diesel and Aus politics dont mix... apparently

[smithy010]

I reckon centralised emissions (ie, using electric cars, charged from coal powered stations), when staring in the face of continued fossil fuel usage is a better option.
It has to be more efficient,(especially if seemingly wasted off peak energy is used) and it would clean up our cities a lot.

My two bob on this issue

[Edison]

I reckon centralised emissions (ie, using electric cars, charged from coal powered stations), when staring in the face of continued fossil fuel usage is a better option.

I think a bunch of solar panels on the roof is more of a hoot, as you don't bother plugging it in, you just get in and drive, and don't bother looking for a shady spot. Kill the flick of birds with one stone. simple ventilation for the car interior of course, fold down solar panels? whatever...

but it's really only good for long runs- you have to heat it. right?

Nod. I have 5-6 hours driving from my house to sydney where everything else is. nothing else is an option and the only one is perfect.

now i'm happy. all you guys are very aware and this makes me very happy.

Cool, today I'm apathetic, some energy thing, maybe something i didn't eat.

What you guys are doing isn't new discovery, it's simple rediscovery. It is a cycle that you can find has been going for over 100 years. Engineers design, oil companies bury, engineers re-invent the wheel. Fully electric cars were all the rage many times over. I saw a pic of a fleet of 50 2-ton trucks UPS had, the caption 'they set records for economy and reliability' probably like the 20's or 30's. The battery tech is simple Nickel-iron batteries. Do they sound fancy? thats cause they are not, do they work? of course, they have been there done that. when nickel iron batteries get old and die, they don't die, they keep their discharge capactiy, all of it, they simply take longer to charge. It's called an edison cell. you could build them yourself, except sheets of nickel are hard to come by. it's one of the things that has been wiped out same as 20hp DC low voltage motors. oil companies aren't stupid. car companies aren't independent. Why aren't immobilisers compulsory? because replacement cars make a profit too you know.

[shrug] It's like the Maccas manager looking at a bubbler outside his shop on a hot day, you see people happy to drink cold water from a tap, he sees lost sales, and $200 for a vandal as a tiny investment. try finding clean fresh drinking water in a 1st world country and you will wear out your shoes. you could sponsor a well into tank stream in the centre of sydney so we can all have a drink, but the managers will block blow up vandalise or poison (crypto sporidium sound framiliar?) the thing that is killing their profits.

It's like one cow says to the other cow 'i just found out where hamburgers come from' and the other one says 'I don't want to hear your leftwing conspiracy theory crap'.
well, in this case, it's not news to this cow even though it is news to others. me i want to go live in the jungle. and thats what i'll do as soon as im ready ( a couple of years i think)

[Edison]

Careful. Petrol hybrid cars are not futile. They are very effective at what they do and are part of the solution.

they are to shut people up is all. keep them busy so they don't go out and build their own.

Seriously which is better for the majority+enviroment, and which is going to make a profit ?
do you want the profit from one tram, or all the oil plus all the cars ? hello?

[LS1 Cobra]

I think the future lies in electricity and local power generation. Solar power is the ultimate sorce of all our energy so we may as well go to the source. The world we live in is a system that is almost a closed loop for energy. The only significant external energy input is from the sun and it's a resource we should be looking at tapping directly.

Think about it this way, fossil fuels no matter how they were created all got their energy from the sun. Fields of Canola turned into bio diesel, forests of trees or organic materials broken down into peat and then compressed into coal or into oil beneath the earths surface etc all got the majority of their their energy from the sun.

Solar power is easily converted into electricity. The problem with electricity as an energy source is that moving it from one place to another is not very efficient. Sticking it on a wire from the power station and transmitting it to your home results in a lot of that energy being used up along the way, turned into heat or radiated away. Compare that to the relatively efficient way of transporting of fossil fuel energy, just stick it in a container and carry it from place to another or let it flow down a pipe.

Fossil fuels are also an easy way of storing energy. Again, just stick it in a container and use it when you need it. Unfortunately storing electricity is a lot more complicated and expensive.

I reckon one solution is to have solar cells on the roof of every house and solar and wind farms in rural areas. Run these into an inverter and feed them back into the grid. Power from all these houses could feed most of our energy requirements for industry etc during the day and any excess could be put into storage. But how do you store that electricity cheaply, simply and environmentally ? Batteries? with all the chemicals and heavy metals in them they are an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Not an option for large scale storage in my opinion. How about kinetic storage systems ie use the electricity to pump water to the top of a hill or up a tower and then let it drain back down at night to drive a turbine and generator. Or how about storing it in giant flywheels that spin up during the day and spin down at night.

There may still be a need for conventional power stations to fill the gaps in peak times but they would be much smaller than we have now.

You cant destroy energy, just convert it into a different form. We need to harness that ability and turn it into forms we can use over and over.

Solar cells and wind generators may be expensive now but it's a matter of supply and demand. If there is a requirement for huge numbers of them then there will be investment in ways to make them more efficient and cheap.

Solar cell roof tiles could be a requirment for every new house, along with a water storage tank

At the moment the world is in the grip of the oil companies and fossil fuels. We won't change in a hurry because fossil fuels are relatively cheap and easy. The oil companies, auto companies and industries reliant on these fuels won't change easily especially when they control the governments that make the rules.

