Letters to the Editor
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Solar panels on every hybrid car roof
Give me the standard corporate line about how it'll never work, it'll never pay, et cetera...
Rather than pissing away three trillion dollars killing Iraqis who never did a damn thing to us, how about funding solar panels to generate electricity? To my acid-damaged way of thinking, that seems like an investment worth the capital outlay.
The next time you hear a suit telling you how some "alternative" energy scheme will not and cannot work, find a Marine to throw him in a rocky gully.
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SD County a test case
There is already much opposition to new power lines here is San Diego County, where they are being blamed for the devastating wildfires last year. Some groups believe new power plants can be built within the county, but that too will face considerable opposition. Already there is a move afoot to move the two power plants built on the coast further inland. These plants used crude oil at one time, and the oil was transferred by ship, from offshore terminals.
At issue most people believe solar will come to the rescue, and that consumers will be selling as much electricity as they use in just a few years.
These hybrid chargers would have an electronic sensor which only allows them to charge during off hours, which is one way of controlling the number of miles people drive. The real issue is growth, and probably number one on the list of problems is a new airport, which while it would relieve airport traffic would encourage more development, and the need for more electric power.
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People who don't count costs don't count costs
In other words, the cost differential doesn't mean much to them. Or at least you hope so. On the other hand, my dentist does not worry that much about the price of gas for his Benz C55 either. So at that level of affluence the hybrid has to offer the right features and panache that one would otherwise see at that price point. Whatever that ineffable quality is, it has to be there, somewhere. The whole "Proletariat's Car for the Environment" thing won't sell, won't move unit sales. Lower income people don't have that $3500 buffer to spend even where the operating costs of the beater they own now, are higher. For those downmarket people you need to market a cheap people mover that consumes marginally less, gets better mileage and pollutes less. Even if that means a small high efficiency gasoline or other liquid fuel powerplant. Pound for pound cars now are 2x more efficient than 20 years ago. The problem is they weigh 2x as much wiping out the savings. But if people movers weighed no more than 1 ton, or 1000lbs less than they do now that would afford the opportunity to build smaller engines that easily get 40-50mpg like the Yaris/Fit/Versa class of people movers today. Just build them a little more cheaply, ~$2000 less with 20% more efficient powerplants (or just smaller ones).
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Jebus H. F&*k!ng Chri$t!
Okay, HERE WE GO AGAIN. How do we keep all the cars going?
Yes, OKAY, FINE, the production and distribution grid can charge up that many cars if they all charge during off-peak hours. Take the total rated capacity of the entire power system (X gigawatts, or X gigajoules per second), multiply it by the amount of time (seconds), and you have the total energy it could produce. Then take the total amount of energy it does produce during the same time period. A minus B equals your spare capacity, equals enough to charge 1 million plug-in hybrids or whatever the fuck it is. In other words, the X gigawatts of generation capacity, if it was fully used during what are currently off-peak periods, could generate that much POWER.
But that power is meaningless if the ENERGY isn't there. Running those power plants at full capacity during what are currently off-peak hours means that they would be consuming fuel that whole time. Natural gas. In short supply. Already in depletion. Not making any more of it.
Talking about capacity when it's the primary energy that's the real bottleneck is like being in the desert with no water and saying, Don't worry, my canteen can hold fifty gallons! I can go for days.
A year ago How The World Works was talking about how biofuels could make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption. Hmm, very complex issue, lots of interesting discussion, scratching of heads, hmmm, could it, couldn't it, depends, hmmm.
One harvest into the earliest stages of a biofuel economy, food prices have skyrocketed. Food riots throughout the Third World. Grain stocks at a record low. Price of flour doubling. People are already going to starve and die because some people decided to treat the food vs. fuel debate as though it was an actual debate in which reasonable people with a grasp on reality might differ.
So, please. Pretty fucking please, Andrew, I beg of you. STOP trying to legitimize the ongoing pathological obsession with keeping ther cars running. Because every scheme--EVERY scheme--to keep doing so that has come up in the past thirty years has collapsed utterly as soon as someone looked at the actual constraining factor.
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A chuckle..
at this line:
"...the authors acknowledge that consumer decision-making is not always predicated on finely honed cost-benefit calculations".
No offense intended, but that's a 9.7 on the "duh" scale. I mean, come on... people are still buying Ford n50s, where n>1.
I've read some interesting ideas folks like AC Propulsion have for tapping extra energy (via regen, iirc) in the batteries during the day for plugged in hybrids and it sounded interesting. Rather than have a plant that only comes on during peak, siphon off a few hundred to maybe a thousand watthours from many, many plug-ins. Cute, and sounded so complicated to implement that I think the sun will cool before we see it.
@ Gordon Wagner:
I'm a pretty big supporter of solar & EVs - this message brought to you by the shining sun of the Monterey Bay area, after all. However, I'm not sure if the added weight of an inverter plus panels - and their drag - will make up for the fairly small gain such an addition would bring a car so enabled. There is also cost - see the "Duh!" above such that even if it was "cheap" (ie, $few hundred), that's still less money for the stereo, donchaknow.
It might work, or maybe only in really sunny conditions, I don't know. A casual punching of numbers based on my array's potential, weight of components and such isn't promising. I tend to prefer my panels on the ground in optimal locations given current tech. I believe this is changing; we'll see. For the time being my little EV it just for getting around town, some 90-95% of my driving - and I've always had more power than I need to do my daily tasks.