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There is no "excess energy" being produced by the alternator. You're either placing a load on it or your not. The more power you draw from the alternator, the harder it is for the engine to turn it over. Energy In - Irreversible Losses = Energy Out.
You'd be saving gas and using more electricity. Congratulations, you've made a crude plug-in hybrid. Your energy is now coming from both the gas tank and the power grid. Unfortunately, I don't think a single battery would make a noticeable difference one way or the other. It'd be no different than putting an electric motor in series with your driveline and powering it from that battery, you could take a little of the load off the engine, but not much, unless you had a substantial battery pack on board.
No it isn't. You can say all the hubbly--bubbly you like, but the fact is that if this works, we'll be using hydrogen in the same way we are currently using gas... Just without the 300% reaping benefit. Gas is a natural battery. We put very little energy into it, and get phenomenal amounts out. Why couldn't this be the case with another substance? Because you've got it all figured out? It doesn't fit into one of today's scientific categories, so it isn't real? Th world REALLY IS flat?!?!?!
Unless we maybe change the way we do something? It is more than possible to mount a conventional fixed magnet alternator (exactly like the one sitting out there on my motorcycle) on a car... In which case we could harness all the excess energy produced by the alternator, (You know, the stuff that is usually disbursed through the tires into the ground.) and put it to use doing something. Like Oh, I don't know, breaking the bonds of a stable water molecule, releasing two very unstable substances, and making way for a new chemical reaction called "combustion"? I know it's crazy, but I have a far-fetched Idea that one day the streets will be swarming with machines that actually use this "combustion" to travel through space. WITHOUT HORSES!
Yep. Saving expensive gas. And using cheap electricity. What was stupid about that again? Oh, wait...
Just because we don't put a lot of energy into gasoline to get a lot out doesn't mean anything. Gasoline takes millions of years to create deep underground. We are not storing energy in gasoline to be burnt later. That energy comes from the earth, and it took millions of years to charge that battery. All we're really doing is pumping it out of the ground and burning it. The problem comes when you start trying to make your fuel so you can immediately burn it, conservation of energy says that'll never work. Splitting water into it's components so you can recombine them will not yield a net energy gain. That would be running on the same principle as creating gasoline from it's componenets so you can burn it. It simply doesn't work that way in reality. That net energy gain you are looking for has to come from somewhere. The only places you're going to get easy energy come from the sun, wind, geothermal, or oil.
There is no excess energy produced by the alternator. There are irreversible losses that occur, which you're not going to be able to do anything about, but there's no energy floating off into space that you can magically tap into without putting an additional load on the engine in the first place.
I didn't say it was stupid. There was nothing condescending or sarcastic about my comment on using both electric and gas. I merely pointed out that a single battery wouldn't make much of a difference in daily driving.
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