Martin's Page
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- Are you interested in becoming an organizer in your area?
- Maybe--But Not Sure What to Organize
- Tell us about your experience with alternative energy:
- I've been pushing the Water Powered Vehicle Concept on the Internet and Blogs for the past few months. I've looked at the various Water Powered Technology that currently exist on YouTube and want the US Government to back Americans Retro Fitting Our Current Vehicles to this technology.
- What excites you about this campaign?
- The idea of decreasing our dependency on Foreign Fuel.
- What do you want to do to help?
- Put Alternative Energy at the forefront of our Nations agenda.
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The Senate is working the Stimulus Package this week, so now is the right time to contact Senators Durbin and Burris!
See Jeff's Discussion at our Illinois 11th District Group. You can use the Pickens Plan site to send it to Durbin, via Contact your US Senators. The letter is all typed in for you, or you can modify it as desired.
Senator Burris hasn’t set up his e-mail account yet, but you can use the same link to print and send the letter via snail mail to
Senator Roland W. Burris
523 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC 20510
DC Phone: 202-224-2854
Do it NOW!
Thanks,
Jim Maher
District Leader, IL 11th
We urge all Illinois Congressional District 11 Group members to call our House Representative and both Senators and ask them to support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus Package”).
Call on the phone. You can follow up with a letter or e-mail, but make the phone call. The call will have more impact, and there is not much time (the Bill should be up for a vote in the House on Wednesday).
Call:
Representative Deborah L. (“Debbie”) Halvorson at Washington: 202-225-3635, Joliet: 815.726.4998
Senator Roland Burris at Washington: 202-224-2854
Senator Richard J. Durbin at Washington: 202-224-2152, Chicago: 312-353-4952
Tell each of them:
That you are a constituent.
That you encourage them to support passage of the Stimulus Package.
That you especially like the wind energy support provided by:
Extension of the Production Tax Credit for Renewable Energy
and implementation of a renewable infrastructure loan program..
That you ALSO want them to support increased use of domestic natural gas by
Increasing the Alternative Motor Vehicle Credit to benefit medium- and heavy-duty truck operators
and extending the Alternative Fuel Tax Credit.
Report back:
To the District Group with results via this Discussion - Urgent action needed on the stimulus bill.
Thanks,
Jim Maher
District Leader, IL 11th
I hope you are right but judging from today's news clips his bipartisanship seems to be "go along or go away". We'll see. There are too many important things to get done in the next few years to continue this way.
Welcome to the Energy PArty, Martin. I am the (temp) leader of the GA branch/group. I read your comments about the auto-makers' bailout and the alt. fuel network and these are excellent points - especially since Congress (House) is debating the Stimulus Package right now. Actually, the Dems are planning it and locking out the Reps which is not, to my way of thinking, the way to conduce a bi-partisan operation.
You probably received the mass message forn T. Boone this week concerning getting active with our Congressional representatives - please do that, and bring these things up to them. Also please consider joining the IL Group of the Energy Party and encourage others in IL to do the same. We MUST get involved, and NOW. Too much time has passed and too little has been done, and it is up to us - ALL of us - to do it.
Regards,
Allen R. Gale
Energy Party of GA Leader
I assume you are also in the 11th like myself - it is an extremely gerrymandered district as you will see for yourself if you use this link: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/findyourreps.xpd?state=IL.
If they do not do the job we need done, I will want to gear up to run for the 11th as part of the Energy Party. I regret that our 11th district Pickens Party leader, Jim Maher, considers taxation irrelevant - it is NOT! It's what started the first American Revolution in 1776.
PLEASE REVIEW MY COMMENTS UNDER THE ENERGY PARTY PLATFORM SECTION.
The Fair Tax is anything but .... it exempts all corporations from any Federal taxes.. it is a reiteration of the theme of ... only the little people pay taxes, that was so magnificently expressed by the heiress Leona Helmsley after she inherited her husband Harry's fortunes in real estate!
