What form of alternative energy should be developed to solve energy problems we face now and could face later?

Answer 1

Harnessing hydrogen. No negative by products to burning it, just water.

Answer 2

Hydrogen is not an energy source, but a carrier (portable fuel). It's amazing how many people don't know the difference, even journalists. One needs an energy source (coal at present) to create Hydrogen. Yes, good old coal is where it comes from *now*. In the long run, nuclear fusion is the way to go. It needs work though, since it's not practical now. Fission in the interim is needed. With abundant safe energy, you can make all the hydrogen you would ever want from water via electrolysis.

Answer 3

nuclear fission is the best answer. Not nuclear fusion as we have now.
It will give no waste except hydrogen that could be used to create more energy and then only leave water. The theory is quite exciting and has probably been discovered already but oil companys all know once it is readily available then they would be broke and all countries with a supply of water will never fight or want for more energy.

Answer 4

Zero point energy or energy from the vacuum. Nikola Tesla called it Aether Physics--many laughed at him; now they are no longer laughing.

"A Simple, Cheap Free Energy Generator -- But How Do You Collect and Use the Energy?

Let us make very clear that extracting energy from the vacuum is very easy. We will use a device which can be built for a dollar.

Take a charged capacitor, and lay it on top of a permanent magnet so that the E-field of the capacitor is at right angles to the H-field of the magnet. Then the standard Poynting flow S is given by S = ExH, which in this case is maximized for a 90-degree angle between E and H. In fact, the magnitude S of S is just the product of the two magnitudes E and H. The direction of S is at right angles to both E and H, and given by the usual right hand rule.

Well, even by orthodox theory, that is an actual Poynting energy generator. It just sits there and pours out free energy, directly extracting it from the vacuum. There are two dipoles -- one electrical and one magnetic -- continuously serving as an asymmetry in the fierce vacuum flux. Once you pay to make the permanent magnet and charge the capacitor (or use an electret), that simple gadget will extract energy from the vacuum and pour it out indefinitely.

This illustrates how easy it is to extract energy from the vacuum. However, it comes out in nondivergent or difficult-to-use form. So the problem is to intercept and divert a substantial portion of it, or convert a substantial portion of it into a usable form.

That is the problem that the DOE should be working on, with maximum effort. "


Mainstream physics academia has said that overunity devices violate the Law of Conservation of Energy. This is erroneous. Extracting energy from the vacuum is converting the vacuum energy to electrical energy or converting the vacuum energy to heat energy to electrical energy. How does this violate the Law of Conservation of Energy? Energy is converted, NOT created or destroyed.
Extracting energy from the vacuum is not new and many inventors have patented devices that are capable of doing it. What happened to all of them? Most were "disproved" for violating the Law of Energy Conservation, or Momentum, by mainstream academia. Of the ones that couldn't be "disproved" our lovely government uses a law that allows them to deny a patent or seize the patent of any invention they deem to be a "matter of national security" Last year over 1500 patents fell into this government trap. About 20% of these 1500 were Military in nature. Can you say "protect the air polluting oil companies".
The problem is that Joe Blow politician is promised a vice presidency in "Big Corporations R us" when he retires from public service, provided that he does certain things for "Big Corporations R us" while he is in office.
I'm not one of those conspiracy theory people. Just read and you can make up your own mind.

Answer 5

Definitely solar power. Enough sunlight falls on a 30-mile square in Nevada to supply the entire country's energy needs. Not risky, dirty, or sabotageable like nuclear, and addresses global warming directly by not depending on or generating either any "new" heat or greenhouse gases.

And wazzup with all these "hydrogen" answers? Yeah, hydrogen is a nice fuel, but it takes too much energy in the first place to get it.


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Answer 6

There are various energy needs and various answers will need to be found. The one source that we are failing to use to advantage is tidal power. The rotation of the Earth and Moon generate enormous amounts of free energy that we could harness to generate electricity and would supply most of our needs with no advesre effects or waste products of any kind. Tidal power produces more reliable energy than either wind or solar power.

Answer 7

Nuclear Fusion, the energy that powers the sun. It is the only long term hope for clean, cheap, abundent energy that could have minimal effect on the enviornment.

Answer 8

Nuclear Power all the way. The public needs to be educated and all of the ridiculous hype needs to be crushed.

Answer 9

Short term: Wind and Solar
Long Term: Hydrogen

Answer 10

Let's eliminate some options before we find something that works ...

1) As others have stated here, hydrogen is just a storage method, not an energy source. Getting hydrogen out of hydrocarbons (like oil) is cheap, but then we're back to fossil fuels or polluting biofuels again. Getting hydrogen out of water is an energy-losing proposition, because water is very stable, and you will always lose more energy cracking the molecule then you will get in reclaiming the energy from using the hydrogen. Hydrogen may have some uses as a storage mechanism, but not an energy source. Out.

