His math was to calculate how much electricity it takes to seperate hydrogen and oxygen in water. It takes a lot. As far as cars go, if you wanted to run your car off a supply of hydrogen from water, you would need a battery bigger than your car.
Hydrogen as an energy storage medium is useful in some situation though. One nice thing about Hydrogen is that it is light weight. The ratio of stored energy to mass is high.
There are some issues with transportation and storage that don't occur with other fuels, but maybe we could solve that somehow. Your right, though, that there are no toxic byproducts from burning Hydrogen. I'd rather have Hydrogen coming out to my home than natural gas if it could be cost effective and safe.
I'm not farmilliar with this turbine setup that splits water with the suns's energy. I understand that reflectors could concentrate sunlight to extreme heat levels, and I understand that that can be made to produce steam, but steam is just water vapor. How does it get from gaseous H2O to gaseous H2 and O2?
Did you read about it online? (Link please)
Or was this on TV? (What show?)
I'd like to know more.
This site:
http://www.ush2.com/
...is trying to sell you books and movies. Take their information with a grain of salt. All of the information that could possibly be in those are freely available somewhere on the internet. Although it is sometimes nice to have the information nicely collected for you. My point is that you shouldn't expect them to reveal some new secret. If the books are well written and accurate then you should be able to find some positive reviews online somewhere.
The you tube video is just an advertisement for the website selling the books. In the video he says, "Were not patenting this information, we are freely giving it away." Freely??? It's not free if they are selling it! I'm not saying there might not be some useful information there.
You say, "Why are we not making this?"
In some ways we are. NASA has taken advantage of the light-weight nature of hydrogen as a fuel. When the space shuttle would launch and the 2 solid rocket boosters would get used up and fall away, it was all hydrogen and oxygen from there on. The big tank to get them into orbit and once in orbit there manuvering thrusters were H2/O2.
One of the books is about using solar energy to heat water for home use. They say it heats to 185F in winter in Michigan. That's amazing if true. I bet it can't do that
every day in winter in Michigan. But still, if you use this to preheat your water and still use a conventional water heater, there is bound to be some savings. I believe these solar water heaters are actually in use somewhere. That might be something I research a bit when done here. I'd like to see what some people say about it that aren't trying to sell books.
-tim.
Since, CocaCola posted while I was typing...
OP: "
sustainable energy supply?" Coke:"
it doesn't sustain itself."
Certainly seperating H2 from water is not
self sustaining. That would be overunity. However, "sustainable" in the context of environmental concerns means someting else. If we can produce as much of something as we need and only use what we produce, then that activity can be sustained indefinately. If a technology relies on the previous existance of something that could one day run out, then that's not sustainable.
For example, paper. If we plant new trees, let them grow, harvest them, and make paper out of them, then that's sustainable. But if our need for paper excedes what we can plant and harvest and we have to cut into previosly existing rain forests and old growth to meet our needs, then at some point it wil all run out and that will be the end of our hey-day in the sun. Not sustainable. Coal, oil and natual gas are not sustainable energy sources, because what we are using took millions of years to occur natually.
OP: "
perfectly safe" Coke: "
Hindenburg" LOL. Yes! Great example. Hydrogen can go BOOM! It is no safer than natural gas. (It is less safe in some ways.) They switched from Hydrogen to Helium in blimps. Helium is a bad way to heat your home. It doesn't burn. Great for blimps.
Hindenburg Fail Video
And to the OP, a reminder, I'd like to know:
Did you read about it online? (Link please)
Or was this on TV? (What show?)
