The Fast Lane to Clean Fuel Energy Independence
2011 APRIL 21
The fast lane to clean fuel energy independence & low utilities and vehicle-fuel bills — the antidote to & nemesis of filthy coal, dirty-bloody fossil oil, hazardous-&-nuisance water-contaminating-and-dissipating fracked natural gas & shale oil, unprincipled crop- & wild-lands biofuels & most-dangerous, Frankenstein nuclear sourced electricity, etc. — Pee-ew!:
This article is about the transitional fast path to clean fuel energy independence — antecedent to the eventual dominance of solar, wind-turbine, geothermal, hydro & ethical bio-fuel sources of fuel energy for generating electricity — achievable via biodigester methane gas, from sewage, sequestered from the atmosphere & outer environment, sanitized & turned into clean electricity, making possible low utilities & vehicle-fuel bills. Hydro also refers herein to hydrogen-fuel-cell technologies, including such powered motor vehicles and on-site electricity generators for homes and businesses, etc., under market testing or under development or exploration. (This article can also be accessed from Twitter or easily by searches on the search engines Yahoo or Bing.)
Advanced societies need to get over their squeamishness about industrially exploiting the endlessly renewable, abundant and potentially cleanest fossil fuel resource of all for generating electricity and compressed vapor gas (an alternative fuel for co-powering plug-in electric and hybrid motor vehicles en mass, or for optionally powering them solo), which human societies themselves produce, for conversion to or the extraction of methane gas, being human excrement, as well as both food and ecological waste, that can be reprocessed into manufacturing methane gas at the nationwide network of already existing municipal sewage treatment plants. This already existing sewage-treatment-plant infrastructure and permanently renewing human-waste resource for potential inexhaustible quasi-natural-gas and electricity generation for powering our society, if harnessed, can, on its own, largely extricate our society from dependence on all other fossil fuels and nuclear-reactor power plants for fuel energy (electricity, and cleanly vapor and liquid gas) generation and supplies in the short term and extricate it wholly when combined with proliferating solar, wind-turbine, geothermal, bio-fuel and miscellaneous hydro technologies and sources of fuel energy generation and production. Real-life proof of concept for this proposal is the fact and applied science examples in society itself that some farms and farm towns in both the U.S. and China are already electrically and vapor-gas powered from reprocessed methane gas extracted from cow manure. Over recent years, radio and TV have periodically reported on these scenarios as well. Easily accessible knowledge of these examples is available in articles on this subject via internet search engines under the search request “farms using cow manure to generate methane gas to make electricity,” www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_biomass-manure.htm, www.registerguard.com/…/energy-lochmead-farms-projectdairy.html.csp , www.learningjoyresources.com/cow.htm, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/…/24farmers.htm. Certain of these articles explain that biodigesters breakdown the manure, or waste, called biomass, into methane gas and move the methane into pipes that lead it into turbine chambers that convert it into electricity that is distributed, thus diverting the methane gas (among the most potent greenhouse — atmospheric-heat-trapping — gases, www.epa.gov/methane/, that otherwise would naturally and inevitably issue from manure or biowaste breakdown) from entering the atmosphere and therein transforming it into an innocuous and valuable, renewable fuel-energy resource: endless methane gas sequestered, tamed and sanitized via biodigesters for supplying clean electricity. The biomass residue or leftovers from this process has been found to make excellent plant and crop fertilizer and can be marketed for this purpose. In a twitter feed of 12-17-2011 titled ‘Rwanda’s Poo-Powered Prisons,’ BBC reported in a caption accompanying a video link “In order to reduce energy costs and protect Rwanda’s forests, the country’s 14 prisons have introduced biogas burners, so they are now 75% powered by the inmates’ own waste. The burners need one thing – a regular, reliable supply of waste – and jails are perfect.,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16203507. Eco-economist, star general economist Jeremy Rifkin refers to biodigesters or biogas burners as bio-converters.
Sanitized methane gas transformed into electricity by biodigesters is a permanent environmentally acceptable source of clean, renewable fuel energy as well as solution to the often hazardous disposal problem of human bodily and food waste and human society’s ecological waste, much of which is discharged into major bodies of water and rivers. As biodigester electricity production systems are primarily built for processing large quantities of biomass and can be setup in a matter of months, they are ideally suited to produce methane gas transformed into electricity at municipal and military-base sewage treatment plants immediately. Small biodigesters under experimental development should within the decade be available for outfitting on yachts, and commercial and military ships, and maybe airliners and spacecraft (maybe including, in combination with solar-tech electricity, for space stations and at human settlements on Mars and Earth’s moon), for benign disposal and harnessing of on-board (or on-site) human excrement and food waste for on-board (or on-site) self supplying of electric fuel to these craft (and environments).
Municipalities can finance the installation of publicly-owned municipal biodigester electricity and methane-gas production and distribution utility plants with the offering of common general-obligation or revenue municipal bonds providing repayment of the bonds, to purchasers, with interim interest payments, free of all taxes: federal, state and local, that is the case for these bonds typically for other municipal and state bond-financed public works. Repayment of the bonds would come from the subscriber-based revenue performance of the plants — the electricity and methane gas from these plants could be sold to utility companies in competition with supplies coming from environmentally destructive or hazardous and polluting conventional fossil-fuels-extractive big coal, oil and natural gas companies or sold and delivered directly to public ratepayer subscribers or sold in a combination of both delivery options. Bond purchaser-investors could be from all: Federal Reserve Bank or even local retail banks over the counter (maybe and hopefully these could be enlisted to retail service all interested investors), brokerages (above a threshold dollar amount for big-money investors) and a termed individual volunteer, opt-in, investment-special-assessment-tax on real estate (for local property owners). To preclude the piling onto the profits and accumulating and accumulated savings, or treasuries, of these projects by all nature of money needs, desperation and spending ideals, rigid annual spending purposes and limits should be established and set by law and in the bond-offering contracts on these treasuries, which should be for spending primarily on the structural needs of school buildings, school supplies (including low-cost online-education interactive computers), assistance for enabling six-day-weekly-service libraries, in support of free vocational, technical and science community college education and free-diploma-and-credential-qualifying online education extending from elementary school through community college, for solarizing all municipal buildings (including with solar trees in municipal parking lots for charging electric vehicles, http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/08/world/asia/singapore-supertrees-gardens-bay/ , http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/will-solar-trees-sprout-in-parking-lots/ , http://theonefeather.com/2012/06/solar-trees-saving-energy-in-cherokee/ ) to minimize municipal government electricity needs and costs, and for limited-expense urgent or emergency police, firefighter and ambulance equipment and technology not readily available from ordinary emergency-responder budgets. Secondarily, it should be for supplementing to a legally prescribed limited extent existing budgets for public lighting, sidewalks, roads, parks, gyms, swimming pools, physical-fitness facilities, restrooms (a biodigester resource collector that can feed the municipal biodigester electricity and methane gas production plant) and other essential “public” municipal infrastructure only, with normal tax and municipal budget and deficit spending offset by these treasuries going to slow increase in, stabilize and reduce property and business taxes, so as to make for an maximally educationally and employment development as well as residentially and commercially welcoming and hospitable community and social environment, and not for public-money grants, subsidies or loans to or insurance for businesses, individuals or entities of any kind or for public employee compensation of any kind apart from the non-extraordinary middle-class and living-wage employment compensation of the municipal biodigester plant employees and maybe a minimum-wage cadre of physically fit first-responder cadets, in steady social and academic good standing, at the high-school and community-college levels in a first responder reserve candidate program in these municipal schools, cadets from high schools and community colleges who would be hands-on, active part-time first responder workers especially during high-school and community-college vacation breaks, under official supervision for both, and in limited “supplement” of augmentatory or adjunct special municipal class instructor compensation, like online and substitute class instructors. Smaller municipalities, based on population size, that would likely be unprofitable relative to the investment capital requirements in establishing biodigester electricity and methane gas production and distribution plants might team up in profitable blocs, as possible, of investment and profit-sharing partners for this purpose. A specified percentage of new annual retained earnings pooled from among municipalities might go to a state fund to pay for free state university education for math, science and engineering public university students who are long-time residents of the state (whose parents or guardians and/or who themselves have paid long-term state resident sales, income and/or real estate [property], etc., taxes). The treasuries of these plants must be left to grow and be unsubject to corrupt, political and business patronage and rescue spending and not be sponged from in the least by salaries and benefits and retirement packages to highly compensated institutional homesteading or careerist lawyers, sidelined politicians and boards of directors or regents or the like (oversight and audit boards could be staffed by qualifying volunteers from especially among retirees and professionals in the business community with a vested interest in having a clean environment and stable and restrained vehicle and home fuel-energy bills and property taxes as well as inexpensive and free public higher education for long-time state residents, especially emancipated youth and young adults). These treasuries must be permanently solvent and increasingly substantial for plant facilities repair, remodeling, upgrading and expansion and self replacement with technologically advanced plants as well as for meeting their passage-of-time-based increasing operational and staffing expenses, etc., and for their permanent independence from borrowing and debt in order to be able permanently to meet all of their core municipal funding and support commitments. Cities with huge populations, like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, should lead and set the example with this municipality-based clean fuel-energy production paradigm.
