Except that tolls are a relatively expensive method of collecting money; far more economical to simply collect ALL the money necessary from the gas tax.
Besides; it's not like the government actually does much to reduce automotive pollution that gas taxes can pay for; medical insurance normally covers that.
Highway patrol would be another thing to pay for with the gas tax, now that I've thought about it a bit more. That and things like plowing.
The military does a lot more than just secure oil supplies, so it'd be funded multiple ways.
Basically my point - upon rereading my sentence is awkward, but charging a tax on the fuel only breaks down if the alternative fuel doesn't end up being dispensed in fuel stations intended for motor vehicles. If ethanol wins, for example, odds are an insignificant fraction of people will make it at home. People will simply fill up with E85 or even E100 at the pump, where it can be taxed.
For example, electric vehicles would be recharged from home. They'd be an issue. LNG might be an issue - you can put a compressor system into the house.
Biogasoline, Biodiesel, ethanol, etc? Would be dispensed from gas station just as gasoline and diesel are today.
Electric vehicles might end up being less of a hassle - I see there being a good chance of them ending being mostly local commuting vehicles - collect the road maintenance costs from local real estate taxes. Essentially you'd pay for the road in front of your property and a percentage of the feeder roads.
Even better, each state gets to pick the proper combination that meets their needs.
My remaining concerns are the inefficiencies of the toll systems. Plus, if you're concerned about wear and tear, until a significant percentage of vehicles are alternative fuel in a way that doesn't have the vast majority of people filling up in gas stations, gas taxes work just as well unless you're talking about something very specific that's more expensive than average - perhaps a bridge or tunnel.
It also depends on how hungry a deer is and the relative quality of the food. A stuffed deer can afford to be very, very skittish. One that hasn't eaten it's fill in a couple days/weeks is going to start taking chances - including eating the plants off your back porch, especially if they're tasty to the deer.
That's why we need hunters to actually reduce the deer population. If all everybody does is scare them off, eventually there will be so many deer that the non-scary food sources are exhausted and the deer overcome their fear of the scary things. That or start starving over the winter, which isn't a nice way to go either.
I think you should read up on the treatment of Carthage - and it's far from the only case.
The ancients, while they may not have had the modern perception of what an economy is, certainly did know about it - and the biggest target back then were the farms.
When I play AoE and I kill the peasants to shut down resource collection I am thinking like a modern, not a medieval.
And yet it was a common medieval tactic. Well, they'd often take the area and make the peasants harvest the food for them, but that was a practical decision.
Just keep the nice ratings labels so we know what is in the box and we'll be fine, no need for religious loonies telling us what to watch and play, thanks much.
I'm willing to bet that if I actually bothered to read up on the rating specifications that I'd be able to tell you the rating 95% of the time for any given game going by only the box, even if you cut out the rating label.
It's not like the games glorifying the ol'ultraviolence are subtle about it, right? Leisure Suit Larry type games, the same deal.
Still, keep the label for the relatively lazy and unknowing parental types and call it good.
In the USA, at least, it's pretty standard for any form of mass transit, be it buses, subway, or light rail, to lose money hand over fist purely from ticket revenue; they require fairly massive subsidization by the government to keep running.
Often the money for this comes out of the gas tax pot on paper. Personally, I think the idea of different pots of money is just a game - the politicians have enough flex to play around. Schools getting more money from the lottery taxes? Reduce the amount they get from realty taxes, spend the remainder as you want...
Yeah, and then the Palins of this world redirect your tax dollars from California or Massachusetts to build roads and bridges to nowhere in their states.
The Palins of the world tend to accept gifts, even if they're not very practical. Better to blame Begich, Murkowski, and Young, and the tendency for ALL legislatures to overlook other's pork in favor of having their own ignored.
The gasoline tax doesn't come close to covering the costs the automobile imposes on the nation. Costs resulting from driving aren't just maintaining the roads, they include the pollution, medical care, bad urban planning, ensuring the availability of oil, etc.
Would YOU want to pay more at the pump in terms of gas taxes to subsidize the roads for those not making use of oil?
At the moment I'd consider this acceptable as a mild subsidy of efficiency and alternate fuels.
With a toll road, compared to actual damage done, the toll system can be considered a negative toll - you'd pay the same for a Honda Fit, half the weight(therefore something like a quarter of the damage), as you would for many luxury cars and SUVs.
This could be fixed with some sort of fancy scale system, but I think that it's best to wait until ~10% of vehicles on the road are alternative fuel - and I mean truly alternative fuel, unlike the current fleet of gasoline 'hybrids' that you can't plug in.
However, you didn't address the parent's concerns: 1: As a tax for keeping roads up, it's very inefficient. Over 50% of the money goes towards servicing the toll collection system; not the road the toll's for. 2: These tolling companies, by and large, are European, and from some quick research are expecting 15-20% back on their investment annually. That's BIG profits - going right overseas.
I'd add a #3: Most tolls I've seen, including the EZPass, require slowing your vehicle. This both reduces the capacity of the road, increases travel times, and increases fuel usage; pollution and CO2 emission. Traditional pay cash booths are the worst, of course, normally requiring a full stop. But most electronic pass ones still require the vehicle slow down substantially.
However, I agree that this is an unlikely scenario. Most presidential would-be assassins of recent years have been mentally unbalanced. It doesn't strike me as likely that Hinkley or Moore would have been smart enough to come up with or pull off a plan involving explosives.
I have to agree. IEDs and AT4s would be highly likely to require government assistance to pull off - How the heck are you going to plant an IED big enough to take out the president's limo on a busy street? How do you get the RPGs into the country?
Also, historically we respond suboptimally to that stuff. I mean, we invaded not one, but two countries over 9/11! Well, I believe that Iraq was more delayed by 9/11 than caused, I always felt Bush was gunning for Iraq. But it makes for a more pithy statement.;)
Can you imagine what we'd do if somebody went after the POTUS, much less succeeded? It wouldn't matter if they weren't with the government. Of course, you also have to look at who'll replace him - Bush had Cheney. Would you want Cheney in the White house as POTUS? That's like the theory about Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X - they had to kill Malcolm before they dared go after King.
but the dealer wouldn't let me put more than $5K on the home equity Visa.
