Loxley ([info]goodluckfox) wrote in [info]peak_oil,
@ 2007-07-17 18:52:00
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Well, I wrote to Professor Heeger (follow up to Polymer Solar Cells)
Some of you may recall that I did the last time a man of science was mentioned in a popular news article (it was the one about there being a trillion barrel oil field in the Gulf of Mexico). Like that scientist, Professor Heeger was nice enough to write me back. But unlike that scientist, he says that the article is basicly correct. Here's his reponse to me. I hope he doesn't mind.

*paste*

Our Science article reported real progress.

Separately, printing trials are underway --- intial results are all
positive.

This technology will work and it promises to be very low cost.

Nevertheless, we have many problems to solve.

Initial products will be introduced next year for indoor use, for
consumer
applications etc. More time is required for rooftop implementation.

Alan Heeger

*end paste*

So. THAT is cool. I pretty much trust what guys like this say. Unlike whackjob theorists, their research is peer reviewed and published, and like law, all that you have is your reputation. Scientists like this can be MISTAKEN (Pons/Fleishman cold fusion anyone?) but they are only very rarely con men.

Reading between the lines, it looks like the stuff must be kind of fragile... not able to stand up to direct sunlight or the elements maybe? Sheeeit, I'd build me a greenhouse with Lexan windows and put my array there! :)

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[info]wolfp10
2007-07-18 01:35 am UTC (link)
http://www.ipos.ucsb.edu/ajh.html

Solid credentials.

Curriculum vitale and publications list (52 page pdf) are available at his site.

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[info]hammerforge
2007-07-18 04:04 am UTC (link)
It is one of the technologies that I am fairly optomistic about.

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[info]venuspluto
2007-07-18 05:27 am UTC (link)
If it can power air conditioning during global warming without creating more emissions, I'm sure it will be welcomed. However, this is the kind of thing that would be used for easing the descent into the de-industrial age than for keeping up the level of energy usage we have going on right now. In the meantime, Here's some turd-in-the-punchbowl perspective on solar power.

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[info]evilref
2007-07-18 07:46 am UTC (link)
Well, he admits that there is a long engineering road between laboratory and rooftop. That's reassuring. :-)

The turd-in-the-punchbowl pointed out by [info]venuspluto is the storage problem I mentioned earlier. As a storage medium, oil is just so convenient. Because of this, oil totally dominates the personal transportation scene, and personal transportation is maybe 50% of domestic energy use in the West ... and will be elsewhere, if the peoples of India and China get their way.

Solving the problem of personal transportation with solar requires energy storage again, because even with direct sunlight and 100% conversion, a modern car covered in solar cells would still only generate 1/3 of what it uses.

I don't think the world is saved just yet.

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[info]goodluckfox
2007-07-18 08:11 am UTC (link)
I disagree (respectfully, of course). Remember that the average commute is less than 50 miles per day. Even our old lead-acid batteries are up to the task of powering electric cars THAT far. Also, think about a car's duty cycle; it's not in use all the time. It gets to sit still and soak up solar energy. for long stretches of the day where you're at work, or it's sitting in the driveway.

When gas gets THAT expensive, people will start driving light electric vehicles for their around-towning, and use their SUVs and pickups or whatever for longer trips, which are rarer.

I'd love to build an electric vehicle and a solar power station to keep it and my house charged.

You are right about oil being a convenient energy storage medium though.

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[info]evilref
2007-07-18 09:53 am UTC (link)
I disagree (respectfully, of course). Remember that the average commute is less than 50 miles per day.

I don't know we are disagreeing as much as you think. I thought long and hard about converting my kitcar to electric. In the end, I replaced the engine with a biodiesel engine instead, but a lot of the reason for that is that I live in a rural district, where fifty miles would get me to the nearest supermarket, and about halfway back.

My commute is about fifteen feet: I am sitting at my normal place of work, and if I look through that door over there, I can see where I sleep. That was my solution to the energy cost of commuting. Other commuting problems can be solved without cars: in the country where I live and the country where I used to live, maybe 50% of commuting energy could be saved by introducing mandatory school buses.

The main factor in choosing to go biodiesel was time: when I finally made the decision, I had a broken kitcar and was going to emigrate in less than a month. I went with biodiesel because I could do the conversion in less than a week, and pay less than £500 to do it. But the other major factor was the lack of sensible battery technology. I bought 24kWh of lead acid AGMs cheap off eBay -- paid about £250 for the lot -- but they weigh 800kg, which is about the same as my kitcar. We will use them to go off-grid when we move into our new house.

My kitcar would do between 3 and 5 miles to the kWh, depending on speed. Speed is a big factor in car energy use. This is masked by the characteristics of internal combustion engines, which are most efficient at highest powers: the power required to overcome air resistance is proportional to speed, not distance. For commutes, lower speeds and shorter journeys are acceptable, but commutes are the journeys best solved by public transport.


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[info]evilref
2007-07-18 09:54 am UTC (link)
When gas gets THAT expensive, people will start driving light electric vehicles for their around-towning, and use their SUVs and pickups or whatever for longer trips, which are rarer.

As for battery technology, the sort of abuse a battery gets in an electric vehicle means that lead-acid technology doesn't last long. If your battery delivers 500 cycles at 80% capacity, and gets you 50 miles, then you can expect to replace the battery after 500 40-mile journeys, or after 20,000 miles. If your battery delivers 3000 cycles at 30% capacity, you get 50,000 miles out of a battery, but only for little journeys. If the battery costs $10,000, that's between $0.20 and $0.50 a mile for battery wear, not withstanding the electric bills.

