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Navy Bomb Squads Get a Solar Power Upgrade
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from TPM's Idea Lab:
"The U.S. Navy's bomb squads have a weight problem. To keep their field gear powered up, the typical explosive ordnance disposal unit has to haul fifty pounds of specialized chargers and related devices around, creating an unwieldy and potentially dangerous drag on the operation. Now help is coming from an unexpected source: the sun. The Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Training and Evaluation Unit 2 in Virginia has been testing five prototype lightweight field power kits that include solar cells as a key component. The kits replace fifty pounds of equipment with a compact system that weighs only about nine pounds."
That's because most alternate energy schemes are just a Liberal tree-hugging pipe dream that destroys jobs and wastes money. That doesn't mean that there's no alternate energy scheme that ever works. It does mean that you tend to need big bucks and an overriding reason to make it work. Oh, like the military.
An outbuilding on my property is a candidate for solar because there's no legal way to get city power to it (for reasons unimportant to this discussion) and -- oh yeah -- the neighbors wouldn't permit the noise of a wind farm. My power needs in that particular building are modest enough that I can consider solar without being buried in panels and deep-cycle batteries, else I wouldn't consider it. The initial cost will be about three times the cost of trenching and running a conduit would have cost (had it been permitted) and I now have to factor in maintenance costs, but I don't have a lot of choices. I guess I should go hug a tree now.
Near my work is a skyscraper with five tiny wind turbines on the roof. I read in the local paper that they provide 4% of the building's power on windy days. But they are pretty, and people can point to them and say "See? Wind power!!!" I guess the CEO should go hug a branch. Or a leaf.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Guys, you're missing the point.
...) This unit can accept power from a lot of different kinds of sources (conventional grid AC, but also DC etc.), they plan to also distribute a set solar cells and buffer batteries, that can (naturally) also plug into this unit - but will almost double the weight of the equipment to about 17lbs. (Still a lot less than 50 lbs, but the usual caveats of solar power apply, so they are quite likely to end up using other sources a lot as well.)
The weight savings result from doing away with a mess of redundant equipment/chargers etc. that were designed by moronic, egoistic engineers whose idea of standardization is that they are happy to follow any standard, so long as it's theirs.
They were instead replaced by one small and much more lightweight unit that weighs 9lbs instead of 50lbs and is still able to plug into all their gadgets and charge their batteries. (Maybe one day we can do that with laptops and cellphones too