Incidentally, methane gas is not typically referred to as a fossil fuel, although it is a naturally occurring gas produced from decaying biomass, whereas natural gas, whose main constituent is methane, and, which, unlike methane burns off and emits CO2, a gas that makes up the majority of atmospheric heat-trapping gases, is referred to as the atmospherically cleanest (the least polluting) of the three major fossil fuels, being NG, fossil oil and coal,http://www.energy.gov/energysources/fossilfuels.htm, http://www.energy.gov/energysources/fossilfuels.tm. These three official fossil fuels all emit CO2, the overwhelmingly most abundant atmospheric heat-trapping gas indirectly warming the hydrosphere and directly contributing in the majority to global warming and climate change. Among these human-society fuel energy resources, coal emits the most CO2, followed by fossil oil, with NG the least. They all emit the heat trapping gas methane as well — the most methane emitted by NG. While methane is 21 times more efficient as an atmospheric heat trapping gas, it fortunately can be removed (that is, shed and destroyed) from the atmosphere by hydroxyl oxide radicals (HO) and other sources, http://www.epa.gov/outreach/scientific.html, also in the atmosphere, and makes up a modest 18% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, compared to CO2′s 72% share of the atmospheric greenhouse gases, where CO2 also has a much longer atmospheric life than methane, http://timeforchange.org/CO2-cause-of-global-warming. The heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere is reflected down to Earth’s surface as heat energy that is significantly absorbed by the hydrosphere (the Earth’s bodies of water — including glaciers, tundra, snow cover, clouds and precipitation, and subterranean ice and water deposits and waterways — and near-surface, often transitory, moist lower atmosphere of wet ground, fog, mist, evaporation, ground steam, marine spray and steam, and/or humidity), particularly by the oceans and seas in whose relative heat-energized, lashing surfaces (capable of generating electricity), together with air-pressure dynamics and temperature clashes, it is susceptible to breeding, brewing and fueling marine- and ground-level extreme weather events or storms, such as typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes and cyclones, http://www.thehcf.org/images/2007/3B_feedbackS.jpg,http://co2now.org/. Editorially speaking, without personal research on the subject matter, this trapped and reflected-heat-energy buildup may also have a causal role in the occurrence of monsoons and flood downpours.
Some of the early social repercussions of climate change will be unusually and routinized increased incidents of heat-related deaths, disease outbreaks, agricultural losses (with inland fresh-water and food shortages and soaring utilities-water and food prices), mass migrations (often continuous mass trickling or streaming illegal immigration), populist tumult, populist revolts, coups and agricultural land grabbing, in complicity with corrupt or compromised political leaders, in agriculturally choice locales in developing nations, as all the while fossil fuels industry representatives, beneficiaries and minion mass-media personalities and politician defenders and advocates first will say or have said that climate change is or was not real or is or was a hoax and later will say or are saying it is unrelated to CO2 emissions from industrial fossil fuels use (most significantly inclusive of internal-combustion-engine transportation). All of this moreover happening as the hypocritical, scoundrel company leaders in this industry prepare to exploit — based on official scientific climate change knowledge and field observations and satellite surveillance of the melting icy, heretofore industrially forbidding, polar environment — with beaming faces, starry eyes, salivating hanging tongues and hands gleefully rubbing together, and marvel at the polar-meltdown resultant accessibility of gargantuan polar oil and natural-gas (as well as precious metals) deposits for drill-baby-drill extraction, revenues, profits and stock appreciations and dividends galore, hallelujah, Great God Almighty! Or is this latter circumstance a Greek-tragedy of sufficiently more fateful rope to irresponsible, reckless psychotic-psychopathic, majestic capitalism (the toxic, unhealthy, hazardous and harmful products suppliers, as well as those that and who so derive their products or otherwise derive them unscrupulously, not to forget arms merchants and the arms industry, and their consumer markets alike) to not only destroy itself but for it to both homicidally-suicidally poison and destroy human civilization and the human species and hang, choke, itself while glutting in short-term, short-sighted splendor, or convenience, and puffing rapturously from its gold-inlaid and gem-studded psychoactive-hempwood, dope-packed, dope-smoldering, smokey opium pipe? Let not one of us be deceived about the proposed Canadian-TransU.S. XL Keystone pipeline and other proposed and new major domestic fossil fuels projects. That toxic fossil fuel transporting pipeline and those jobs are not about job creation; rather, mostly short-term disposable jobs are often necessary to develop those and such projects for the purpose of generating indefinite company revenues and profits. For the very most part, they are not career length jobs that lead to a company retirement and pension — thus, for whom it may concern, appreciate and safeguard doggedly and at all costs your federal Social Security pension and Medicare health retirement benefits!. And how, in the societal and moral bottom-line analysis, does it profit folks to risk and sacrifice their own and their loved ones’ and brethern’s health, home or dwelling, workplace and employment or business stability to fossil-fuels-energy-ore extraction-and-use polluted air and water and the ravages of the climate-change extremes of scorching drought and brutal inclement weather for yo-yo gasoline-automobile overall-uptrending gas and oil prices and briskly rising automobile and property casualty, especially, and health and life insurance policy premiums?
Germane to this latter issue, the author of this writing repudiates the fossil-fuels expansionist drill-baby-drill, ravage, pollute, poison, spill, blight and kill national-fuel-energy agenda of primacy-of-profits 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and rejects his candidacy and strategy of opacity regarding the public disclosure of his financial and tax, with emphasis on “income tax,” paying integrity and character in publicly vetting, as a presidential candidate, the status of his publicly accountable and verifiable ethical fitness to occupy the highest public office in the nation, without his insistence that the public rely on and trust his self-serving mere words and uncorroborated assurances of financial and tax-paying rectitude. All federal civil servants and members of the armed forces are subjected to an agency or FBI character background check or investigation and all proposed presidential cabinet secretary appointees are subject to Congressional challenge and confirmation as well as an FBI background check. Traditionally in modern times all other presidential and vice-presidential candidates, except for one, have made extensive public disclosures of their income-tax and financial background — incidentally, in separate property marriages, in which a non-candidate spouse of a candidate for political office may have entered the marriage with substantial personal assets or an inherited fortune, the political-office candidate spouse has no right to or involvement with those assets by law so long as those assets remain separate property and disclosure of that spouse’s personal separate assets and related financial affairs may be a liable trespass against the privacy of that spouse and a liable basis for divorce of the offending spouse. Certainly mega-millionaire scion Mitt Romney knows this when he facetiously cites former presidential candidate U.S. Senator John Kerry, D-Mass (who promptly made a thorough public financial and income-tax disclosure on himself during his candidacy), as having not made a public financial and tax disclosure on his wife, the heir to a large fortune before his marriage to her, and dishonestly makes reference to this appropriate nondisclosure (a disclosure John Kerry would have had no legal right to make) as a justification and excuse for making a peek-a-boo minimal, scant and untimely (in effect “I’ll reveal the other financial and tax tidbit on myself after the election.”) disclosure of his own financial and income-tax filing and paying background and history. The same legal situation applies to U.S. Senator John McCain, R-Az., and his presidential bid in 2008 when he, also as an exception to the clean-politics norm like Romney, disclosed publicly only his own controversially two most recently due and filed 2006 and 2007 federal income tax returns but appropriately nothing on his premaritally independently rich, mega-millionaire heiress wife, another example of minimal financial and tax disclosure on a presidential candidate and nondisclosure on a wife by a presidential candidate Romney cites as a justification and excuse for his not making a full or extensive financial and tax disclosure on himself. Apparently Romney is obstructing full or extensive disclosure on himself because he is embarrassed and has something disturbing to hide and feels the harm to himself from tiny disclosure or nondisclosure is tolerable in comparison to the devastation a full or extensive disclosure might precipitate. It is suspect when he says in effect “I have paid lots of taxes” and avoids the term “income taxes” — he seems to be fudging with the use of this hedge language. His remark that his tax returns are proper but that if he were to publicly release and disclose them Democrats would pick through them to find fault insinuates that there are concerning, culpable faults with them, indeed, that are grist for political controversy and damage to him and his presidential candidacy. Romney is of dubious financial and income-tax paying and filing character until there is certified documented revelation to the contrary, which may, however, result in a finding of disreputable character.