I get 60mpg out of my converted kitcar. Since diesel doesn't cost $30 a gallon, I'll save over the electric option. And since it will run on vegetable oil from the supermarket, by the time that costs $30 a gallon, we'll have bigger problems than fuelling our cars. Many of us will be starving.

(And I use my SUV for when the lake rises and the track from the road to our house is impassable. I'm planning to use it to tow farm machinery when our farm purchase completes. But since it's summer, the SUV has not left our property since one day in early May, to go to a roadworthiness test.)


I'd love to build an electric vehicle and a solar power station to keep it and my house charged.

So would I: but the truth is, the batteries are not up to it. Edison's battery would be (Edison's battery was used in the Detroit Electric -- a 100mile EV popular in the 1920s) since the Edison battery doesn't wear. There are Edison batteries that are still in service, when they were made in the 1920s. But for some reason -- call me a conspiracy theorist -- the Edison battery hasn't been developed much since Edison's day. Perhaps battery manufacturers don't see that making an everlasting battery is a good marketing decision.

When California had its ZEV policy, the only US-made vehicle to provide a sensible solution was the TEVan. That was an Edison-powered EV. The TEVan may be long gone, eliminated by the lawyers, but the batteries are still sold secondhand, and they are very popular when they come on the market.

Someone could use all the advances we have seen in nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal-hydride batteries to provide an Edison battery that would make a practical EV. It would have shortcomings relative to the average car, but for trucks, it would make a fine tractor unit for haulage.

Some day in the future I may re-visit this subject. But for now I have a biodiesel solution at home, and I have turned my attention to household energy use, rather than transport. If things turn really nasty, I'd rather have a warm home and food on the table than the ability to drive when there is nothing to drive to.

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[info]peristaltor
2007-07-18 06:40 pm UTC (link)
But for some reason -- call me a conspiracy theorist -- the Edison battery hasn't been developed much since Edison's day.

Actually, not really. The Edison batteries, the "Ironclads" -- named such because, yes, they lasted forever and had iron casings -- use a nickle-iron chemistry and an alkalie electrolyte. They were perfect for low-speed vehicles (under 20 mph); but, as you know, going faster uses more power. Ironclads couldn't deliver that power.

These batteries have relatively high internal resistance, meaning that the more energy drawn from or added to them at once raises the heat so badly that they boil the water from their electrolyte. Even when used as solar/wind storage batteries, folks in the twenties needed to keep them watered.

The Eagle-Picher TEVan batteries had similar problems, made worse by the heating. These batteries sometimes melted. I hear through the grapevine China is still making NiFe. They, as you say, would be ideal as a home power source.

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[info]albionwood
2007-07-20 02:24 am UTC (link)
Apparently these guys are importing Chinese-made NiFe batteries. The Web site looks amateurish, and I couldn't find a price, so it's not easy to tell if these things are worthwhile or not.

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[info]peristaltor
2007-07-20 02:53 am UTC (link)
Again, if you're going off-grid, they should prove far superior to LA. I'm not doing that, so I really don't care.

Price, though, would be an important thing to know.

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[info]peristaltor
2007-07-18 06:46 pm UTC (link)
Oh, and your cycle life info is a wee bit optimistic. Drain a battery to 80% and most EVs would be reduced to a crawl. Most lead batteries start to seriously shorten their longevity when routinely discharged below 25%.

Even though they use chemistries other than lead, Insights and Prii, program their charging systems to recharge the onboard boost packs when they reach only 10% discharge, just to maintain the lifetime of the pack.

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Cold fusion
(Anonymous)
2007-07-18 04:31 pm UTC (link)
Alan Heeger wrote:

"Scientists like this can be MISTAKEN (Pons/Fleishman cold fusion anyone?)"

Pons and Fleischmann were not a bit mistaken. They were replicated by hundreds of scientists in world-class laboratories, and these replications were published in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers in mainstream journals. You will find a bibliography of ~3,500 papers and over 500 full text reprints of papers this subject at our web site:

http://lenr-canr.org

I suggest you review original sources before commenting on this subject.

Thank you,


Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org

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Re: Cold fusion
[info]goodluckfox
2007-07-19 12:29 am UTC (link)
First, *I* said that, not Alan Heeger. Please, I don't want to put words in the man's mouth. Don't get so flustered

Second, I would very much like to believe that Cold Fusion works. But the fact is that while some people have replicated their results, others haven't, and nobody really has given a good explanation of WHY that is. If it worked, we'd be using it. It's too damn valuable. There is no scientific consensus on the issue yet (by people who know far and away more physics than I do, and I'm no slouch). Until there is, I'm calling Pons and Fleishman (honestly) mistaken. I'm not saying that they're WRONG. But that's not the same thign as saying they're right, either. It's the difference between "not guilty" and "innocent"; a subtle distinction.

And speaking of original sources, I took a look at your website. Being affilliated with a Fringe Science entity such as "Infinite Energy" (who I found to have articles about pyramids channelling atmospheric electricity, references to over-unity, Lifters, and aetherdynamics) isn'g going to win you any points with me.

MAYBE there's something to Cold Fusion. A bunch of people have recorded some pretty anomalous results. But maybe they're mistaken, as the anomolies could have other explanations, and other equally skilled scientists in equal facilities were NOT able to duplicate the results. We don't know yet.

Leave faith up to the religions. Science (and economics!) is a lot more pragmatic.

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Re: Cold fusion
[info]peristaltor
2007-07-20 02:56 am UTC (link)
Actually, from what I have noted, it does work. It doesn't, though, work well. So far it proves a great way to catalyze paladium into a far less precious metal with a tiny amount of power generated.

And no one really knows why.

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