric motor/electric generator.

Newer systems use carbon-fiber composite rotors that are stronger than steel and are an order of magnitude lighter. Lightweight rotor systems use magnetic levitation to eliminate mechanical bearings and increase energy efficiency by eliminating drag imposed by conventional bearings.

Flywheel power storage systems in current production (2001) have storage capacities comparable to batteries and faster discharge rates. They are mainly used to provide load leveling for large battery systems, such as an uninterruptible power supply. Developers of such flywheel energy storage systems include Hitec Power Protection, Active Power, AFS Trinity, Beacon Power, Piller, Powercorp and Pentadyne.

Flywheels are not affected by temperature changes as are chemical batteries, nor do they suffer from memory effect. Moreover, they are not as limited in the amount of energy they can hold. They are also less potentially damaging to the environment, being made of largely inert or benign materials. Another advantage of flywheels is that by a simple measurement of the rotation speed it is possible to know the exact amount of energy stored. However, use of flywheel accumulators is currently hampered by the danger of explosive shattering of the massive wheel due to overload.

One of the primary limits to flywheel design is the tensile strength of the material used for the rotor. Generally speaking, the stronger the disc, the faster it may be spun, and the more energy the system can store. When the tensile strength of a flywheel is exceeded the flywheel will shatter, releasing all of its stored energy at once; this is commonly referred to as "flywheel explosion" since wheel fragments can reach kinetic energy comparable to that of a bullet. Consequently, traditional flywheel systems require strong containment vessels as a safety precaution, which increases the total mass of the device. Fortunately, composite materials tend to disintegrate quickly once broken, and so instead of large chunks of high-velocity shrapnel one simply gets a containment vessel filled with red-hot sand (still, many customers of modern flywheel power storage systems prefer to have them embedded in the ground to halt any material that might escape the containment vessel). Gulia's tape flywheels did not require a heavy container and reportedly could be rewound and reused after a tape fracture.

When used in vehicles, flywheels also act as gyroscopes, since their angular momentum is typically of a similar order of magnitude as the forces acting on the moving vehicle. This property may be detrimental to the vehicle's handling characteristics while turning. On the other hand, this property could be utilised to improve stability in curves. Two externally joined flywheels spinning synchronously in opposite directions would have a total angular momentum of zero and no gyroscopic effect. (This is not strictly true, they would have a huge torqueing moment around the central point, trying to bend the axle. However, if the axle were strong enough, no gyroscopic forces would have a net effect on the sealed container.)

In hybrid-bearing systems, a conventional magnet levitates the rotor, but the high temperature superconductor keeps it stable. If the rotor tries to drift off center, a restoring force due to flux pinning restores it. This is known as the magnetic stiffness of the bearing. Rotational axis vibration can occur due to low stiffness and damping, which are inherent problems of superconducting magnets, preventing the use of completely superconducting magnetic bearings for flywheel applications.

Parasitic losses such as friction, hysteresis, and eddy currents of both magnetic and conventional bearings in addition to refrigerant costs can limit the economical energy storage time for flywheels. However, further improvements in superconductors may help eliminate eddy current losses in existing magnetic bearing designs as well as raise overall operating temperatures. Even without such improvements, however, modern flywheels can have a zero-load rundown time measurable in years.

This website http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/UCEP/2000-nsf/Presentations/Hebner_Abs.html lists the price at approximately $300-$400/kw-hr of storage. According to the EIA http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.html:

"Electricity consumption by 107 million U.S. households in 2001 totaled 1,140 billion kWh."

Note that this is not ALL US electrical consumption, only households. Businesses add to the energy usage greatly. At $300/kWh for storage, and assuming you only build enough storage for 25% of US electrical needs, you are looking at $85.5 TRILLION. Now, I'm not too sure of the veracity of the site I listed; $300/kWh seems very, very high. Lets say the cost is actually $30/kWh. That's still $8.55 trillion.

