Alternative Energy Questions

[sophia8]

Me & t'other half were enjoying a Saturday morning lie-in discussing the various methods of alternative energy production.
And he posed me a couple of questions:
1) If we found a foolproof, cheap way of extracting hydrogen from water and started using it for all of our energy needs, what would be the long-term result for the global enviroment? I'm talking about millennia down the line here - what would all that freed-up oxygen do in the very long term? What if we started running out of water on Earth?
2) Wind power works by extracting energy from the air. So if wind farms were to go up everywhere, would that eventually start affecting global weather patterns?

Any answers?

 

[Dilb]

1) Hydrogen is either used for power by burning, chemical reaction (fuel cell), or fusion. Burning and fuel cells both recombine hydrogen with oxygen, so their would be no net change. Fusion releases so much energy that the effect on the average oxygen concentration would be tiny. Slight changes in algae density would probably have more of an effect.

2)Maybe, but it's doubtful it would have any real effect on a large scale. Cities and logging already disrupt weather patterns slightly, and it's unlikely that enough wind farms would ever go up to dwarf the effect of tall buildings or deforestation. Even if they caused a big effect, it's questionable whether we'd really care.

 

[sophia8]

1) Hydrogen is either used for power by burning, chemical reaction (fuel cell), or fusion. Burning and fuel cells both recombine hydrogen with oxygen, so their would be no net change. Fusion releases so much energy that the effect on the average oxygen concentration would be tiny. Slight changes in algae density would probably have more of an effect.

2)Maybe, but it's doubtful it would have any real effect on a large scale. Cities and logging already disrupt weather patterns slightly, and it's unlikely that enough wind farms would ever go up to dwarf the effect of tall buildings or deforestation. Even if they caused a big effect, it's questionable whether we'd really care.

Thanks for that Dilb. I should have known the answer to the hydrogen question. I shall now go and tell him.