GM's sales are taking a beating in California, where an entire generation of drivers have grown up without once owning one of the General's vehicles. Few people know that the artist formerly known as the world's largest automaker has been communicating with children aged Kindergarten and up for years. The General's charm offensive comes via their education division, which provides free classroom curricula to civic-minded teachers. And anyone who thinks that GM's dragging its feet on green issues– at least in the PR sense– would do well to examine their latest lesson plan "The Energy Highway: Solutions Ahead." Although the words "global warming" are conspicuous by their absence, they're all about the CO2. Thanks to GM's partnership with The Weekly Reader, millions of kids will trace the domestic carmaker's proposed arc, from internal combustion engines to flex-fuel vehicles to "extended range" electric vehicles to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. And that's OK because we'll use renewable energy sources to power the electric plants that create the hydrogen for the vehicles. Ta-da!
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1. Steal underpants
2. ?
3. Profit
can be transformed to:
1. Undefined and probably politically unpopular renewable energy sources
2. ?
3. Hydrogen as energy independence
Personally, the only way I see it as working is either a.) lots of nukes or b.) solar power satellites, which are back on the radar since our armed forces need electricity in areas which lack steady, dependable supplies of it.
GM’s next flex-fuel engine should be able to run on either coal or antimatter. Talk about flexible…
Will The Weekly Reader join Motor Trend and other magazines as targets of TTAC’s disapproval now?
THE HYDROGEN CITY OF THE FUTURE!
SEE! how the Shell “Gas-Station” becomes a thing of THE PAST, now replaced with SHINY MODERN NEW Shell HYDRO-STATIONS!
SEE! the line of 30 SLEEK CRYOGENIC TANKER TRUCKS, waiting to deliver a day’s supply of the “FUTURE FUEL” to the “HYDRO-STATON”!
SEE! the seventy-five year-old woman attempting to attach the high-pressure hose coupling to her CAR OF THE FUTURE… wait… no worries; a helpful Attendant will assist her!
Re Neoncat:
what you don’t realize is how expensive nuclear is. Huge capital costs, years to build, during which time capital gets tied up.
I suspect that a lot of people focus on nuclear because of some subconscious feeling that it’s somehow more macho than distributed solar. But in ten years or so it will probably start to become financially attractive to put PVs on the roof, and feed any excess into the grid. This sort of distributed solar has the advantage that terrorists, acts of god, and the like can’t shut down a huge piece of the country.
By the way, in terms of capacity, wind energy is currently growing about six times as fast as nuclear worldwide. That is, for every megawatt of nuclear that’s being built, 6 MW of wind are going up. If the politicians would get out of the way, in a couple of years we’ll have about 500 MW of wind (equivalent to half a typical nuke) here in Massachusetts just off of Cape Cod.
Wave and tidal power are also poised to take off.
And the potential for reducing demand is huge.
As far as sources of energy that don’t produce co2, there are no silver bullets, one steel bullet (efficiency measures of all sorts), some lead bullets (PV, wind, ocean, biofuels (but not corn-based ethanol), maybe nuclear) and a lot of buckshot.
Whether all of this will be enough when the population is slated to grow 50% in the next 50 years is another question.
David Holzman:
This sort of distributed solar has the advantage that terrorists, acts of god, and the like can’t shut down a huge piece of the country.
He could always turn off the sun, but at that point, we have more to worry about than our energy source…
@ David Holzman
I don’t disagree about the cost of nuclear energy or that distributed solar would be nice to have; I’m just not sure that distributed solar will be enough to crack methane or water in industrially significant amounts. As for wind and tidal, they’ve been just around the corner for at least twenty-five years – since the last energy crisis in the seventies and eighties, in fact. I believe both fall under “politically unpopular renewable energy sources”, as does nuclear. Please don’t misunderstand me – I think wind, tidal, nuclear and solar power are great, but I’d really really like it if we went with solar power satellites – no cloudy days to worry about, terrorists couldn’t touch it and we would really start to develop space as a resource.
@ Virtual Insanity
That would be an end to the various Death Watches that I think no one at TTAC anticipated. I doubt that God will be that merciful to Detroit.
i just thought of this but the largest percentage of green house gas is water vapor which is what a hydrogen powered vehicle produces –isnt it ironic that we will be cutting one green house gas for another? i still think its better if you believe co2 is causing the climate to change– we can use the water if we collect it. why cant we build the nuclear plants underground so if they do go homer simpson on us it wont be such an event?
