Actually, the average estimate of their utility bill is $5000 annually, not $5400. So they're saving $4200 a year with their solar, not $4600. That $37,000 takes about 8.8 years, not about 8.08 years, to break even. The overall ROI also reduces commensurately. But it's still in the ballpark, still under 9 years payback, still well worth the investment over 30 years.
That article has a lot of consumption and billing numbers for each of utility and homegrown power, but it's hard to get exact performance comparisons because the numbers don't exactly measure the same things. There is no exact start and end date, just month names, and approximate mentions of offsets into them, not lining up generation and billing dates in either the solar generation half-year or the time before drawing from only the utility. And practically no data on income from overgenerating, selling back to utility or grid.
But there is enough data to make rough comparisons. They say their January/utility bill was $446, but their December bills are the highest (all of which extra usage was billed in the highest rate, 300% of the base rate). So let's say their average bill used to be $450:mo, or $5600 annually. However, they said up front that their annual bill is about $4400. We'll take the average of $5400. Now their July-December/solar bill is $389.39. Even if we call that $400, and so their annual/solar bill is $800, they're saving $4600 a year. They paid about $55,000 before rebates, about $37,000 after all rebates. Their utility bill savings pays off their installation investment in $37,000 / $4600 = 8.04 years. Pessimistically, they should be paid off in 9 years.
These systems have a minimum lifetime of 30 years (if you don't invest in an upgrade during that time). Even if energy rates stay the same in those 30 years (probably not, probably higher), that $4600 for 21 more years is $96,600, or 2.6x the installation cost. Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years. If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years. Conversely, if you took out a 30 year mortgage on your home at today's average rate of 5.63%, you'd net 9.8% benefit. Which means that it's worth mortgaging (part of) your home to invest in these, with a fraction of your old utility bills paid as mortgage interest, and getting $78K more ("profit", really utilities savings) after 30 years, with no out of pocket.
That could be even better than they say. Their reasons for failing to maximize their roof generating area don't seem compelling: "it would get a little crowded up there". Other than access to the panels for cleaning, who cares how crowded it is? It looks like they could double their area. Which would give them closer to zero Winter bills, but overkill in Summer that exceeds what's left (if any) during Winter, which exceeds their "zero annual bill" maximum for reselling overgeneration to the utility at retail rates. So probably about 1.5x the area would give them Summer overgeneration that would equal their Winter utility draw, netting zero bills. It's got to cost less than 1.5x to install just more area, because labor and shared components (especially the inverter that sells power back to the utility) are a substantial cost that doesn't increase at all at that rate. Say it costs 1.2x, or $44,400, but they save the full $5400 annually. That's still about the same time in payback (about 2% longer), but 3.7x the return. And the "green feeling" is complete.
Bill Clinton obviously misses Air Force One something fierce. His foundation's got $billions to spend, and our government needs the extra cash. We should sell it to him (with the nuke football dock ripped out, of course). Otherwise the Air Force is gonna have to hold a bake sale to buy the new one.
Why would we read the Wall Street Journal for insight into governing carbon emissions in a market? The WSJ has lied for years about carbon emissions and climate change. Even before it was bought last year by Rupert Murdoch to join the NY Post and Fox News (and many other lying tabloids) in his fascist communications empipre, the WSJ was lying about climate change and markets. Even beyond the carbon pollution and climate change, the WSJ spent the last decade and more lying to us about how unregulated markets would make us all rich, but they've robbed us all blind.
We have to debate a lot to get a carbon emissions market right. Doing it in the pages of the Wall Street Fox Journal is a good way to do it totally wrong. And if you think the financial crash the WSJ helped cook up is bad, wait until you see what the WSJ would do for the air we breathe and the rest of the environment we need to live.
I'd like my regular GNOME desktop and its windows to be displayed with a real Z-buffer, with windows behind windows. These glasses should do something like that without much development work.
I'd also like to see these glasses coupled with a camera that recognizes real objects in view and displays annotations overlaid on them. That's harder, but still not too hard.
If these glasses could squeeze most of 1600x1200 into just the foveal central focus of vision , with lower rez for the majority of the view that is peripheral vision, we might get extremely high rez 3D displays without the higher manufacturing and bandwidth costs of high rez in the entire field. That's possible with 3D glasses, even though it's not for single field displays like monitors.
