What I'd like to see is a material that's photovoltaic, and strong enough to be parked on. Then go around and start replacing parking lots with it.
Then you'd be sacrificing the sun falling on the cars. Meanwhile, the owners of the cars would probably be annoyed by the extra heat left in and on the cars by that sunlight. With solar roofing materials already available, why not kill two birds with one stone and put up solar carports?
I'm afraid that you're too late. Pumped-storage hydropower stations have already been cited for fish kills. I can only find indirect references; link, another link.
Our children will be more computer savy than we are. This will all sort itsself out in a few years.
Just because they're savvy doesn't mean that they'll have appropriate skepticism about the reliability of machines that aren't quite computers to them, like ATMs. Further, even if they're skeptical it doesn't mean that they will be able to throw out the hacked system and return it to something which isn't built for fraud - once the power elites get their fingers into the election process they are going to use their influence over pols, the media and everything else to make sure they keep that power.
This is not possible.... with Windows... no after market company will ever get to see the source. When MS discontinues bug patches for NT4, there is nobody with the source code to continue them. So, for this to work MS would have to release the source code for old versions of Windows. This is impossible, as the new versions of Windows contain most of the old source. Windows 2000 is very very very much based on Windows NT, which is no longer supported.
So you're saying that Microsoft's "shared source" program and its system of NDAs is impossible?
Microsoft could easily release source to a maintenance company on a flat-fee or percentage-of-revenue basis, and then collect money for doing nothing at all. To prevent the maintenance company from cutting into their new business, they could restrict them from selling new licenses or improving the products to add new features. But anything that let people stay with the old product longer would cut into revenue from upgrades, both for the basic OS and for the various suites which run on it.
Your conclusion about competition is probably correct, though. When you are competing on cost at the margin, you can't cut your price below zero. Unless Microsoft can somehow buy legislation to outlaw free software, their money machine is not going to run for much longer.
It wouldn't surprise me if we are seeing a replay of what happened to the US auto industry. In the 50's and 60's, auto execs were designing cars to last only a few years. They justified this on the basis that the customer would always want the latest model (the model-year being another invention of auto executives), but they never asked the driving public if they wanted to effectively pay for 1/3 to 1/5 of a car every year so that the auto companies could build more cars. In pursuit of sales the auto companies were selling out the interests of their customers, and when Toyota and Honda came to the USA with products of much higher quality and durability, the public deserted by the millions.
(Support costs are a red herring. Auto companies don't re-engineer cars after the warranty/recall period, and they don't even stock parts after a decade or so. There is a large network of independent mechanics and parts vendors which support old vehicles long after the maker has stopped spending a cent on them. There is no reason that Microsoft couldn't do something similar with old software.)
We're looking at the same thing with software. The upgrade treadmill and patch-compatibility problems drive people nuts and impose huge costs, and they're looking to get off. But upgrades and maintenance are the only way that Microsoft can have a consistent and growing revenue stream; Microsoft's business model is directly opposed to the interest of their customers. Something's got to give under all this pressure, and right now the bulging inner tube poking through the rip in the tire sidewall has a smiling penguin on it.
If the batteries are paying their own way by e.g. buffering power fluctuations on the grid (and preventing events like 8/14), the cost of driving the electric car becomes the cost of electricity. Compared to gasoline, electricity is pretty cheap (10-20 KWH of electricity for a buck depending on the time of day rate, compared to 5-10 KWH worth of gasoline for a buck at typical efficiencies and pump prices).
Ever lifted a regular car battery? They are *really* heavy, and they're not even enough to power a car a half a mile.
A typical car uses between 200 and 300 watt-hours per mile at cruise, while a typical car-battery sized deep-cycle battery holds about a kilowatt-hour. (The car battery probably holds about the same, but can only discharge it all a few times before being destroyed by the physical changes. That's the difference between deep-cycle cells and starting batteries.) So, the car's battery can hold enough energy to push it for several miles.
I found it disconcerting that the car itself is rated at 70 MPG equivalent, while it only gets 35-40 MPG on trailer power. AC Propulsion does not publish hard specs on the efficiency, but my calculations showed that it consumed on the order of 0.64 pounds of fuel per horsepower-hour. A typical car at cruise gets 0.40-0.50, medium-speed diesels hit 0.32, and marine diesels can get 0.260 lbs/hp/hour, or about 50% thermal efficiency. I think they lose a lot by running a tiny engine at 6000 RPM; a Geo Metro engine and transaxle would probably do a lot better.