With the hole the US had dug in regard to our financial stability, I don't think we can swing tens of trillions of dollars in construction over the next 5-10 yrs before energy depletion becomes very painful.

Over flywheels..

Fair's fair.

The OP explains quite clearly what the problems are with hydrogen -- it makes no sense as an energy storage medium.

It can be used in intermittent combustion engines ("intermittent combustion engine" is an inside joke from the turbine folks).

The problem is storage and, more to the point, loss of 30% of energy needed to simply produce hydrogen.

Remember, it doesn't cost energy from some other source to fuel the production of oil. Oil is free energy. Even if it did, the process would be minimally energy-intensive.

You can't burn hydrogen to fuel the production and storage of more hydrogen.

If you have the zero-emission, renewable energy capacity to power 1/2 of our entire civilization (the amount needed to convert from oil to hydrogen, not counting the vast quantities of cheap natural gas that would need to be introduced in order to bring the hydrogen to market)

then why would you waste all that electricity using it to manufacture fuel?

Why wouldn't you use it to directly power your civilization?

By that logic, just use all that renewable energy to power the waste hydrocarbon manufacturing process and use it to create gasoline!

Follow me here -- imagine you have a solar array somewhere or a nuke plant that is capable of powering the entire city of LA.

Now you take ALL that energy, and simply to make it easier to drive as it is now, you spend 90% of it manufacturing and distributing hydrogen and the technology to distribute it.

This would be a constant, ongoing use of energy, one that is now powered by the oil and gas we are distributing, which is the only reason it's economically feasible (the energy used to get the oil to market, for the suppliers, represents only an opportunity cost and is otherwise free).

Now you have to build a SECOND solar array, a SECOND nuke plant to power everything that still runs on electricity, since the resultant Hydrogen can only power 10% of LA's energy needs.

Better yet, imagine a world where America, China, Britain and Germany continue to drive more and more. Consuming all available steel. But the cars are ALL-ELECTRIC, thanks to the flywheel.

Something the auto and transpo companies refuse to allow happen, because it would put their oil and gas distribution investments in Houston and Dubai, and governmental contracts for "innovative technologies" such as hydrogen and energy-intensive superconductors, out of business, just as surely as a party rental place won't inform you where to buy those nice chairs you rented. Capeche?

Now, given this supposedly FINE scenario, which most environmentalists seem to be working towards,

You would have to double the number of power plants that are currently required to support a given population, because the electricity requirements would instantly double.

Renewable, zero-emission coal, nuclear, you name it. It would double the minute the cars stop using oil. All those cars and trucks and farm equipment consume an amount of power that is comparable to the energy use of the entire electrical grid.

Now imagine you say, "let's power the cars with hydrogen instead" --
you'd have to have three times as many of those NEW, EXTRA power plants
and use it for the sole purpose of producing hydrogen.

This scenario would destroy the earth. We'd be looking at the techno-futurism of the 1950s where Earth's population and energy usage has outstrippedand ceased to be dependent on the natural world, and we all live in bubbles. All for what? To allow Americans to continue driving to the store on intelligent freeways at 100 miles per hour, using their government ID tracking devices to ensure they are full citizens qualified to use all this expensive technology, so they can buy 30-40 bags of chinese-made crap on every trip?

the same as industrial-grade power plant facilities.

Magnetically suspended flywheels are research-grade technology.

The objective is to put them in cars, obviously.

That means flywheels suspended by permanent magnets,
not high-temperature superconductors!

You can't quote a price on something that is not in mass production.

Especially when the technology I'm talking about was bought up BY
the fucking auto companies and stripped for useful innovations,
which were applied to hybrid cars instead. Where the heck do
you guys think hybrid cars came from? They took a working
prototype flywheel car, stripped it of useful innovations such
as dynamic braking (an innovation which was necessary to make
flywheels work) and an all-electric, permanent-magnet suspended
flywheel engine, and REINTRODUCED the internal combustion engine!

This is not rocket science. Hydrogen is an energy sink
that uses 70% or more of the input electricity to create
and store. Then you have to burn it in a fuel cell at 30%
efficiency. Total energy available to produce work: 10%.