Thanks again Joe. What are your thoughts about this National Electric Grid they are proposing. I guess it's a way to distribute electric generated by Solar and Wind through most of the country. I imagne this will minimize the need for coal burning electric plants also? What do you think?
Martin, I am no expert on the existing power grid nor on what can be done to improve it but what I read is that the existing system for distributing power is outdated compared to the more modern types of systems now used elsewhere.
I expect that one of its characteristics is that it is sufficient for transmitting power from local power generating companies to its customers and can move a limited amount of power around from one part of the country to another.
For example, suppose there is a major winter storm that hits a given part of the country. The demand for electric power there goes up as a result. The power generating capacity of the power plants in that area may not be able to keep up with the increased load so they require help from the power plants far away whose local customers are unaffected by the storm. Those plants generate extra power and the existing power grid transfers it over to the customers who need it. As a result relatively small amounts of the total power are actually moved great distances by the grid. Most is used near where it is generated. As the existing system was developed, we simply built the power plants close to where the customers were. As a result we haul a lot of coal around and pipe a lot of natural gas around to where it is to be burned to make power.
With the Pickens Plan, a new requirement is created. Boone is talking about replacing nearly a quarter of all of our power generating capacity (that which is powered by natural gas) with wind generated power. If you have never seen it, go to the main www.PickensPlan.com page and click on the Whiteboard Presentation just to the left of the video screen. There he shows how there exists an area in the middle of our country which is most suitable for generating electric power from the wind.
If we do that, the power grid will be faced with a different kind of demand which it is not currently able to meet. That is, about a quarter of all the electric power generation will be taking place in the middle of the country but the vast majority of the customers are located more toward the East and West coasts of the U.S. Therefore, the grid will be called on not to move small amounts of power around over moderate distances, but large amounts of power over great distances. Also, as the wind changes from hour to hour, the sources of generated power will move around as the wind changes. That is another thing the new grid will have to contend with, a much more dynamic redistribution of the power. So I believe these are the primary reasons why the grid needs to be updated.
Concerning your question about minimizing the need for coal burning power plants, I do not believe they will be affected directly in the short term... only those that burn natural gas. In fact, some of the power plants that burn natural gas now might be converted to burn coal in the short term.
However, by the time we build all of these wind and solar power generating facilities, we will have developed technology and methods of manufacturing that dramatically drop the cost of doing that. In the long run, we might well find that we can make power from the wind and solar at a cost that is very competitive with mining, transporting, and burning all that coal. So the coal burning plants may eventually begin to disappear as a result. The air would undoubtedly be a lot cleaner. Coal is basically black because it contains so much carbon and the burning of it puts a tremendous amount of carbon into the atmosphere.
There is one other area that I expect might become a source of renewable power in the future. Actually, it is just another source of natural gas that is nearly free and which does not involve drilling into the ground to get at it.
Whenever organic matter decomposes, methane gas results and is released into the atmosphere. Methane gas is the primary constituent of natural gas. Unlike oil and coal, methane does not take tremendous pressures and temperatures and vast periods of time to form. It is a simple process and takes only a matter of a few weeks to carry out with simple equipment. It is even possible to make a methane reactor as a backyard project and especially makes sense if you happen to have a continuing source of organic waste. Good examples are large livestock farms. Large pig farms and so-called mega-dairies fit the bill. Right now, the large mega-dairies wash all the manure into large manure lagoons that hold millions of gallons of it. There it decomposes and the methane gas is released into the atmosphere where it becomes one of the dreaded greenhouse gases. Some facilities have begun enclosing their manure lagoons, capturing the methane and burning it to generate electricity which they sell back to the power company.
Some folks will argue that burning the methane creates more carbon dioxide which is true but if it is not burned, the same carbon gets into the atmosphere in the methane that is released instead so it is not much of an argument against burning the methane for power. And, yes, that same methane could be used to power vehicles just as advocated by the Pickens Plan.
Other sources of organic matter can be used to create methane as well. Just about anything that biologically decomposes will do. Grass clippings. Garbage. Sewage. Dead fish. You name it.