At some point, the percentage the CC companies charge exceeds the cost of processing check or cash by a good deal. Large dollar checks they'll spend the effort and call the bank/electronically verify it. Cash well, they'll count that and check for counterfeiting. For lots of medium dollar purchases (10X1000), credit cards are actually the cheapest for most businesses over the costs of handling cash or worrying about rubber checks.
The small motors used in typical hybrids are over 90% efficient going forwards and over 85% efficient acting as a generator.
And the ones used in diesel-electric locomotives add another 7% to that. ANY motor big enough for a car will be efficient if properly built.
For sports cars.
For all cars Otherwise, why is no production hybrid using one?
Actually, the tesla roadster is coming equipped with a two-speed sequential gearbox plus reverse. This is necessary because the vehicle is a super high performance car and it needs to hit high speeds. Commuter cars don't need two forward gears, so they don't need any gears (except perhaps as part of the mechanism which drops the shaft, if any) so they don't need a reverse gear, either.
Your news is old, they ended up tweaking the motor to spin even faster as they couldn't solve the problems with the two speed transmissions.
A "generator-motor" system is called a "series hybrid", whether you have batteries or not.
I'd tend to disagree; without any way to store the electrical power, the system is unable to decouple fuel usage and motive force; or recover energy via regenerative braking. If it's considered a hybrid; it's a pretty weak one.
So far attempts to use a single power system to do meaningful regenerative braking on that scale have failed.
Source? What do you consider 'meaningful' regenerative braking? Still, current production hybrids use NiMH batteries; with a 66% charge efficiency, meaning that discounting generator/motor losses you lose a third of your energy just charging the battery. Going by your 85% generator and 90% motor, that's 50% recovery stop to go. LiIon is 99.9% efficient done right, increasing the overall efficiency of regenerative braking to 76%. Might lose a bit of efficiency with the control circuits as well, but I think that's included in the motor efficiencies. Anyways, that's effectively 50% more energy, which means 50% more miles recovered from the stopping energy. Would boost the effective mileage of stop and go city driving quite a bit. Let's see Toyota boasts about it, Lexus claims it, Ford claims it.
The only thing limiting the usage of regenerative braking is the power of the electric motor and that it can only be applied to the wheels hooked up to the drive train. IE if you have a front wheel drive hybrid, braking lightly enough to only use regenerative braking will only have drag on the front wheels. Not actually that bad - regenerative braking is naturally anti-lock.
If you don't care about regenerative braking and batteries, then there's really no reason why you would need that many batteries, or for that matter, any at all beyond what you need to start the engine which runs the generator.
I have always figured the ideal solution was to build a generator into a turbine (to reduce the weight of the generator.) Chrysler drove a turbine-powered car across the country in the 1960s. My understanding is that it ate transmissions. I aim to eliminate the transmission. If your generator is not large it had better be fast. Turbines are fast. Seems like the perfect match, to me.
Right now though, fast small turbine = inefficient loud turbine. Atkinson style IC engines are quieter, more efficient, and need less maintenance.
Electronic control is becoming more common anyway. There's a lot of small-to-medium sized equipment with an electronically-controlled hydraulic drive, now. And if I were designing some
They are attempting to cut costs and have less of an impact on the environment as well as stretch their mission capabilities in certain situations.
Trust me, they're not so worried for the environment as they are drooling at the ability to cut down the need to ship in highly flammable, potentially explosive diesel. Importing diesel, or anything for that matter, into a warzone is an expensive activity.
You're right about not having enough info on the test vehicle, I initially wrote '3 axle', but changed it to '6 shocks' because of the trucks with two shocks in the back thing. As for trains, I've been aware of them for years. Standard tech was that they put a resister net on the roof of the train to dissipate the watts resulting from using the motors in a braking mode. Around 5 years ago they started playing around with true hybrid trains with battery storage capacity, but I haven't seen anything on it since.
because of the torque and power ratios being the same at all motor speeds.
It mostly came down to cost and weight. A mechanical transmission capable of handling the torque requirements for starting a train would be far heavier, wear quickly(frequent replacement), plus you'd need to regularly replace brake pads on all the train cars for whenever you stop/slow the train. The motor/generator system essentially is the transmission, with the bonus that it can provide essentially no-wear braking power for most stops.
Imagine a 50 car cargo train charging capacitors when slowing for a corner or going down hill and the sway of the cars be it turbulence from the non-streamlined design or natural wind currents providing half the power or more for the next leg of the trip.
The only problem with this is that we don't really have any capacitors with the necessary power storage capabilities; even ultracaps would be overwhelmed. EEStor claims to have something that should work, but until an independent lab/authority actually tests one, I'm skeptical.
It would probably work with heavy trucks too but my understanding was that the heavier the vehicle, the worse the economy was regardless of being a hybrid or not. Some of the SUV hybrids don't seem to get much more mileage then the gas and diesel counter parts. Sure, there would be a 35-50 percent gain but that isn't much when your not starting out with much.
Most hybrid SUVs are actually 'mild' hybrids, they still have a full size engine in them to support towing heavy trailors, even though most never tow anything, heck the hitch on my truck has only been used so far for hauling my ass out of the ditch*. Car hybrids give up essentially all towing ability. So that limits gas saved. Still, something to realize about mpg figures is that it isn't linear.
You save more fuel increasing the mpg of the truck by 10 mpg than the car by 20.
The Panel vans and so on probably would save quite a bit in fuel just from being turned off at stops and waits in heavy traffic.
Don't forget capital costs and hourly wages - if the time it takes to fire up the trucks after each stop increases the number of trucks/drivers you need to get your deliveries done by 10%, it's not worth it. Thus even a 'mild' hybrid system with an effectively instant-start engine is worth the money. That most panel vans drive mostly inside of town, where hybrids rule and traditional engine vehicles do their worst, makes them an obvious target. Same with school/city buses.
*Went from gravel road w/traction to paved coated in ice from overnight rains. Was turning onto the road, not going very fast, but enough on that slick ice to lose traction and slide across the road into the ditch. The hitch was the best spot to attach the hook to pull me back.
What is a "weak hybrid"? That doesn't mean anything that I know of, and the word "weak" is entirely unclear in this context.