As far as price/performance fuel wise: $200,000 buys a lot of petrol!
The tzero is a hand-built car at a hand-built price. I can buy a lot of Mack Truck for the price of a Testarossa, but my ride won't be nearly as classy.
What the tzero lets people do is make a statement with their money. I think that most anybody who spends that much money on a vehicle just to make a statement is silly, but the same technology often winds up being used in mass-production vehicles at a tenth the price.
Some things you might have noticed had you been paying attention:
Power electronics are cheap and follow a Moore's Law-like curve.
Lithium batteries are the up and coming technology, and are also getting cheaper at a dizzying rate.
Induction motors are dumb, cheap affairs of laminated steel and copper which are rugged and extremely cheap in quantity.
The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.
Where are the hybrid gas/electric kits for existing cars? That would be a great project!
The first really insightful thing you've added to this discussion! I can't say for sure, but I'll wager a pitcher of beer that the engineering hassles of a dual-powered vehicle are not appealing to the kind of person who wants to be "green", and the costs defeat the purpose for people merely trying to save money. To be truly practical you'd need the efficiencies of mass production, and they appear to be coming.
Unfortunately for your critique, it's addressed to the old version of the tzero (the one with lead-acid batteries, not lithium batteries). You made a number of other mis-statements which you could have corrected with a visit to the manufacturer's web site. (Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with AC Propulsion, and I think their vehicular product is a toy for people with too much money. If they can get some of that money, more power to them [150 kilowatts at a time].)
* It may do 0-60 in 4 seconds, but so can lots of vehicles if you do hairy modifications to the engine and drivetrain. The car is tiny and light, obviously, since it needs only 200 horsepower to produce those figures.
2450 pounds is not light in my book, though the lithium-ion version is reported to weigh a bit under 2000 pounds. The sparkling performance is due in no small part to maximum torque being available from zero speed, a characteristic of many types of electric motors.
* Note the careful wording: "...Efficiency *to* 70 mpg." That tells me they are taking an average and counting when the motors are off while cruising.
You count the time your engine isn't working on a downslope when calculating your gas mileage, and your car gets its best mileage when putting along on the cruise control too. Not that the tzero's motor shuts off; the tzero doesn't have gears or even a clutch, so the motor is spinning whenever the car is moving.
* Good luck getting a charge when you run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. At least the AAA can bring you a 5 gallon container of petrol with a conventional vehicle.
If these vehicles were common you'd have charging stations everywhere, and you could always accept a partial charge from another vehicle. You know, like siphoning gas only without the risk of fire? (AC Propulsion used to list this as one of the features of their technology, but they've either removed it from their web site or made it very hard to find. It is implicit in the ability to generate AC to back-feed the grid; see the link named "Vehicle-to-Grid Demonstration Project: Grid Regulation Ancillary Service with a Battery Electric Vehicle".)
* A 100 mile cruising range is less than one half of the range of a typical passenger car with an ICE
That's for lead-acid batteries. The lithium-ion version has a range of about 300 miles.
* Totally electric cars are less efficient in the winter, when power is drawn for heating.
That's what hybrids are for. If you are using the hybrid battery in "depletion mode", you just switch over to engine power after you use the battery's non-surge capacity. If you run short distances between charges, that might be never.
* The emissions aren't "near zero," it's just that the extra pollution would be emitted from power generation facilities. Those power generators may be more efficient, but an increase in output (to supply these vehicles) is going to introduce tons (literally) more pollutants into small areas of the planet.
Figures? The typical ICE vehicle runs around 20% efficiency or less on average. If the tzero is powered by combined-cycle powerplants burning natural gas at 50% efficiency and has 40% losses in transmission, batteries and conversion, that's still 30% net efficiency. Plus, the waste heat of the combined-cycle plant can be harnessed to do useful things; you can't do that with the heat coming out of the radiator, exhaust or brakes of the ICE car. And with electric cars and microturbines as co-generating heating plants, the net efficiency of the system can go over 80%.
You can also hook the tzero up to a wind plant or solar panels. 500 watts of solar panels would give you about 12 miles a day. The I
1) I fought the company developers who insisted upon having administrative privileges for everything
Everything? I don't suppose it occurred to you that developers work using tools, that those tools are often written with certain assumptions about the configuration of the system they run on, if those assumptions are not satisfied the tool will not run, and that if the tool does not run the developer cannot do his job.
If the developer cannot do his job, the company has no product and pretty soon neither of you has a job.
