Energy

*INSULATE (2685)

If you want to make your home more comfortable, and cut down on energy bills, one thing you can do immediately and cheaply is to insulate.

My single-pane windows transferred heat and cold very readily, so I cut out sheets of pink extruded-foam insulation to fit my windows. I put duct tape around the edges to keep them from crumbling. Then I covered these pieces of foam with contact paper that matched the walls on the inside and outside of my house. I used clear tape around the edges to keep the contact paper from peeling.

During the winter I keep them up most of the time, except when the sun is hitting a particular window. During the summer I reverse the process. My home stays much more comfortable now.

It gets so cold here, and these Tedsulaters insulate so well, that sometimes when I’ve taken them down in the morning, the insides of the windows have been covered with very thick ice.

In the summer, your house can stay much cooler if shades are put on the outside of your windows. That way the heat doesn’t reach the windows, and cannot be transferred into your home. Also, you can keep you home much cooler by keeping the attic better ventilated. Attic fans and large vents keep heat from building up and being transferred into your home.

Even though my motor home’s walls are only 2” thick, and over half of the wall space above 3’ is single-pane glass, from August ’03 to August ’04 I used only 5,217 KWH. That was the year we had our coldest cold snap ever (-18 degrees) and our hottest July ever. The previous year’s (August ‘02 – August ’03) KWH was quite a bit less: 4,628! This may not seem like a big deal except for the fact that my home is powered completely by electricity – I use no propane. I’m hoping to lower my electricity usage even further with a solar water heater.

If you’re wondering if my home would be uncomfortably hot or cold with such miserly use of electricity – wonder no more. I can’t sleep in a very warm room, and year-‘round I prefer wearing only the amount of clothes required by law.

*Every year the U.S. receives eighty thousand quadrillion BTU’s of energy from the sun – over one thousand times what we receive from all other sources combined. Russell Peterson (2389)

Tired of your high energy bills? Why not try solar power to heat your water and home. Or use it to cook your food and generate electricity. It’s free – with no planned rate hikes. And it should be arriving quite consistently for a few billion years.

If you don’t want strange-looking contraptions on the roof of your home, then why not use shingles that generate electricity? A man named Subhendu Guha has invented a shingle that does just that. Using his shingles on 1/3 of your roof will provide all your home’s electrical needs when the sun is shining. Read more about this on pg. 85 of the July ’97 issue of Discover magazine.

*HYDROGEN – It’s not just for bombs anymore. (2511)

In Mrs. Rehn’s 8 th grade science class we took a beaker of water and put two electrodes in it. We hooked the electrodes up to a battery and watched as bubbled came off the electrodes. The bubbles were oxygen and hydrogen. We inverted another beaker over it to catch the hydrogen, and after a while lit a cigarette lighter next to the inverted beaker. A barely discernable blue flash let us know our experiment was successful. Hydrogen is an inexhaustible fuel source. When you burn it, the exhaust “fumes” are water vapor, so if you sat in a closed-up garage full of hydrogen-burning cars with their motors running, all you’re going to get is a sauna. Wouldn’t it be something to live in a city with crystal clean air!

A gas-burning car that is switched over to hydrogen will get 20% better fuel efficiency, and still have about the same horse-power. Also the motor oil won’t get black. Since a fuel tank for a hydrogen-burning car is three times as big as a gas tank, you’re going to need a big car. A ’64 Cadillac Fleetwood sounds good. A ’79 Lincoln Town Car sounds even better. Or how about a big SUV, or a full-sized van. Cool! And you won’t even be accused of supporting terrorism or not driving for Jesus.

But these cars are gas hogs (oops!) – hydrogen hogs. So. Make your own. You have electricity and water don’t you? Yes, it’s that easy. If you want free electricity, then use sunlight and photovoltaic cells. And you don’t need clean water either.

Hydrogen can be used to power rockets (moon rockets), planes, busses, trains, motorcycles, etc., and can be used to cook your dinner and heat your house. It can be put in a generator and used to make electricity. Sunlight is free and water is very available (you can use sea-water too), so the American people, and the people of the world could be energy self-sufficient. We wouldn’t have to rely on utility companies, energy bureaucracies, and multinational conglomerates any more.