Darn... Sometimes I get the word wrong. Look up 'mild hybrid'. Basically, it's a hybrid that's not really capable of moving a signifcant distance or at a significant speed withough the engine running; as opposed to 'strong' hybrids that can. It's also something of a relative term. Generally speaking, a hybrid that can just about get through that redlight before having the engine started would be considered 'mild', the one that doesn't bother to start the engine until you get on the throughfare a mile from your driveway would be a strong one.
From your sentence fragment it is unclear whether you advocate this approach or not, but it is probably a fantastic idea.
If it makes engineering/economical sense, go for it. Electric motors, on average, increase in efficiency the larger they get, so railroads and huge cranes/the crawler that moves the shuttle, tanks and rockets included, to the launch pad use very efficient motors. The fans in your computer generally aren't all that efficient in comparison.
The problem is that it would best be applied to every wheel on the vehicle (including on the trailer.) Perhaps the approach would be better applied first to the lowly box truck.
Why the heck would it have to be applied to every wheel? As the Tesla roadster shows, at this time drivetrains are more efficient than hub motors. You keep unsprung weight down, and a single big motor/generator is more efficient than a number of small ones. The driveshafts and associated parts aren't actually all that heavy or inefficient. If you're not going to make the thing all wheel drive, well, you can still use regenerative braking for most stops - you'd only use the backup brake pads on all wheels for hard pushes on the brake pedal. One benefit I've read about for hybrids that use regenerative braking is that the brakes are generally a lifetime item. Pads designed to last a useful time on a traditional engine vehicle are overkill on an regenerative, essentially making them 'life of the car' unless you're doing something weird.
The tesla roadster is coming equiped with a forward-reverse transmission. With a generator-motor system, you don't even need that. The engine turns a generator, producing electricity that goes to a controller to feed the motor that's actually hooked up to the wheels. Just run the motor in reverse for backing up. I will admit that you might still have a fixed gear transmission to translate motor RPMS to wheel RPMS to keep everything in spec. But those are very light, very simple, and very strong.
Well again, you have to ask yourself if the amount of power we're talking about is worthwhile.
10% more gas mileage for a heavy vehicle is easily worth it, in my opinion. Just going by the article's claims, and assuming the upgrade doesn't cost too terribly much.
For instance, if you had a hydraulic hybrid vehicle this would be very worthwhile.
Well, it seems that it needs electronic control to function correctly, so it might end up being more expensive. Then again, it might not be. There's certainly lots of options.
I think the vaccine-autism blamers are encouraged by a couple things. 1. Looking for someone, anyone to blame. 2. Under financial duress from the extra expenses of an autistic baby, they want to hit *somebody* up for money.
Consider how John Edwards made much of his money - suing doctors for neonatal defects not necessarily caused by them.
Add to this that the truckers rent or own their own cabs as part of the business and there's little incentive for anyone to innovate or upgrade in a direction that would hurt their prospects for hauling.
Conservive I can understand. However, there are large fleets out there, and as the parent mentioned, a 10% savings in fuel costs is substantial. New car every year type substantial.
Now, as for the pneumatics, that's easily handled with a couple electric pumps. Still, I don't think anybody's talking about making semis anything other than weak hybrids. Or killing their transmission in favor of a smaller version of the generator-motor system used in trains because it's actually more efficient than a mechanical transmission.
With a bit of logic, I'd see the shock generators simply dumping the energy into a motor attached to the drive train. Just a small motor, 5hp for a 'heavy truck', maybe 15-25hp for a semi. If the brake is applied, run the power to a resistor net located somewhere for disposal. Or send it to the battery.
If the popular vote truly counted, that would be a very compelling reason to register and/or go out and vote.
While the EC means that a North Dakotan's(633k, 3 EC votes) vote counts about three times as much as an Californian's(34M, 55ECV), that doesn't mean your vote doesn't count.
North Dakota gets a vote for every 211k people. California gets a vote for every 618k.
If nothing else, your vote still counts for your representative, senator, state and local government, etc... Remember, the President doesn't work in a vacuum - Having Senator A instead of B in office can mean some important differences, even if they're not immediately apparent.
You do realize that this will only effect hybrid or electric cars right?
Given the specific mention of military hummers, which are most certainly NOT hybrids or electic, it must have some benefit for non-hybrids.
Then again, how difficult would it be to replace the starter and alternator with a motor/generator capable of putting power to the drivetrain? Even if it's only a 5hp sustained, that'd be more than enough to take the 1kw each of the six shocks is capable of putting out(1hp=746W). Switch out the lead battery for a LiIon/NiMH of substantially more capacity. Increased cost, but probably actually lighter than traditional systems. For cold areas, there are LiIon that perform *as rated* at -40C. Not the 'put a bigger battery than you could possibly need in warm weather so you still have enough power to start when the oil is like jelly and the battery has 10% capacity left'.
You'd end up with a mild hybrid that can do stuff like shut off the engine at stops. Oh and stick the energy gained from the shocks back into moving the vehicle.
If they can't get the cost of this stuff under those dollar figures, then they are probably costing more then any savings.
The only problem I see with your figures is that they're explicity talking about trucks and other heavy vehicles. So you might want to redo your figures for 12-20 mpg ranges. Their test mule was a heavy truck with six shocks. Indeed, they also mention that it provides a better ride than traditional shocks, so there's a possible selling point there. 20 mpg/15,000 miles=750 gallons. Save 75 gallons a year(10%), that'd be $150@$2 gas, $300@$4 gas. Ten year timeframe? Could save them $3k, more if they've got a really heavy truck or are driving on particularly bumpy roads.
Then again, I've said numerous times that it makes more sense to make trucks and SUVs hybrid before you start making sub-compact hybrids. More fuel to save, more room to put the components, components end up being a lower percentage of the cost of the vehicle, etc...
I mean, look at the typical UPS/FEDEX panel van. Consider it's usage - stop and go traffic all day in the city for most of them. Right now they have a diesel engine that doesn't get turned off when they stop. How much fuel can be saved if you turn the truck into a hybrid? As a bonus, the heavy battery pack in the bottom of the vehicle would help mitigate the tipping hazards of a tall vehicle like that.
My guess is that their effectiveness is going to go as the shock absorption abilities go and will only be effective for that typical 5 years then severely degrade after that like regular shocks and struts seem to do.
