Very optimistically speaking, solar panels have a maximum lifetime of about 30 years and dont produce energy at night.
So as I suggested, build a solar panel into the roof of each car that is manufactured so that it can produce a certain amount of Hydrogen and Oxygen in the daytime. The average lifetime of a car is way less than 30 years so no big deal there. You might not get enough fuel to totally run the car but you will definitely supplement oil based fuels. Additionally, night-time recharges from a mains outlet will help.
I know this only shifts the energy source elsewhere but in
all (even oil burning systems) cases, electricity generating power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines.
Trucks dont run on electricity, I think you are underestimating transporation, it doesnt run on electricity and it probably wont be in the near future.
No they don't. But they
could. The only way they ever will is if it becomes cheaper to do so. The world is, unfortunately, driven by economics.
Also the electricity of the mining machines is not the fuel itself but rather the fuel that the electricity in the first place.
I realize this but as stated above, power plants of any type produce more usable energy and less polution from that same amount of fuel as your average internal combustion engine does.
even if car engines were modified to run on hydrogen, hydrogen at roomtemperature is a gas (with a very low energy volume) and must be compressed in safe fuel cells before it can be used as a fuel conveniently. The fuel cells are the smack in the face for hydrogen based engines as they cost to much to be a convenient replacement for every vehicle currently on the highway or even every vehicle in the future.
Fuel cells are a completely different issue. They produces electricty directly from a chemical reaction. In actual fact they are many orders of magnitude more efficient at converting potential chemical energy to usable motion than a conventional internal combustion engine which dumps as much as 90% of it into the environment as heat.
My thrust is more towards the direct use of Hydrogen and Oxygen gas in a regular engine. This is a much easier transition for most car owners than switching to an electric motor. Research over the last 20 years or so has given us options other than compressing the gasses to store them. We now have gas tanks that have a microscopic honeycomb structure of specially developed catalytic metals which can store vast amounts of Hydrogen in a very small space as
metal hydrides. All you need to release them is to supply a small amount of heat. remove this heat and they suck up hydrogen gas like a sponge.
There is actually another option which is currently under development.
Nuclear batteries.
They are able to directly convert beta particles produced in the radioactive decay processes of certain elements, into electricity. A nuclear batter will produce a continuous supply of electricity which will remain constant for a significant portion of the half life of the isotope used as it's source. about one mili-gram of a radioactive isotope can put out 1.5V DC for thousands of years.
Hydro electric power plants produce energy out of nuclear power, the sun commits to fusion, emits energy and causes clouds (building up the amount of gravitational energy) to rain on mountains which in turn produces rivers that produce electric current with the help of hydroelectric plants, ultimately by nuclear power.
The author may not have had his facts perfectly straight, accurate and clear but I dont think your argument holds.
The fact is that you can take all energy back to the root cause of the big bang if you really want to.
It still remains a scientific fact that Gravitation is
NOT an energy source. At the very best, hydro-electric power could be described as converting
Potential energy into
Electrical energy since Potential Energy is the technical term for the energy contained in an object that has been lifted up to a higher altitude.
It also seems pretty obvious to me that this cannot be the ultimate source of the energy because something had to actually perform the lifting in order to impart this potential energy to the water. That something is heat from the sun.
The author most definitely
didn't have his facts straight and correct. I was even being overly generous to say that 3 of his 4 were correct.
There is actually only
ONE source of energy anywhere in the entire universe.
[span style=\'font-size:14pt;line-height:100%\']HEAT[/span]
Heat drives everything, or to be more accurate, the spreading of heat energy from a location of greater heat to one of lesser heat or the increase in universal entropy.
If you really want to get worried, start there. One day in the distant future, all heat energy will be spread equally across the entire universe and no potential will be left to create any more of it. A state of perfect entropy with a mean temperature of close to absolute zero. That's a scary thought.