The companies want profit, the govenments want power whilst we as the consumers are after the goods and services for the cheapest price. The cost to change will have to be worn by someone, either the prices for goods and services will go up (well that's happening already) or company profits will go down (not likely when they control the governments) or we all pay the price as we destroy our environment.

It seems as though it's all going to be up to us regular citizens to make the moral choices for the environment by choosing sustainable energy sources and the companies that back them.

I'll get off my soap box now.

[brackie]

More people should be standing on soap boxes. Well said!

Strange it all comes back to electricity...hybrid cars, solar cells etc etc. As you say, the problem comes back to, "How do we store it?" The sun is the source of all usable energy on Earth (OK.. we have bacteria in the ocean trenches converting inorganic chemicals from undersea volcanoes into chemical energy, but that isn't really usable by us) so how do we store it? Perhaps electrolysis of water is the answer (yes, seawater is OK and we get salt as a byproduct) so that the hydrogen produced can be stored as a metal hydride or used in a fuel cell. Fuel cell-powered car is still a long way off and hybrids are really only a stopgap. We will still be left with the cost of battery replacement and no way of disposing of the battery material safely.

You're dead right about the convenience and portability of fossil fuels.

[gldgti]

heres a thought:

whats works like a fossil fuel, is cleaner than a fossil fuel, looks like a fossil fuel, but is made from energy from the sun?

biodiesel!

we've been here i know, but remember all that variety stuff? - you guys are all dead right about whats should be happenning, but remember that we will alsways need some "convenience fuel". something to get us form point a to point b where it isnt possible to take your electric car, or when you have too heavy a load to carry.... thats where i see "man made fossil-like fuel" coming into it.

honestly, i'm a believer in all the renewables. all of them! solar being at the top of the list really, closely followed by wind (another freaking obvious one).
but believe me - i really do love the diesel engine - its a piece of engineering that will have uses well after all the oil is gone from the ground....

like we've all been saying - it will take a variety of measures, and no single quick fix will do it.

now, who is going to start lobby-ing?

[posscakes]

holy moly what a fantastic thread.

i think regardless whatever the political support for it, biodiesel use is getting a lot more widespread. i smell it on the street all the time. theres a commercial biodiesel plant here in adelaide just near my house. it employs about 50 people so it must pump out a fair bit of the stuff (Australian Renewable Fuels) they dont sell it to the small time user though, most of it gets sold to a mob called dermody petroleum, who i think is owned by bp probably gets mixed into blends with petro diesel and sold commercially.

there must be hundreds of different ways to derive and source oil either fresh or recycled to make biodiesel. i think ARF even use animal oil. brackies points about pulling off a canola crop are valid like everything its energy intensive and theres costs involved, but canola is just one way not the only way surely. and yes wouldn't it suck if if tassie's forests all got ripped out and reduced to a canola paddock just so we run our cars???

electric cars???? well i guess if you've got a green source of energy it must be better than petrol surely. also a guy told me today there are ways of charging dead 12 volts in a few seconds it involves using the terminals of a powerful welder? can anyone shed any more light on this? has anyone tried it before. the same guy who told me about the welder trick also told me about this bus that was trialed in germany that had a pertetual motion but i guess thats a whole new thread different sorts of motors etc.

also i once heard about people making acytelene from used aluminium cans and running engines on that. also if anyone hasn't seen it yet mr sharkey on this forum has an interesting website deals with electric & diesel vw worth a look. i think its www.mrsharkey.com if no luck google it.

[brackie]

Fuel cell-powered car is still a long way off .....

Corrrection... GM have one on the road. Apparently it runs on liquid hydrogen stored in cylinders beneath the floor. Looks scary as you all know how cold liquid hydrogen is and what it does to living tissue if it comes in to contact.... I wonder where and how you'd fill up I guess the infrastructure costs would be huge and of course the consumer pays.

[peter_j_g]

Some more biodiesel news...

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Fin.../1135221942460

[brackie]

Where's the feedstock coming from? The commentator made a valid point that China won't sit on her hands and watch accessible palm oil etc. go to Scandanavia. Europe can't supply enough rapeseed to feed it and lard is just a dream. I'm only a Joe and obviously the number crunchers have done their homework, however the cynical side of me and my scant knowledge of the stock market makes me wonder.....
Let's do some sums.
Potatoes in Tassie fetch ~AUD200/tonne at the farm gate. Our ground can grow ~65 tonnes/ha so that's AUD/12,400 per ha before costs. However like most crops this has to be done on a 4 year rotation with lesser value crops occupying the 3 other years so your spuds are really only a AUD3,100 per year crop.
I doubt very much that canola can get anywhere near that figure.
I can graze 350 dairy goats on 50ha of ground for an annual return of ~AUD160,000 (before costs) and that's AUD3,400/ha which compares well with pyrethrum, poppies or any of the commonly grown crops in this region. But I can do it every year without a rotation. Brassicas like rape (canola) too need to be rotated every 4 years so really they're not going to be able to compete with other crops available to the farmer. I doubt very much whether supply will meet demand so we're no better off than we were with dinodiesel.
Any agscientist or economist on this forum please correct me if I'm wrong as I'd love to be