Like in any election, character is and always is a crucial issue. It is incumbent on the voting citizen public to thoroughly audit and know everything about its prospective leaders and to make its choices of elected leaders based on its examination and full and certain knowledge of the candidates for elective leadership office — for making informed decisions and choices — “beyond words and arguments.” Character, especially long-time entrenched adult character, is the foolproof indicator and predictor of an individual’s inclinations and future patterns and habits of conduct and action, and not at all an individual’s words or words separated from deciding-others’ knowledge of that individual’s character. Do not trust shadowy figures, especially those insistent on remaining shadowy, as regards matters of their character, such as Mitt Romney. It is a truism that behind many a big fortune is a big crook and a path beaten thereto by crookery, often a path beaten by ruthless fortune-hunter or glory-hog individuals with a flair for finery and a way (forte) with words — “All that glitters is not gold.” Just like it is foolhardy to entrust our money or lovely, or gorgeous, daughter, wife or girlfriend with a stranger or unsavory individual, it is a most probable unpardonable, regrettable blunder in the making to entrust the leadership of our nation to a shadowy individual of dubious or uncertain character. Do not let the seductively, for some, glib Republican duo of glitz and glamor both demagogue, and scaremonger us on, the competence of government (while ignoring the endless procession of grandiose incompetence, recklessness, roguery — the most recent high-profile such rogues being J.P. Morgan-Chase Bank and CEO Jamie Dimond and Barclays Bank and its CEO Bob Diamond in July of 2012 — and failures in private enterprise, pretending and mythologizing that somehow and magically humans in government service are different and lesser than humans in commercial employment), Social Security retirement, Medicare and Medicaid and dupe/sweet talk divide and conquer the older and younger generations into approving the fracturing and gradual destroying of Social Security retirement, Medicare and Medicaid, now free of investment in the turbulent and often equity-destroying stock-market casino, with promises of preservation of the current defined benefit models for those 55 years of age and older at the time of system reform to the privatization, marketplace models they propose (to attract the voting support for the reform from the particulary voting active bloc of elder voters, giving them a sense of safety and remaining-life security for themselves). If the generations declare with their unified votes in the majority that these defined-benefit, and government protected and administered, social-safety-net programs will not be deprioritized and are not subject to compromise, they will not be diluted and compromised and they will be prioritized and made to work permanently by politicians who observe and understand that their political-office jobs depend on their viability, in disregard of the talking-heads and tongue-wagging news-talk commentators of the mainstream mass news media of public persuasion owned by the corporate wealth class. Let us not be swayed into believing that the foe of these programs and the social safety net in general, being Romney’s VP running-mate Paul Ryan, is suddenly now the friend of Medicare with the gimmick of his trotting out his 78-year-old mother as a political prop before an adoring Republican crowd and announcing that she is receiving Medicare and attesting to his want to save Medicare (yes, his no-change protection plan for those 55 years old and above at the time of legislative enactment of his proposed Medicare system reform and changeover for future recipients would take care of her and of course any mother would like to she her son to be the vice-president of the U.S.) — expediency and shameless duplicity are a centuries-old, tried-and-true successful ploy of many desperate and ruthless politicians.
Making the Best of a Bad Situation in Extreme Heat States: for making the best of a bad situation in the states experiencing extreme heat this summer, where affordable, buildings should be solarized and air conditioners should be operated off of and electric vehicles should be charged on on-site solar (and where practical and affordable, charged on on-site wind-turbine and/or geothermal as well) generated electricity during the daylight hours to lower the potential and avoid the occasion for electrical-utility-company grid-demand overloads and failure (blackouts and brownouts), associated with exceptional mass air-conditioner usage for coping with such lethargizing and health- and life-threatening heat and to have a daylight unlimited supply of electricity for unlimited daytime air-conditioner usage. Religious entities might start extending to the public righteous equity for the tithes, donations and exemption from taxation they receive by also solarizing and air conditioning their churches or houses of worship and other buildings and opening them up as cooling centers for those oppressed by the extreme heat who do not have air conditioning or cannot afford high utility bills for running air conditioning. The expectation should be that this heat situation will be the new normal, or norm, in spring and summer in the concerned states and that climate change is in place. In the near future, nighttime and localized 24-hour solar electricity may be available for these uses as the problem of clean, chemical-free solar-capture energy storage has been solved by a process of storage in and later extraction from molten salt, Arizona uses molten salt for storage : Solar Power Engineering, www.solarpowerengineering.com/…/arizona-uses-molten-salt-for-st… - www.solarpowerengineering.com results, Feb 7, 2011 – 150-MW solar project planned for Arizona will use molten salt for energy storage. Utility-scale developer SolarReserve has received its …; Gemasolar Finishes Building Molten Salt – Backed Solar Power Plant …, www.greenoptimistic.com › Solar Power, Jul 7, 2011 SolarReserve Receives Funding for CSP & Molten Salt Energy Storage in Nevada … Solar Power Plant That Uses Molten Salts as Energy Storage …; Solar Power for Vampires: MIT Team Invents 24-Hour Solar System, CleanTechnica - 1 day ago … a concentrated solar power system with a molten salt heat storage system. … the idea is to heat the salt with solar energy, then transfer theenergy …
Also, simple 24/7 independent, off-grid, on-site self-sufficiency electricity for major businesses and large landed estates, in geothermal energy rich locations, is conceivable via joint geothermal and solar panel electricity-generation installations on the same general site, with geothermally bankable solar energy feeding a geothermal energy receptor conduit routed to the below-ground geothermal energy extraction and delivery or supply source to passively and automatically replenish extracted geothermal energy. On-site solar installations could be used to both supply facilities and their infrastructure with direct and immediate electricity for daylight use as well as bank thermal solar energy geothermally to replenish geothermal energy extracted for 24/7 electricity generation and usage, thus permanently precluding geothermal energy reservoir depletion (even if there is some naturally occurring geothermal energy renewal, which at the point of industrial scale extraction would probably not be enough or at a sufficient rate to offset the size of the continuous extraction). Geothermal energy specifically for electricity generation, as opposed to geothermal heat-pump energy for mere modest-temperature heating or warming, would apply for this purpose.
A most recent breakthrough new technology arrival for dramatically augmenting the time span for solar electricity generation or making it standalone 24/7, reported publicly on 02-29-2012, is night-time solar cell technology that generates electricity in the dark, developed by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, http://www.greenwala.com/channels/green-technology/blog/13103-Scientists-Develop-Affordable-…. Also, cat-tail wind turbines that do not endanger birds and bats are here, Wind Power Without the Blades: Big Pics : Discovery News news.discovery.com › Tech News.
Like it or not, believe it or not, the new seasonally extreme heat norm, that is a circumstance of in-place and enduring climate change in many U.S. states, will compel offices and businesses in the affected states, as well as households that can afford them, to adopt on-site solar, wind-turbine and geothermal electric power systems and on-site chargeable plug-in all-electric vehicles [that are tune-up, oil-change, gas, coolant and smog-control-inspection free, low-cost for maintenance and insurance, and for which one does not have to wait in a petro-station gas-pump line when one recharges at home, especially with a high-speed charger, or at one's driveway solar charging station, for those able to afford either of the latter] and plug-in hybrid vehicles, as economically practical beneficiary side products of their solar electric power systems, for workers and people generally therein to function comfortably and financially efficiently and have affordable and undisrupted electric power during the extreme heat season.
The benefit and importance of solar electrical power was dramatically highlighted on Tuesday, 08-31-2012, when India suffered the largest crash of a conventional fossil-fuels-based electrical power system in the history of the world that affected a population areas of 670,000,000 (six hundred seventy million) people, shutting down business extensively and all rail transportation systems, mucking, miring, impeding and halting urban road traffic, regulated by electricity-dependent traffic lights, on an unprecedented grand scale and trapping miners underground for hours. A spate of tweets posted on Twitter on that day and the day after the power grid crash [several interconnected conventional fossil-fuels-based grids crashed jointly] advised that those fortunate enough to have on-site solar energy systems substantially powering their properties in this area of sun and heat rich India were advantaged with sustained electricity availability to their facilities and residences and the ability to still operate nearly as normal.
Investment in Solar Electric Power Goes Mainstream: Chevron Oil, Bank of America, Total Oil [France's largest oil company], General Electric Corp., Pacific Gas & Electricity [P.G.&E.], Google, IKEA, Apple Inc., Facebook, with the U.S. Department of Defense newly being a major employer of solar-power companies for solarization of its U.S. military facilities, and, as and to the extent applicable, its vehicles, air and water craft and equipment and with Ford Motors contracting similarly to offer a limited, discounted house rooftop solar-panel purchase option with the purchase of its plug-in all-electric and hybrid vehicles for offsetting in part with clean solar electricity substantially dirty fossil-fuels-sourced electricity supplied by traditional electrical-power utility companies.)
In summary, in addition to being a basis for lower property-energy and transportation-fuel bills, this new source of local fuel energy production would shift massive revenues from going abroad to foreign oil production companies and to environmentally abusive and indifferent domestic and foreign polluting fossil fuels companies to coming back home to our own municipalities and states as a basis for lowering property taxes, and funding free and low-cost hi-tech public community-college and university education, job training and re-training and affordably assisting adequate public safety and emergency personnel staffing and with their essential small supplies.
24/7 fuel energy independence from nuclear power plants and all fossil fuels via convergent solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and bio-fuels energy and man-made methane gas from sewage excrement-plus converted to electricity, as they presently are to varying degrees, and shared as electricity via national and international smart-grid and electrical-transmission-cable linkages is a practical near-term option and permanent solution to the whole of our society’s, if not the global advanced societies’, fuel energy needs and problems. However, comparatively much less polluting and less global-warming fossil-fuel vapor natural gas (NG) obtained without problematic hydraulic fracking should remain as a long-term fuel energy resource, a resource increasingly used to generate electricity in replacement of filthy coal in power plants and to power alternative-fuel natural-gas cars but a fuel energy that is not renewable — less polluting and contributory to global warming, on the whole, than the other fossil fuels. Methane and vapor natural gases, the cleanest-burning fossil fuels, which are greenhouse gases (albeit moderately nuisance or dangerous gases to Earth’s atmosphere, climate and weather patterns when exposed directly to the atmosphere as opposed to captured, contained and tamed in power plants for conversion to electricity) but which are virtually immediately available as the transitional or interim dominant fuel energies for the self sufficiency and fuel-supply independence of our fuel energy economy to meet all of our society’s electrical and vapor-gas (including compressed vapor gas and significant quantities of liquid gas made from vapor gas) needs, for which a ubiquitous network of power plants in society exists to utilize them to produce and supply all needed electricity and vapor gas for society now, might be phased down to becoming permanent supplemental, lower-scale and emergency fuel energy resources when the infrastructure as well as electricity, cleanest-vapor-gas and cleanest-liquid-gas production of the alternative, renewable clean fuel energy sources of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biofuels have become dominant for meeting all of society’s fuel energy needs. In reality it will take both methane gas extracted from our sewage treatment plants and domestic natural gas — where there are enough natural stores of natural gas (a vapor in its natural state like methane gas is) in the U.S. that on their own can meet all of our nation’s fuel energy needs for approximately two centuries — to reliably and securely satisfy all of our society’s fuel energy needs well in excess of what it needs until the fuel energy supplied by the clean alternative energy sources come to take the lead in satisfying, with guarantee, all of our society’s fuel energy needs. Impartial Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) geophysical energy studies have determined that either domestic wind-turbine or solar energy, especially if they could be stored, could more than satisfy all of our nation’s electrical energy needs around-the-clock permanently.
