The Happy Hybrid
Summary - Hybrid gasoline vehicles and new-design nuclear plants, lots of them, are the short term answer. They buy time for the better longer term combo’s while immediately boosting supply, cutting oil consumption, reducing oil and coal pollution and overall knocking down greenhouse gases. If this approach offends thine eye, then pluck it out. Let’s go.
The two chewiest energy problems, right? Light vehicle transportation sector stuff and power generation for homes and businesses. Fragen 1: how to get to clean and sustainable versions of power for both. Fragen 2: How to get the biggest bang for the buck in both for both the short term and the longer term.
In the utopian future, thousand foot, invisible (via Romulan cloaking devices so as to not offend the advanced aesthetic sensibilities of cultured citizenry and governors) wind and water turbines and super-efficient citrus-scented solar cells generate the electricity and make the hydrogen generation for the transportation sector. Sweet. But there are miles to go before we get within spitting distance of anything like that. So ...
Short Term
Cars and Light Trucks - If you don’t know it already, hybrid cars are here and they are coming out in enough different shapes and sizes that most drivers can find one that suites their needs (see the past couple of posts for more hybrid car info). Increasingly, too, they are being produced in enough volume that you won’t have to wait a year to drive one off the lot. They don’t require special fuel and they don’t need to be plugged in. Stated plainly, there’s nothing wrong with them. All cars and light trucks should be thusly equipped. Sure, they still burn gasoline and emit CO2, but in much smaller amounts than conventional light vehicles. What about hydrogen n the short term? Well, today, infrastructure issues aside, the easiet way to make hydrogen is from natural gas. AEman says don’t bother burning carbon fuels to make hydrogen for cars as some suggest … what’s the freakin’ point of that? Sustainable clean sources (e.g., solar, wind and water turbines) will not be able to generate nearly enough H2 any time soon so let’s make the most of hybrids on gas.
Power for Homes/Biz - Today it’s coal, oil, gas and nuclear in the U.S. The first two create lots of greenhouse gases, while the second two are comparatively “clean”. However, oil and gas are demonstrably finite resources and are subject to significant price volatility. The current nuke plants are inefficient and far more dangerous and expensive to run than they need to be. AEman suggests, short term, a wave of new-design nuclear reactors to retire the aging nukes as well as all coal and oil burning plants. While these new reactors are an excellent way to generate H2 for early H2 cars, there’s just way too much home/biz demand for this power to go anywhere but towards supplementing, then replacing, coal, oil and aging nuke power plants. The objective here is to buy time for the maturation and wide deployment of truly sustainable clean power sources a.k.a. turbines and solar. Hmm, understand the quibble with “short term” on this, but the point is this is work we could/should embark on NOW. The tech is there, the economics are there, only the politics are not; that’s where you come in.
Long Term
Cars and Light Trucks – Don’t undo hybrids; rather, take advantage of the smaller The “engines” required to broadly introduce H2 fuel cells faster than would otherwise be required. Where does the H2 come from? See next.
Power for Homes/Biz – The longer term wave would have Pebble or similar reactors phased out by turbines and solar. In utopia, turbines and solar create both electricity for direct delivery to commercial/residential power and H2 for use the transportation sector above as well as point-of-use power generation in residential fuel cells.
posted by Andy Bochman at 9:13 AM
 
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