From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 17:43:12 MDT
[TransdimensionalElf] i dont know how much any of you know about the rather simple laws of supply and demand but they work something like this: as supply decreases while demand increases price goes up regardless of what the consumer does or says. as long as people keep using gasoline from any company the price is going to continue to go up.
[Hermit] Supply is increasing rather than decreasing. Demand is about constant (increasing by about 2% per year). US pump prices are expected to average at $1.46/gallon - less than last year - through summer 2002. Refer http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/plugs/plmogas2.html.
[TransdimensionalElf] if you were a little less selfish you would realize that by converting your car to run on hydrogen and getting solar cells for your house you would never have to buy gasoline again and you can sell your excess solar power to the power company to offset the cost. as the cost of gasoline increases this option will become inevitable so the question is not if but when.
[Hermit] This is where I take issue.
[Hermit] Firstly, there is more Hydrogen in a bucket of gas than in a bucket of liquid Hydrogen - and the bucket of gas is safer and much easier to distribute. It also does not embrittle objects with which it comes into contact. Which means that even when we do transfer to a Hydrogen energy distribution network (inevitable) we will be distributing it in the form of a synthetic chemical fuel with characteristics similar to those of gas.
[Hermit] Secondly earth level solar technology is not so much pseudo science as bogus claims. At the Earth space interface we have around 1200W/m^2 - a very respectable power density. By the time that power gets down to Earth, it has dropped to 200-400W. Much less respectable. Now put in the efficiency factor of solar cells ranging from a usual commercial value of around 7% to a NASA best of around 25%. This implies that they best energy density commercially available is around 14W/m^2.
[Hermit] Factor in conversion and transmission losses and it drops below that. Introduce batteries into the chain and you are talking about half that at best. Now take into account the fact that solar cells age and that by 5 years their efficiency has halved, and realize that it takes energy to produce them. Also take into account the fact that the time value of money can be equivalented in energy - at which point, doing the sums shows that solar cells are to all practical intents and purposes ways of shifting energy, rather than producing it, with no hope of them ever providing a return on investment (being economical) without radically improving their efficiency – or covering much of the earth in collectors.
[Hermit] A far more practical approach is the one frequently advocated here, which is to position a number of large space based solar collectors (using a solar powered fusion reactor) in orbit, and transfer the power to earth where it is needed via microwave or laser. A couple of such could provide effectively free power to anywhere on Earth for the next 100 years and completely transform the planet. Refer to e.g. 13. The Proposed Global Village Structure: Power in Hermit's Afghanistan Proposal - November 2001 (http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=7;action=display;threadid=11621). This could be accomplished for less money than the US is spending on defense in the next three years - or about the projected half-a-year global expenditure on oil (at $25/barrel in normalized dollars) by 2002.
[Hermit] Or why this is a vital component in the Viral Manifesto (http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=7;action=display;threadid=11586)
Regards
Hermit.
PS re the original proposal - ignoring the fact that it does not provide the data to evaluate the truth of its claims, consider the fact that the people you know are also the people that know you - and the fact that email spam is already out of control before advocating a pyramid scheme which would, if successful, do quite amazing things to email spam levels.
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25447>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 25 2002 - 13:28:46 MDT