If you can't find a way for the developer's tools to run correctly without administrator priviledges for "everything", then your OS is fucked up. Microsoft had an example of how to do it properly (Xenix) in-house before they released Windoze 1.0, and ignored it.
then, when their systems got fucked up, I fought their managers over the time I lost geting pulled away to fix the asinine problem they created by hosing their machine.
And if two Windoze utilities conflict on your server and fuck it up, you're still stuck sorting it out. Sometimes the tools have bugs. Unless the developer has the source to the tool (gonna get the source to the interface for an in-circuit emulator? how about Visual Studio?) the developer can't control what it does to the system. They still probably have to use it, if for no other reason than it's the company standard.
2) I fought again to maintain ownership of files and permissions, because people like #1 above would walk in and do things like install ODBC drivers on a web server that was running company specific programs
I don't know which is more ridiculous: letting anyone touch the company webserver, or insisting that cross-development source code files on a desktop workstation are in any way equivalent.
4) I fought people with bad attitudes all day.
Making it impossible for someone to do their job will do that; if it's your policy, it's your fault. You really want to make brownie points? Hose someone's computer with some magic update that blows away some essential driver that was working just fine the day before, then make them wait five days to get around to letting them do their job again. (That happened to me too. I don't work there any more.)
As for my current situation, I've now got permanent local admin rights on my own desktop. The revision control system works as it is supposed to, I can actually use the editor to edit files, and the various tools are installed and running. The truly sick thing is, everything was working fine for the guy who had the same computer before me... so IT had to know how to set it up properly, they just thought that was optional for me. Is that your attitude too?
I'm really, really glad that I don't work with people like you anymore.
It's probably mutual. Today I wish that I could take the Fortune-50 customer for the project I'm working on that's been delayed because of IT's screwups and point them at the people responsible for making me run in circles trying to figure out why my tools didn't work instead of getting product out the door. If there's any resemblance to you, I'm sure it's just coincidence.
According to the epa at yosemite [epa.gov], municipal solid waste amounted to 309 teragrams of methane in 1997 alone. What's a teragram? a trillion grams.
Why the funky units? Everyone I know calls it a megatonne.
This is partly why there is an increasing interest in converting methane from dump sites into liquid natural gas or other types of convertible energy.
Transporting natural gas requires energy, and removing the CO2 and H2S to bring it up to pipeline quality requires more and costs money besides. The prevailing model seems to be to use it on-site, to produce electricity. As large landfills are typically located not far from municipalities which consume large amounts of electricity, this works well.
I am not a sysadmin, so what I do is a little different from most Slashdotters.
I fight the company IT department to get the permissions I require to run the software I need to do my job.
I fight again to gain ownership of the files containing the source code I have to edit to produce the company's products. (It doesn't do anyone much good if the files are set read-only and owned by some administrative function other than me as they're checked out of the revision management system, but that's what IT's default settings did.)
I fight the undocumented and idiotic conflicts between pieces of Windoze software. For instance, today I discovered that a certain serial port chip-programmer application is completely locked out of the use of a port if I use XP's Hyperterminal on that same port, and I can only use that port with the programmer app again if I reboot Windoze. (Bill Gates, you suck dead rotting donkey cock.)
I fight the absurd and ridiculous limitations of test software, such as a hard limit of ten messages I can pre-define to be sent on the test bus when I have come to need a minimum of 11. (Even more ironic, the test hardware I'm driving is based on Linux and ought to be way more capable than the crippled Windoze interface I must use to talk to it.)
Talk to me next month and I'll probably have a new litany of complaints. I do thank ghu that I only have to deal with the reboot monkeys of IT rather than generic Windoze lusers, though.
You're saying "at the end of this year, I've produced a net amount of 0,0 CO2 in my system" while in fact you should be saying "look... over the past year I have raised the average amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and since everybody else is doing so as well and our cycles are out of sync the netto percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere must have been raised by my actions".
Of course, you could level the same accusation at anyone who reduces their net biomass by losing weight.
The total amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is the product of the rate of CO2 addition and its residence time; the faster CO2 is removed, the smaller the total effect. From the atmospheric rate curves it appears that the residence time of CO2 from coal and the like is on the order of decades; if the residence time of CO2 from a macademia nut hull is less than a year, that's quite an improvement. Or you could even use the nut farm to remove atmospheric CO2 as an ongoing operation.
Actually, storing the shells longer is probably beneficial because they will dry, though perhaps you want wet shells so that the liquid water trapped in the shells will undergo a phase change as you burn the shells, which results in a great deal of energy being available due to the expansion of the water.
