JumpStart by Robb Armstrong for March 27, 2012

Horses dump about 25 pounds of … eh … stuff … every day. Back in the olden days, it would just dry up on the streets. Then the wind would blow the dried … stuff … into the open windows (no AC) which spread all sorts of diseases.So the the horseless carriage was actually considered quite the boon to a pollution-free environment!

@Phatts California

Your story sounds like a load of horsestuff to me.

This day and age I wish we still had the horse and buggy.

The Ford model T was designed to run off of gasoline, kerosene, or ethanol. It was the first flex fuel vehicle! Things haven’t changed so much.

Poor deluded Sunny. It’s not fun riding a horse and buggy. I know because I did that once. It’s really slow. Horses not only dump a lot, they eat a lot and don’t always smell very good. @Ashburnstadium, you are dreaming. It would take years to and a lot of money to build an infrastructure like what you and the President want. It has to be workable and made so it wouldn’t become obsolete in ten years. Wind power only works when there’s wind and at this point there’s no way to store energy that isn’t used right away. Solar panels are really expensive. Better to use what we do have but still keep working on alternative sources of energy as a backup.

Honda and Mercedes already have hydrogen fuel cell cars in America. Many issues remain. The wight and size of the lead container to hold the hydrogen in a reasonable amount and who builds first the cars with little to no fuel stations or the fuel stations with no cars for their fuel.

Personally I think hydrogen fuel cells are part of the answer; drilling off shore and building pipelines to obtain more dinosaur fuel is definitely not.

Maybe some day we’ll have an engine that sucks CO2 out of the air for fuel. Or perhaps some heat sink that uses the heat from combustion engines and recyvles it.

The Laws of Thermodynamics:1 – You can’t get something for nothing.2 – You can’t break even.3 – You can’t get out of the game.

Yes, riding a horse and buggy is fun… at least until you see what comes out of the… uh… “exhaust”.

@hippogriff, thanks for the info. I should have looked it up first!@Ashburn Stadium, following from a UK professor of technology – do we have an answer yet? quote – Elementary hydrogen does not occur naturally. Its production by electrolysis uses more energy than it produces. Supplies from refinery operations are limited. Production from fossil fuels or biomass is accompanied by production of carbon dioxide, which is the main greenhouse gas. Unless some method can be found of locking up the carbon dioxide – and present methods are only under development – the uses of hydrogen as an energy source or even an energy carrier are limited.

@Gator007I would love it to be in the horse and buggy age. Nice transportation and able to watch the scenery at the same time. As for the “road apples”, if it’s gathered and composted properly, it’s great fertilizer for gardens and fields. You can’t really compost carnivore droppings as they don’t have the same content as those from herbivores. In fact, from a how-to manual, they strongly advise against using carnivore droppings and that includes from dogs.

Or go for a sleigh ride! Sit in a rocking chair in a high wind, put your feet in a bucket of ice water, have somebody shake bells in your ears at a deafening volume, and there you have it. Oh, what fun!

@LameRandomName:What’s more, wind turbines can’t start rotating on their own—they need to get electricity from the grid for that. When there’s enough wind, the energy flow is reversed and they act as generators. And they also can’t generate reactive power-this and the former needs to come from conventional power stations. And there are also the grid losses-for the electricity to get to your home from the power station needs 5-6 transformation stages, and 100s of miles of cables. I think that an electric car has many disadvantages-the battery power is hardly enough to drive the vehicle, what happens when you need the headlights, the A/C or even the radio? And, their range, is say 100 miles. When the battery’s dead, that’s it:kaput. You need to be towed away. No fast refueling with a gas canister. And good luck trying to make a 12-wheeler electric, a 2850 HP diesel locomotive, a ship or even a plane (4 2,500 HP engines).

Well, I would suggest those espousing hydrogen ICE and fuel cells to look up the power point presentation “The Hydrogen Myth” by Stephen Fleming of Georgia Tech, an entertaining and educational view.

Hydrogen is not an answer. Quite aside from the astronomical cost of fuel cells (the technology is viable, the cost not so much – and platinum and other precious metals used in them will go up, not down in cost with mass-production), there’s the issue of the high opportunity (and real) cost of creating hydrogen – you either create H2 from natural gas (meaning we are still fossil fuel dependent, and the efficiency is comparable to just burning the natural gas in internal combustion engines, which cost far, far less than fuel cells). Or, you go with electrolysis of H2 from water is a VERY electricity intensive process – approx 4x more electrical energy is consumed than is yielded in H2 potential work done. Hydrogen is like a very inefficient battery for storing energy – it’s only advantage is that once generated, it has higher energy density than current batteries. That’s a very poor use of electricity – H2 will always be at a huge competitive disadvantage to the energy sources that need to be used to create hydrogen. It’s that thermodynamics thing SQLMamma mentioned – physics is a byotch that way.

thing is: electric motors came first. they just werent very efficient.