Might last longer due to the nature of the energy absorbtion, but you're right. A lot of cost and durability issues need to be resolved.
Over in Florida there's a man who spent some time in prison convicted *dealing* due to the sheer amount of pain pills he had. It took 3 juries to convict him, with a judge hammering on *YOU MUST CONSIDER ON THE LETTER OF THE LAW, NOT ACTUAL FACTS*. Even the prosecution said there was no evidence of him dealing - he had serious problems and was highly resistant to the pills. They ended up giving him a spinal morphine pump in prison... Talk about a waste of government funds. Three trials, a couple years paying for his medical care in the prison hospital ward for a wheelchair bound man.
I'm sure somebody will ID his name and post a link.
I try to provide links so I may support my position and so that people not simply assume I'm making stuff up.
As do I, I was just mentioning that you got a little basic there - I generally post links for any specific statistics or information, not general stuff.
However neither solar nor wind should need nearly as much of either than a nuclear power plant will.
Solar, well, it depends a LOT on the specifics of the installation. Biggest user of concrete would probably be a stand alone plant with concrete supports, but you could probably substitute metal for a lot of concrete. On the other hand, the concrete needed for monopole type wind turbines will surprise you.
Though I'm not sure I'd think 200 pylons for 5 megawatt wind turbines would use less concrete and steel than a 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant.
First, I'd like to apologize for crashing your machine. I simply ended up closing the browser after a while. Today I saved the pdf before opening it, works fine. Apparently Adobe's downloading system is messed up. Do you have a counter for the Berkeley study, showing that wind needing 10 times the steel and 4 times the concrete per MW? (Duplicating the nice html link with the excerpt) Back on topic - Have you ever seen how much concrete goes into putting footings in for a simple chain link fence? Now consider your 5MW turbine. Some relevant parts, pulled from the article: "The machine has the capability of generating approximately 17 GWh of power a year" - 17 GWh/year. Including a 90% capacity factor, a 1GW nuclear plant would produce ~7,884 GWh You'd need 463 turbines to equal the power generation of the nuke plant. Much longer, and you'll be looking at 2 GW plants, right now 1 GW is on the low end for 'big' plants, 1.4 and even 1.6 GW are showing up. "Winds as low as 3.5 m/s will disengage the electromagnetic disc brakes and the turbine should have peak performance during winds of 13 m/s. Winds of 25 m/s or more will cause the turbine to cut-out." Minimum wind to produce power: 7.8mph, Max: 55mph, Max power: 29mph. "The world's largest wind turbine, a 120-meter (394-feet) behemoth" - It's 120 meters tall, and given even the lightweight blades is a monopole design, requiring a good base to withstand the wind in all weather. Hmm - 45 foot tower, requires a base 3' deep, 6' in diameter. 1/15th in depth, double the depth as width. Scale that up, the 120 meter tower would require a base 8 meters deep, 16 meters wide - 1.6k cubic meters of concrete. To replace the nuke plant you'd need 740k m^3 of concrete.
So, using 1970s figures, of which modern plants are designed to 'use even less', a GW plant would require only 190k m^3 of concrete. 40k tons of steel (Imagine how much steel those 463 turbines would need!)
Oh - found a link to that 5MW turbine with steel usage - 1100 tons of steel PER TOWER, for the tower alone. Various parts in the 425 ton head are also made of steel. 509.3k tons of steel to replace that nuke plant. 469k more tons than the
I didn't exactly need links to such simple near universal construction materials as concrete, steel, cement, and such. I'm well aware of the nuclear cycle.
It's not like wind doesn't need them either - and a stand alone solar complex will use them as well. For solar, roof mounts would be the lightest, structural material wise, but photovoltaic panels use all sorts of nasty stuff anyways. Nuclear has very low life-cycle CO2 emissions - scroll down a bit for the chart. Coal is 966-1306, Gas 439-688, Solar PV 100-280, Wind 10-48, Nuclear 9-21. Interesting article on green nuclear power I'd rather directly link the referenced UC Berkeley study - but This should do: Wind: 460 Metric tons steel, 870 cubic meters concrete for 1 MW Nuclear: 40 MT steel, 190 m^3 concrete Coal: 98 MT, 160 m^3 (there only for comparison purposes) Update - found it! - but doesn't want to download completely on my system.
While Uranium mining and refining is fairly nasty, the trick is that you need so little of it - You'd end up mining more cadmium and other rare and nasty minerals for photovoltaic panels.
Yes I have. "Hooked on Subsidies: Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power" is one. CATO, a Freemarket Institute, also has articles that say something about coal subsidies.
But you lose the bonus points, my article still has relevance, since 'Hooked on Subsidies' only mentions putting it up against coal, which I don't consider a viable clean alternative, even with 'clean' and carbon sequestration. For the energy produced the subsidies on wind/solar are far, far higher than nuclear. And yes, I do consider 'rebates' subsidies.
Not that I necessarily object to all subsidies. For example, energy efficiency deductions. I don't think insulation and other energy saving measures should be factored into real estate taxes. Yes, I include solar panels and such in there. Call it my 'people shouldn't be penalized for owning a quality house'. Not a big house, not a fancy house, but a quality one - safe, efficient, well insulated, etc... People shouldn't be penalized for painting their shack and installing good windows.
Oh, and your syngas link brings up an interesting point. If I got my way, the building of the 300 or so plants needed to shut down our actively carbon emitting power plants would free up a LOT of coal for syngas activities. I know it can be done - the Germans did it during WWII. Economically? That's a better question. Personally, I prefer the idea of algae trays in the desert for biodiesel and biogasoline.
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Except that tolls are a relatively expensive method of collecting money; far more economical to simply collect ALL the money necessary from the gas tax.
Besides; it's not like the government actually does much to reduce automotive pollution that gas taxes can pay for; medical insurance normally covers that.
Highway patrol would be another thing to pay for with the gas tax, now that I've thought about it a bit more. That and things like plowing.
The military does a lot more than just secure oil supplies, so it'd be funded multiple ways.
By the sounds of it, you need a decent roof-mounted directional antenna. I have one and it works for getting TV from over 45 miles away.
Of course, my antenna is longer than I am tall.
http://www.winegarddirect.com/viewitem.asp?p=HD8200U
And I don't even need an amp!
