SkyTran photo

[Tad Winiecki]

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but Doug Malewicki has written an article "Silicon Is About to Change the World ---Again!" in the IEEE Proceedings of November, 2009.  It includes a photo of the SkyTran prototype vehicle and guideway at Ames Research Center. See www.skytran.net.

 God bless you

Tad Winiecki
 Higherway Transport Research
 "Suburb to suburb quicker"
http://higherway.us
 Evacuated Tube Transport licensee
http://www.et3.com

[Brad Templeton]

It cites 200 "mpg" for the Skytran. What's the math behind this
number, since it is not a liquid fuel powered vehicle?

Is it just taking "gallon" == 125,000 BTUs, and then converting to KWH
at the 3412 BTU/kwh pure rate or at the 10,300 btu/kwh power plant
rate average?

On Nov 23, 1:37 am, Tad Winiecki <winie...@pacifier.com> wrote:
> I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but Doug Malewicki has
> written an article "Silicon Is About to Change the World ---Again!" in
> the IEEE Proceedings of November, 2009.  It includes a photo of the
> SkyTran prototype vehicle and guideway at Ames Research Center. Seewww.skytran.net

> <http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.skytran.net%25...>.

[Jerry Roane]

Brad

Why would someone take the average power plant energy conversion efficiency?  If we are talking future cars then it would be at the incremental power plant efficiency of  >50% for co-fired but then you are still not back to a liquid fuel with that conversion. (gas, lumps of coal, nuclear rods etc.) Skytran is very aerodynamic with a low "rolling" friction since it does not exactly roll. 

I agree there is much confusion about the Automotive X Prize liquid fuel to electric "fuel" conversion which is equal BTU energy.  There is no reason to convert to liquid except the public understands what they are most used to which is mpg of their cars.  mpgE is an attempt by the X Prize folks to put an understandable unit for their millions in prize money.  They do clearly denote the BTU equivalent in their information.  Since PV will be the electric generation method of choice as fossil fuels draw down it would make more sense to put electric car travel performance in square feet of sunshine rather than gallons of a fuel that won't be affordable and thus not used.  Sunshine for your location is simple enough to look up on the Internet.  You just plug in your address and you get all the sunshine data needed to convert your electric energy needed for your daily commute.  Skytran is very efficient so it won't take much sunshine to power it.

I propose using the daily commute mileage of 29 miles at 31.63 mph as part of this new proposed standard.  That way the user can look at their solar panel and visibly see if they have enough power for their car given their location.  The price of the sunshine is zero until the government figures out a way to tax sunshine.  The PV solar panels at around $3 per kilowatt is what the car owner will be paying for. 

Jerry Roane

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[Brad Templeton]

I wasn't actually wanting to start a debate about what efficiency
number to use for electric power, I mainly wanted to know what number
was used. They expressed the fuel consumption in mpg for an electric
vehicle, and so that requires finding out what number they used.


Since you bring it up, I do believe the local grid average is the
right number to use, and the national grid average if proposing
national solutions. I believe it is a common mistake to think there
are green (or solar) electrons. Electric transportation uses
electricity, and electricity does and should come from the grid, not
from any particular source. We had this discussion in another
thread. The right thing to do with any source of power (solar
panels, nuclear plant, gas planet etc.) that is near the grid is to
connect it to the grid. That way 100% of its output is used, and can
be delivered at the best time to deliver it. The result of adding
clean power to the grid is to reduce the amount of power generated by
non-clean methods (particularly coal and gas if you can.) The result
of adding power to the grid at peak times is to reduce the peak
generation needs for plant and transmission lines. So there should
be no solar cars or nuclear cars or coal powered cars (or trains, or
PRTs, or monorails, or LRTs)

There is just the grid. You can put up solar panels and charge your
electric car only from those panels and say you have a solar car, but
the truth is if you do this you are doing it wrong, and worse, you're
doing it wrong just so you can brag about how good you are, which is
the worst sort of irony.

So, nationally the grid is 50% coal, 20% gas, 20% nuke, 10% hydro, <1%
other. On a state by state basis there is a great flash app I
blogged about here: http://ideas.4brad.com/great-power-graphic-tells-us-put-solar-power-new-mexico-how

(This chart also tells you that putting solar panels in California is
stupid if you can find a way to put them in New Mexico or Utah, and
putting them on the east coast is really stupid.)

> > transport-innova...@googlegroups.com<transport-innovators%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> > .

[Jerry Roane]

Brad

We are talking past each other.  I am saying that when an advanced transportation system is powered, that the power that will be in place at the ribbon cutting is the number to use not the current number.  The power mix today has no bearing on the future other than as a worst case do nothing bottom of the barrel lower limit. 

