The US NG/PROPANE/E85 Vehicle and GSHP Energy Policy and Economic Recovery Plan

Great Debates
41

That may be! The US has a rolling stock of 244 million gasoline powered vehicles. The US replaces these vehicles through new car purchases at the rate of about 15 million vehicles yearly. It will take about 16 years to replace this rolling stock with Bio-diesel engines. Given a new car design cycle of 3 years and for algae plants to come on line of about 5 years we are talking about a 20 year span of time to eliminate imported oil not counting the risk associated with all the unknowns and unproven. Don’t forget of course that the government would have to mandate these radical changes and we all know that the government is corrupt and will find a way to totally screw up what may be a good idea.

And of course electric vehicles will prevail eventually I expect in that 20 years, when a high capacity battery and electrified roads and 40% efficient high temperature photo voltaics are perfected.

The Policy converts these 244 million vehicles to NG/PROPANE/E85 in 8 years using all known and well understood technologies and existing pipeline, grid, manufacturing infrastructure, having been designed built, installed, used, and used again over the last 30 or more years and all that is needed is ample tax credits to motivate the individual to do a good job.

With each NG/PROPANE/E85 conversion taking about 8 hours labor and GSHP installation taking about 5 days
CO2 is reduced today and meets CO2 targets 8 years forward and
people save money today and
jobs are created today and
the recession stops today
not in some distant future with promises of all flowers and butterflies derived from uncollateralized debt.

42

What about plug-in biodeisel hybrids?

43

The hybrid bobsled plug-in is lookin Good Hoser.
I hear it works well in the far north.
Isn’t it made by government FIAT.

But you would need that round thingy whose invention set off the economic boon of the bronze age for it to work here in the lower 48. And the hybrid would have to be a husky/toy poodle mix to meet Obama’s CAFE standards. The KKK (Kühnle Kopp & Kausch AG) has an after market EPA certified plugin combined power/heat unit employing dog farts to compliment your totally GREEN personal transporter.

Thats biodeisel Gilda.
Oh Never Mind!

44

Well, that clears things up.

45

Okay. But you’re still using grid electricity to pump the heat inside, which was generated by burning fossil fuels in a heat engine where well over half the heat is wasted. Burning the fuel in a home generator captures most of the wasted heat as well, which is useful for homes at high latitudes.

Thanks for your efficiency cite, but it’s a manufacturer’s ad for a product with a stated COP of 5. This might be true under certain conditions (how warm is the groundwater and how warm is the space being heated?) but I’d like to see an unbiased cite such as a consumer group test or something academic. I concede your point though, especially since the heat pump can be used for summer cooling as well.

[QUOTE=focusonz]

Grid losses are only 4% to 7%.

Electric generator efficiency ranges from 35% to 60% depending on fuel.
[/quote]
Well 60% is pretty exceptional and only applies to combined-cycle plants. The truth is power plants generally send over half the fossil fuel energy up the towers as heat, and in high latitudes that heat is valuable.

[QUOTE=focusonz]
This Electric generator efficiency would be the same for centralized power plants or your in home combined power/heat plants so is not relevant to the comparison during the cooling season.
[/quote]
Fair point, in fact I’m pretty sure a home CHP plant would be less efficient at generating electricity compared with a power plant. I’m a Brit so the idea of a “cooling season” is a bit foreign to me, although since I’ve moved to Australia I’m getting used to it. CHP only makes sense at high latitudes where cooling isn’t required, or has to be limited to winter use.

[QUOTE=focusonz]
Maintenance costs for those millions of distributed in home combined power/heat units would be 1000% of the costs that are incurred for those few centralized power plants.
[/quote]
A very good point and one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for small scale CHP. Ideally they’d need to be maintenance-free for at least ten years, have the same footprint as a domestic boiler and run nearly silent as well. Certainly challenging, but I don’t think impossible.

[QUOTE=focusonz]
Over the year the in home combined power/heat units are less efficient by easily 50% or more depending on the length of your cooling season as the heat is unusable during the hot months. Thus would be totally stupid to implement in all the southern tier states.
[/quote]
I did say that CHP would be supplementary to heat pumps. Limit it to the northern states.

[QUOTE=focusonz]
Why do it if it only address the need in the northern tier stats and there is no manufacturing base for them. They are a pipe dream. A fuel cell approach is much more practical and efficient but they have yet to be perfected and again there is no manufacturing base.
[/quote]
That’s like not bothering with insulation or double glazing in Alaska because it’s pointless in Florida. CHP combined with heat pumps would be of great benefit to high latitude states.