For you, something cheaper would work:
http://www.winegarddirect.com/viewitem.asp?p=ANWGHST
In my area, they're staying on the VHF spectrum - better range in fairly uncluttered area.
I get good signal >45 miles from the transmitters.
Basically my point - upon rereading my sentence is awkward, but charging a tax on the fuel only breaks down if the alternative fuel doesn't end up being dispensed in fuel stations intended for motor vehicles. If ethanol wins, for example, odds are an insignificant fraction of people will make it at home. People will simply fill up with E85 or even E100 at the pump, where it can be taxed.
For example, electric vehicles would be recharged from home. They'd be an issue. LNG might be an issue - you can put a compressor system into the house.
Biogasoline, Biodiesel, ethanol, etc? Would be dispensed from gas station just as gasoline and diesel are today.
Electric vehicles might end up being less of a hassle - I see there being a good chance of them ending being mostly local commuting vehicles - collect the road maintenance costs from local real estate taxes. Essentially you'd pay for the road in front of your property and a percentage of the feeder roads.
Even better, each state gets to pick the proper combination that meets their needs.
My remaining concerns are the inefficiencies of the toll systems. Plus, if you're concerned about wear and tear, until a significant percentage of vehicles are alternative fuel in a way that doesn't have the vast majority of people filling up in gas stations, gas taxes work just as well unless you're talking about something very specific that's more expensive than average - perhaps a bridge or tunnel.
It also depends on how hungry a deer is and the relative quality of the food. A stuffed deer can afford to be very, very skittish. One that hasn't eaten it's fill in a couple days/weeks is going to start taking chances - including eating the plants off your back porch, especially if they're tasty to the deer.
That's why we need hunters to actually reduce the deer population. If all everybody does is scare them off, eventually there will be so many deer that the non-scary food sources are exhausted and the deer overcome their fear of the scary things. That or start starving over the winter, which isn't a nice way to go either.
Yes, I do have venison in my freezer...
I think you should read up on the treatment of Carthage - and it's far from the only case.
The ancients, while they may not have had the modern perception of what an economy is, certainly did know about it - and the biggest target back then were the farms.
When I play AoE and I kill the peasants to shut down resource collection I am thinking like a modern, not a medieval.
And yet it was a common medieval tactic. Well, they'd often take the area and make the peasants harvest the food for them, but that was a practical decision.
Just keep the nice ratings labels so we know what is in the box and we'll be fine, no need for religious loonies telling us what to watch and play, thanks much.
I'm willing to bet that if I actually bothered to read up on the rating specifications that I'd be able to tell you the rating 95% of the time for any given game going by only the box, even if you cut out the rating label.
It's not like the games glorifying the ol'ultraviolence are subtle about it, right? Leisure Suit Larry type games, the same deal.
Still, keep the label for the relatively lazy and unknowing parental types and call it good.
In the USA, at least, it's pretty standard for any form of mass transit, be it buses, subway, or light rail, to lose money hand over fist purely from ticket revenue; they require fairly massive subsidization by the government to keep running.
Often the money for this comes out of the gas tax pot on paper. Personally, I think the idea of different pots of money is just a game - the politicians have enough flex to play around. Schools getting more money from the lottery taxes? Reduce the amount they get from realty taxes, spend the remainder as you want...
Yeah, and then the Palins of this world redirect your tax dollars from California or Massachusetts to build roads and bridges to nowhere in their states.
The Palins of the world tend to accept gifts, even if they're not very practical. Better to blame Begich, Murkowski, and Young, and the tendency for ALL legislatures to overlook other's pork in favor of having their own ignored.
The gasoline tax doesn't come close to covering the costs the automobile imposes on the nation. Costs resulting from driving aren't just maintaining the roads, they include the pollution, medical care, bad urban planning, ensuring the availability of oil, etc.
Then we need to increase it.
Would YOU want to pay more at the pump in terms of gas taxes to subsidize the roads for those not making use of oil?
At the moment I'd consider this acceptable as a mild subsidy of efficiency and alternate fuels.
With a toll road, compared to actual damage done, the toll system can be considered a negative toll - you'd pay the same for a Honda Fit, half the weight(therefore something like a quarter of the damage), as you would for many luxury cars and SUVs.
This could be fixed with some sort of fancy scale system, but I think that it's best to wait until ~10% of vehicles on the road are alternative fuel - and I mean truly alternative fuel, unlike the current fleet of gasoline 'hybrids' that you can't plug in.
but after ten years time the system is working very effectively from West Virginia all the way to Maine. And it's convenient.
Sure, it's 'effective' at extracting tolls, though there are issues...
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061128/NEWS/611280319
http://www.wbaltv.com/news/11080847/detail.html
However, you didn't address the parent's concerns:
1: As a tax for keeping roads up, it's very inefficient. Over 50% of the money goes towards servicing the toll collection system; not the road the toll's for.
2: These tolling companies, by and large, are European, and from some quick research are expecting 15-20% back on their investment annually. That's BIG profits - going right overseas.
I'd add a #3: Most tolls I've seen, including the EZPass, require slowing your vehicle. This both reduces the capacity of the road, increases travel times, and increases fuel usage; pollution and CO2 emission. Traditional pay cash booths are the worst, of course, normally requiring a full stop. But most electronic pass ones still require the vehicle slow down substantially.
Sooner or later, transponders will simply get integrated into license plates, and those will be a lot harder to clone.
Like the tags in passports have?
However, I agree that this is an unlikely scenario. Most presidential would-be assassins of recent years have been mentally unbalanced. It doesn't strike me as likely that Hinkley or Moore would have been smart enough to come up with or pull off a plan involving explosives.
I have to agree. IEDs and AT4s would be highly likely to require government assistance to pull off - How the heck are you going to plant an IED big enough to take out the president's limo on a busy street? How do you get the RPGs into the country?
Also, historically we respond suboptimally to that stuff. I mean, we invaded not one, but two countries over 9/11! Well, I believe that Iraq was more delayed by 9/11 than caused, I always felt Bush was gunning for Iraq. But it makes for a more pithy statement. ;)
Can you imagine what we'd do if somebody went after the POTUS, much less succeeded? It wouldn't matter if they weren't with the government. Of course, you also have to look at who'll replace him - Bush had Cheney. Would you want Cheney in the White house as POTUS? That's like the theory about Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X - they had to kill Malcolm before they dared go after King.
but the dealer wouldn't let me put more than $5K on the home equity Visa.