Apparently you were unable to view the attachment clearly showing in graphic form the solar electrons being generated to power the car.  At the risk of repeating a graphic here it is again. 

I do agree location will factor into a PV solution.  The spare power generated by this garage would offset a small portion of your home power but be completely decoupled from the power grid to be fair to the power plant companies.  Thermal decoupling would be the simplest so your personal PV is not diluted by the decisions of others about coal.  In your model you assume that whatever decisions about pollution versus electric rate are made by a few rich dudes is fine with every citizen in the North American interconnected grid.  By decoupling through the air conditioner and/or refrigerator freezer you will fully utilize your investment in PV and the rich dudes who own and control your life are as they say on Project Runway ---" Out!" (with a German accent) 

How can you let yourself be pushed around by the grid component owner's ideas?  I feel the need to take responsibility for myself.  They can do whatever they want but don't ask me to be a part if they make poor decisions based on the assumption that coal pollution is just a fact of life so get over it. 

Putting PV on a non-sun-tracking roof is wasteful of that investment I will grant you that one.  PV is like agriculture.  It has a steady payback over your remaining lifetime but no one year will be stellar.  What PV on an efficient car does is accent the value of the car being efficient.  Show me how the NE coal plant would be powering my Texas grid car.  I write off the NE coal powered locations as being the rust belt that no one wants to go back to if you follow demographic trends.

Jerry Roane

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[Charl du Toit]

Brad you are right about hooking up to the grid, but only if there is no
storage in the equation.
I like what these guys are doing:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4334490.html
and you can then run a wind-powered monorail or whatever.

Charl du Toit
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
www.CamdeK.com

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[Brad Templeton]

Sorry to be so blunt but no, no, no, no. You don't want "storage in
the equation" unless you are far off the grid, not with any storage
technology that we have or are dreaming of today for small
installations.

The problem with using storage is that storage fills up. Once it is
full, you are discarding all the extra power you generate, just
throwing it away. And with most battery technologies, once you get
even partly charged the battery can no longer take current at the full
rate, so you also throw the power away during that phase. And that
phase is most of the time, because you don't want your batteries to be
in heavy discharge state much of the time. You want them full, both
to maintain good lifetime, and because you want the power available,
of course.

The only storage that makes sense is storage of arbitrary capacity.
By and large, the grid is the only answer for that. If you are a
hydro plant you can pump water uphill. If you are a fuel cell you can
split water if you have vast hydrogen tanks. But even the best
methods have losses (even batteries have some losses) and they are not
practical in small applications.

The grid will take all the power you can generate, and make use of it
with tiny losses. (In fact, it may make use of it with "negative"
losses because your overage will power your close neighbours,
eliminating the loss that was coming from shipping the power from far
away.) The grid compensates for any power you put into it by scaling
down generation at the plants that can be turned up and down quickly
(natural gas and hydro) and over the long term, with the baseload
plants.

Anything else is throwing away power needlessly, which is why, if you
are next to the grid, grid-tie is the only proper green solution.
This bothers people because they want to imagine they have "green"
electrons and they don't like realizing that electrons have no colour
on the grid.

To beat the grid as an offload solution, your storage has to:

a) Be of enough capacity that it can store all that you can generate
at all times, which is vastly more than you actually need.
b) Be 100% efficient in recovering all the energy you store. (Or
actually, more than 100% efficient, which is also impossible.)
c) Not have its own environmental consequences of significance (metal
mining and processing, recycling etc.)

> blogged about here:http://ideas.4brad.com/great-power-graphic-tells-us-put-solar-power-n...

[Brad Templeton]

On Nov 24, 2:43 pm, Jerry Roane <jerry.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Brad
>

> We are talking past each other.  I am saying that when an advanced
> transportation system is powered, that the power that will be in place at
> the ribbon cutting is the number to use not the current number.  The power
> mix today has no bearing on the future other than as a worst case do nothing
> bottom of the barrel lower limit.

I must respectfully disagree. While we can't predict the power mix
of the future, it is even more incorrect to predict it will be perfect
and clean than to predict it will be exactly as it is today. I would
even venture that one is more clearly the way to bet.

>
> Apparently you were unable to view the attachment clearly showing in graphic
> form the solar electrons being generated to power the car.  At the risk of
> repeating a graphic here it is again.

Electrons are not solar. Electrons are electrons. Having more
clean generation of power is good, but there is only one thing to do
with your cleanly generated power and that is to grid-tie it.
There are two problems in electric transportation.

1) Generate electricity with less environmental damage.
2) Produce transportation that uses less electricity.

These problems are disconnected. At first examination, they may seem
connected. But with today's technologies they are not, and it is
wrong to pretend they are -- and indeed, once you understand the issue
as I view it, it is misleading to say that they are. To me, it seems
like a trick, a way to fool people into thinking your transportation
offering is greener than another offering.

