CR, welcome back to reality. Hovering, lurking, doesn't count. It's only your 'physical' presence which converts you to reality, like a photon being observed or a Shroedinger cat in a box being inspected.
But, as with your failure to love Big Brother $ill, you are off on a wrong tangent on fuel cells.
They can't 'export' electricity into the grid because fuel cells have to have a fuel source and the point of having a fuel cell is not to use an expensive fuel cell to avoid pollution or operate in space, vehicles, or some other local environment where lines can't be used.
The main purpose of fuel cells [as currently being messed around with] is to avoid pollution from fossil fuels or for some other local convenience factor. Okay, if they have a fuel cell and the grid power is expensive at peak times but the fuel cell doesn't have much to do, it might sell power, but usually, a fuel cell would be busy at peak times where it is doing what it's supposed to, which is supply power for the local need.
People wouldn't ship fuel to a fuel cell rather than burn it in a big, remote, power station and ship the electrons via wires to where the oomph is needed.
The fuel for a fuel cell is most cheaply obtained from fossil fuels, so there isn't going to be any reduction in fossil fuel consumption, pollution or dependence on OPEC supplies.
Most pollution in cities comes from disgusting diesels. That can best be reduced by pollution taxation, turbine improvement and transport efficiencies [so people aren't stopping at traffic lights every 10 seconds]. Roads now in existence are vastly underused because they are grotesquely inefficient because people don't know how to drive, they have reaction times measured in seconds rather than microseconds [which any self-respecting ASIC can do], they lack perception, they run out of fuel, they go too fast on a wet road and crash.
There are umpty trillion barrels of fossil fuels waiting to be used and so they should be. The CO2 is great plant food and if we can just raise CO2 levels, we'll warm the joint up a bit or at least avoid another ice-age [except that to ensure CO2 is considered bad, the environmentalists say that CO2 emissions will cause both runaway warming and runaway freezing - come in Ashley!!]
The oil used to all be out in the ecosystem and it our moral obligation to free the fossil fuels to bring all those Carbons back to life, where they should be. Enjoying the sunshine and playing chasey [where the loser gets eaten - it's a dog eat dog world].
Oil and gas, coal and heavy tars are in huge supply. They are fine as an energy source, but they'll be abandoned before they are depleted as the world's population crashes towards the end of this century. Check out 20 year old women's propensity to breed to see why there will be a crash - breeding is now chosen than a simple byproduct of natural inclination. Contraception is the most significant invention ever, other than verbs and It.
Energy consumption per person will fall too as efficiencies improve and needs change.
On volatility and flammability, diesel spills generally do NOT catch fire. Gasoline forms huge vapour clouds and a low energy ignition source does the trick [such as a battery spark or grinding metal]. You can't light diesel with a spark! Sure, if you crash a plane, with red hot components and lots of fine spray, you can get jet fuel alight, but even then, it's not that easy.
You might recall the 'this stuff won't burn in a crash' debacle quite a few years ago when [I think it was Dupont] crashed a plane to show how safe it was, but unfortunately, as with shooting down that missile the other day, something went wrong and the plane hit a big steel pole in the wrong place and the whole thing caught fire. Nevertheless, diesel and kerosene do NOT catch fire to anywhere near the extent of gasoline and hundreds or maybe thousands of lives per year would be saved if cars didn't catch fire so easily after a crash.
Maybe in an enclosed space a spark could ignite diesel/kerosene vapour, but I wouldn't want to depend on it happening. Nor bet that it wouldn't.
Fuel cells in vehicles is [for the most part] a dog. It will NOT play a significant part in reducing pollution and is a political fig leaf.
Also, I still love $ill.
And Globalstar [believe it or not]
Mqurice |