I'm hoping these glasses are trivial enough to use for everyone, and cheap enough to make, that they finally jump the watershed into a whole new era of display features. Because the old ones are getting boring. And not just for gamers.
Yes, the pattern is comparing some possible (but not even mentioned) privacy invasion by Democrats to vast, deep and continuous invasions by Republicans that not only violated the Constitution, but necessitated the creation of FISA, only to violate FISA millions of times.
FDR didn't make laws - he was the president, and could only sign ones passed by Congress. He didn't "threaten" the Supreme Court, though he did try to increase it from its stalled small size to one large enough to cover the work demanded of it, rather than ignoring so many essential cases.
The pattern is repeating some Republican talking points, without bothering to back them up, as false "balance" between aggressive and sometimes irresponsible Democrats and the treasonous Republicans who always have carved out new categories of invasion.
Obama's announcement of Dawn Johnsen to run the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC, the office from which John Yoo "legalized" torture) is the best encouragement so far that Obama is reforming the uncurbed powers Bush/Cheney took for the White House. Also Leon Panetta for CIA and Eric Holder for Attorney General. I'd most prefer to see Joe Biden make his #1 job removing all the extra powers from his VP office, but I don't have such high hopes for Biden. Which is why Bush/Cheney's powergrabs were so dangerous: they're as permanent as their successive holders want them to be.
No one should have the powers that Bush/Cheney seized or created. Not them, not Obama, (probably;) not even me.
But if you can't tell the difference between how Republicans do wrong and how Democrats do wrong, you're not comparing Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Bush to Kennedy/Johnson/Carter/Clinton. You're saying something lazy and ignorant that equates extreme bad with merely not good.
Coal's consequences, including climate change, radioactive pollution, devastating waste pool bursts, damaging conditions inside the mines, ecological catastrophe from mining like mountaintop removal, all make it much more expensive than solar. If it didn't, it would indeed compete well. Instead, it's subsidized by hiding its true costs so it can compete. Especially in the Bush era, when laws reducing its pollution were rolled back simply at the request of the coal industry. Hence the large number of coal plants.
And no, I didn't gloss the "problems" of night and clouds in the Southwest. There's more than enough sunshine when the sun is shining (almost half of all the time) for it to be quite effective. You're just ignoring that, and raising quibbles instead. And ruling out solar power in your neighborhood based on two months during winter. So that's all the time I'm willing to spend in this thread.
Using solar power to produce chemical fuels for transport across the country isn't at all necessarily very inefficient. The transport hasn't crippled the efficiency of petrofuels, though they routinely cross continents and the globe. Electricity likewise crosses long distances now with acceptable losses. It's less efficient than local consumption, but we're choosing among real alternatives, not rejecting energy sources when they can't be used at their theoretical maximum.
Likewise, solar is entirely possible in upstate NY. At 1KW:m^2, the maximum insolation is a very high rate from which to lose lots of power before it's impractical. Try drawing a solar panel on your own roof using the RoofRay calculator, and see how much your electric bill drops (probably to zero most of the year). That calculation averages latitude, day/night, seasons and weather.
The point of using solar is not to stop using other fuels, it is to use solar instead of other fuels, where appropriate. Submarines aren't going to be solar powered any time soon. But the more solar is used, the less other fuels will be used. Since those other fuels are more costly (either directly or in their consequences), solar will be used more. But that will decrease the costs of most of those other fuels to acceptable levels, so they will continue. If only NYC continued to consume petroleum for power while the rest of the world went to solar, NYC would probably have the cheapest energy costs in the world. I'm looking forward to testing that principle in the real world, as we replace most dirty and costly energy with cheaper stuff like solar.
Solar in the Southwest frees up other fuels for use elsewhere, much cheaper due to lower demand. Solar can also be harnessed to generate fuels that can be shipped like oil and natural gas are. And in fact the grid is a mostly fungible source of power throughout its span, even before we interconnect it better probably starting this year.
Since you just moved to upstate NY, you evidently haven't spent enough time there to know that there's enough sunlight for solar. I lived upstate for 4 years, among the worst weather in the state, and it had enough for solar to power most houses without the grid.
