Fuel Efficiency?
Like many of the fuel efficiency schemes for cars, including hydrogen fuel cells, this article on putting extra batteries in the Toyota Prius fails to acknowledge the expenditure of fossil fuels required to create the alternative energy source. For example, plugging in the Prius and using wall electricity merely moves the burning of fuels to coal in mid-west plants, rather than gas in the car's tank. Similarly, isolating the hydrogen in a fuel cell car currently takes more energy that we can produce in the fuel cells. Perhaps someday that'll be more efficient, but I'm not sure. I'm not against alternative methods of energy production, I just think we're barking up the wrong tree--cars in Europe are at least twice as fuel efficient as those in the US. Why don't we start with that?
posted by zandperl @ 4:05 PM
4 Comments:
People are proud of their inefficient vehicles in this country.
At least if the car is using electricity we are burning fossil fuels found in our own country instead of in the middle east.
I think the point is there are economic and environmental ramifications that the general public fails to consider when talking about "alternative" energy.
For example, has anyone considered the total amout of fossil fuel used in the entire process to manufacture solar panels?
Bottom line, if clean sources of power were able to keep up with our energy demands perhaps this thread wouldn't exist.
Reducing our power consumption is probably the single most economic and practical thing we can do.
Of course, long term we do need to find additional clean sources of energy - hopefully which will keep up with our demand.
JB you have a good point. I definitely feel wind and solar power are important, but I haven't considered what it takes to start such projects. I was actually pondering the other day how much energy it takes to refine Uranium-235 for nuclear power plants. While I don't know what it takes to make the fuel, it must obviously take less energy than is produced in the actual plant, otherwise we wouldn't actually make nuclear power plants. Ditto for solar or wind farms. We just need *some* net gain for them to be worth doing, but I hope it's a large gain.
On a related note, unmanned space missions today always use one of two power sources: nuclear, or solar. In this case, how much energy is used to create the energy source is irrelevant. All that matters is how long it will last, and nuclear sources last a long time, while solar power lasts until the solar panels degrade due to micrometeroites (in space) or are covered by dust (like on Mars). Solar is more common, probably b/c of the public's blind fear of nuclear power.
*sigh* Poor Hubble Space Telescope. The solar banks are still working well, but the batteries are getting old, and soon won't be able to hold a charge at all, and then that's the end. Unless the last gyros go before that...
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