First discovery of a new electricity source in more than 160 years...

[Immortal Wombat]

thanks

[Q Classic]

yeah, but you're a girl. that alone sends a bunch of the people here into twitters.

[st_swithin]

Well, at least it works for me somewhere. Doesn't do a damn thing for me in RL, that's for sure.

[Q Classic]

hey, we should set up a st_swithin fan club, like the ones we had for blackwidow and femmeadonis...

[st_swithin]

Thanks. I'm not sure if my poor little Asian-influenced sense of humility could stand the pressure though.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Dissident
we have many better ways of generating electricity. but we still have crappy ways of storing electricity

One word: Hydrogen. I recently saw a TV program about the "hydrogen revolution", very interesting.

Let me see...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen.html

http://people.howstuffworks.com/hydrogen-economy.htm

http://www.emagazine.com/january-february_2003/0103feat1.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,793581,00.html

[Q Classic]

even with bush's investment, it's not going to happen. it's fuel cells or bust.

to develop an infrastructure based around hydrogen would be extraordinarily expensive, not to mention difficult to actually roll out.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by ixnay
Oh crap my cellphone has run dry let me go fill it up

Yeah -- don't you hate it when that happens?

[MrFun]

Originally posted by mrmitchell
We're going to find that some liquids do it better than others. A far-off distant place will hold most of the liquids. We will endlessly meddle in their affairs.

I'll stick to supporting solar + hydrogen + hydro + nuclear, at least until these things become seriously efficient.

You say you're going to support the types of energy you mentioned only until they become more efficient, then AFTER they become more efficient, you're not going to support them?

[st_swithin]

I want to see what happens with the pentaparticles. Maybe they'll find a use for the quarktets.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
even with bush's investment, it's not going to happen. it's fuel cells or bust.

to develop an infrastructure based around hydrogen would be extraordinarily expensive, not to mention difficult to actually roll out.

we did it with gasoline. It's not like it's impossible.

[Wraith]

--"we did it with gasoline. It's not like it's impossible."

Depends how you're defining impossible. Certianly not impossible from a technical standpoint, but there are a couple things to consider.
One is that we've already got a distribution system for gasoline. When we built that infrastructure, there wasn't one for anything directly competitive (unless you want to count coal, but there weren't ever many coal-burning cars). Replacing a legacy system is always going to be more difficult than creating a new one from scratch.
Second is that the technology would be more difficult. Hydrogen isn't the easiest stuff to move around. The best bet would be to use things like the mini-nuke plant in the other thread to have point-production scattered around where necessary, but politically that one will never happen (NIMBY, etc). Unfortunately, that doesn't leave much. I don't think solar or wind are reliable and predictable enough for people to want to base a business (ie. their hydro-gas station) off of them, and if we're making it with power from coal and oil... well, what's the point? Hydrogen just doesn't transport well, which means it doesn't lend itself to a few large-scale factories and distribution centers.

Wraith
"I'm an engineer, not a normal person."
-- Dilbert ("Dilbert")

[Q Classic]

yes, we did it with gasoline. but gasoline, after it was rolled out, was very quickly profitable.

i don't see the same result with h. too many people will be using the old cars, using old engines, and gasoline will be cheaper, at least for the first few years, if not permanently.

unless it's heavily subsidized by the government, even as it runs at heavy losses for several years, the infrastructure will not develop.

[mrmitchell]

Originally posted by MrFun




You say you're going to support the types of energy you mentioned only until they become more efficient, then AFTER they become more efficient, you're not going to support them?

'These things' refers to the runnnig water devices

[The Vagabond]

LOL. I bet if you simply rub silk ( or should it be wool?) against a glass wand you'll get more electricity, and with less energy expenditure. Sure, their work is interesting. But it doesn't justify the kind of fuss produced around it (well, it seems that U of A excels at publicity). As people here already pointed out, all this makes sense only if it is (at least, remotely) feasible to get more energy out of it than the energy pumped in to pump the water flow. Unfortunately, the cited article avoids mentioning this problem at all. So, for now, it looks like exploding an atomic bomb in order to heat up a cup of coffee. Any comparison with solar batteries is irrelevant and confusing, since we don't need to pump any energy for them to work (the energy comes from the sun). As for the physical effect itself, it was known before. But, again, their work is interesting and important, if only because they've achieved a better quantitative understanding of the effect. They've done a good job (at least, the graduate student Yang did ), and they don't deserve such a false and silly publicity.

a new method of generating electric power by harnessing the natural electrokinetic properties of a liquid such as ordinary tap water, by pumping fluids through tiny microchannels.

Pumping fluids through tiny microchannels requires a hell lot of energy by itself, and is itself a subject of studies how to do it more efficiently.

But on the other hand, I can imagine a practical application on a "by-product" basis. For example, if you have a system where water gets pumped through tiny microchannels anyway (for some other reason), why not to harness the electricity thereby produced. Perhaps even a small amount of electricity produced in this way will be useful for something within the same device.