Yes, Carter failed to foresee Reagan covering up the AQ Khan nuke spy network that stole nuke tech from Dutch/German labs and spread to Pakistan, Libya, Iran and N Korea.
But he did foresee the threat of proliferation that Reagan (to be charitable) ignored, and reduced it. Without that reduction, more than just Pakistan (and possibly N Korea) would already have well known nukes to threaten with.
Yes, city life demands concentration and ignoring lots of irrelevant stimuli. That's what the mind is for.
Meanwhile, people who never learn that kind of mental focus often don't develop those skills to apply to other environments, like social groups of people.
But though city people can relax by going to a park, and have cramped memory or other "open minded" faculties restored, country people can't spend 20 minutes in a city and acquire a focus that will last a week or a year.
Sounds like these researchers are either country bumpkins, or just people who need to spend some more time walking in the park.
Nukes aren't "green". The production of their fuel produces nearly as much Greenhouse pollution as is emitted by the fossil fuels they substitute for. Building, maintaining and demolishing their plants consumes even more power. The maintenance of their toxic spent fuel consumes lots of energy, producing lots of pollution, indefinitely. Security for all those operations is also wasteful.
With nukes, there "isn't much" waste by mass compared to, say, coal or petroleum, but a little nuke waste goes a long way.
These batteries or supercaps can fit into arbitrary shapes. So unless the Tesla is a fully solid volume already, there's going to be plenty of extra volume into which to fit even a larger volume supercap. Even if the Tesla had to scale its volume up the small percentage that a larger supercap might take over a battery, that's not going to increase its drag very much, and therefore its efficiency. Besides, this supercap's materials aren't orders of magnitude heavier or lighter than battery material - they're probably fairly close in spatial density.
Hydrogen is interesting only as a storage medium in the car for electricity. The whole point of this supercap is that it's much more efficient than hydrogen in storing the electricity that drives the wheels than is cracking water or even conversion from petrofuels. H2 from electric replaces a 99.9% efficient dis/charge supercap with 76% hydrolysis * 94% compression * 35% fuelcell = 25% efficiency (or, with 75% liquefaction, more common and probably safer, 19.95%). Fuelcells aren't ever going to be close to 99.9% (maybe high 80%s), and generating/storing the hydrogen isn't going to get much better than 90%, even with an efficiency breakthru). The supercap probably weighs less than a 20-30KW fuelcell and the hydrogen storage/delivery system, so there's extra efficiency pushing a lighter car.
Nukes don't even break even compared to natural gas CCGTs, even when ignoring the high costs of producing the fuel, building the plants, and dealing with the old plants (cleaning and demolition) and of course the waste. And with efficiencies jumping perhaps 2.5-4x, we have plenty of relatively much cleaner energy sources in natural gas, solar/wind, and even oil and coal - spending some of that efficiency scrubbing the pollution at the plant, perhaps into plastics or biomass.
But slapping 4 of those electric wheels onto a gasoline Ferrari, adding only 140Kg to do it, could be quite a blast.
Yours is another significant insight. Gasoline engines get an average of 20% efficiency of their energy contents, really only 18% to the wheel on the road, as shown in this fabulous primary energy source to mechanical energy flowchart. Except that flowchart shows "Combi", presumably Combined Cycle Gas Turbine at 55% efficiency, when tri-cycle plants can produce between 85-89%, if their heat output is directly consumed in buildings, displacing the fuel that would otherwise have to heat those buildings - which is how we do it, so 87% CCGT is the number to use.
The path from natural gas to wheel replaces that flowchart's "battery 80%" with "supercap 99.9%". So natural gas to wheel is 91% (refine/transport) * 87% (CCGT) * 94% (grid) * 99.9% (supercap) * 90% (motor) = 67% well-to-wheel through natural gas. Gasoline is 86% (refine/transport) * 18% (combustion/transmission) = 15.48% well-to-wheel through gasoline (90% * 22% = 19.8% diesel). Diesel power plants to electric wheels deliver 90% * 48% * 94% * 99.9% * 90% = 36.5%, which has got to be higher than if we used gasoline in electric power plants (which we don't, but comparing efficiencies burning them in cars would say that diesel's 36.5% is 19.8:15.48 gasoline's 28.5%). So the overal efficiency comparison is something like 67:28.5, or 2.35x as good for cars consuming oil as gasoline through a power plant to electric wheels, vs oil as gasoline through a car's gasoline engine.