[QUOTE=focusonz]
I use stop gap in terms of generationAL horizon, 80 years. Switching to NGV’s and GSHP’s US easily extractable oil will supply the US industrial base for 100 more years and US easily extractable NG will supply NGV’s for 100 more years and coal will last 300 years. AS IT IS NOW 10 YEARS AT $3T TRADE DEFICIT AND NO DRILLING FOR NG AND OIL, THE US HAS GOT ABOUT 7 YEARS TILL THE BALLOON POPS.
[/quote]
Okay, I get it. Your OP is a polemic. You’re trying to get things moving using immediately available technology and products because you see a ticking clock,and CHP is too much in its infancy and too limited in its application to be part of your plan. Gotcha.

[QUOTE=focusonz]
NG produces 15% less CO2 and is 15% more efficient fuel for an ICE while ethanol is about 15% less efficient but produces about 15% less CO2 as it is from a bio source.
[/quote]
less CO2 I can understand - it’s a hydrogen-rich hydrocarbon. But I’ve heard the opposite regarding NG ICE efficiency compared with gasoline. Do you have a cite?

[QUOTE=focusonz]
Using composite tanks with NG absorbent materials the NG fuel tank weight and capacity for the same vehicle mileage range are on par with gasoline tanks. And the absorbents allow for tank pressures not exceeding 400PSI.
[/quote]
Interesting. I’ll look it up.

[QUOTE=focusonz]
Why do you allow yourself to be led by others in believing anything? HVAC is not a religion it is a science. The payback calculation is simple math based on price of installed system and cost of saved energy bills.
[/QUOTE]
And right here is where you lose people. You want to persuade people, SHOW them. Don’t rant, don’t patronise. I think you’re completely correct - outfitting the whole of the USA with heat pump space heating would be of great benefit, may be enough to grant oil independence, would save a lot of CO2, and would probably cost less than the war in Iraq or what cap-and-trade will end up costing. Not so convinced on the NG powered vehicles but I’m wavering - need more data. It’s a great idea. You shouldn’t have too much difficulty convincing the technically literate. Now you need to persuade everyone else.

46

Typically 50% to 70% of rated efficiency is what we see in the US as HVAC job shoppers for the most part in the past have not been mathematically diligent with proper duct sizing to maintain proper airflow over the inside coils for them to run at peak efficiency and they invariably oversize the unit as well so the units cycle time is too short decreasing efficiency and of course they neither insulate nor bury the feeder pipe deep enough from the vertical or horizontal loop nor insulate the pump house when open loop so it too loses efficiency or of course the loop may be too short. I tested one the other day that was running at 50% rated efficiency, Insulated the pump house and feeder pipe and the efficiency came up to 75% of rated.

No it is not pointless in Florida. Florida peak electrical consumption is during the summer months running all those air conditioners. But the people don’t think to put insulation in their homes well because they beleive it is like a blanket to keep warm in. Well duh no it keeps the heat out. Floridians need to put R50 in their ceiling and R24 in their walls and double glazing and eliminating air infiltration just like Minnesotans do. Let manual J and Manual S be your guide.

As a matter of fact I won’t sell a GSHP unless the homes insulation is high quality and air infiltration has been minimized. Using expanded foam makes the insulating job easy in existing structures and after having done that you size the GSHP with the new heat loading and you find that your GSHP and ground loop is half the size as it would have been without the proper insulation. And foam lasts as long as the house.

Come to think about it. The way the numbers work a person would save more energy by insulating to reduce air conditioning than a person saves to insulate to reduce heat bills. Apples and apples here is the number of cooling degree days in the south would have to equal the number of heating degree days in the north and let sun insolance fall where it is latitude wise. The sun heats the spaces outside the envelop but inside the structure, attic, brick veerner, etc, in the north giving an assist to the heater while the sun in those same spaces puts an additional load on the A/C.

No when people say that I can be pretty much certain I have lost them long before then. You sound like an off the grid type of person and are stuck on CHP Well go for it. But think about this. The other 6.5 billion people have been struggling living and dying off the grid for the last 10,000 years and it just didn’t work well for them and it has zero possibility to work well for them in the future. It is a job that someone else can do for them and they will pay to have that done if the price is right but the environmentalist wack job marxists have through litigation and stupid EPA regulations are causing the price not to be right. There is not a damn thing wrong with the environment in the US. China has the smog problem as evidenced by the delay of the summer Olympics a couple of years ago, all from coal plants and hibachi cooking. And the environmentalists don’t see that because the Chinese are marxists, too.