2) Zero Point Energy. Seems great in the sci-fi books, no good in reality. The problem that zero-point-energy (ZPE) proponents don't recognize is that if you find some way of removing energy beneath the ground state of a source (and there is a lot of it) you will be left with a system that violates Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (since you would be able to localize the point source and you violate the Third Law of Thermodynamics because you would be lowering the Entropy of the closed system. "Fine" the ZPE proponents say, "maybe the physics is wrong." But that argument won't fly because it is the same physics that predicts the ZPE to begin with! ZPE is out. And for the record, I too came up with a ZPE energy scheme using shuttered oscillators in the Casimir Effect, and it seemed pretty sweet until I actually did the physics and found it would violate the very laws that predicted both the Casimir Effect and the Zero Point Energy.

2) Nuclear Fission - Out. We can't live in safe, comfortable world with every Tom, Dick and Harry having their own Thermonuclear Reactor. Waste is a problem and nuclear proliferation is a problem. Yes, there are reactors that are safer, and harder to make nuclear weapons fuel, but they can be converted to the dangerous kind with effort.

3) Nuclear Fusion - Out. The biggest problem with Fusion is that it still requires more energy into the process than you can get out of it. Plasma physicists swear up and down that they'll sove this problem in twenty years, but they've been promising that for twenty years, and twenty years before that. And, like conventional thermonuclear reactors, fusion reactors leave us with a very radioactive, poisonous reaction vessel after we're finished with it. The reaction components are clean, the apparatus is not. But, let's say we could get Fusion to work. Is limitless, 'free' energy really what we need as a society? Fusion is so wildly complex (requiring at minimum a building-sized reactor) and energy would be in the hands of governments and mega-corporations rather than in the hands of small communities and individuals. If you think we currently have problems from politics of oil, the politics of fusion would be far worse, with nations held prisoner for their power needs. And even if we could develop to a state of political benevolance (which 'aint gonna happen in my opinion) and actually give out all of this energy for free, is that healthy? Do we need to be a race of people with climate-controlled everything, with legs that barely work because we drive our zero-emitting electric cars everywhere and never lift a finger while our zero-emitting robots mow our laws and bring us a beer? "Free energy" is definitely not free, it means never having to conserve, just letting the tap of energy run all day and all night. This is not good to our development as components of nature.

4) Fossil Fuels like oil, coal, gas, etc.. Out, no future. For obvious reasons, we're turning our atmosphere into a toxic stew. And even schemes that bring pollution to near zero, still leave us with CO2 that needs to be stored indefinitely.

Now, what would work ...

1) Wind, depending on the location. One of the most promising aspects of wind-power is "low entropy capture" where the mechanical wind energy is not converted to electricity, and then stored it or grided, which causes conversion and storage/transmission losses. But rather, couple into the wind mechanically, and store the energy mechanically, for instance through compressed air. Efficiency of such a system would be much higher than current systems. And the compressed air could be used for driving cars, running machines and HVAC.

2) Geothermal and indirect solar, such as tidal and wave power. Again, depending on location.

3) Solar concentrator - not photovoltaic panels, but rather just mirrors that concentrate sunlight to boil water and run conventional steam turbines. Very efficient, much more so than existing photovoltaics.

4) Photovoltaics - Crystalline panels need to be phased out in favor of amorphous panels, because amorphous panels have the ability to be manufactured on conventional printing-press-like machines. Their efficiency is lower than crystalline, but their future is more assured, because their cost is potentially lower than crystalline panels by orders of magnitude. Future homes could easily have their entire roof tiled with them, and they are nearly unbreakable. Even the sides of the homes and windows could be covered in them, and they wouldn't necessarily look like any other than conventional building materials and windows. The social advantage of this is that people become their own power stations, forcing them to make choices out electricity, to conserve, to perhaps spend an evening on the porch with their neighbors drinking lemonade rather than inside of an air-conditioned home watching television. Rooftop electrical generation also aovids our current transmission losses, of which up to 20% is lost just in moving electricity around the country by high-tension wires.

5) Human power. This is my all-time favorite power source, because it connects us with the source of our power, and allows us to make decisions about what we want to do with our power. Want to use your ultra-efficient laptop for an hour? Crank up the little fella for three minutes. Need something from the hardware store, hop on your bike or in your ultralight pedal/solar powered ultracapacitor car and go to your neighborhood shop. Want to read a book in the middle of the night, pull on your pendulum powered LED light. Human power would force us live in concert with Mother Nature, to build homes that don't heat up like ovens in the summer, or shiver like shaved poodles in the winter. It doesn't work for factories or jetliners obviously, nor for moving a semi-truck of potato chips. But it then allows us to make decisions on these issues. Do I need to travel 20 miles to Walmart if a partly human-powered economy would allow a neighborhood general store? Do I really need that piece of plastic that has been shipped in from China? Do I really need a lawn with nothing but grass when I could have a small, functioning farm in my yard?

In the end, I think the answer for society is to take both the low-end and high-end approach. So much of what we currently waste energy could be dramatically curtailed. And as I sit in the attic office of my home in Alabama's heat, typing this, I'm sweating. No fan, no A.C. But it's not all bad, it's just sweat. Big deal. At the same time, we need a seperate energy economy for things that need a lot of energy like making steel and building space stations, or running hospitals, and making energy for elderly people.

But consider that about half (!!) of the world's energy is just used to heat and cool air, and then half of the remaining is burned up in transportation innefficiencies. One of the most effective energy solutions is probably the least sexy ... conservation, intelligence, frugality.