Just a few thoughts on this
I got a bit of a LOL out of your slip (or was it?) of the phrase “civic-minded teachers”. My kid’s teacher drives a Civic too.
I wonder if it would be any fun to drive when GM finally invents the Transporter first seen on the starship Enterprise.
GM PR is finally getting it. That they’ve already lost the current generation of buyers and it’s time to look longterm and nurture the next generation to consider them.
@neoncat
I repeat, wind is growing at six times the rate of nuclear worldwide. It is no longer around the corner. There is a lot of it. Wave and tidal are about where wind was 20 years ago, but experts expect progress to be much faster, partly because particularly for tidal, some of the technological lessons of wind are applicable. (I just wrote about this–see probably the december issue of Environmental Health Perspectives (EHPonline.org).
I haven’t looked into solar power satellites in 30 years but I suspect they would be hugely costly. Clouds are not a big deal. One of the first places PVs will be financially rewarding is in Massachusetts. This is driven more by the local cost of electricity (I pay about 16c/kwh) than the weather.
@stuntnun
burning gasoline produces more water per unit energy than hydrogen. And w/ hydrogen from renewable electriity, you would be putting water back into circulation which you had taken out ofcirculation in the first place.
nukes require a huge amount of cooling water, so even if they were underground, any “event” would cause huge contamination
Solar satellites sound good, but I wouldn’t want to be in the path of whatever transmission method used. Kinda like a cat in the microwave thing.
why do they explode nuclear weapons under ground? hope your wrong about that.–and about the water, aren’t you creating a water molecule in the process of using hydrogen and that would add water to the environment- if the electricity used to make the hydrogen came from say wind power isn’t that adding? you really sure burning unleaded fuel creates more water than burning hydrogen? i thought it took water to refine oil but could have bad facts. i do hope we do go too hydrogen though just to get off foreign oil .
I’m intreged about the alluminum + gallium = hydrogen discovery by Prof. Woodall at Purdue.
Not a significant infrastucture problem. Hell, UPS or FedEx could do it. Pelletized raw materials – easy and safe to transport – would make it easy to replenish the tank.
Gallium is easy to obtain, but like mercury, is in a near liquid state at room temperature. But it isn’t noxious, so storage shouldn’t be an issue.
Someone must see a downside, but I don’t.
@David Holzman
Nuclear power’s cost depends on a lot of things (the state of the grid, liability, lawsuit delays, skilled construction labor).
The Canadian province of Ontario does a good job running its nukes (and selling power at nice markups to the power-plant phobic US Northeast). BTW, electric rates in Ontario are < 8 cents kWh...
Stuntnun,
They did used to explode nuclear weapons underground if I remember correctly. But the worry with nuclear power accidents is not the explosion so much as the spread of radioactivity. Since you have to have a tremendous amount of water goign thru the power plant to keep it cool you can’t avoid the contamination potential by putting it underground (nukes are typically sited on rivers or the ocean).
ihatetrees: the northeast US is many times more densely populated than Ontario, so it’s a lot harder to site any sort of plant. Nonetheless, it’s amazing how the wealthy enviros along Nantucket Sound, including our US senators, Kennedy and Kerry have gone all NIMBY over Cape Wind. Pisses me off no end.
I’m guessing you’re implying that nuclear is not so expensive when you say you have 8c/kwh electricity, but how much of your grid is nuclear, how much is hydro, how much is coal, and how much is natural gas?
I repeat, wind is growing at six times the rate of nuclear worldwide. It is no longer around the corner. There is a lot of it. Wave and tidal are about where wind was 20 years ago, but experts expect progress to be much faster, partly because particularly for tidal, some of the technological lessons of wind are applicable. (I just wrote about this–see probably the december issue of Environmental Health Perspectives (EHPonline.org).