But that's all irrelevant to the supercap (except I included the supercap's 0.01% efficiency loss in those comparative figures), until the different weights are also considered. That supercap + in-wheel electric might replace 205Kg drivetrain + 45Kg gasoline = 250Kg with 14Kg motors + 127Kg supercap = 141Kg, or 56.4% the weight. So this supercap doesn't just get in the game, it probably reduces a small car with 2 average American passengers (probably about 300Kg total) from 1200Kg down to about 1100Kg, or 8.5% the weight lost.
If energy performance is proportional to weight, all other things considered equal, 2.35x efficiency on 92.5% weight is 2.54x the overall efficiency.
But wait, there's still more! If you could recharge this car at home (or office), the extra mileage you spend driving to refuel is also extra efficiency (besides your time not spent at a gas station or driving to/from it, but rather doing something at home/office). Solar can directly charge the supercap without rectifier or grid losses, probably another 10% gained. Hinting that the entire gasoline refueling infrastructure could be replaced by electric grid and minimal recharging infrastructure, and the lighterweight factories for (presumably) supercaps and electric motors. And of course that electric is generable from natural gas or directly from oil/diesel, at even higher efficiencies.
All of which means that if a real supercap in practice is even half as performant per kg as is this EEStor supercap, it's better than gasoline in every way. Which, when considering the consequences of consuming gasoline beyond the physics (as in geopolitics and climate), makes an extremely compelling case. If $10B would make this happen in 5 years, it would be well spent. Hell, probably $100B would be well spent, because that's about 40B gallons of gas, while the US consumed about 107B gallons in 2008. If the US really could improve efficiency by 2.5x, that would be worth over $100B a year. And since natural gas costs less per joule than gasoline does, perhaps only half, that $266B reduced by 2.5x by efficiency and then by 2 by price could cost only $67B, a $200B savings each year.
Let's hope it meets the claim. And if not, let's make something that does.
Capacitors are notable for their re/discharge efficiency and speed. They are commonly used as in effect a time delay for the arrival of electrons through a circuit after them, but the delay can be zero. They are the remedy to the main problem with electric power: storage, or any time delay at all, and have suffered mainly from charge density per kilogram, which this supercap solves quite substantially.
There will be quite a lot of problems, that we've taken for granted accepting because we didn't have deep enough capacitors, that we will see solved with supercaps if they're cheap, including the energy to make and recycle them.
Actually, since gasoline weighs about.75Kg:l, a 60l tank weighs 45Kg, and this supercap weighs 127Kg, while the gasoline's 566KWh compares to the supercap's 52.22KWh, the gasoline's energy density is 2.82222222 * 10.8387591 = 30.5893868x the supercap's.
However, that's comparing to just the gasoline. The supercap isn't just the capacitive powder/plastic, it's the entire device. So include the gas tank's weight with the gas for comparison.
And then, since the gasoline must be combusted into power, include the engine and the entire fuel system all the way to the transmission. Then you've got to add the electric motor to the supercap for the comparisons to be equal. The electric motor can weigh very little, like the motors mounted in-wheel by Michelin at just 7Kg per wheel (*2 for 41hp = 14Kg). Electric vs gasoline energy density probably comes in at parity, or electric superior.
Plus regen braking delivers a huge advantage to the electric system (especially in traffic, where it can exceed a return of 50% to storage). And since the electric system weighs so much less than the gasoline, it spends less of its power moving itself, in a lighter car. Which is a nonlinear efficiency favoring the lighter vehicle.
So in fact this supercap should outperform gasoline cars. Just like current electric ones do, in the most important metric: acceleration. VVVvvvvvooooommMMMMMMM!!!!
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Actually, the average estimate of their utility bill is $5000 annually, not $5400. So they're saving $4200 a year with their solar, not $4600. That $37,000 takes about 8.8 years, not about 8.08 years, to break even. The overall ROI also reduces commensurately. But it's still in the ballpark, still under 9 years payback, still well worth the investment over 30 years.