Modern prototype Flywheels transfer 90% of line electricity
to propel the vehicle, not 10%.

However they are owned by the FUCKING AUTO COMPANIES who you guys are defending!

Both technologies! Guess which one they're funding?

Guess which ones theire defunding? (LNG buses, for start -- they are going back to diesel buses claiming HYBRID is the last step in forward progress for road transportation!)

These decisions are made bsed on how much money they can get to gold-plate a niche-market technology, not what is most efficient.
That is why we have hummers! That is why Bechtel and Bombardier
fight tooth and nail to shut down any mass transit system or
mag-lev innovation that does not use their slow, energy-sucking,
ultra-expensive PROPRIETARY technology! It is about GRAFT and
market control and maintaining their investment in the oil sector.

You think they'll do anything to piss off the distributors? The
oil companies make all their money distributing oil, not producing
it. They own all the filling stations now -- the ones you guys
pretend will one day be converted, at government expense. An all-electric car would put them out of BUSINESS! Cheap electric
cars, or fast electric transit (such as mag-lev on conventional tracks) would put Bechtel and Bombardier out of the transportation market,
where they thruve on charging governments as much as possible for
expensive, hood-ornament starter systems with energy-inefficient,
bleeding edge proprietary technology that only they can service or repair.

Wake up!!! Hydrogen costs far more to manufacture on a large scale
than a simple motor does. Flywheel is a combination battery/motor
technology. It is based on 100 year old principles. It requires
permanent magnets to be efficient, not industrial-size conventonal
power plant flywheels.

It does not cost $300/kW/h to MASS produce a technology that is still in the research phase -- a technology that is essential for an all-electric car!!! Who do you think goes and buys up (kills) all the research on anything that removes oil from the equation??

Especially when the technology I'm talking about was bought up BY
the fucking auto companies and stripped for useful innovations,
which were applied to hybrid cars instead. Where the heck do
you guys think hybrid cars came from? They took a working
prototype flywheel car, stripped it of useful innovations such
as dynamic braking (an innovation which was necessary to make
flywheels work) and an all-electric, permanent-magnet suspended
flywheel engine, and REINTRODUCED the internal combustion engine!

The Gyrobus I provided a link to had dynamic braking in 1950, it's not a new technology.

http://www.answers.com/topic/gyrobus

Vehicle braking was electric, and some of the energy was recycled back into the flywheel, thereby extending its range.


I would like to see a link or two to your claim that the auto industry is buying up patents on flywheel technology.

This makes them heavy, but small and usable in cars.

Conventional flywheel generators are huge and can
barely fit in a bus. That's because conventional
bearings have friction and magnetic bearings don't.

Friction is (correct me if I'm wrong, IIRC)
directly proportional to the speed and geometrically
proportional to the surface area.

Therefore a flywheel with conventional bearings only
works if it contains a huge, heavy wheel inside that
is much bigger than the bearings and whose momentum
far outweighs the amount of friction lost to bearings.

A magnetically levitated flywheel hass no friction --
just magnetic flux which is comparatively tiny.

Mag-lev, in flywheels as in rail transport, depends on
the invention of NON-SUPERCONDUCTING permanent magnets
capable of safely confining objects.

Auto and rail manufacturers have deliberately stripped
these innovations (for instance, Halbach arrays)
of useful innovations --

in order to fund their own conventional oil-era
technologies (expensive superconducting maglevs that
are not compatible with conventional rail and do not
compete with highways; expensive induction-drive light rail
that is slow and not even INTENDED to compete with highways,
merely to provide a hood ornament and a source of graft
for public officials and developers).

In the case of the working prototype flywheel car, the
car companies financing the research project demanded that
it cease and desist, because they wanted to use the
next-generation, brand-new technology which had been
invented for magnetically suspended, woven or wound
composite flywheel car engines, and use it to produce
hybrid gas-electric cars instead -- which they did.