During the summer of 2008 the website The Hot Spring.net, a fuel-energy information news source, posted a link to and brief summary of an article titled ‘Wind Power Set to Become the Leading Energy Source,’ citing a 1991 U.S. Department of Energy study that reported that the three states of North Dakota, Kansas and Texas generate enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy the national electrical needs and that a current study by a team of Stanford University engineers has determined that they have substantially more potential than to satisfy all of the national energy needs, given improvements in wind turbine technology and added harnesssable off-shore wind energy potential. Also during this period the website NaturalGas.org (NaturalGas.org) reported that the U.S. has between 1,190 and 1,779 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as estimated in 1999 and 2000 by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Nation Petroleum Council and Potential Gas Committee, capable of supplying the U.S. economy for centuries at current fossil-fuels consumption rates. MIT News website in late 2008 posted an article titled ‘Major Discovery from MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution and read the solar section of The Presidential Forum on Renewable Energy,’ http://www.2008energyforum.org/, reporting that more than enough solar energy reaches the Earth in an hour than the whole human population uses in a year. Another elaborate and extensive solar electricity study titled ‘A Study of Very Large Solar Desert Systems with the Requirements and Benefits to those Nations Having High Solar Irradiation Potential’ also reports that a fraction of the captureable solar energy reaching the Earth can meet all of world humanity’s annual electrical energy needs, www.geni.org/globalenergy/…/energytrends/…/solar/solar…/Solar-Systems-in-the-Desert.pdf.
As Earth is a natural bi-solar cyclically rotating planet, it can produce around-the-clock intercontinental solar-generated electrical energy for intercontinental exchange and sharing (with some half of our planet always cycling through either a day or night phase), forever, via redundantly numerous below-ocean-and-sea-floor electricity transmission cables. Wind on a national basis, or on a regional basis within most nations, is also in constant supply.
The wind always blows, the sun always shines, there is always daylight, human excrement always flows and ecological and agricultural waste is forever growing and decaying, on a global basis, somewhere on Earth in huge abundance, for producing electricity, vapor and liquid methane or natural gas, biofuels and bioplastics.
Contrary to the disinformation being disseminated by some broadcast media academic advocates and apologists of nuclear reactors and natural gas (NG) and very finite and highly polluting fossil oil for meeting our national fuel energy needs, solar-sourced electricity is generated in daylight, generpower.gmc.globalmarket.com/products/…/outstanding-low-light-performance-solar-panel-108612.html, www.tradeindia.com/selloffer/2753236/Solar-Phone-Charger.html, solarcalculator.org/solarcalculatorfaq.html, whether or not the sun is shining, as anyone can observe in the operation of any common solar-window-powered device, such as a solar-powered calculator or radio, which may even operate without fail indoors on artificial light and in low light (Demark is even marketing solar-powered street lamps that operate in low and indirect light and that also feed electricity to electrical power plants, solarchargeddriving.com/…/624-street-lights-going-solar-in-europe.html). Inevitably, laptop computers will feature a built-in or attachable solar window to power them and charge their batteries, come rain or shine or be the sky cloud covered. Also contrary to the claims of some of these 1950s and 1960s atomic-era-minded, out-of-touch and out-of-date scientists that cars cannot or can barely operate on solar power, hi-speed solar car races are routinely held, with major events having been in the U.S., Malaysia, Turkey, Japan and Australia — but these vehicles are far from pretty and are not suited for multi-person and family driving or highway long-distance driving currently, Images for solar car racing, www.worldsolarchallenge.org/, www.discoversolarenergy.com/solar/races.htm, www.dasolar.com/solar-blog/…/5-reasons-to-love-solar-car-racing/. Notwithstanding, some all-electric and hybrid vehicles coming to market will also feature a solar panel for the continuous passive charging and recharging of their batteries in daylight. Also, take a look at and read a brief write up on the world’s first solar boat (more like a yacht or small ship) that sailed around the world at http://www.gizmag.com/turanor-planetsolar-solar-powered-boat-completes-trip/22421/ .
We should strive vigorously and irreversibly for swift energy independence free of dirty politically problematic fossil oil, natural-gas extraction by environmentally and biologically problematic hydraulic fracking, environmentally and biologically devastating and filthy coal extraction, and dubious, anti-environment and anti-human-community potentially mammoth time-bomb nuclear power plants, the most expensive and time-consuming to build and riskiest of electricity production facilities, at taxpayer co-signor liability for financing and loan-repayment default and taxpayer insurance obligation for nuclear catastrophes, as private lenders and investors will not finance or fund nuclear power plants without government loan guarantees, and insurance companies will not insure them against structural failure, malfunction or environmental or public injury or catastrophe. In the context of Murphy’s law, which states “What can go wrong, will go wrong,” and the famous observation and dictum in the slightly differing words of each the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch and 18th-century British intellectual Alexander Pope that in synthesized paraphrase said “To err is to be human,” we cannot afford the least margin for error coming from a nuclear disaster, resulting in uninhabitable contamination of the environment and the evacuation of entire human communities, nuclear-radiation poisoned soil, water, air, flora and fauna, and food, and consequent skin and organ cancers of all kinds afflicting ourselves, our children and our loved ones, including our first responders and health-care providers, apart from lethal and harmful biological mutations and other health injuries and birth defects resulting from a nuclear disaster. Even nearly infallible techno-intellectually supreme theoretical physicist Albert Einstein admitted to having blundered big-time in his science work.
Incompetent and dishonest comparisons have been made between the safety record of nuclear power plant reactors versus that of road vehicles and a similar comparison with airplanes by these same folks. They point out that many more accidents occur with and lives are lost in road vehicle accidents (5.5-million car accidents in the U.S. in 2009, www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/statistics.html; death toll of 42,031, www.drugwarfacts.org/, 2009) and airplane accidents (average annual fatal airliner accidents of 27.2 and average annual death toll of 794 for the first decade of the 21st Century, 01-04-2011, www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-04/airline-crash-deaths-rose-13-to-828-last-year-worse-than-decade-average.html – no general airplane statistics are readily available). However, these are wrong-headed apples and oranges comparisons. First, this is because there are astronomically more road vehicles and airplanes than nuclear reactors — currently there are circa 250,000,000 registered road vehicles, wiki.answers.com › … › Cars & Vehicles › American Cars -, and 1,000,001 airplanes in the U.S. (the 2 search engine sources for this figure, obtained on 05-17-2011, were gone from the search listings upon the author’s return to copy and paste them to this commentary on 05-20-2011 and 05-21-2011), whereas there are 104 commercial nuclear reactors and 34 research nuclear reactors in the U.S., not including military and DOE reactors, www.nei.org › Resources & Stats › Nuclear Statistics, wiki.answers.com › … › Science › Energy › Nuclear Energy. Secondly, road vehicles and airplanes operate on a multidirectional mass scale, whereas the very few nuclear reactors relative to these — as well as relative to coal-fired and NG-electricity-generating power plants — do not. Thirdly, road vehicles and airplanes are mobile and means of transportation operating in respectively highly to moderately dense vehicle and aircraft environments, whereas, apart from those in nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear reactors are immobile and locationally fixed facilities or buildings, not subject to collisions with each other or offensively with anything else. Finally, the magnitude of the damage in road vehicle and airplane accidents per incident is very limited and of very limited potential with respect to human, property, social and ecological (including air, water, soil and biological long-term contamination) casualties and destruction. Also, harsh nuclear radiation dosing from nuclear contamination persists indefinitely or long term in the extreme, and is not comparable in the least to the innocuous bio-irradiation of a banana or to the problematic particulates given off by mined or quarried coal and coal-fired power plants, as apologists for and promoters of nuclear power plants speciously allege. Advocates for nuclear power plants and putt-putt natural-gas CO2-fart cars/motor vehicles (the latter by federal and state government fiat and patronage example), and their lobbyists and apologists, are not caring citizens or patriots concerned for and committed to the environmental health of our nation and the optimal technological advancement of the U.S., nor do they give a damn about the condition of our planet and its poisoning by fossil-fuels CO2 emissions and nuclear waste and radiation contaminants; rather, they are staunchly committed to protecting their fossil-fuels and nuclear financial and industrial turf and their perpetuation, at all costs, employing whatever necessary means, including unconscionable con artistry and stinking lies, at taxpayer support, funding and patronage to the exclusion of their alternative, renewable clean-energy industrial competition.
