There is no such thing as "free energy" in physics terms, all energy has to
come from somewhere, and can not be created nor destroyed, only changed in
form. The whole energy game is converting the energy to a useful form. The
only exception is nuclear reactions.
Luckily for Solar power, we have a giant spherical nuclear reactor that we
orbit around at a convenient distance to collect the nuclear energy that has
been changed into light form, and convert it to electrical form. It's free in
terms of $ once you have the equipment to harvest it, but the energy comes
from somewhere, it's just normally energy wasted by beating upon the ground.
So it is free in the sense that collecting it is just wasting less of it.
"HHO" gas is simply a combination of hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, in the exact
quantities that allow them to burn completely to form water
(dihydrogen-monoxide a.k.a H2O). Creating HHO gas from water requires as much
energy as is released when they recombine to form water. Plus, there is no
100% efficient process to do this, and when it burns you can't make use of
100% of the energy releaed. So basically in the overall process you are going
to lose energy, not gain energy.
Since you can only get out (a maximum) of what energy you put into producing
HHO, it's only useful as an energy storage medium (like a battery), unless
you can find a naturally available source of it. This is why oil is useful,
nature has already converted the energy into a form of chemical energy that
we can use. The energy in oil came from somewhere too, originally the sun,
converted to chemical energy by living organisms, and concentrated into oil
by underground pressure and heat. We are just lucky nature has already done
the work for us in this case.
Energy can only be collected and converted. And you lose some energy in any
conversion process. A car is a closed energy system, all the energy
enventually comes from the fuel (unless you have a solar car or something).
making HHO in a car requires converting the chemical energy in the fuel to
mechanical energy (20-50% efficient), which is converted to electrical energy
by the alternator (80-95% efficient), which is used to electrolyse the water
(I'm guessing less than 90% efficient), which is burnt in the engine (20-50%
efficient). On this path you are now left with 2-2-20% of the energy you
started with in the fuel. This is fundamental physics, to get more energy out
of this conversion than is put in, requires rewriting those fundamental laws.
If anyone manages to do that, they should apply for a Nobel prize, and open a
power station, not mess around with trying to save fuel on cars.
Note that the HHO gas could be useful if you have an abundant source of energy
in a form that isn't convenient to run a car, and you use this enery source
to generate HHO to use that energy in your car. e.g. Use solar power to
electrolyse water. You then have to solve the storage problem of course, the
same problem as hydrogen cars face. I'm also fairly certain you would be far
better off storing the electricty from solar panels in batteries rather than
electrolysing water. Batteries can be up to 95% efficient, and electric
motors can be over 95% efficient, burning HHO is at best 50% efficient, and
fuel cells to generate electricty from hydrogen are about 50% as well, so you
would end up with less useful energy after electrolysis.
Cheers,
Mark