New water power torch?

I'd be sceptical about the vehicles but the water torches have been around for decades if not longer and AFAIK are often used by jewellers, the last one I saw was anyway and was somewhat smaller than the one shown.

The narration is very cheesy, but indeed, the concept is very well known.

This is what we should be doing with excess wind and hydro power generation capacity.

Just as soon as we figure out how to store hydrogen for any length of time -- folks have been working on that for decades.

The narration is exceedingly uninformed, and they flat fail to correct a gross misstatement (about this replacing fossil fuels) by the guy's business partner.

Water doesn't power anything. Hydrogen is a decent fuel, but it takes energy to separate it out of water. So separating water into hydrogen and oxygen is a way to store energy, but it only works to the extent that you can efficiently store hydrogen -- and as a species we haven't figured out how to do that.

So this is not some whiz-bang new thing, it's just a retread of a bunch of old things. And they're all old things that -- at best -- we haven't figured out how to use on a large scale yet. And -- at best -- it's just a way to store and maybe transport solar and other alternative energy until it can be used. But hydrogen isn't the only way to store energy, it's still far from proven, and this guy hasn't done anything to advance the state of the art in hydrogen storage.

He said store, not compress. Hydrogen storage has all kinds of problems.

Did you hear about the guy who is selling some old Michael Jackson photos he took in the 70's to finance his world-changing invention: an electric motor that generates more power than it uses. Fortunately this only made the entertainment section and the article was mainly about the photos.

Aside from the issue of storage, converting electricity to hydrogen is actually pretty inefficient at about 50 to 80% depending on the scale and sophistication of the system. Then of course you have to generate the electricity which also has inefficiencies. Then there is the energy needed to compress the hydrogen if it is stored in a conventional cylinder. There are more efficient systems already being used to store the excess electricity generated by power plants. These involve either pumping water uphill or large banks of batteries.

If someone can figure out a good method for storing hydrogen in an adsorbed state, it MAY have some role to play for storing energy for internal combustion use, but there are a lot of hurdles in its way.

Two are that it leaks through steel and makes it brittle, i.e. good shrapnel.

The graph shows good chrome-moly steel losing half its strength in a week.

jsw

Yes, I have had to explain that to a lot of local 'geniuses'. I was waiting to see what he would say first. :)

_Goal_. If something worked and was practical, it wouldn't be a goal.

HTH, indeed.

It would also appear to show the steel that is suitable for the job as the graph shows the results for 4 different steel compositions.

Lets do it then.

And all of them were assesed at 540C

Species! Exactly what I keep telling people, we need a species of bacteria that when put in the sun and given food it produces hydrogen. Mikek

We still couldn't store the hydrogen.

Bacteria that would photosynthesize to an oil that's suitable for refinery feedstock, or to an alcohol, or propane, or just about any other fuel that we actually _could_ store -- that would be cool. And they could photosynthesize straight to coal, and it'd still be carbon-neutral.

I think it's being worked on. I don't think we're there yet.

My sound is on the fritz - is there a transcript anywhere?

Thanks, Rich

Well, go ahead then, End 40 or 50 years of research, and give us the answer.

I've heard that hydrides were once a viable idea, kind of like a metallic Zeolite or something.

Cheers! Rich

Rich Grise fired this volley in news:iqv4jk$f77 $ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

They're still "in the process" with hydrides, but they look very promising.

They've been talking about average energy densities greater than LiPo cells, but capturing hydrogen instead.

Now, to me, that doesn't make sense, because even compressed into a metallic form, it's not _that_ dense. But "they" say...

LLoyd