At some point, the percentage the CC companies charge exceeds the cost of processing check or cash by a good deal. Large dollar checks they'll spend the effort and call the bank/electronically verify it. Cash well, they'll count that and check for counterfeiting. For lots of medium dollar purchases (10X1000), credit cards are actually the cheapest for most businesses over the costs of handling cash or worrying about rubber checks.
The small motors used in typical hybrids are over 90% efficient going forwards and over 85% efficient acting as a generator.
And the ones used in diesel-electric locomotives add another 7% to that. ANY motor big enough for a car will be efficient if properly built.
For sports cars.
For all cars Otherwise, why is no production hybrid using one?
Actually, the tesla roadster is coming equipped with a two-speed sequential gearbox plus reverse. This is necessary because the vehicle is a super high performance car and it needs to hit high speeds. Commuter cars don't need two forward gears, so they don't need any gears (except perhaps as part of the mechanism which drops the shaft, if any) so they don't need a reverse gear, either.
Your news is old, they ended up tweaking the motor to spin even faster as they couldn't solve the problems with the two speed transmissions.
A "generator-motor" system is called a "series hybrid", whether you have batteries or not.
I'd tend to disagree; without any way to store the electrical power, the system is unable to decouple fuel usage and motive force; or recover energy via regenerative braking. If it's considered a hybrid; it's a pretty weak one.
So far attempts to use a single power system to do meaningful regenerative braking on that scale have failed.
Source? What do you consider 'meaningful' regenerative braking? Still, current production hybrids use NiMH batteries; with a 66% charge efficiency, meaning that discounting generator/motor losses you lose a third of your energy just charging the battery. Going by your 85% generator and 90% motor, that's 50% recovery stop to go. LiIon is 99.9% efficient done right, increasing the overall efficiency of regenerative braking to 76%. Might lose a bit of efficiency with the control circuits as well, but I think that's included in the motor efficiencies. Anyways, that's effectively 50% more energy, which means 50% more miles recovered from the stopping energy. Would boost the effective mileage of stop and go city driving quite a bit. Let's see Toyota boasts about it, Lexus claims it, Ford claims it.
The only thing limiting the usage of regenerative braking is the power of the electric motor and that it can only be applied to the wheels hooked up to the drive train. IE if you have a front wheel drive hybrid, braking lightly enough to only use regenerative braking will only have drag on the front wheels. Not actually that bad - regenerative braking is naturally anti-lock.
If you don't care about regenerative braking and batteries, then there's really no reason why you would need that many batteries, or for that matter, any at all beyond what you need to start the engine which runs the generator.
I have always figured the ideal solution was to build a generator into a turbine (to reduce the weight of the generator.) Chrysler drove a turbine-powered car across the country in the 1960s. My understanding is that it ate transmissions. I aim to eliminate the transmission. If your generator is not large it had better be fast. Turbines are fast. Seems like the perfect match, to me.
Right now though, fast small turbine = inefficient loud turbine. Atkinson style IC engines are quieter, more efficient, and need less maintenance.
Electronic control is becoming more common anyway. There's a lot of small-to-medium sized equipment with an electronically-controlled hydraulic drive, now. And if I were designing some
They are attempting to cut costs and have less of an impact on the environment as well as stretch their mission capabilities in certain situations.
Trust me, they're not so worried for the environment as they are drooling at the ability to cut down the need to ship in highly flammable, potentially explosive diesel. Importing diesel, or anything for that matter, into a warzone is an expensive activity.
You're right about not having enough info on the test vehicle, I initially wrote '3 axle', but changed it to '6 shocks' because of the trucks with two shocks in the back thing. As for trains, I've been aware of them for years. Standard tech was that they put a resister net on the roof of the train to dissipate the watts resulting from using the motors in a braking mode. Around 5 years ago they started playing around with true hybrid trains with battery storage capacity, but I haven't seen anything on it since.
because of the torque and power ratios being the same at all motor speeds.
It mostly came down to cost and weight. A mechanical transmission capable of handling the torque requirements for starting a train would be far heavier, wear quickly(frequent replacement), plus you'd need to regularly replace brake pads on all the train cars for whenever you stop/slow the train. The motor/generator system essentially is the transmission, with the bonus that it can provide essentially no-wear braking power for most stops.
Imagine a 50 car cargo train charging capacitors when slowing for a corner or going down hill and the sway of the cars be it turbulence from the non-streamlined design or natural wind currents providing half the power or more for the next leg of the trip.
The only problem with this is that we don't really have any capacitors with the necessary power storage capabilities; even ultracaps would be overwhelmed. EEStor claims to have something that should work, but until an independent lab/authority actually tests one, I'm skeptical.
It would probably work with heavy trucks too but my understanding was that the heavier the vehicle, the worse the economy was regardless of being a hybrid or not. Some of the SUV hybrids don't seem to get much more mileage then the gas and diesel counter parts. Sure, there would be a 35-50 percent gain but that isn't much when your not starting out with much.
Most hybrid SUVs are actually 'mild' hybrids, they still have a full size engine in them to support towing heavy trailors, even though most never tow anything, heck the hitch on my truck has only been used so far for hauling my ass out of the ditch*. Car hybrids give up essentially all towing ability. So that limits gas saved. Still, something to realize about mpg figures is that it isn't linear.
Small Car -> Hybrid, 30mpg -> 50 mpg. 15k miles/year.
30mpg: 500 gallons. 50 mpg: 300 Diff: 200 gallons saved
Truck, 20mpg -> Hybrid, 30 mpg, 15K miles/year
20mpg: 750 gallons. 30 mpg: 500 g, Diff: 250 gallons.
You save more fuel increasing the mpg of the truck by 10 mpg than the car by 20.
The Panel vans and so on probably would save quite a bit in fuel just from being turned off at stops and waits in heavy traffic.
Don't forget capital costs and hourly wages - if the time it takes to fire up the trucks after each stop increases the number of trucks/drivers you need to get your deliveries done by 10%, it's not worth it. Thus even a 'mild' hybrid system with an effectively instant-start engine is worth the money. That most panel vans drive mostly inside of town, where hybrids rule and traditional engine vehicles do their worst, makes them an obvious target. Same with school/city buses.