If you'll recall, before the Prius -- which came along in 2001 I believe -- hybrids were considered no more economical or efficient than flywheel engines.

They had a choice to go all electric with a working flywheel engine capable of recharging AT HOME and delivering pulsed power to start the vehicle, stripped the innovations which the inventors had used to make hybrid flywheel/electric feasible, no actually they simply removed the flywheel and replaced it with a gasoline engine.

Why do you suppose they did that?

I'll give you a hint: As someone recently mentioned in another thread, Oil and Gas companies do not make money by raising the price of oil. They make money by owning all the distribution points. Gas stations. Tankers. Technology that can't be retrofitted if cars suddenly stopped using gasoline and went all-electric.

The inventors of the flywheel car in the 1990's proved that it was far more efficient than battery alone. As DUers keep saying "who killed the electric car?" This is your answer. Flywheel engines were the next step. The investors who killed the prototype flywheel car are responsible for killing the future of all-electric transportation.

Instead, they took the technology that was invented for the flywheel car (it is not simply a matter of using yesterday's flywheels anmd yesterday's dynamic drives, see the wikipedia article), removed the flywheel and put all their efforts into the previously impractical (just like the flywheel) hybrid car.

(powered by 100% gasoline, but soo much more efficient, allowing the oil companies to sell the same amount of gasoline to many more drivers across the globe clogging up many more highways. But nobody mentions that, because GOD KNOWS we can't go back to the dark ages of the 1950s, when people drove less, and there was less productivity = higher wages and lower resource production/consumption).

Ask anyone in the transportation/planning/environmental sector today, and they will tell you that hybrid is the end of the line.

Hybrid cars, driving 99% of trip miles. .5% of trip miles in industry-built and owned hybrid buses. (replacing LNG fleets which they, to protect their oil investment, are lobbying to get rid of.) With the remaining .5% of trips on slow, expensive 19 mph light rail, built by Bombardier and Bechtel, where they can test out their future systems and charge the government for it. Transit ridership is not the goal here, and neither is reducing the overall consumption of gasoline -- the objective is to sell the resulting technology.

That is the world of tomorrow they're trying to sell us on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array

"In the 1980s, the late Klaus Halbach, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, invented the Halbach array to focus accelerator particle beams."

So any patents on Halbach arrays would be either expired or close to expiring.

You keep speaking of flywheels as "generators", they are not generators, they are a form of battery instead.

The author is right only in the sense that hydrogen is a storage medium, but Hello! Instead of using natural gas we can use solar or wind energy to create the hydrogen!

This is a hit piece, plain and simple.

First of all, anyone who doesn't realize that oil extraction powers itself
is in for a rude surprise when the oil becomes too expensive to
bring it out of the ground.

Other storage mediums, like flywheel batteries, are more efficient than hydrogen!

They can be charged by plugging them into the wall!

If we HAD solar or wind we sure as hell wouldn't waste it
manufacturing fuel, we'd send it directly out over the wires!

Doing so is less lossage than turning it into hydrogen!

It takes 20 hydrogen tankers to bring enough hydrogen to market for 100 cars!!!!!!

Hydrogen cannot be stored in metal containers for extended periods
of time. It bleeds thru the metal and fittings at 3-4% per day!

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/25106.pdf

I don't know who's feeding you this info, but this study shows there are many diffrent cost-effective ways to store and transport hydrogen.

"Before we instantly accept alternative energy lifeboats that will let us keep our current lifestyles, don't you think it wise to see if they float?

Here are nine questions that you must ask of yourself, and anyone who claims that they have found a perfect alternative to oil. After answering these questions, you may have a better idea about whether you want to jump (or throw your family) into something that might sink in short order.

Deluding yourself that the energy problem has been solved only guarantees that the crisis will hit you and the planet much harder in the end.

The end of the Age of Oil is a life and death game. Can you afford to be cavalier about it? Do not think of prudent, but ultimately temporary, steps that should be taken to soften the blow as solutions."
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052703_9_questions.html