That article has a lot of consumption and billing numbers for each of utility and homegrown power, but it's hard to get exact performance comparisons because the numbers don't exactly measure the same things. There is no exact start and end date, just month names, and approximate mentions of offsets into them, not lining up generation and billing dates in either the solar generation half-year or the time before drawing from only the utility. And practically no data on income from overgenerating, selling back to utility or grid.
But there is enough data to make rough comparisons. They say their January/utility bill was $446, but their December bills are the highest (all of which extra usage was billed in the highest rate, 300% of the base rate). So let's say their average bill used to be $450:mo, or $5600 annually. However, they said up front that their annual bill is about $4400. We'll take the average of $5400. Now their July-December/solar bill is $389.39. Even if we call that $400, and so their annual/solar bill is $800, they're saving $4600 a year. They paid about $55,000 before rebates, about $37,000 after all rebates. Their utility bill savings pays off their installation investment in $37,000 / $4600 = 8.04 years. Pessimistically, they should be paid off in 9 years.
These systems have a minimum lifetime of 30 years (if you don't invest in an upgrade during that time). Even if energy rates stay the same in those 30 years (probably not, probably higher), that $4600 for 21 more years is $96,600, or 2.6x the installation cost. Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years. If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years. Conversely, if you took out a 30 year mortgage on your home at today's average rate of 5.63%, you'd net 9.8% benefit. Which means that it's worth mortgaging (part of) your home to invest in these, with a fraction of your old utility bills paid as mortgage interest, and getting $78K more ("profit", really utilities savings) after 30 years, with no out of pocket.
That could be even better than they say. Their reasons for failing to maximize their roof generating area don't seem compelling: "it would get a little crowded up there". Other than access to the panels for cleaning, who cares how crowded it is? It looks like they could double their area. Which would give them closer to zero Winter bills, but overkill in Summer that exceeds what's left (if any) during Winter, which exceeds their "zero annual bill" maximum for reselling overgeneration to the utility at retail rates. So probably about 1.5x the area would give them Summer overgeneration that would equal their Winter utility draw, netting zero bills. It's got to cost less than 1.5x to install just more area, because labor and shared components (especially the inverter that sells power back to the utility) are a substantial cost that doesn't increase at all at that rate. Say it costs 1.2x, or $44,400, but they save the full $5400 annually. That's still about the same time in payback (about 2% longer), but 3.7x the return. And the "green feeling" is complete.
Does DivX/MKV content play in MPlayer? Specifically, the PPC version with the SPE drivers for the PS3?
"override any media coverage"
What does that mean?
Bill Clinton obviously misses Air Force One something fierce. His foundation's got $billions to spend, and our government needs the extra cash. We should sell it to him (with the nuke football dock ripped out, of course). Otherwise the Air Force is gonna have to hold a bake sale to buy the new one.
Why would we read the Wall Street Journal for insight into governing carbon emissions in a market? The WSJ has lied for years about carbon emissions and climate change. Even before it was bought last year by Rupert Murdoch to join the NY Post and Fox News (and many other lying tabloids) in his fascist communications empipre, the WSJ was lying about climate change and markets. Even beyond the carbon pollution and climate change, the WSJ spent the last decade and more lying to us about how unregulated markets would make us all rich, but they've robbed us all blind.
We have to debate a lot to get a carbon emissions market right. Doing it in the pages of the Wall Street Fox Journal is a good way to do it totally wrong. And if you think the financial crash the WSJ helped cook up is bad, wait until you see what the WSJ would do for the air we breathe and the rest of the environment we need to live.
I'd like my regular GNOME desktop and its windows to be displayed with a real Z-buffer, with windows behind windows. These glasses should do something like that without much development work.
I'd also like to see these glasses coupled with a camera that recognizes real objects in view and displays annotations overlaid on them. That's harder, but still not too hard.
If these glasses could squeeze most of 1600x1200 into just the foveal central focus of vision , with lower rez for the majority of the view that is peripheral vision, we might get extremely high rez 3D displays without the higher manufacturing and bandwidth costs of high rez in the entire field. That's possible with 3D glasses, even though it's not for single field displays like monitors.
I'm hoping these glasses are trivial enough to use for everyone, and cheap enough to make, that they finally jump the watershed into a whole new era of display features. Because the old ones are getting boring. And not just for gamers.
