AUG 28

Nothing wrong with harvesting energy from farm wastes. As long as nutrients aren't being removed from the soil along with the energy.

Any ethanol that we can 'cleanly' produce means less sequestered carbon pulled from underneath the ground. Liquid fuels for ground transportation are likely a short term need as we transition to electricity.

This might not be the right place to ask this, and I'm probably being dumb, but I'm just wondering since Bob's comment above got me thinking about electric cars: Have there been any attempts by engineers to create a wind-powered car? I don't mean like something with sails or anything; i mean a vehicle that has a sort of windmill on it that could generate the power to run the car? You wouldn't even need for it to be windy outside because the speed of your movement forward creates a sort of wind that would turn a windmill. I can't seem to find anything about it on the internet so maybe its not feasible, but does anyone know?

S.E.: My first thought was that that might be sort of like saying, "could we create a car powered by the spinning of its own wheels?"

You would be using additional energy from your motor to compensate for the drag created by the wind turbine's capturing of the airflow created by your cars' movement.

However, I suppose it might be worth thinking about the feasibility of putting a mini wind turbine where there is already a drag (such as on the grill - if there are any cars that still have grills).

Brent

The perpetual machine lives on... unfortunately, completely impossible. But try to convince this nut-job:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkcn8ZkvKKc

As long as there is money out there to be conned from the scientifically-challeged, there will be these con jobs.

The video even has a catchy "jesus" soundtrack... but Jesus knows the laws of thermodynamics more than anybody.

If these "ugly watermelons" are 10% fermentable juice, we should have been fermenting them already! I wonder what watermelon wine tastes like...

SE and Brent - Here's the problem, you would be using gas/battery power to drive the car forward in order to create the wind. And any "machine" is less than 100% efficient.

You're not going to get out all the energy you put in due to friction between all the moving parts and due to the air the rest of the car has to push out of the way.

Think of all the heat that a car's engine puts out. Put your hand on a tire after driving for a while. All that heat is lost energy - energy used but that did not contribute to moving the car.

And, before we get there, there isn't enough surface area on a car allow us to cover it with solar panels and power the car. In addition, flat is not a good angle. Panels need to face the sun as much as possible.

Better to mount the wind turbine where it gets good, unobstructed wind and the panels where they can face the sun and then feed that power into the grid. Use grid power to charge the batteries. And hope like crazy for better batteries in the near future.

Better, more affordable batteries and we can kiss the gas pump goodbye.



Whatever electricity you get back is going to be only a fraction of the energy that you had to

This is not a good development. What is to stop farmers from deliberately disfiguring their watermelons in order to direct them towards ethanol production? Strict policing of watermelon farms will be necessary.

Repeat after me: Burning hydrocarbons (including ethanol and fossil fuels) produces greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in water! Got it?

There was a guy in Home Power magazine a few years ago who had a wind turbine in his pickup truck. He worked by the seashore in southern california. He would erect the windturbine during his work day in the parking lot. (The bed of the truck was full of batteries.) He'd fold the wind turbine down to go home, then attached the battery bank, with a cable from his truck, into his house, and run his appliances all night.

Golmekker - we don't have the sort of government control over agriculture here that you apparently experience. If the biofuel market is high enough growers will simply sell all their watermelons for fuel. No need to deface them.

There's a larger argument over whether farm land should be used for food or fuel. But whatever control might be established it's not going to be government guards watching the watermelon fields.

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Oakleigh - there's a huge difference between burning fossil fuels and burning biofuels.

When we burn fossil fuels we are releasing sequestered carbon. When we burn biofuels we are recycling hydrocarbons that are already in the atmosphere.

My grandfather used to make watermelon rind wine I don't know how much of the watermelon itself he made. and mom makes pear and peach wine from tree falls...so... just cause its ugly food doesn't mean that there aren't other industries or food based processes that can use it if dude above considers alcohol a food group...people just have to think of there waste in creative ways and shasam the cycle is a circle not a cliff we are careening toward. and why not fuel over wine? farmers still burn their crops if they make too much on occasion (subsidized by gov and costs too much to ship the grain to starving nations, that is if its good for anything but corn syrup or feeding lots anyhow. if this is the case, and sometimes it is, I'd prefer it would be made into biofuel) anyway, fuel and whine are almost the same thing except one you drink and one your car drinks...i'm obviously not a chemist here but alcohol and ethanol have a similar ring to them both of them ending in burnable. you can make wine/spirits from anything that ferments/rots. that's just about everything that was once alive. they even make fish wine in china (probably had to add sugar but still). everything rots thus everything breaks down which i would assume means everything has the potential to be a fuel or energy source. everything is made out of energy after all...unless you are counting the spaces in between the energy. so yea harvesting or harnessing crop left overs is a great idea weather it feed the hungry, or get you to work on time.

I love watermelon and its good for health too. Hope this could make a good biofuel additive.

Thanks for the only pop-up website I have ever actually enjoyed. I will definitely be back to read again.

I would wonder how much fertilizer these farmers use and how much they spend on it. I would argue that the 20% that gets left in the field would help farmers by decomposing and acting as natural fertilizer, thereby cutting some of the costs of buying industrial fertilizer.