This is largely because of government mandates, many places have passed legislation which requires x% of their electrical supply to be powered by renewable sources. Wind is selected because it costs 1/3-1/4 as much as solar. Adding a Mw of power via wind is still about 3 times more expensive than conventional combustion turbines.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/assumption/pdf/electricity.pdf#page=3
KBW,
No, it’s because wind is cheaper than nuclear. And yes, there are sbsidies and mandates for renewables in a lot of places, but there are plenty of subsidies for conventional sources and nuclear as well. Ever hear of the Price-Anderson Act? Absolves the utilities of liability in the case of a nuclear accident. There wouldn’t be any nukes in the US without it. It was passed probably in the late ’50s because the utilities weren’t interested in taking on the liability. Also there have been huge research subsidies for nuclear, that dwarf the subsidies for renewables, the way Jupiter dwarfs Pluto.
Sure, conventional combustion turbines are cheap cheap cheap, but there are those annoying matters of CO2 and limited supplies of natural gas.
@David Holzman
I’m guessing you’re implying that nuclear is not so expensive when you say you have 8c/kwh electricity, but how much of your grid is nuclear, how much is hydro, how much is coal, and how much is natral gas?
I’m saying that in the grand scheme of things, nuclear can be competitive. To power most of the grid, it’s either nukes or coal or gas. (UNLESS there’s a political and social revolution that reduces the ever growing electric demand).
No, it’s because wind is cheaper than nuclear. And yes, there are sbsidies and mandates for renewables in a lot of places, but there are plenty of subsidies for conventional sources and nuclear as well. Ever hear of the Price-Anderson Act? Absolves the utilities of liability in the case of a nuclear accident. There wouldn’t be any nukes in the US without it. It was passed probably in the late ’50s because the utilities weren’t interested in taking on the liability. Also there have been huge research subsidies for nuclear, that dwarf the subsidies for renewables, the way Jupiter dwarfs Pluto.
You miss the point, if price were the concern, utilities would just install combustion turbines. In fact, in states without mandates for renewables, combustion turbines are the power source of choice. At 3-4x the price of conventional sources, wind simply isn’t very competitive today without subsidies.
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/background.pdf
Here in Ontario the cost of electricity is based on the MOST EXPENSIVE utility that is currently running. Nuclear bids into the grid at $0/MWH, so it’s always on, always sending electricity to the grid. On a really hot summer day when the demand becomes too much for what is currently running, Ontario turns on it’s coal plants, which bid in at a very high price. That high price is paid to everyone across the board. Yes nuclear has expencive overhead coming from the construction, but the operating cost is relativly low. As for the large amounts of water that is needed to cool a nuclear reactor, that is true, but it is a closed loop system, meaning that once we have that water, we don’t need anymore. Yes we are on a lake and many are on rivers, but the water taken from the lake or the river is then returned. It goes through the system, through the light water side of heat exchangers. It IS possible to have an entirly closed loop nuclear system that does not require outside water, it is just more costly and since the rivers and lakes are abundant enough, we stick to doing it the easier way.
I don’t want to slam wind energy, i am all for it, but it is not RELIABLE. Windmills have a very narrow margin at which they are effective. If the wind doesn’t blow hard enough, they don’t spin, if the wind blows too hard, the brakes go on and the windmill doesn’t spin, in order to keep the tips of the windmill from reaching supersonic veolcity (which would shatter the blades). They are building wind farms all around where I live and I see how many are down at any given time and know that we cannot live the lifestyls we are accustom to solely on wind.
Caffiend:
From what I have read, the major issue addressed by that form of producing hydrogen (aluminum and gallium alloy + water) is delivery and storage, which is a major step forward. While, when you combine the efficiency of a hydrogen fuel cell powered by the pure hydrogen resulting from this reaction, it could *compete with $3/gallon gasoline.
I think the problem is, most of the supporters of this are overlooking the price of gallium, which is between $250 and $500 per kilogram. And I have heard that this method requires 10-20% gallium. That raises the price well beyond the range of feasability, no matter how expensive gas is. I haven’t found any hard facts on this though.
Tidbits about Al + Ga + H20
Aluminum is $1/lb (US), but has a much lower energy content (2.4 kWh/lb) than gasoline (6 kWh/lb).
The hydrogen produce from this method is pure, so it is 75% efficient, vs. the 25% efficiency of your standard ICE.
There are several articles written about this, but be careful of the hardcore environmentalist’s websites, because they seem to gloss over any downside that might be there.