Yes, the pattern is comparing some possible (but not even mentioned) privacy invasion by Democrats to vast, deep and continuous invasions by Republicans that not only violated the Constitution, but necessitated the creation of FISA, only to violate FISA millions of times.
FDR didn't make laws - he was the president, and could only sign ones passed by Congress. He didn't "threaten" the Supreme Court, though he did try to increase it from its stalled small size to one large enough to cover the work demanded of it, rather than ignoring so many essential cases.
The pattern is repeating some Republican talking points, without bothering to back them up, as false "balance" between aggressive and sometimes irresponsible Democrats and the treasonous Republicans who always have carved out new categories of invasion.
Obama's announcement of Dawn Johnsen to run the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC, the office from which John Yoo "legalized" torture) is the best encouragement so far that Obama is reforming the uncurbed powers Bush/Cheney took for the White House. Also Leon Panetta for CIA and Eric Holder for Attorney General. I'd most prefer to see Joe Biden make his #1 job removing all the extra powers from his VP office, but I don't have such high hopes for Biden. Which is why Bush/Cheney's powergrabs were so dangerous: they're as permanent as their successive holders want them to be.
No one should have the powers that Bush/Cheney seized or created. Not them, not Obama, (probably ;) not even me.
But if you can't tell the difference between how Republicans do wrong and how Democrats do wrong, you're not comparing Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Bush to Kennedy/Johnson/Carter/Clinton. You're saying something lazy and ignorant that equates extreme bad with merely not good.
Before the Bush era, such tricks were infrequent. Throughout the Bush era, they were the primary government operating principle.
Prior to Bush Jr, they peaked during the Reagan/Bush era. Prior to that, they peaked during the Nixon era.
See a pattern?
You checked at Guantanamo on just why each of the prisoners there was imprisoned?
Dick Cheney, is that you?
Nuclear power costs 25-30 cents per KWh, at least double the average electricity costs in the US.
Coal's consequences, including climate change, radioactive pollution, devastating waste pool bursts, damaging conditions inside the mines, ecological catastrophe from mining like mountaintop removal, all make it much more expensive than solar. If it didn't, it would indeed compete well. Instead, it's subsidized by hiding its true costs so it can compete. Especially in the Bush era, when laws reducing its pollution were rolled back simply at the request of the coal industry. Hence the large number of coal plants.
And no, I didn't gloss the "problems" of night and clouds in the Southwest. There's more than enough sunshine when the sun is shining (almost half of all the time) for it to be quite effective. You're just ignoring that, and raising quibbles instead. And ruling out solar power in your neighborhood based on two months during winter. So that's all the time I'm willing to spend in this thread.
Using solar power to produce chemical fuels for transport across the country isn't at all necessarily very inefficient. The transport hasn't crippled the efficiency of petrofuels, though they routinely cross continents and the globe. Electricity likewise crosses long distances now with acceptable losses. It's less efficient than local consumption, but we're choosing among real alternatives, not rejecting energy sources when they can't be used at their theoretical maximum.
Likewise, solar is entirely possible in upstate NY. At 1KW:m^2, the maximum insolation is a very high rate from which to lose lots of power before it's impractical. Try drawing a solar panel on your own roof using the RoofRay calculator, and see how much your electric bill drops (probably to zero most of the year). That calculation averages latitude, day/night, seasons and weather.
The point of using solar is not to stop using other fuels, it is to use solar instead of other fuels, where appropriate. Submarines aren't going to be solar powered any time soon. But the more solar is used, the less other fuels will be used. Since those other fuels are more costly (either directly or in their consequences), solar will be used more. But that will decrease the costs of most of those other fuels to acceptable levels, so they will continue. If only NYC continued to consume petroleum for power while the rest of the world went to solar, NYC would probably have the cheapest energy costs in the world. I'm looking forward to testing that principle in the real world, as we replace most dirty and costly energy with cheaper stuff like solar.
Solar in the Southwest frees up other fuels for use elsewhere, much cheaper due to lower demand. Solar can also be harnessed to generate fuels that can be shipped like oil and natural gas are. And in fact the grid is a mostly fungible source of power throughout its span, even before we interconnect it better probably starting this year.