It was not that long ago that the WWII generation lived off the grid. And millions of Chinese are just now coming up on a grid. Now these rurual electric grids may not be tied to the metropolitan grid using wires but they are tied to the grid by way of those stupid 8% efficient photo voltaics which cost more to make than it would to just run the wires direct from the coal generator used to run the foundries to make the damn silicon. It pisses me off that my tax dollars pays the 30% tax credit to people to install a fucking photo voltaic porcha on their roofs thats imported from China.

I was talking to guy on another message board. This guy had a job and had this dream about Pickens stupid windmills and was an engineer. He said right there in front of God and everyone that it made no sense to insulate a home when the insulation was used only half a year. He knew he was lying but every one believed him as he came across as a leader. And yes he just believed in Obama, too. And yes the elitist selfish prick kept the masses in ignorance just like this doper planet does a lot of the time.

I surely don’t have to explain the false hood of this guys assertion for you but for others here goes. By analogy if you spend $1M to do something once each year but you discover if you spent $100K on an upgrade and it then only costs you $500K to do that something once each year then you saved $400K in the 1st year and $500K for each year after that. Such a deal! Spending money on insulation is the same and saving money each year on the energy that you are not losing determines the payback period for the insulation upgrade.

Half the people in the US just believe that the government will do everything for them and half the people in the US believe that the government will just stay out of their way and let them live their lives. Well the government does not grow food, weave cloth, build shelter or produce energy and it just grabs more power to be the leaders of them. If Portugal had a government in 1492 like what we have in the US, Columbus would never have discovered American

47

Not really. And you’ve far from lost me - you’ve convinced me. Chalk one up.

If you can take some advice however, you convinced me with your posts in this thread, not with your OP. It’s too long and doesn’t communicate your argument well - in fact it’s not at all clear what you’re even talking about on first reading.

I clicked on the thread title out of curiosity. Halfway through your “TO…” list I started to skim. Halfway through your “We have no energy…” list I started to skip. There’s a lot of CAPITALISATION which is basically SHOUTING, and there’s too much “we the people” and “yoke of oppression” stuff that get’s you catagorised as a crank. And your links at the end gave little clue as to what they were all about - few people are familiar with the acronyms you used.

What you could have posted is something like:

"I propose that instead of investing money and resources into wars in the middle east, economic stimulus packages and cap-and trade, we make a national effort to upgrade all the buildings in the USA to ground source heat pumps (GSHP) for space heating and cooling. This will:

a) lower everyone’s heating and cooling bills, saving money and boosting the economy
b) reduce energy demands so as to reduce CO2 emissions and meet our 2012 target
c) free up natural gas currently used for heating for use as a vehicular fuel, granting the USA independence from oil imports

In order for this to happen, certain changes will have to made to current legislation and I propose large tax breaks to stimulate implementation."

After introducing your subject, then you make your case and back it up with figures and multiple cites for the figures, and leave out the politics. Just a suggestion.

48

What Matt said. Smaller opening thread with a more precise point.

49

I mis remembered fuel mileage is about the same gasoline vs CNG in factory stock vehicles.

Designing an ICE from the ground up for CNG or for ethanol you would realize about 15% better gas mileage as you could use high cylinder compression taking advantage of the higher oxygenation (octane).

Suburbia encroaches on farmland everyday. So whether the farmland is used up for subdivision or algae beds is neither here nor there. You will say that it could use land way out in the middle of nowhere USA but transporting the fuel becomes the problem as its hygroscopic and gelling make that difficult. There are no pipelines used for E85 now much less biodeisel.

Bio this or that is all just off-grider dreams. Once a high capacity battery is developed then the all electric car will become a reality and the only infrastructure needed is the wall outlet and all the car designers will have to do to their hybrid product lines is replace the ICE under the hood with that battery. While the tsunami is in the same direction but without the ICE all electric vehicles for the commute

So why install an ICE CHP in your home when the direction by the auto geeks is electric and the ICE of the CHP would have to be very large to supply enough electricity for an automobile and the home.

In the near term, today, convert cars to NG/PROPANE/E85, replace old worn out NG furnaces and air conditioners with GSHP’s especailly in electric resistive heated apartments occupied by half the families in the US and put all the jobless back to work building an infrastructure that will save them money year after year with lower utility bills.

