Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinnkai
YOU CANT FUCKING RUN A CAR ON WATER WITHOUT EXPENDING MORE FUELS IN CHARGING THE BATTERY.
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Fine, fine.. delete the word fossil.
I will deign that running an electrolysis car off of solar energy WOULD be effective.
You're still expending other fuels. My argument was thermodynamic, not practical. I realize that you can't really consider sunlight as a "depleting" resource in the conventional sense. My primary argument is that most people advocating "water cars" don't understand that it is truly "electrolysis cars" and that that electrolysis requires another energy source.
Solar powered "water cars" are the ONLY subset of "water cars" that would be economically viable.
From "Net Energy Analysis for sustainable energy production from silicon based solar cells" (2002, ASME):
Quote:
It is readily apparent from Figures 1-3 that all silicon based
solar cells in any type of design and placed anywhere in the
U.S. will pay for themselves in terms of energy over their
lifetime. This is counter to the resilient myth that solar cells
will never be viable because they cannot ever make up for their
embodied energy. This myth started with an analysis of very
early cells [19] and continues today because of the confusion
generated by the economically based “emergy” analysis [20].
The payback time ranges from about 1 year for BIPV
installations in Phoenix made from high efficiency a-Si (Fig.
3b) to nearly 5 years for low efficiency c-Si in a centralized
power plant located in Detroit (Fig. 1a). The fact that devices
constructed from the second most abundant element in the
Earth’s crust can payback the energy used in their fabrication
in under five years make silicon based solar cells an extremely
attractive major source of energy. In the thirty-year lifetime
looked at here Si based solar cells will produce between 6 and
31 times the amount of energy used to produce them (Fig. 1a
and 3b).
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They would be
quite effective, however.