Since you just moved to upstate NY, you evidently haven't spent enough time there to know that there's enough sunlight for solar. I lived upstate for 4 years, among the worst weather in the state, and it had enough for solar to power most houses without the grid.
Yes, Carter failed to foresee Reagan covering up the AQ Khan nuke spy network that stole nuke tech from Dutch/German labs and spread to Pakistan, Libya, Iran and N Korea.
But he did foresee the threat of proliferation that Reagan (to be charitable) ignored, and reduced it. Without that reduction, more than just Pakistan (and possibly N Korea) would already have well known nukes to threaten with.
Yes, city life demands concentration and ignoring lots of irrelevant stimuli. That's what the mind is for.
Meanwhile, people who never learn that kind of mental focus often don't develop those skills to apply to other environments, like social groups of people.
But though city people can relax by going to a park, and have cramped memory or other "open minded" faculties restored, country people can't spend 20 minutes in a city and acquire a focus that will last a week or a year.
Sounds like these researchers are either country bumpkins, or just people who need to spend some more time walking in the park.
Nukes aren't "green". The production of their fuel produces nearly as much Greenhouse pollution as is emitted by the fossil fuels they substitute for. Building, maintaining and demolishing their plants consumes even more power. The maintenance of their toxic spent fuel consumes lots of energy, producing lots of pollution, indefinitely. Security for all those operations is also wasteful.
With nukes, there "isn't much" waste by mass compared to, say, coal or petroleum, but a little nuke waste goes a long way.
Suicide with a gun is extremely effective and clean (compared to with a knife).
Louis Braille, inventor of the alphabet glyphs readable by blind people, was born exactly 200 years ago today.
These batteries or supercaps can fit into arbitrary shapes. So unless the Tesla is a fully solid volume already, there's going to be plenty of extra volume into which to fit even a larger volume supercap. Even if the Tesla had to scale its volume up the small percentage that a larger supercap might take over a battery, that's not going to increase its drag very much, and therefore its efficiency. Besides, this supercap's materials aren't orders of magnitude heavier or lighter than battery material - they're probably fairly close in spatial density.
Hydrogen is interesting only as a storage medium in the car for electricity. The whole point of this supercap is that it's much more efficient than hydrogen in storing the electricity that drives the wheels than is cracking water or even conversion from petrofuels. H2 from electric replaces a 99.9% efficient dis/charge supercap with 76% hydrolysis * 94% compression * 35% fuelcell = 25% efficiency (or, with 75% liquefaction, more common and probably safer, 19.95%). Fuelcells aren't ever going to be close to 99.9% (maybe high 80%s), and generating/storing the hydrogen isn't going to get much better than 90%, even with an efficiency breakthru). The supercap probably weighs less than a 20-30KW fuelcell and the hydrogen storage/delivery system, so there's extra efficiency pushing a lighter car.
Nukes don't even break even compared to natural gas CCGTs, even when ignoring the high costs of producing the fuel, building the plants, and dealing with the old plants (cleaning and demolition) and of course the waste. And with efficiencies jumping perhaps 2.5-4x, we have plenty of relatively much cleaner energy sources in natural gas, solar/wind, and even oil and coal - spending some of that efficiency scrubbing the pollution at the plant, perhaps into plastics or biomass.
But slapping 4 of those electric wheels onto a gasoline Ferrari, adding only 140Kg to do it, could be quite a blast.
Yours is another significant insight. Gasoline engines get an average of 20% efficiency of their energy contents, really only 18% to the wheel on the road, as shown in this fabulous primary energy source to mechanical energy flowchart. Except that flowchart shows "Combi", presumably Combined Cycle Gas Turbine at 55% efficiency, when tri-cycle plants can produce between 85-89%, if their heat output is directly consumed in buildings, displacing the fuel that would otherwise have to heat those buildings - which is how we do it, so 87% CCGT is the number to use.