*Went from gravel road w/traction to paved coated in ice from overnight rains. Was turning onto the road, not going very fast, but enough on that slick ice to lose traction and slide across the road into the ditch. The hitch was the best spot to attach the hook to pull me back.
What is a "weak hybrid"? That doesn't mean anything that I know of, and the word "weak" is entirely unclear in this context.
Darn... Sometimes I get the word wrong. Look up 'mild hybrid'. Basically, it's a hybrid that's not really capable of moving a signifcant distance or at a significant speed withough the engine running; as opposed to 'strong' hybrids that can. It's also something of a relative term. Generally speaking, a hybrid that can just about get through that redlight before having the engine started would be considered 'mild', the one that doesn't bother to start the engine until you get on the throughfare a mile from your driveway would be a strong one.
From your sentence fragment it is unclear whether you advocate this approach or not, but it is probably a fantastic idea.
If it makes engineering/economical sense, go for it. Electric motors, on average, increase in efficiency the larger they get, so railroads and huge cranes/the crawler that moves the shuttle, tanks and rockets included, to the launch pad use very efficient motors. The fans in your computer generally aren't all that efficient in comparison.
The problem is that it would best be applied to every wheel on the vehicle (including on the trailer.) Perhaps the
approach would be better applied first to the lowly box truck.
Why the heck would it have to be applied to every wheel? As the Tesla roadster shows, at this time drivetrains are more efficient than hub motors. You keep unsprung weight down, and a single big motor/generator is more efficient than a number of small ones. The driveshafts and associated parts aren't actually all that heavy or inefficient. If you're not going to make the thing all wheel drive, well, you can still use regenerative braking for most stops - you'd only use the backup brake pads on all wheels for hard pushes on the brake pedal. One benefit I've read about for hybrids that use regenerative braking is that the brakes are generally a lifetime item. Pads designed to last a useful time on a traditional engine vehicle are overkill on an regenerative, essentially making them 'life of the car' unless you're doing something weird.
The tesla roadster is coming equiped with a forward-reverse transmission. With a generator-motor system, you don't even need that. The engine turns a generator, producing electricity that goes to a controller to feed the motor that's actually hooked up to the wheels. Just run the motor in reverse for backing up. I will admit that you might still have a fixed gear transmission to translate motor RPMS to wheel RPMS to keep everything in spec. But those are very light, very simple, and very strong.
Well again, you have to ask yourself if the amount of power we're talking about is worthwhile.
10% more gas mileage for a heavy vehicle is easily worth it, in my opinion. Just going by the article's claims, and assuming the upgrade doesn't cost too terribly much.
For instance, if you had a hydraulic hybrid vehicle this would be very worthwhile.
Well, it seems that it needs electronic control to function correctly, so it might end up being more expensive. Then again, it might not be. There's certainly lots of options.
I think the vaccine-autism blamers are encouraged by a couple things.
1. Looking for someone, anyone to blame.
2. Under financial duress from the extra expenses of an autistic baby, they want to hit *somebody* up for money.
Consider how John Edwards made much of his money - suing doctors for neonatal defects not necessarily caused by them.
Add to this that the truckers rent or own their own cabs as part of the business and there's little incentive for anyone to innovate or upgrade in a direction that would hurt their prospects for hauling.
Conservive I can understand. However, there are large fleets out there, and as the parent mentioned, a 10% savings in fuel costs is substantial. New car every year type substantial.
Now, as for the pneumatics, that's easily handled with a couple electric pumps. Still, I don't think anybody's talking about making semis anything other than weak hybrids. Or killing their transmission in favor of a smaller version of the generator-motor system used in trains because it's actually more efficient than a mechanical transmission.
With a bit of logic, I'd see the shock generators simply dumping the energy into a motor attached to the drive train. Just a small motor, 5hp for a 'heavy truck', maybe 15-25hp for a semi. If the brake is applied, run the power to a resistor net located somewhere for disposal. Or send it to the battery.
If the popular vote truly counted, that would be a very compelling reason to register and/or go out and vote.
While the EC means that a North Dakotan's(633k, 3 EC votes) vote counts about three times as much as an Californian's(34M, 55ECV), that doesn't mean your vote doesn't count.
North Dakota gets a vote for every 211k people.
California gets a vote for every 618k.
If nothing else, your vote still counts for your representative, senator, state and local government, etc... Remember, the President doesn't work in a vacuum - Having Senator A instead of B in office can mean some important differences, even if they're not immediately apparent.
You do realize that this will only effect hybrid or electric cars right?
Given the specific mention of military hummers, which are most certainly NOT hybrids or electic, it must have some benefit for non-hybrids.
Then again, how difficult would it be to replace the starter and alternator with a motor/generator capable of putting power to the drivetrain? Even if it's only a 5hp sustained, that'd be more than enough to take the 1kw each of the six shocks is capable of putting out(1hp=746W). Switch out the lead battery for a LiIon/NiMH of substantially more capacity. Increased cost, but probably actually lighter than traditional systems. For cold areas, there are LiIon that perform *as rated* at -40C. Not the 'put a bigger battery than you could possibly need in warm weather so you still have enough power to start when the oil is like jelly and the battery has 10% capacity left'.
You'd end up with a mild hybrid that can do stuff like shut off the engine at stops. Oh and stick the energy gained from the shocks back into moving the vehicle.
If they can't get the cost of this stuff under those dollar figures, then they are probably costing more then any savings.
The only problem I see with your figures is that they're explicity talking about trucks and other heavy vehicles. So you might want to redo your figures for 12-20 mpg ranges. Their test mule was a heavy truck with six shocks. Indeed, they also mention that it provides a better ride than traditional shocks, so there's a possible selling point there.
20 mpg/15,000 miles=750 gallons. Save 75 gallons a year(10%), that'd be $150@$2 gas, $300@$4 gas. Ten year timeframe? Could save them $3k, more if they've got a really heavy truck or are driving on particularly bumpy roads.
Then again, I've said numerous times that it makes more sense to make trucks and SUVs hybrid before you start making sub-compact hybrids. More fuel to save, more room to put the components, components end up being a lower percentage of the cost of the vehicle, etc...