Ninety-nine nuclear reactor accidents have been documented from 1952 to 2011, the majority in the U.S. (57+), with the worst of these having been the 1986 Ukrainian Chernobyl accident resulting in the evacuation of the Ukrainian town of Prypiat and approximately 350,000 people from adjacent communities in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and the dispersing of radioactive debris in the air across Europe, apart from the tremendous economic dislocation and loss in these communities, (Benjamin K. Sovacool, Wikipedia) — we should not assume that there are no unreported nuclear accidents, along with serious nuclear harm and covered up and disowned such harm. The considerable literature on the Chernobyl nuclear accident attributes less than 60 to up to 149 human deaths directly to it and 4,000 to 980,000 indirectly. Read an article by Dr. Helen Caldicott, M.D., founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and Physicians for Social Responsibility, for an honest and candid health-related assessment of the Chernobyl nuclear accident at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/11/nuclear-apologists-radiation. A book recommended for reading by author and professor Karl Grossman on this accident titled ‘Chernobyl: Consequences of the Castrophe for People and the Environment,’ initially published in Russia in 2007 and republished in English translation in 2009 by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, reports the medical findings of a team of European scientists’ investigation — independent of the nuclear industry and political and government influence and control – of the health impact of this accident; in contrast to a 2005 United Nations report estimating the number of human lives lost due to this accident at 4,000, this book reports that 985,000 human lives were lost as a result of it, Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.
We should ignore nuclear industry advocate’s and apologist’s admonishments against critics and questioners of nuclear safety, in the wake of the March, 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear malfunction and eventual meltdown in Japan, as exhibiting hysteria or being hysterical. Alarm, concern and circumspection (reflection and all-around reexamination) in response to a catastrophic accident or event is a most healthy, appropriate and intelligent response. To submissively heed such defensive nuclear-industry admonishments and attempts at unconscionable psycholinguistic bullying and public-relations manipulation is to submit to mindless passivity and unmitigated exposure to nuclear hazard, to the benefit of the nuclear industry. Their “Don’t worry — be happy” and “Trust in us” insinuations are no more valid than those of the Thalidomide, cigarette-tobacco, lead-poisoning, Agent-Orange, Bhopal-catastrophe, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1142333/, Chernobyl-nuclear-accident, WMDs, combat depleted-uranium and white-phosphorous munitions, Wall Street banking-collapse, commonplace coal-company coal-mine collapses and explosions, Deepwater Horizon oil-spill-and-contamination-understatement, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/10/report-federal-government-underestimated-underreported-oil-spill-size.html, and NG-hydraulic-fracking, http://environment.about.com, claims of innocence. Dr. Karl Grossman, professor of journalism, has posted an article on the internet on the dishonest, if not brazenly mendacious, face-saving pronouncements and ruthless political influence of the nuclear industry, sworn to shoving nuclear power down our throats come hell or high water. It is titled ‘Fukushima and the Nuclear Establishment,’ byline ‘The Big Lies Fly High,’ at http://www.counterpunch.org/.
Taxpayer loan guarantees for nuclear power-plant construction and liability for nuclear-reactor (or electricity-generating nuclear-power-plant) malfunctions and disasters are an egregious nuclear industry example of the two-faced free-marketplace libertarian and economic-conservative principle of “privatization of profits and socialization of risk and loss” at taxpayers’ expense and the underfunding or defunding of social-safety-net public-assistance, health-care and pension programs for the middle and under classes. This is the middle-finger-in-your-face by some in the corporate and industrial sector for their corporate and industrial public welfare and wealthfare at taxpayer liability.
(Incredibly, some knowledgeable public critics of federal loan guarantees for the construction of nuclear electrical power plants seriously assert that the loan guarantees also mean direct federal loan funding for the construction of these nuclear power plants if they are not able to secure private financing or sufficient private funding for their construction, as well as the absurd guarantee of the loan repayment by taxpayer money in the event of loan default by the owner-operators of the nuclear power plants.)
Why do they spew all of this jive talk on us? Because they think they are so smart, and, the rest of us, in the collective, are so gullible and stupid — they are the born foolers and we largely are their born fools, and, they, by nature or circumstance, are the entitled predators and we are their legitimate prey. To them, very many of us, if not the majority of us, have depth-of-reasoning deficiency disorder, in our believing in the likes of the Bigfoot creature, magic and the timelessly failed but renewed and re-calculated prophesies of the doomsday second-coming of the Messiah and the rapture to heaven of His faithful followers, in escape or resolution of their health and social problems, obesity, marital difficulties, difficult living circumstances, financial hardship and hard-to-manage or unmanageable bills and debt, etc. Also, they have learned that they can buy our tax money from our elective government representatives — tax money in the form of government contracts, loan guarantees (insulating corporations and their owners and operators for loan defaults from liability), subsidies and special tax breaks — in trade for a relative pittance in legal bribes, paid directly by themselves or indirectly by their lobbyists and surrogates, in election or re-election campaign contributions, promotional mass-media publicity, or other political-support favors or services, as well as with gifts, wining and dining, romance and sham-book or speaker-touring deals, etc., and awaiting high-paying reward jobs as media personalities, consultants, Congressional or White House lobbyists, corporate executives or board-of-director members for loyal and beneficial legislative, voting and/or policy- or decision-making while in government legislative or executive (or even judicial) service. Some self-centered wealthy vested interests simply buy political office directly with the mass-media-publicity and political-campaign power of their considerable wealth and fundraising from their wealth-class bonds — if and when elected, they advance, support and vote for legislation in support of their own, their wealth-class and preferred supporters’ financial and political interests, indifferent or callous toward middle-class and underclass folks’ economic concerns and issues. We are their fools, dupes and prey; they are our foolers, cons and predators.
Nevertheless, let the crackling lightning flashes and blazing lightning bolt of illumination of the new clean renewable fuel energy economy and movement hotly strike and zap through the stormy dark clouds and thundering propaganda and control of the old, dirty fossil-fuels and dangerous nuclear industries, of their beneficiaries and of their deluge of mass-media and political mind-polluting-influence big money to keep us attached to and dependent on these environmentally and biologically polluting and poisonous fuel-energy sources.
If a radio talk-show host sounds like an incessant, insistent megaphone in promotion of natural gas cars over all-around superior electric cars and the mass production of most-slowly and most-expensively constructed nuclear power plants over all-around safer and overall cleaner renewable energy- and NG-sourced power plants for electricity generation, at taxpayers’ expense and/or insurance and liability, they are simultaneous cryptolobbyists mouthing infomercials for the status-quo dinosaur, passe and environmentally dangerous fossil-fuels, in general, and nuclear reactor and mining industries, attempting to thwart competitive new and emerging, better vehicle and energy industries. Some of these talk-show hosts will ignore and make no mention of the superior performance features of plug-in all-electric and hybrid vehicles but will ask where they get their electricity, suggesting and sometimes falsely saying from filthy- or dirty-coal, which in fact supplies 44.5% of all electricity in the U.S., followed in size of production by NG (23.3%, with a 4.3% increased production of electricity from 2008 to 2009 and with the overwhelming majority of new electrical power plants now and to-date being NG-fired or fueled), which together with hydro (6.9%), wind-turbine (1.9) and the other sources of renewable fuel energy (1.8%), produces 33.9% of all U.S. electricity, with wind-turbine, especially, and solar production increasing meaningfully per year over the last two years appraised, 2008 and 2009. The remaining 20.2% of electricity production comes from nuclear power plants, which underwent a .9% decline in production from 2008 to 2009, compared to a 3.7% decrease in production by coal-fired power plants from 2008 to 2009. Some of these talk-show hosts will pretend that NG-fired or fueled electrical power plants do not exist and balk at and dismiss mention of them. To the fright of the fossil-fuels and nuclear industries, as is apparent and has been said in this commentary, sanitized methane and NG together with the other renewable sources of fuel energy can immediately replace both coal and nuclear sources of electricity production, and, excluding biodigester methane gas extraction from sewage, are making steady progress in this direction based on market pressures and demand. While NG is a better source of fuel energy for electricity generation than coal or nuclear ore, CNG vehicles are inferior to plug-in all-electric and hybrid vehicles, except for their beating out plug-in all-electric drive (not plug-in hybrid-drive) with regard to very large commercial trucks.
Their association of electric and hybrid motor vehicles with dependence on CO2-emitting filthy or dirty coal and coal-fired power plants for generating their fuel-energy electricity is an insincere association meant to discredit these vehicles as being environmentally friendly and to smear them as being another source of atmospheric pollution and global warming, worse than their competitor highly polluting and climate-endangering fossil-oil (gasoline) and NG based fuels powering traditional, sole internal-combustion-engine motor vehicles. They know damn well that coal and coal-fired power plants generate a minority, declining percentage of all U.S. power plant electricity, which can virtually immediately be replaced by takeover NG and NG-fired or -fueled power plant electricity, and that proliferating solar and wind-turbine power plants, solarized homes and other buildings, as well as solar-electric charging ports, can supply respectively power-grid and off-grid electricity to provide maximally clean-sourced electricity to charge the batteries of these vehicles. While they are really in support of coal fuel and the totality of the fossil fuels industry, whose stocks pay steadily good returns, they will use justifiably reviled coal fuel as the smear weapon, in proposed guilt by association, to defeat the marketplace rise and prospective success of electric and hybrid vehicles as viable competitors and replacements of the highly polluting and climate-endangering fossil-fuels-powered status-quo paradigm of sole internal-combustion-engine vehicles — competitors that threaten their markets and stable fossil-fuels and nuclear energy investments and fat money streams. It’s more dirty-tricks marketplace politics on their part.
