Dan's Comments

In regards to James Stutton's comment that all new ICE vehicles should be flex fuel, what would that mean for diesel engines?

It's about time we heard something about SES. After all the hype a while ago, I stopped seeing news about them. I was afraid that it had turned out to be a scam or hoax.

North Dakota doesn't have the infrastructure to export the power they generate in-state. Does South Dakota have the same problem?

How difficult is it to build a furnace capable of safely combusting glycerol?

It sounds like a good idea, but who, exactly, is in this target market?

As a Tennessee resident, I'm excited to read about this.

I'm not convinced yet of the merits of celluosic ethanol as opposed to biodiesel, but it's certainly an improvement over ethanol made from corn.

Can't you burn glycerin? Seems like the biodiesel plants could generate their own electricity and steam by burning the glycerin.

It sounds like they've got open air ponds for the algae, so the carbon dioxide would come from the atmosphere.

North Dakota has huge potential for wind power generation, but last I heard they don't have the infrastructure to sell that power to out of state consumers.

Anyone know anything about that?

I think that Kennedy is simply afraid that it'll hurt the value of his property to have giant wind turbines "ruin" his ocean view.

So this is a fuel that can be stored and transported as a solid but then converted to liquid fuel when they need to use it?

Or did I completely miss the point?

What, exactly, is fuel grade ethanol?

Is that just another name for E85?

So why is this turbine interesting? Is it the first to optimize for low wind speed?

Compared to batteries, fly wheel storage generally has less energy density, but the capacity of the fly wheel doesn't deteriorate over time like batteries do. Therefore, in theory, in any situation that a fly wheel could technically replace a battery bank, it will be cheaper in the long run since it can be used indefinitely whereas the batteries need to be replaced or rebuilt periodically.

The same could be said about super-caps.

It has yet to be demonstrated that a reasonably priced fly wheel can be built with enough life expectancy and energy density to make this theory realizable.

Actually, it's my understanding that these high-tech fly wheel energy storage systems are pretty much silent since the fly wheel is suspended in a vacuum via magnetic bearings (read: no medium to transfer vibrations to the housing).

Of course, so far these things only exist in labs, but maybe some day we'll see one in the real world (I haven't decided how optimistic I should be yet).