(03-10-2022, 11:48 AM)mikesez Wrote:

(03-10-2022, 10:29 AM)NewJagsCity Wrote: As stated in a previous post somewhere, solar is not viable as a replacement for the majority of electric load usage until battery technology achieves massive advances.  Heat your water, it'll do a 3rd of the job.  Light your home, maybe.  Run your HVAC, no.  Run your computers?  Maybe.  Fridge/freezer?  LOL. Charge your EV in 2035?  Not the way batteries work today.  We need either fusion, nuclear or Fuel Cell based on hydrogen.  And none of those except nuclear are safe enough yet.

I agree with most of that.  I'm a big proponent of us subsidizing more nuclear fission plants.  And I know we (US government) already give a lot of money to the nuclear fusion experiments in the UK and France.  I'm in favor of that as well.
I also agree that there are applications for liquid hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen could be the automotive or aircraft fuel of the future. It can power fuel cells, but it can also power internal combustion engines, which might be less expensive for cars and planes. In either case, we would have to manufacture liquid hydrogen, in plants that will use electricity.  So it could be really important to scale up our electric grid with all sorts of carbon free sources of energy, so we can have a stable supply of liquid hydrogen.

I would love to see liquid hydrogen take root, but its too volatile a fuel at the moment. Hopefully someone is working on it.

Of course, its going to produce a lot of water/water vapor as a by-product. Its also going to release heat. Might cause a similar effect as CO2 (rising tides and temps), just from a different direction. Of course, if the hydrogen is made from water, then the net sum of that might be ok. of course, you need electricity to produce hydrogen that way, which leads us back full circle to the original problem.

I'm with you on nuclear fission/fusion. That to me is our most sustainable long term alternative that will actually give us the results we need, given our current infrastructure of energy consuming devices.

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