In fact, more often than not, the paired offering is not just
misleading, it's of negative value. That's because if you put up
that solar garage in a place like California, hoping to power your car
with magical solar electrons, where the grid is mostly gas and
nuclear, you just offset some natural gas. However, if you just
have the electric car, and put the solar panels in Utah or New Mexico,
not only will they get more sun, but they will offset a grid that is
over 90% coal!

By pushing the vision of a "solar garage" you are, I have to say,
being environmentally destructive compared to somebody sticking to the
basic truth. That truth today can be distilled down to a simple
question: "Are you doing the most to reduce pollution with your
money?" And more simply, "Are you reducing the amount of coal being
burned?"

You may find that a bit too simplistic. By having the electric car,
charged from the grid in California, you are doing good. And you're
even doing a good job with respect to your own behaviour, you have cut
down the pollution caused by your driving.

But when you put the solar panels on the garage, of course on the
surface you have also done something, cleaned up the local grid a bit
by spending a *lot* of money. But what you didn't examine is what
you could have done with that money to achieve your goal of reducing
emissions. And there are so many better answers than putting panels
up in places that either have grids that are above-average in clean,
or places that are below-maximum in sunlight.

There is one counter example. If you live downwind from a coal plant,
I could see you putting up panels in a lower-sunlight location to cut
back demand on that particular coal plant, rather than putting them
somewhere that would cut back a distant coal planet even more. It's
not the best thing for the planet, but it is the best thing for you
and your neighbours, so I can support that.

>
> I do agree location will factor into a PV solution.  The spare power
> generated by this garage would offset a small portion of your home power but
> be completely decoupled from the power grid to be fair to the power plant
> companies.  Thermal decoupling would be the simplest so your personal PV is
> not diluted by the decisions of others about coal.  In your model you assume
> that whatever decisions about pollution versus electric rate are made by a
> few rich dudes is fine with every citizen in the North American
> interconnected grid.  By decoupling through the air conditioner and/or
> refrigerator freezer you will fully utilize your investment in PV and the
> rich dudes who own and control your life are as they say on Project Runway
> ---" Out!" (with a German accent)

No. See the other message on why, if you care about the environment,
you must not decouple from the grid.

>
> How can you let yourself be pushed around by the grid component owner's
> ideas?  I feel the need to take responsibility for myself.  They can do
> whatever they want but don't ask me to be a part if they make poor decisions
> based on the assumption that coal pollution is just a fact of life so get
> over it.

Do you really feel the need to take responsibility for yourself if it
results in more pollution than if you had joined with others, even
imperfectly?

The fabulous thing about grid-tie is that it actually benefits from
bad decisions by the big power plant operators. They put in dirty
power, and by doing grid-tie of clean power you are taking away demand
from them. They will burn less fuel, they can't avoid it, thanks to
you. Grid-tie lets the best and cleanest generators directly offset
the dirty generators with the highest operating costs. (Sadly, that
tends to be gas in most places but we can work to change that.)

>
> Putting PV on a non-sun-tracking roof is wasteful of that investment I will
> grant you that one.  PV is like agriculture.  It has a steady payback over
> your remaining lifetime but no one year will be stellar.  What PV on an
> efficient car does is accent the value of the car being efficient.  Show me
> how the NE coal plant would be powering my Texas grid car.  I write off the
> NE coal powered locations as being the rust belt that no one wants to go
> back to if you follow demographic trends.

Well, if you accept global warming, and perhaps you don't, then it
doesn't matter where the GHGs are injected, Texas or Ohio.

And alas, PV is not as you describe. It is not yet grid-competitive,
so it has no "payback" and is still some distance from being able to
do so. PV serves these functions today:

a) Wealthy people who wish to buy a non-competitive power generation
system to make the world greener can spend extra money (theirs or the
government's) on power to do so.
b) Power generation in locations where grid connection is not
practical
c) In some circumstances, provide spot power at peak times where grid
peak costs are so high that the solar can be grid-competitive.
d) A bizarre sort of investment in the hope that PV companies, given
money, will produce grid-competitive PV in the future.

and also:

d) A means to funnel government money to PV suppliers through rebates

But tell me if you know more functions PV serves today

>
> Jerry Roane
>

[eph]

I agree that direct heat to power conversions don't make sense. The
best conversion depends on context, and could be $, GHG emissions or
total fossil fuel use among others.

One point is that since the relatively low cost of electric power to
fossil fuel power means that "green" sources can be afforded (at a
higher cost per kWh). It does make a difference because it means that
solar collectors or wind turbines will be built where none would exist
if the money went to fossil fuel suppliers.

F.

> blogged about here:  http://ideas.4brad.com/great-power-graphic-tells-us-put-solar-power-n...