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Non-Tech : Alternative energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D_I_R_T who wrote (2093)	9/1/2005 4:40:01 PM
From: Rock_nj	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16955

This is a good resource for learning about cutting-edge battery research and companies involved in battery development. freeenergynews.com I'm sure there are others out there, but this is a site that I check pretty often for alternative energy information. They have a daily news roundup of alternative energy developments that is very interesting to read. freeenergynews.com Once petroleum prices itself out of the market, it will either be electrics or hydrogen that will probably take over. I lean towards electrics for two reasons: safety and availablity. Electric is pretty safe, especially compared to combustables like gasoline and hydrogen. Electric is also widely available. Sure, we'd have to perhaps upgrade parts of the grid and generating system to handle the new load, but electric is already just about everywhere. How hard would it be to convert a gas station to a charging station? The holy grail for electrics would be to produce a battery that provides an average car a 300 mile charge and can be recharged in a matter of minutes. That would make electrics just as versitile as current petroleum powered cars. How far off is that day? I don't know. I do know that developments in nanotechnology hold the potential to redesign batteries so they are much more efficient at storing energy and capable of being recharged much faster (the biggest issue for recharging is having a clean enough path from the charging source to the battery, nanotech can solve this problem by building perfect pathways on the molecular level). I wouldn't be surprised if this threshold is reached by 2020 at the latest. Hydrogen suffers from a slew of problems from safety to energy density. Some of these problems can be solved no doubt. But, to build a hydrogen economy would be a far more expensive task than converting to an electric energy economy for cars, which is already in place for other uses.