Some landfills generate a lot of waste methane. They often burn it off just to get rid of it. You drive by a large landfill and you are likely to see some pipes extending up from the ground with a flame burning away at the top. That stuff could be powering some vehicles. It just needs to be compressed and maybe filtered a bit.
For those that might argue that we need to minimized the carbon we put into the atmosphere, consider this. The carbon in the atmosphere (primarily carbon dioxide) is the fuel upon which the plants grow during photosynthesis. As they grow, they lock up the carbon in themselves. That is, the very substances of a plant itself contains the carbon that it absorbed from the atmosphere. When a plant dies, it will decompose and its carbon will end up back in the atmosphere either as carbon dioxide again or as methane. Eventually, the carbon in the methane will be reduced to carbon dioxide before it can again be absorbed by another growing plant. Whatever process does that in nature is releasing the energy that the process of the growing plant put into it during photosynthesis. By burning methane, we simply release the energy for our own use that was bound to be given up eventually anyway. We are not digging more carbon out of the ground as with oil or coal. That energy that we release when burning methane originally came from the sun as light and was absorbed by the growing plant. So burning methane created from organic decomposition is simply another way of using the energy from the sun.
Joe
But don't let this little bump in the road discourage you too much. New developments have been taking place that promise to make the mass production of hydrogen gas more efficient. We will never be driving hydrogen powered cars around in the future until we find ways to make lots of hydrogen gas for those hydrogen filling stations and lots of fuel cells for the cars. All of this will likely take a few decades to get going well.
In the meantime, Mr. Pickens is showing us why we should use renewable sources like solar cells and wind to generate electricity. That electricity can replace the part of our current electricity generating capacity that is powered by natural gas. And that freed up natural gas can be used to power the nation's semis. And that eliminates the need for much of the foreign-supplied oil.
Maybe the process should be explained to the public the other way around as follows. Build semis to run on natural gas because the gas is already ours and less polluting than oil. But consuming all that natural gas will begin to increase our demand for it and begin to drive the cost of natural gas up which will begin to increase the cost of electricity because a substantial source of energy used for electricity generation is natural gas.
The increased cost of electricity will then justify the expenditure of building wind turbines and solar cell farms to generate electricity. Making so many wind turbines and solar cells will help develop the process of constructing them so the manufacturing costs for wind turbines and solar cells will go way down. In the end, we will probably also find that wind and solar is cheaper than burning coal to generate electricity and so eventually, the burning of coal will decrease substantially yielding another big benefit in the reduction of carbon entering the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Either way we describe it, the idea for doing this comes from Mr. Pickens and we owe him a debt of gratitude for pointing us in a good direction.
By the time it all takes place, of course, it will have evolved into something a bit different from what anyone imagines right now. Things always go that way. But we have to start somewhere and this is a really good somewhere to start.
Joe
As I understand how that process is supposed to work, it goes something like this. The car engine generates some electricity. The electricity goes into the "fuel cell" where it breaks water (H2O) into 2 parts hydrogen (the H2 in H2O) and 1 part oxygen (the O in H2O). This process of using electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen is called electrolysis. The hydrogen is then burned in the engine. I am not sure whether the intent is to use the same oxygen or to use oxygen from the air to do the burning, but this argument can apply to either case. For purposes of keeping things simple, let us suppose that the same oxygen that is produced in the "fuel cell" is to be burned by the engine.
When the engine burns the hydrogen and oxygen, the two gases combine explosively in much the same manner as when a mist of gasoline in air burns (which is what conventional car engines do). So if we send the oxygen and hydrogen from the "fuel cell" into the engine's intake, it will burn inside the engine, pushing the pistons in the usual manner, and exhaust will emerge from the exhaust pipe. The pistons will push on the connecting rods and turn the crankshaft in the usual manner and propel the car on down the road.
The exhaust of the engine will contain only one thing, water vaper. That is, when you burn hydrogen and oxygen, they recombine into H2O again. Since the exhaust is hot, the exhaust is basically steam not liquid water, but it is the really the same thing. If you collected the exhaust and cooled it down, you would simply have water.