I mean, look at the typical UPS/FEDEX panel van. Consider it's usage - stop and go traffic all day in the city for most of them. Right now they have a diesel engine that doesn't get turned off when they stop. How much fuel can be saved if you turn the truck into a hybrid? As a bonus, the heavy battery pack in the bottom of the vehicle would help mitigate the tipping hazards of a tall vehicle like that.
My guess is that their effectiveness is going to go as the shock absorption abilities go and will only be effective for that typical 5 years then severely degrade after that like regular shocks and struts seem to do.
Might last longer due to the nature of the energy absorbtion, but you're right. A lot of cost and durability issues need to be resolved.
Over in Florida there's a man who spent some time in prison convicted *dealing* due to the sheer amount of pain pills he had. It took 3 juries to convict him, with a judge hammering on *YOU MUST CONSIDER ON THE LETTER OF THE LAW, NOT ACTUAL FACTS*. Even the prosecution said there was no evidence of him dealing - he had serious problems and was highly resistant to the pills. They ended up giving him a spinal morphine pump in prison... Talk about a waste of government funds. Three trials, a couple years paying for his medical care in the prison hospital ward for a wheelchair bound man.
I'm sure somebody will ID his name and post a link.
I try to provide links so I may support my position and so that people not simply assume I'm making stuff up.
As do I, I was just mentioning that you got a little basic there - I generally post links for any specific statistics or information, not general stuff.
However neither solar nor wind should need nearly as much of either than a nuclear power plant will.
Solar, well, it depends a LOT on the specifics of the installation. Biggest user of concrete would probably be a stand alone plant with concrete supports, but you could probably substitute metal for a lot of concrete. On the other hand, the concrete needed for monopole type wind turbines will surprise you.
Though I'm not sure I'd think 200 pylons for 5 megawatt wind turbines would use less concrete and steel than a 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant.
First, I'd like to apologize for crashing your machine. I simply ended up closing the browser after a while. Today I saved the pdf before opening it, works fine. Apparently Adobe's downloading system is messed up.
Do you have a counter for the Berkeley study, showing that wind needing 10 times the steel and 4 times the concrete per MW? (Duplicating the nice html link with the excerpt)
Back on topic - Have you ever seen how much concrete goes into putting footings in for a simple chain link fence? Now consider your 5MW turbine.
Some relevant parts, pulled from the article:
"The machine has the capability of generating approximately 17 GWh of power a year" - 17 GWh/year. Including a 90% capacity factor, a 1GW nuclear plant would produce ~7,884 GWh You'd need 463 turbines to equal the power generation of the nuke plant. Much longer, and you'll be looking at 2 GW plants, right now 1 GW is on the low end for 'big' plants, 1.4 and even 1.6 GW are showing up.
"Winds as low as 3.5 m/s will disengage the electromagnetic disc brakes and the turbine should have peak performance during winds of 13 m/s. Winds of 25 m/s or more will cause the turbine to cut-out."
Minimum wind to produce power: 7.8mph, Max: 55mph, Max power: 29mph.
"The world's largest wind turbine, a 120-meter (394-feet) behemoth" - It's 120 meters tall, and given even the lightweight blades is a monopole design, requiring a good base to withstand the wind in all weather.
Hmm - 45 foot tower, requires a base 3' deep, 6' in diameter. 1/15th in depth, double the depth as width. Scale that up, the 120 meter tower would require a base 8 meters deep, 16 meters wide - 1.6k cubic meters of concrete. To replace the nuke plant you'd need 740k m^3 of concrete.
How much would the nuke plant itself take? Modern nuclear reactors need less than 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt of average capacity. Alternate site, Berkeley study(PDF warning)
So, using 1970s figures, of which modern plants are designed to 'use even less', a GW plant would require only 190k m^3 of concrete. 40k tons of steel (Imagine how much steel those 463 turbines would need!)
Oh - found a link to that 5MW turbine with steel usage - 1100 tons of steel PER TOWER, for the tower alone. Various parts in the 425 ton head are also made of steel. 509.3k tons of steel to replace that nuke plant. 469k more tons than the
I didn't exactly need links to such simple near universal construction materials as concrete, steel, cement, and such. I'm well aware of the nuclear cycle.
It's not like wind doesn't need them either - and a stand alone solar complex will use them as well. For solar, roof mounts would be the lightest, structural material wise, but photovoltaic panels use all sorts of nasty stuff anyways.
Nuclear has very low life-cycle CO2 emissions - scroll down a bit for the chart. Coal is 966-1306, Gas 439-688, Solar PV 100-280, Wind 10-48, Nuclear 9-21.
Interesting article on green nuclear power
I'd rather directly link the referenced UC Berkeley study - but This should do:
Wind: 460 Metric tons steel, 870 cubic meters concrete for 1 MW
Nuclear: 40 MT steel, 190 m^3 concrete
Coal: 98 MT, 160 m^3 (there only for comparison purposes)
Update - found it! - but doesn't want to download completely on my system.
While Uranium mining and refining is fairly nasty, the trick is that you need so little of it - You'd end up mining more cadmium and other rare and nasty minerals for photovoltaic panels.
Yes I have. "Hooked on Subsidies: Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power" is one. CATO, a Freemarket Institute, also has articles that say something about coal subsidies.
But you lose the bonus points, my article still has relevance, since 'Hooked on Subsidies' only mentions putting it up against coal, which I don't consider a viable clean alternative, even with 'clean' and carbon sequestration. For the energy produced the subsidies on wind/solar are far, far higher than nuclear. And yes, I do consider 'rebates' subsidies.
Not that I necessarily object to all subsidies. For example, energy efficiency deductions. I don't think insulation and other energy saving measures should be factored into real estate taxes. Yes, I include solar panels and such in there. Call it my 'people shouldn't be penalized for owning a quality house'. Not a big house, not a fancy house, but a quality one - safe, efficient, well insulated, etc... People shouldn't be penalized for painting their shack and installing good windows.
Oh, and your syngas link brings up an interesting point. If I got my way, the building of the 300 or so plants needed to shut down our actively carbon emitting power plants would free up a LOT of coal for syngas activities. I know it can be done - the Germans did it during WWII. Economically? That's a better question. Personally, I prefer the idea of algae trays in the desert for biodiesel and biogasoline.