The path from natural gas to wheel replaces that flowchart's "battery 80%" with "supercap 99.9%". So natural gas to wheel is 91% (refine/transport) * 87% (CCGT) * 94% (grid) * 99.9% (supercap) * 90% (motor) = 67% well-to-wheel through natural gas. Gasoline is 86% (refine/transport) * 18% (combustion/transmission) = 15.48% well-to-wheel through gasoline (90% * 22% = 19.8% diesel). Diesel power plants to electric wheels deliver 90% * 48% * 94% * 99.9% * 90% = 36.5%, which has got to be higher than if we used gasoline in electric power plants (which we don't, but comparing efficiencies burning them in cars would say that diesel's 36.5% is 19.8:15.48 gasoline's 28.5%). So the overal efficiency comparison is something like 67:28.5, or 2.35x as good for cars consuming oil as gasoline through a power plant to electric wheels, vs oil as gasoline through a car's gasoline engine.
But that's all irrelevant to the supercap (except I included the supercap's 0.01% efficiency loss in those comparative figures), until the different weights are also considered. That supercap + in-wheel electric might replace 205Kg drivetrain + 45Kg gasoline = 250Kg with 14Kg motors + 127Kg supercap = 141Kg, or 56.4% the weight. So this supercap doesn't just get in the game, it probably reduces a small car with 2 average American passengers (probably about 300Kg total) from 1200Kg down to about 1100Kg, or 8.5% the weight lost.
If energy performance is proportional to weight, all other things considered equal, 2.35x efficiency on 92.5% weight is 2.54x the overall efficiency.
But wait, there's still more! If you could recharge this car at home (or office), the extra mileage you spend driving to refuel is also extra efficiency (besides your time not spent at a gas station or driving to/from it, but rather doing something at home/office). Solar can directly charge the supercap without rectifier or grid losses, probably another 10% gained. Hinting that the entire gasoline refueling infrastructure could be replaced by electric grid and minimal recharging infrastructure, and the lighterweight factories for (presumably) supercaps and electric motors. And of course that electric is generable from natural gas or directly from oil/diesel, at even higher efficiencies.
All of which means that if a real supercap in practice is even half as performant per kg as is this EEStor supercap, it's better than gasoline in every way. Which, when considering the consequences of consuming gasoline beyond the physics (as in geopolitics and climate), makes an extremely compelling case. If $10B would make this happen in 5 years, it would be well spent. Hell, probably $100B would be well spent, because that's about 40B gallons of gas, while the US consumed about 107B gallons in 2008. If the US really could improve efficiency by 2.5x, that would be worth over $100B a year. And since natural gas costs less per joule than gasoline does, perhaps only half, that $266B reduced by 2.5x by efficiency and then by 2 by price could cost only $67B, a $200B savings each year.
Let's hope it meets the claim. And if not, let's make something that does.
Capacitors are notable for their re/discharge efficiency and speed. They are commonly used as in effect a time delay for the arrival of electrons through a circuit after them, but the delay can be zero. They are the remedy to the main problem with electric power: storage, or any time delay at all, and have suffered mainly from charge density per kilogram, which this supercap solves quite substantially.
There will be quite a lot of problems, that we've taken for granted accepting because we didn't have deep enough capacitors, that we will see solved with supercaps if they're cheap, including the energy to make and recycle them.
Actually, since gasoline weighs about .75Kg:l, a 60l tank weighs 45Kg, and this supercap weighs 127Kg, while the gasoline's 566KWh compares to the supercap's 52.22KWh, the gasoline's energy density is 2.82222222 * 10.8387591 = 30.5893868x the supercap's.
However, that's comparing to just the gasoline. The supercap isn't just the capacitive powder/plastic, it's the entire device. So include the gas tank's weight with the gas for comparison.
And then, since the gasoline must be combusted into power, include the engine and the entire fuel system all the way to the transmission. Then you've got to add the electric motor to the supercap for the comparisons to be equal. The electric motor can weigh very little, like the motors mounted in-wheel by Michelin at just 7Kg per wheel (*2 for 41hp = 14Kg). Electric vs gasoline energy density probably comes in at parity, or electric superior.
Plus regen braking delivers a huge advantage to the electric system (especially in traffic, where it can exceed a return of 50% to storage). And since the electric system weighs so much less than the gasoline, it spends less of its power moving itself, in a lighter car. Which is a nonlinear efficiency favoring the lighter vehicle.
So in fact this supercap should outperform gasoline cars. Just like current electric ones do, in the most important metric: acceleration. VVVvvvvvooooommMMMMMMM!!!!