In high school physics, we are taught that you cannot create or destroy energy. Well, that is almost entirely true. Actually, as Einstein showed us with his famous formula, it is possible under special circumstances to convert mass to energy and vice versa. But since we are not dealing with atomic bombs or reactors here, none of that comes into play.
So, if we cannot create or destroy energy, how did the energy get into the hydrogen and oxygen gas that is released when they burn? It is from the electriciy that was used to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen in the first step. Powering that process does not take an insignificant amount of electricity to generate all the hydrogen and oxygen that an engine sucks in through its intake.
It actually takes a lot of electrical energy. And the car engine has to spin an alternator or generator of some kind to produce all that energy. In the end, because energy can neither be created or destroyed, the engine cannot make more energy by burning the hydrogen and oxygen than it took to separate them from the water with which we started.
To top it all off, there are a lot of other things going on that steal energy from the whole process as well. For example, the engine gives off heat from its radiator and from the car's heater. The air around the car is pushed aside as the car travels (which actually heats the air slightly as it is moved). The tires get warm as they roll on the road. I am sure you must have felt a tire after travelling a great distance at high speed and noticed how warm it felt. When the driver steps on the brakes, the brake pads get hot from the friction. All of this energy must also come from the process of burning the hydrogen and oxygen. And, of course, you want the radio, the headlights, and the air conditioner to keep working. And since none of these energy losses contributes to the spinning of the alternator or generator, their energy cannot get back into the process of making electricity to be used to break down more water in the "fuel cell".
Perhaps you have noticed that every time I typed "fuel cell", I enclosed it in quotes. Here is why. In the late sixties, when we went to the Moon, the spacecraft did not use batteries to supply the electrical power. Instead, they had tanks of oxygen and hydrogen on board. The hydrogen and oxygen were brought together in a device known as a fuel cell which performs the process of combining the two in a non-explosive process that generates electricity instead of an explosion. That is, they are not "burned" in the usual sense in that type of fuel cell. The electicity from the fuel cells provided the needed electrical power for the craft. When hydrogen and oxygen are combined in this type of fuel cell, the process also produces H2O as a byproduct. That supplied the pure water for the astronauts as well.
A few years ago, development of a more practical (that is, not-so-expensive) fuel cell technology to produce electricity from hydrogen in a tank and oxygen from the air was accelerated. The idea is that a car with such a fuel cell could stop into the local filling station to fill up a tank with hydrogen. Then the car's fuel cell would combine that hydrogen gas with oxygen from the air and generate electricity. The electricity would power one or more electric motors that would push the car down the road. The byproduct of H2O would dribble out of a pipe onto the roadway where it would evaporate or soak into the soil.
But the development of this type of fuel cell that is both inexpensive and which will last for years will likely take quite a while into the future. Every now and then you will see a demonstration vehicle somewhere that is powered by real hydrogen fuel cells. Those babies cost a fortune to build right now.
So what about the "fuel cells" we see on YouTube. Some bright characters somewhere thought they would be clever and call their electrolysis device a "fuel cell", no doubt to convince casual observers that they were doing something that was really on the cutting edge.
Actually, the electrolysis process has been known for far longer than the automobile has been around.
Now, here is one more thing that should help convince you that the YouTube videos are not really what they seem to be.
Suppose for the moment that the process really did work, that you could get more energy from the burning of the hydrogen and oxygen in an internal combustion engine than it took to separate water into the two gases. Some bright fellow that was not interested in making a car would simply set up an engine by the ocean or a lake and would start up the process of breaking the water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burning it in the engine. The engine would drive an alternator or generator to generate the electricity to keep the process going and then all the excess energy could be used to generate electricity or do any other kind of work instead of driving a car. Sawmills would run for free. Big air conditioners on a building by a lake would run for free. Power generating plants would run for free. We would not need to burn oil or coal to generate electricity.
Remember the old saying about things that sound just too good to be true. Believe me, we would all be as happy as clams if this process really worked.
Joe
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