With elimination of oil imports and huge saving from reduced fuel and utility bills we are talking about up to $1T of increased efficiency/productivity of the $13T US GDP which means that US product costs will be reduce by 8% enough to turn a trade deficit into a surplus then whack $1T off the stupid federal government budget then the national debt could be eliminated saving another $1T annually on interest. As you can see, The US NG/PROPANE/E85 Vehicle and GSHP Energy Policy and Economic Recovery Plan will lead to $3T in direct cost savings per year and 24% reduction of cost of locally consumed or exported Made in America products.

50

E85 is grossly inefficient per acre, takes up valuable farm land and is less efficient than standard gasoline when burned. Bio-diesel does not use farmland and is more efficient than oil refined diesel.

Electric cars cannot replace fuel burning cars because our electrical grid can’t handle it. States like California are barely holding on with the electrical service they’ve got now and due to EPA regulations in most states there is a mandate to reduce energy consumption.

51

–1-- An all diesel 244 million vehicle fleet does not exist!
–2-- A Bio-diesel distribution infrastructure does not exist!
–3-- Algae based Bio-diesel production facilities design using scrubbed CO2 does not exist !
–4-- Algae based Bio-diesel production facilities don’t exist!
–5-- Figure 20 years plus for anything that remotely looks like that to exist
–6-- And why should it exist just to be obsoleted. Burning Bio-diesel releases the CO2 that you so carefully scrubbed from processes so no net CO2 reduction!

To obtain CO2 reduction you must use energy resources that don’t involve CO2 like the inexhaustible energy from the sun and earth.

A solution to your vexing problem is another beauty of the Policy.

++1++ Replacing electric resistive heating from 50 million apartments in the US with 900% solar thermal assisted GSHP’s electric consumption will be reduced by upwards of 1/2
++2++ and CO2 reduction targets are met and exceeded and California has excess electrical service it needs for the California life style.
++3++ The saved electricity then is available to charge the batteries of plug-in hybrid and all electric vehicles.
++4++ The batteries are then used to store the electrical energy produced when the wind don’t blow, the sun don’t shine, or the hydro don’t flow
++5++ Electric cars become an integral part of the electrical distribution infrastructure
++6++and the electrical energy is from CO2 neutral, inexhaustible, and FREE energy sources of the future.

History shows that The US NG/PROPANE/E85 Vehicle and GSHP Energy Policy and Economic Recovery Plan can work. Reagan proved that and many other things. “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”

During the 1st three years of the Reagan Presidency 70,000,000 barrels of oil were saved per month and no longer needed to be imported as oil imports dropped by 50% by the simple conversion of oil fired furnaces to Made in the USA natural gas furnaces. and converting 15% of vehicles to Made in America propane.

A repeat of Reagan’s simple conversion of the US automobile fleet to NG/PROPANE/E85
A repeat of Reagan’s simple replacement of NG furnaces with GSHP’s
A repeat of Reagan’s simple replacement of electric resistive furnaces with GSHP’s

Will reduce imported oil by 100%,
Will reduce electrical consumption by up to 50%,
Will put 15.0 million jobless back to work
Will create a US trade surplus
Will result in a true reduction in US CO2 emmissions.
Will reduce household energy expenses by 90%

And what about the Federal debt?

History shows that fiscal conservative Republicans and the conservative coalition and the Gingrich “Contract with America” can reduce the Federal debt as they did to correct the excesses of the liberal progressive Wilson presidency, the Roosevelt presidency, the Carter presidency, and the Clinton presidency.

During the 1920’s and during the post WWII period from 1950 through 1974 the debt was reduced by 1/2 while during the "Contract with American the debt was reduced by 10% and would have been more had the terrorists no decided to whoop ass on America with 9/11.

A repeat of the lowering the tax burden on American households
A repeat of the reduction in the size of government
A repeat of the roll back of liberal progressive programs or streamlining them for efficiency.
A repeat of the increased employment and economic activity resulting in more Federal revenue
A repeat of restored economic growth resulting in more Federal revenue.
Coupled with The US NG/PROPANE/E85 Vehicle and GSHP Energy Policy and Economic Recovery Plan

Will return the US debt back to a manageable 30% of GDP from the stupidly high of 100% of GDP incurred by the marxist Obama presidency and liberal progressive 111th congress.