To immediately begin to minimize our industrial contribution to global warming while still supplying our industrial and modern society’s building, infrastructure and transportation fuel energy needs stably and plentifully at low or modest cost and break our dependence on environmentally and politically problematical fossil fuels (primarily coal, fossil oil and fracking-extracted vapor natural gas) and nuclear power plants for our fuel energy supplies, we need to do the following:
1. Changeover coal-fired power plants to methane and frackless NG power plants for generating and supplying electricity and supplying fuel vapor methane or natural gas to homes, offices, facilities and infrastructure, including vehicle fueling stations, by cable and pipelines for charging electric vehicles and fueling CNG/CMG-electric hybrid vehicles and CNG-CMG-only vehicles (CNG means compressed vapor natural gas and CMG means compressed vapor methane gas, which are interchangeable for fueling purposes);
(Already some states have changed over some and are changing over coal-fired power plants generally to NG-sourced power plants for generating and distributing electricity and fuel NG)
2. Gradually phase out nuclear power plants and replace them with combination NG/MG-solar and wind-turbine power plants;
3. Patronize and changeover our transportation to all-electric, CNG/CMG-electric hybrid, flexifuel/biofuel-electric hybrid vehicles and hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles, when the latter are not so exceptionally expensive;
(When one takes time to think about it, it makes poor sense to use also dirty, albeit less dirty, CO2- and methane-emitting NG to power vehicles, other than large trucks, until plug-in hybrid-electric automobile technology, preferably CNG-electric hybrid such technology, makes this efficient and economical, in relief from and replacement of very CO2-dirty gasoline derived from politically and environmentally problematic fossil oil. It does little practical and no long-term good to replace an extreme CO2-emitting fuel (gasoline) with a moderate CO2-emitting fuel, where the latter (NG) could be rendered almost totally harmless and kept out of the atmosphere, along with its CO2 and methane emissions, when converted to electricity in electricity generating power plants and replace fossil-fuels and dirtiest CO2-emitting coal that is burned, and cannot be converted cleanly into electricity, to generate 44.5% of the power-plant electricity it currently generates in the US, www.eia.doe.gov › Electricity. NG, together with methane gas, and solar, wind-turbine, geothermal and hydro energy, should be used to replace both coal and nuclear sources of electricity generation, virtually immediately, as non-fracking-derived NG, or NG and methane from sewage, can do now. Their clean-sourced electricity can be most prudently used to power maximally clean-running plug-in all-electric and much-cleaner-running electric-CNG/MG or gasoline hybrid vehicles over conventional gasoline powered vehicles.
Finite NG and would-be pipeline-vulnerable NG/MG most efficiently should primarily be confined to and used for generating electricity, at electricity generating powerhouses, that in turn is transmitted via electrical power cables to homes, offices, miscellaneous buildings, facilities and fuel-energy dependent infrastructure and should not be used directly as a vapor or liquid gas to power vehicles other than electric-CNG/MG hybrid vehicles, and these for no more than several decades, while our fuel-energy economy transitions to a totally clean and safe solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biofuels-dominated fuel-energy economy. Incidentally, drill-baby-drill for domestic oil production is purely for sucking out and selling the last drops of fossil oil from the U.S. at lowest overhead expense and therefore at maximal profit, and not for long-term dirty fossil-oil self sufficiency, as all of our potential domestic fossil-oil deposits and reserves could only supply the U.S. for less than 10 years.
Again incidentally, as much as environmentalist green thinkers, including me, may want alternative, clean, renewable sources of fuel energy to supplant fossil fuels for powering our society now or in the short term, given that utility companies and municipalities are structurally and strategically better able to initiate such change on a relatively rapid, mass and nationwide scale by starting with the cleanest, most widely distributed or immediately distributable fuel sources from among those currently being used, the actual rate of changeover in the demand marketplace for adoption of the alternative clean, renewable fuel energy sources by the more than a combined hundred million households, businesses, nonprofit organizations and government offices of our economy is and will be much lower and slower than the actual and potential rate of changeover in the supply marketplace to cleaner and clean alternative fuels by utility companies, forced by federal and state legislation to increasingly diminish and gradually eliminate fossil-fuels air pollutants and greenhouse emissions, particularly CO2 emissions. This supply-side marketplace first adoption of cleaner and clean, alternative fuel energy sources by creators and distributors of electricity and derivative wet fuels by mandated definite and scheduled phase in at their power plants will guarantee certain and swiftest whole-transportation-system changeover to cleaner and clean, alternative fuel energy sources, encompassing both the supply and demand fuel-energy sides. The starting transitional fuel sources, of course, would be no other than NG and methane gas (for making CNG and CMG, liquified NG and methane gasoline, and electricity), which utility companies and municipal sewage treatment plants are already technologically set up to use or produce. This cleanest fossil fuels transitional phase is necessary as a proactive matter of practical economic efficiency, in not shutting down or disrupting our fuel energy economy by government fiat for instant changeover to a cleanest possible fuel energy economy and without politically impossibly and undemocratically attempting to compel nationally all real-property-owning individuals and entities to solarize, or otherwise alternative-energy engineer, their buildings at their own expense and often lacking, unsuited or indisposed financial means and affordability. Utility companies and municipalities also would be more amenable to cleaner and clean fuel energy-sourced electricity production changeover respectively for sustained profits or new income and profit sources for the sale of alternative cleaner or clean fuel energy competitive in price with maximally politically and environmentally problematical coal, fossil-oil and nuclear sourced fuel energy.
In further digression, some environmentalists among us are not only opposed to all fossil-fuel and nuclear sources of fuel energy but are opposed to and disqualify solar, wind, hydro and bio-fuel sources as acceptable too for being ecologically or environmentally imperfect, as well as are opposed to cars, airplanes and motor-powered watercraft, in addition to eating meat. Sorry to these clean and angelic innocence absolutists, the vast majority of people in the industrialized, technologically advanced nations will not abandon civilization and its amenities and submit to vegan totalitarianism and revert the entire Earth to a pristine, wildlife planet and infantile-innocence utopia neverland. These industrial and technological minimalists or nihilists should volunteer for human settlement of Mars where there is no volcanism or insect, animal or human activity or enterprise to pollute the atmosphere, no grass, turf or insects to unavoidably step on when one walks on the ground, no plants and animals for other plants or animals and humans to overrun, supplant, fight with, hurt, injure, kill and eat, no war or blood feuds among social insects, carnivores, primates and humans, etc., no unnatural, artificial hi-tech industry and technology, no earthquakes, no extreme weather events such as thunder and rain storms, and no hurricanes, tornadoes and tidal waves, etc. However, it is lethally cold on the surface of Mars for any life as we know it and the atmosphere is too thin to support complex respiratory life on its surface, which is also under atmospherically unobstructed, nonstop saturation bombardment by life-killer cosmic rays. Earthly observable life as we know it could only exist on the surface of Mars in technology created greenhouse-like bubble shields, preferably doming expansively giant craters, and would require an industrial energy source in or to those bubbles to generate electricity, at a minimum, for heat to thermally support human habitation and communal hippie bicycle-riding life there and for chemically breaking down, vaporizing and liquifying the ice there to produce oxygen, vapor and water to provide for their plumbing, irrigating, vegetating and crop farming, drinking, cooking and sanitation needs, among others. This situation would present the settlers with the choice of opting for fossil and/or nuclear fuel energy and/or solar and wind fuel energy (where Mars is endlessly rich in both sunlight and wind) to enable these. If they would obviously opt for biodigester methane gas from their sewage together with NG (which has been detected as emanating as methane gas from Mars’s surface) combined with inexhaustible, minimal-labor 24/7-convergent globally power-cable-belted-and-webbed solar and wind fuel energy there for this purpose, why can they not accept the latter energy sources here on Earth? To these environmentally clean absolutists I say that ecologically and environmentally minimally imperfect industrial societies and technology, in progress, are far from being the next biggest problem to the planet — after the problem of the serious human sources of global warming — when compared to the problem of human overpopulation and invasion and engulfment of all of the planet’s marine and terrestrial wildernesses and their wholesale economic colonization and commodification, followed with the consequential destruction and depletion of the biological and biology-supporting stocks and resources of the planet, for amoral profit and out of desperation, well within this century (a problem for which the solution is straightforward but not easy nor democratically nor religiously clear at this time, absent a state of raging tragic crisis: morally and democratically accomplished human reproduction and overpopulation control).
Calls for conferring marketplace advantage on and indefinitely mainstreaming CO2-emitting, global-warming fossil-fuel natural gas and CNG vehicles by federal and state government declarations and executive orders that all government vehicle purchases will be of CNG-powered vehicles, and by their patronage of these cars, to the exclusion of all-electric and hybrid vehicles, in the purported interest of domestic fuel-energy production and supply self-sufficiency and independence from foreign petroleum, and for the purpose of establishing and anchoring both a significant and manufacturing incentivizing market for competitively priced CNG vehicles, without regard to their contribution to globally adverse climate change, amount to calls for a formidable assault on the large-scale growth of the nascent cleanest electric and hybrid vehicle manufacturer and consumer markets. They are also an assault on the growth of the nascent environmentally clean and compatible alternative renewable carbon-free and non-polluting, respectively, electricity and petro energy sources of solar, wind-turbine, geothermal, hydro and non-cropland and non-wildlife-land, largely bio-waste-derived biofuels, and their production industries, for the preservation of the fossil-fuels industry’s fuel-energy dominance and the minimization of its emergent clean energy rivals. Such advantage and patronage would be to perpetuate the fossil-fuels energy-source and industry monopoly and permanently sideline and marginalize alternative renewable energy sources of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and non-farmland biofuels for electricity generation and electric-vehicle and hybrid mass transportation for the long-term foreseeable future, which are otherwise poised to be and could be powered by electricity generated by clean alternative renewable energy sources.