Another way to generate electricity is to use wind power. Windmills are less difficult to make than cars, and have a proven track record of more than 25 years. Some mathematicians say that 12 million windmills could generate all the electricity needed - to make all the hydrogen needed - to fuel our entire nation. Windmills can cost about the same as new cars, and since America can make more than 12 million cars per year, that means, theoretically, we can make enough windmills in one year to fuel America.

What happens when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing? Some of the hydrogen that was made from the electricity could fuel generators until the sun comes up or the wind starts blowing again.

Scientists are also working with algae to produce the least expensive hydrogen. They say that a few very large algae farms could produce all the fuel requirements of our entire nation. And algae work cheap. They’re not even aware of minimum wage laws.

Liquid hydrogen can be sent around the nation in insulated pipelines. If you put a copper cable inside the pipeline you could use it as a superconductor because if the cable is cold enough, electricity can be transported with no loss of power.

If you had a supertanker ship full of hydrogen and you smashed it on the rocks, the hydrogen would evaporate away, leaving an empty ship. If you’re in a car wreck and the fuel tank broke open (highly unlikely since it is made of two strong tanks instead of one thin tank), the hydrogen would vaporized away almost instantly, which means your chances of getting burned are about nil. Hydrogen also doesn’t stick to you like gasoline.

Some scientists tested the explosiveness of hydrogen by firing incendiary bullets into a tank of it. Nothing happened. So they looked at the high-speed movie they took of this experiment. They saw a small flame that lasted for less than one tenth of a second.

Some people might be thinking “What about the Hindenburg? All that fire and all those deaths?” Hydrogen filled airships made around 160 uneventful crossings of the Atlantic before the Hindenburg disaster. The Hindenburg was unwisely flown through an electrical storm when it caught fire. The reason it burned so furiously was because the ship’s skin was coated with the same chemicals that make up thermite, a.k.a. solid rocket fuel. Two-thirds of the people survived. Of the 35 people who died, 33 of them died because they jumped out of the airship when it was still over 100’ in the air.

Still not convinced of the safety of hydrogen? If you don’t like the idea of hydrogen in gas or liquid form fueling your car, hydrogen can now be stored in solid form! A recently invented metal alloy can absorb hydrogen like a sponge and dole it out as needed. This alloy is said to be able to hold twice as much hydrogen as conventional tanks. It can also be put inside the tubular frames of our cars and in other places where the space is wasted. This new alloy can also be used to add strength to the front of a car to help it absorb impacts. Imagine using your fuel tank to cushion a bad crash! Since the hydrogen is bonded to the metal sponge until it is needed, it poses no fire danger if the fuel tank is smashed open. Read more about this at www. ovonics.com

Hydrogen fueled transportation is probably the safest way to go, and is environmentally friendly. Electric cars are environmentally friendly, but are relatively light and fragile. When you get in a wreck, wouldn’t you rather be in a big car than a small economy car?

So, as you now know, there’s no such thing as an energy shortage. There are the occasional contrived “crisis” that empties your pocketbook, drives up energy costs, and consolidates control, but there is no energy shortage.

We should be able to keep our homes as cool or as warm as we want. We should be able to have heated sidewalks, driveways, and roads so we don’t slip and slide on the ice. We should be able to have brilliantly illuminated yards and streets at night to keep bad guys away. We should be able to cruise around in grand old behemoths just for fun. It’s all possible! And if we wanted to, we could probably be the world’s leading fuel exporter!

It’s time to switch over to a hydrogen-fueled economy. The big oil, nuclear, and coal companies wouldn’t have all the control over us that they have now, but they had their day in the sun. It’s our turn now. Educate yourself and your neighbors to the benefits of hydrogen. Write letters to your elected officials. Tell them to stop subsidizing the big, greedy, polluting energy companies and start subsidizing the tax-payers who would like to be environmentally friendly and energy self-sufficient.

Kudos to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger etc. (Republican, California) in his efforts to terminate pollution by proposing a hydrogen highway that will run the length of the Golden State.

A most unique source of unpolluting energy comes from fast-spinning carbon flywheels. 100,000 revolutions per minute fast. Jack Bitterly and his son, Steve, of U.S. Flywheel Systems, Newbury Park, California, have invented 50-pound carbon-fiber flywheels with magnetic bearings that can be used to generate electricity. The electricity then powers electric motors that make cars go. Really go. My question to Messrs. Bitterly – does Junior really need a car with 800 horsepower?

To read about this invention, get a copy of Discover magazine from August of 1996.