Solar power for your home

There is nothing radically new about learning how to solar power your house since solar energy has been around since the beginning. However, the widespread use of how to solar power your house is something that has been around for sometime but not widely used do to cost of installation and ongoing operational costs. However, due to raising fuel costs and the use of technology to make using how to solar power your house more efficient, there has been increased discussion of using this alternative energy. Despite the increased awareness most people are completely unfamiliar with the process of using this alternative energy or what costs are involved.

For those interested in having solar power for the home installed it become critical to examine the companies that provide such panels as well as the process involved with installing the panels. While this is not necessarily complicated of a process many people assume that it will be a wildly difficult installation mainly because they associate solar panels with futuristic, science fiction imagery.

What will power the "future car"?

According to most energy sages, hydrogen-powered cars will be what most of us are tooling around in several decades from now. But you don't just drill in the ground and pump out hydrogen; it has to be extracted from another source.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and is found in many, many different molecules. Thus, it can theoretically be extracted from a wide variety of sources. But the favored sources, at least for now, are:

• water;
• natural gas, particularly methane;
• coal, via coal gasification; and
• biomass (vegetation such as wood chips and agricultural waste).

The processes for extracting hydrogen from these sources are different, particularly in the case of water. To get hydrogen gas out of water, electrolysis is used—that is, electricity is employed to strip the hydrogen molecules out of the water. Comparatively, in the case of natural gas, a "reforming" process is used.

However, no matter what the source of the hydrogen, the process requires electricity and/or other types of energy. Additionally, in the cases where fossil fuels or biomass are used as the sources, the substrates are power-plant fuels themselves, which sets up a sort of competition between using them for generating electric power and generating hydrogen.