Correction: Strike “Hydrothermal” and replace with “Geothermal”.
But when you start thinking of Hydrogen as power storage rather than a power generation, it becomes clear that this has nothing at all to do with reducing our dependence on fossile fuels.
Its natural competitors are other power storage mechansms: Batteries, Flywheels, Superconducting coils, big lakes up high, etc. For that matter, storage is only necessary when you have generating capacity that you can’t turn on and off at will, like solar or wind power. So long as most generating capacity is powered by natural gas, coal, or nuke plants. Hydrogen is a solution in search of a problem.
Uh no. This is about like saying a plan for moving the country to an energy system based on pumping water uphill into large storage tanks. (only more dangerous).
I can just see them passing a bill that gives tax credits for burning coal to generate electricity that is then stored in big hydrogen tanks. In fact, that would be a pretty good summary of the Cheney energy policy except that the hydrogen part won’t be ready to go for a decade or more. :rolleyes:
To the extent this is being billed as an ‘energy plan’ rather than as a ‘storage plan’ It’s just more of the Bush administration offering a faux solution to a real problem that they don’t want to solve, but also don’t want to be seen not solving.
The other thing that seems to be entirely missing is a timeline, which is another time honored Bush strategy for preventing action on important problems: declaring that the need more study.
Well, of course you’d find something wrong with it, Tejota. You’ll never in a million years admit that a Republican proposal might be a good thing.
Your analogy to storing water in big tanks up high is ridiculous, as is your criticism that it’s not an ‘energy plan’. Of COURSE it’s an energy plan - it’s a plan to provide energy for vehicles and other things in a different form than oil. It’s a plan for distributing energy around the country in a useful form. And of course the energy has to be created - there are lots of ways to do that, of varying economic efficiency and environmental friendliness. That’s also part of the energy plan.
Oh, and it’s a plan from the Department of Energy, which also makes it an energy plan.
As for the tax credits for burning oil to make hydrogen - nice strawman. You have some examples of that, or are you just spouting guesses in the Great Debates forum?
Um, Sammy pal, Tejota got right to the point, and along the way showed a better grasp of fundamental engineering concepts than you. Check a basic thermodynamics text - the First Law seems to be eluding you. There is a conceptual difference between energy sources and energy storage which you have acknowledged in passing but without affecting your subsequent assertions.
The concept has nothing to do with partisan politics, despite your puzzling attempt to paint it in those terms, starting with the OP itself.
Waving away the means of producing all that energy, while still calling it a “plan”, was an amusing touch, though.
What are you talking about? Did you miss the part where I said you would have to add the equivalent of 175 nuclear reactors to supply the power?
Of course hydrogen is not an energy source. It is an energy storage and transportation system, so that you can centralize your energy production, keep pollution away from the cities, and reduce the amount of CO2 being emitted overall.
The other big advantage of a hydrogen energy source is that it’s easy to change the fundamental means of production, because you no longer have to change the infrastructure. Today, if we ran out of oil it would be hellishly expensive to replace the entire auto fleet and other petroleum consumers. In the future, if everything ran off of hydrogen with the hydrogen being produced by existing power plants, then when oil becomes too expensive to use you can smoothly transition to the next power source, like nuclear, solar, wind, or whatever.
Not Republican. Bush Administration. I’m under no illusion that Bush represents anyone but his cronies. I’ll leave it to you to decide if the republican party actually is a Kleptocracy or if it has
just been taken over by one at the top.
I won’t disargee that Hydrogen can be an energy distribution plan, but I’m having trouble seeing how this would be an improvement over the current method: electricity.
Certainly hydrogen has nothing at all to do with energy generation, though it may enable some forms of generation to be more useable. But in order to do that, one only needs hydrogen storage tanks near electricty generating stations, not all over.
It still makes no sense to have a large scale system of moving energy around the country in the form of hydrogen rather than in the form of electricity.
Not as far as I can tell. Do you have a cite that describes the generation plan?
Squink nailed it when he said that this is nothing more than piracy of a Clinton administration policy for its PR value. This article backs that up and points out that this was a project put in place by the Clinton administration. The article acknowledges that it will be a while before hydrogen fuel cells are economically feasible, and points out that Bush’s “plan” is little more than an attempt to short-circuit fuel economy standards. There’s nothing noble here at all.
This, by the way, is what Bush campaigners and the ahem liberal media were referring to when they wailed, “Al Gore wants to ban the internal combustion engine!” Gore was a supporter of this research, but he never tried to pass it off as a pie-in-the-sky solution to our energy needs—much less as an excuse to lower fuel efficiency standards.
Sam Stone, this is not a “Republican proposal”. The Department of Energy has been funding hydrogen storage and fuel cell research for years. This is not a new idea, and it certainly is not an idea attributable to a single political party. I’ve worked at DOE national labs during both Clinton and G.W. Bush, and I’ve seen no detectable increase in alternative energy research and funding between the two administrations. Yes, the Republicans didn’t shut down DOE, or forbid non-oil research, but that’s because squelching science research would be political suicide. Big business benefits greatly from nationally funded research.
However, I disagree with Tejota that hydrogen storage would not reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar currently suffer because they can’t guarantee constant supply. Imagine if you could set up solar and windmill farms out in the desert, which would do nothing but charge up hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen storage won’t solve all our problems, but it would definitely have some benefits.
Switching to stored, non-fossil-fuel energy has the added benefit of keeping things like car pollution down as you centralize pollution production (where the hydrogen is generated from, presumably, water), making it easier to control via scrubbers and such. But we could have done this with electricity. In any case, the problem remains the storage itself as I thought it always had, and if we had licked the storage problem already then sailor wouldn’t have to turn blue in the face swearing at people about how stupid hydro is in GQ, then getting pitted for it, and Anthracite would still discuss these energy-related things.
No?
Wow! I guess I miss a lot by only looking at GD. On the other hand, I waste enough time here at SDMB without trying to keep up on other forums!
I just want to discuss these things without the political slurs and partisan nastiness. But that isn’t going to happen until a Moderator decides that it’s going to be that way, or a thread is set up differently and both sides of the political fence behave themselves.
The OP of this thread, even though made by a guy I like, was of a taunting and overly political tone, and that set the stage for the thinly-disguised hatred and slurs of Republicans/Conservatives/non-Democrats which followed. One does not excuse the other, and I think no side is blameless here.
Uh, yeah. You’re right. I was in a bad mood when I wrote that, and had just finished reading another article by a Democrat claiming that the Bush administration was married to big oil. So my OP was rather confrontational.
So, is this thread worth salvaging, even given the wreck of an OP that started it, or would it be worth starting another one, perhaps in General Questions, to calmy debate the merits of the proposal?
I’d suggest you try here again in a few weeks, but this time explicitly try to discourage political responses with your OP. It’s an important and interesting topic, but as the Hydrogen production question over in GQ shows, one that is liable to get confrontational even without politics tossed into the mix.