CNG Cars Are Inferior to the New-Era Plug-in All-Electric & Hybrid Cars
Though natural gas is a good replacement for coal-fired and nuclear power-plant generation of electricity, compressed-natural-gas motor vehicles, overall, are inadequate competitors with the new generation of electric and hybrid motor vehicles.
Electric and hybrid electric-gas vehicles are more efficient and better performing vehicles overall than CNG vehicles. In paraphrase, “CNG, which is 90% methane gas, produces 30% more greenhouse gases than hybrids, CNG vehicles are 25.6% less fuel efficient than hybrids, based on comparison of CNG Honda Civic GX with a Honda Civic hybrid (although CNG is 40% cheaper than the prevailing price of gasoline in GGE, gallons of gasoline equivalent in CNG) and CNG vehicles, like electric and hybrid vehicles (except for the Lincoln Continental hybrid), are several thousands of dollars more expensive than the corresponding model of conventional gasoline vehicles”, www.consumerenergycenter.org/transportation/afvs/cng.html, Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) as a Transportation Fuel, autos.yahoo.com › … › Technology › Natural Gas, Natural Gas Myths. Although methane gas is the cleanest burning fossil fuel with respect to emitting CO2 and atmospheric pollutants, it is among the most potent atmospheric heating-trapping, or greenhouse, gases, www.epa.gov/methane/,www.naturalgas.org/environment/naturalgas.asp. Hybrid vehicles, let alone all-electric vehicles, are cleaner running than fossil fuels vehicles even though their electricity comes in part from coal, supplying of 44.5% of grid electricity, and would still be cleaner running if coal supplied 100% of their electricity, www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/vehicles/electric_benefits.htm, www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/vehicles/electric_benefits.html, ww.plugincars.com/coal-fired-electricity-headed-massive-declines-electric-cars-benefit.html, http://my.epri.com/portal/server.pt?Abstract_id=000000000001015325. Electric vehicles are also less expensive to operate than purely fossil fuels vehicles, www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/vehicles/electric_benefits.htm, www.electric-car-hybrids.com/Electric+Car+Kwh+Per+Mile.htm: non-plug-in hybrid vehicles usually cost $0.05 to $0.07 per mile to operate compared to conventional vehicles, which cost $0.10 to $0.15 per mile to operate. Plug-in Hybrid vehicles can be expected to cost $0.02 to $0.04 per mile (based on average U.S. electricity price). When operating on gasoline, a hybrid vehicle will cost $0.05 to $0.07 per mile compared to conventional (all category of gasoline) vehicles, which cost $0.10 to $0.15 per mile to operate. A typical electric vehicle costs $0.02 to $0.04 per mile for its electric fuel (based on average U.S. electricity price). Since CNG-vehicle fuel costs are 40% less than the cost of gasoline, their operating costs per mile would be circa $0.06 to $0.09.
(For further reading on methane gas, mouse-click on and read www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/NGasI.pdf)
When compared on both environmentally friendly and critical consumer performance criteria, plug-in electric and plug-in electric/fossil-fuel hybrid vehicles outperform CNG-only powered vehicles. Compressed natural gas vehicles take more time to fuel than hybrid or electric vehicles, with no innovation in sight to improve their slow normal full-tank fueling time of 8 hours and more (non-storage time fill of a gallon per hour at a company dispenser and a half-gallon per hour at a home dispenser, for fills taking from 8 to up to 12 hours, and storage quick fill at a public commercial dispenser, taking the same amount of time as a normal gasoline car fill up), www.ngvc.org/mktplace/cng101.html,www.ngvc.org/mktplace/cng101.html, whereas China’s BYD Co. plug-in all-electric car, the BYD’s e6, which has a moderate per-battery-charge driving range of circa 160 miles, has a full charge/recharge time of 20 to 30 minutes and a half charge time of 10 minutes www.byd.com/buzz/company-news/ (there is also the BYD F3DM hybrid, with similar but lesser road performance features as the hybrid Chevy Volt [where the Volt has a total driving range of 375 miles on its combined 35-mile plug-in electric drive charge, at a cost of circa $1.50 in electricity usage from a plug-in charge, and additional seamless 340-mile drive automatically initiated from a full tank of gasoline generating electric fuel, http://www.chevrolet.com/volt/ ] and the BYD all-electric eBUS-12, all of which were extensively fleet tested without operating problems in hot and cold weather — it’s no wonder why Warren Buffett, the investment sage of Omaha, made a major Berkshire-Hathaway investment in this company several years ago). (Subsequent to the writing of this article, on 06-09 & 10-2011 the mass news media reported that Ford Motors has announced that its 2012 C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid car, operating on the similar automotive-engineering principles as the Chevy Volt, will have a driving range of 500 miles from a single combine batter-charge and gas-tank fill-up or full load, www.indiaeveryday.in/…/news-ford-to-have-plug-in-hybrid-with-500-mile-range-1025-2703509.htm. Also, the City of Seoul Metropolitan Government of South Korea operates full-sized plug-in electric buses that fully recharge in 30 minutes, facetak.com/…/S-Korea-unveils-e-bus-route-Nike-Air-Max-Women 03-2011, autos.globaltimes.cn/world/2011-01/609390.html, and the typical full charge for an electric car ranges from between 45 minutes and 2 hours at a hi-speed public EV charger, 3 to 8 hours at a house-garage 220-volt electrical outlet, to circa 8 hours at a standard house-garage 110-volt outlet,wiki.answers.com › … › Categories › Cars & Vehicles (A level-III EV quick charger can half charge a 100-miles-per-full-charge Nissan Leaf in 5 minutes and do an 80% charge on it in less than 30 minutes, planetgreen.discovery.com › Tech & Transport). If BYD Company ever licenses its fast electric-car-battery charge and/or chargeability technology to (the) other electric vehicle makers (or if the other companies come up with competitive fast-charging technology on their own), among these Tesla Motors with 3 versions of its mass-market S-model car that so-far can drive respectively 160, 230 and 300 miles on a single battery charge that quick charges in 45 minutes (it is not clear whether this is a half charge or a full charge at a public hi-speed charger), http://www.teslamotors.com/models/specs, all-electric vehicles will have an overwhelming urban-driving advantage over NG-powered vehicles, which hybrid electric-gasoline vehicles already have. When a 300-or-more-mile driving range for all-electric vehicles is common or standard and the public electric-vehicle recharging infrastructure is widespread (at which the all-electric and electric-fossil fuel hybrid vehicles will naturally become purchase dominant over gasoline-only powered vehicles), they will become dominant, providing the drivability problem with one make of a small EV in freezing weather has been overcome — a problem for that small EV make that can be resolved with CNG hybrid-drive support. If all-weather, maximal-range CNG vehicle drive is combined with fast-charging, maximal-range electric vehicle drive in hybrid electric-CNG vehicles, our nation’s transportation system will be well on its way toward promptly achieving fuel-energy independence from worldwide drill-baby-drill fossil oil and unethical cropland produced oil and pretext wars to steal foreign oil, at substantially lowered CO2 global-warming greenhouse-gas emissions and pollution of the atmosphere by these new relatively clean electric-CNG hybrid vehicles. Over the long term, with major advances in electric vehicle drive-range and minimal-charging-time technology, and with the ubiquity of electric-vehicle recharging stations and ports, still CO2-problematical CNG vehicles should be phased out, except for perhaps large trucks (like big rigs), that are better served with CNG drive than all-electric drive, but maybe not hybrid drive.
Shove Off Putt-Putt Natural Gas Cars & It’s Toilet Flush Time for All CO2-Stinker Fossil-Fuels Fart Cars
Also, new-generation all-electric vehicles entail minimal maintenance and repair, as they have no transmission and require no tune-ups or oil fill-ups and changes; furthermore, they have superior starting and acceleration power than conventional fossil-fuels-powered, sole internal-combustion-engine vehicles, and those made by the major automobile manufacturers can travel at conventional gas vehicle speeds (85 to 125 mph), but technically at much higher speeds, and run very smoothly and quietly, and have driving ranges per full charge of 85 miles to 300 miles, whereas the average daily urban car commute is less than 60 (forty miles) miles, ww.evsroll.com/Advantages_of_Electric_Car.html, www.pluginamerica.org/vehicles?page=6&order…speed…, chargedsv.org/wp-content/uploads/…/EV-Fleet-WG-Powerpoint-v3.pdf. As of 01-01-2009, the highest speed all-electric vehicle, the Aero EV, could accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds and reach a top cruising speed of 208 mph, had a driving range of between 150 to 200 miles, and the potential for a full battery charge or recharge in 10 minutes with the aid of a charge-on-the-run on-board charging system, www.dailymail.co.uk/…/Worlds-fastest-electric-car-speed-208mph-launched.html. The biggest task for clean-vehicle manufacturers will be to make and sell high-performance plug-in all-electric and hybrid vehicles that are affordable to blue-collar and pink-collar workers. )
4. Encourage and expand electric rail and hi-speed rail for cargo and mass human transport;
5. Since methane gas (inclusive of natural gas), the cleanest burning fossil fuel, is such a potentially technologically and economically valuable fuel energy resource, it might be worthwhile environmentally and industrially for both scientific academia and big business to aggressively explore how to and find ways to extract atmospheric heat-trapping and global-warming methane gas from the atmosphere (“mining the atmosphere and skies” while cleaning them, http://www.epa.gov/outreach/scientific.html) and recycling it for its clean conversion to electricity, compressed vapor methane gas and liquefied methane gas for meeting all of our electro-tech industrialized society’s fuel energy needs, in conjunction with the renewable fuel energy resources of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biofuels from both food and ecological waste. It could be endlessly quite profitable to do this and thus be an outstanding investment for the fossil fuels companies and make them good corporate citizens with regard to defusing global warming and adverse climate change. Low-expense solar-cell aerial drones and hovercraft engineered and constructed on the permanent stay-in-flight example of the U.S. Army’s eternal-flight solar-cell-powered aerial drone named the Zephyr might have some part in this enterprise, defense-update.com/wp/20100824_zephyr_solar_powered_uav.html, www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10664362, www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10664362. Such an undertaking would spare the eradication of cattle herds whose manure is blamed for much of the heat-trapping methane gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, not to mention the eradication of humans and all the other domestic and wild animals occupying the surface of the Earth, spanning the whole gamut of animal species from insects to mammals and birds, all of whose feces is a much greater source of methane emission into the atmosphere. By the way, the dynamism for global warming’s wacky weather and climate events arises from and is driven largely by the increasingly warmed oceans and seas, heated by the increasingly polluted atmosphere and heat-trapping gases, chemicals and chemical compounds in the atmosphere — something, for the most part, the common human animal, like the other animals of the Earth’s surface, does not feel or observe directly. This is to say that the hydrosphere (the water bodies of our planet, particularly the major ones) significantly absorbs increasingly more heat from the increasingly more highly heat-packed, particularly upper, atmosphere, by way of warmer precipitation, that is doubly warmed, or kept warmer, in the rise-and-fall cycle of its evaporation process and state and ascent from the warmer hydrosphere to its rise into the greenhouse-gas heat-trapping upper atmosphere to form clouds, precipitation and extreme weather events — the warmer oceans and seas, whose often powerful and busy waves naturally and constantly generate electrical current and winds, and which are rich in salts and hydrocarbons and other volatile chemistry for breeding and driving weather, also melt the once largely stably frozen polar glaciers and tundra that when liquified result in increased ocean and sea levels, and atmospheric moisture,http://www.thehcf.org/images/2007/3B_feedbackS.jpg. Just as the right mix of moisture, gases, heat, air-pressure dynamics, clashing-temperatures and combustible chemical interactions in the upper atmosphere spawn and fuel both wet and dry turbulence and storms there, they similarly breed, brew and fuel — in interaction with the seasons and geographical locations — hydrospheric storms at the marine and terrestrial levels in the form of typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, extreme precipitation and shear winds, as well as, in interaction with atmospheric conditions, heat waves, droughts, deep freezes, ice storms, and so forth.
6. Please talk about this alternative renewable energy proposal and recommend public support for its implementation to your elected local, state and federal representatives. (Incidentally, nuclear waste reprocessing plants can only process a small fraction of problematic nuclear waste for re-use).
Special References and Notes Related to References Embedded in Text
EIA – U.S. Energy Information Agency www.eia.doe.gov › Electricity
Electric Power Industry 2009: Year in Review
Electric Power Annual with data for 2009
Report Released: November 23, 2010
Report Revised: January 2011, April 2011
Next Release Date: November 2011
Report Revised: January 2011, April 2011
Next Release Date: November 2011
Coal. Coal-fired electric generation declined 11.6 percent between 2008 and 2009. With this decline, coal’s share of electricity generation reached its lowest level since 1978: 44.5 percent of electricity generation in 2009, down from 48.2 percent in 2008.
Natural gas-fired power generation increased by 4.3 percent in 2009, raising natural gas’s share of the electricity market to 23.3 percent—its highest share since 1970. Natural gas’s share of the electricity market has been greater than the nuclear share since 2006. New capacity, as well as the increased utilization of existing generators (see Table 5.2 on capacity factors), account for the increase in share.
Nuclear power generation accounted for 20.2 percent of the electricity generated in 2009, a 0.9-percent decrease from the prior year. The decline in nuclear generation in 2009 is the result of scheduled and unscheduled plant outages and derates.
Hydroelectric power generation fluctuates perennially with precipitation levels and snow accumulation. Overall, generation from conventional hydro plants (exclusive of pumped storage) increased 7.3 percent from 2008 to 2009 (Table ES.1).
Renewables. Total non-hydro renewable generation increased 14.4 percent in 2009, following a 19.8-percent increase in 2008. The fastest-growing component was wind power (33.5-percent increase). Solar generation increased 3.1 percent. Since 1998, generation from non-hydro renewables has increased 87.2 percent.
In 2009, renewable generation made up 10.6 percent of total generation. The largest three contributors were hydro (6.9 percent), wind (1.9 percent), followed by wood and wood-derived fuels (0.9 percent). Discounting the hydro portion, renewable generation made up 3.6 percent of total generation.
www.eia.doe.gov › Electricity
Department of Energy - Electric Power
While coal is the nation’s major fuel for electric power, natural gas is the fastest growing fuel. More than 90 percent of the power plants to be built in …
www.energy.gov › Energy Sources ,
www.energy.gov › Energy Sources ,
While coal is the nation’s major fuel for electric power, natural gas is the fastest growing fuel. More than 90 percent of the power plants to be built in the next 20 years will likely be fueled by natural gas. Natural gas is also likely to be a primary fuel for distributed power generators – mini-power plants that would be sited close to where the electricity is needed.
Nevertheless, coal power plants are responsible for 93 percent of the sulfur … and 80percent of the nitrogen oxide emissions generated by the electric …
www.powerscorecard.org/tech_detail.cfm?resource_id=2
www.powerscorecard.org/tech_detail.cfm?resource_id=2
“…coal power plants are responsible for 93 percent of the sulfur dioxide and 80 percent of the nitrogen oxide emissions generated by the electric utility industry”
“Coal plants emit 73 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from electricity generators.”
©2000 Pace University, White Plains, New York
EPA – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Manure can be used for gas, electricity and fuel for a boiler, … Local farmers have contracted with Panda to supply the manure free of charge just to get … Using methane in this way also prevents animal waste from polluting the ground … They use it to run an engine/generator to produce electricity. Cow Power …www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_biomass-manure.htm
Apr 29, 2011 … JUNCTION CITY — The 750 cows at Lochmead Farms, … It uses methanefrom cow manure to produce electricity. … New technology, known as a “biodigester,” is capturing methane gas from the manure and using it to power a …www.registerguard.com/…/energy-lochmead-farms-project-dairy.html.csp
Video shows cow manure produces biogas methane to generate electicity. … Cowpower in the form of biogas from cow manure can actually be used to produce electricity for … A. Through a process called anaerobic digestion manure can produce a gas … We want dairies, other farmers, food processors, municipal sewage …
Sep 23, 2008 … COW POWER Cows at Green Mountain Dairy Farm, right, one of four … that converts the methane gas from cow manure into electricity that … helps the Rowellsgenerate more electricity and saves Ben & Jerry’s the cost of disposing of it. … “We’re saving money by not using sawdust, reducing original …www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/…/24farmers.html
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in …
www.epa.gov/methane/
Natural gas is the cleanest of all the fossil fuels, as evidenced in the … Composed primarily of methane, the main products of the combustion of natural gas are …. Because of its clean burning nature, the use of natural gas wherever …
www.naturalgas.org/environment/naturalgas.asp [PDF
Natural Gas
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
gas is mostly methane, but it also contains small amounts of other … Natural gas and propane are the cleanest burning fossil fuels. …
www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/NGasI.pdf
gas is mostly methane, but it also contains small amounts of other … Natural gas and propane are the cleanest burning fossil fuels. …
www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/NGasI.pdf
Update: QinetiQ’s Zephyr solar powered unmanned aircraft soars to …
The solar powered drone mission continues above the US Army’s Yuma … The current goal is to fly for a further week and prove Zephyr is the world’s first truly eternal plane, … Following the flight, QinetiQ is claiming three world records for the Zephyr: … Name (required): E-Mail (required): Website: Comment: …
defense-update.com/wp/20100824_zephyr_solar_powered_uav.htm
defense-update.com/wp/20100824_zephyr_solar_powered_uav.htm
Jul 16, 2010 … The craft took off from the US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona at 1440… Zephyr is basically the first ‘eternal aircraft’” … and the bigger drones now operated by the military still need to return to base at …
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10664362
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10664362
Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center: Benefits of …pr 5, 2011 … Benefits of Hybrid, Plug-in Hybrid, and All-Electric Vehicles … HEVs usuallycost $0.05 to $0.07 per mile to operate compared to … to $0.04 per mile for fuel (based onaverage U.S. electricity price). Sources and Related Reports. Comparing Energy Costs per Mile for Electric and Gasoline-Fueled …www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/vehicles/electric_benefits.html
Electric Car Kwh Per Mile… but for kWh (electric car) or kg (CNG running car) would you use miles per kWh … EVs use about 0.25 kWh per mile… Tags: Car Electric Conversion … Costs: Per-mile cost: Onaverage, using either an AC or DC motor, … mile 0 2 to 0 3 kWh km 3 4 The U S fleetaverage of 23 mpg of gasoline is equivalent to …
www.electric-car-hybrids.com/Electric+Car+Kwh+Per+Mile.htm
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