That energy of expansion is only available if you have the combustion under pressure and confined in something like a gas turbine. Otherwise all you are doing is cooling the combustion and lowering the efficiency of any engine running off of it by making more heat escape with the stack gases (more heat escapes as latent heat because greater humidity increases the temperature you must maintain to prevent condensation, and reduced combustion temperature further lowers the amount of heat you can extract before hitting the condensation limit).
Depending how you measure efficiency (energy per unit carbon prevented from entering the atmosphere, maybe?) you might be best not to burn the shells but to pyrolize them, perhaps with solar heat. The combustible gases driven off can run engines, while the carbon char left over can be used as a soil amendment. This would add to the ability of the soil to hold water and nutrients while increasing the net carbon inventory over time.
While the continued designation of the storm as a hurricane while it was over Ontario could have been an error, I'll grant you the point. (A storm surge alone wouldn't do it; any high wind on a shallow lake would be sufficient to create one.)
Your link says more or less the same thing twice: "Most of the destruction was a result of flooding from over 200 millimetres of rain in less than 24 hours." Nothing about reformation of the eye, nothing about huricane-force winds, nothing about storm surges e.g. bringing the lake up into the city. (The low pressures in a hurricane can pull water up by 3 feet or so, and winds can push that up and in further.)
The damage wouldn't be as bad here as it will be in North Carolina...
I've lived through storms which dropped thousands of trees, left roads impassable and cut off power for over a week. That's not much more than a nuisance compared to what a hurricane can do.
Big slug of warm, wet air, lots of rain; that's all Isabel will be if it gets that far inland. While it may flood some basements and ruin some farmers' crops, it's not going to be able to pack the triple whammy of rain, high winds and storm surges that makes a hurricane a threat on and near coastlines.
If you are going to use trick mirrors, it looks like the best way is to use a Stirling Engine to convert the solar energy to electricity.
Let's see. If the Stirling engine is 15% efficient (Energy Innovations says they sacrificed half the efficiency for cost, and IIRC small Stirling engines run about 30% efficiency), that means that 100 watts of light from the mirror becomes 15 watts of electricity. If I then convert that 15 watts into light at an efficiency of 30%, I get 4.5 watts of light and 10.5 watts of heat. At $1/watt of output for the generator, the hardware cost is $15 (plus whatever the lamp costs).
If I use that same mirror to bounce that same 100 watts of light in through a window and, say, a dichroic mirror which reflects the 50% which is infrared and keeps it outside, I lose 50% IR + 10% of the remaining visible light and get 45 watts of light. I have no hardware costs for the generator and my lamp life is increased due to being used less. I've replaced at least $150 in generator hardware and kept 105 watts of heat out of my building, which I don't have to pump out again. (If I need heat I can always slide that dichroic mirror out of the way.)
From this I conclude that even in hardware, sometimes less is more.
The efficiency kills you, but KISS rules
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The problem is that Peltier elements are inefficient, windows are pretty good heat-leaks too, and when the sun goes down the Peltiers are just thermal bridges. I'd have to spend a lot of time looking up numbers to be sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if the energy you could generate with the PVs wouldn't let the thermocouples pump out as much heat as the window allowed to leak in. Regardless, it would be a very complex and expensive affair.
If you are talking about overall energy consumption, you might well be better off by making some of those steerable PV thingies into little mirrors. You aim the mirrors to bounce sunlight back up and off the ceiling, which replaces the need for overhead lighting and all its electric consumption and heat generation.
The various claims include "up to 100% efficiency" for future models. They claim to be doing this with stacked junction cells, as noted by others.
Background: Photovoltaic cells are essentially semiconductor diodes with huge junctions exposed to light. Photons hitting the junction area can create electron/hole pairs, which migrate to the N and P sides of the junction respectively. The charges can either recombine through the junction or be drained off through external connections. The problem is that a junction has one and only one operating voltage, and if a photon is absorbed pretty much all of the energy beyond that required to create the electron/hole pair becomes heat. Photons without enough energy to create a pair tend to sail through the cell.
The stacked-junction cell exploits this low-energy transparency to reduce the losses. A high-energy band gap cell is put on top, and it skims the highest-energy photons and lets the rest through. Below that is another cell made of a material with a smaller band gap, which grabs some of the photons at lower energies to make more electron-hole pairs... and passes the rest through. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To get really high efficiency at reasonable cost, you'd have to have the following:
A whole bunch of semiconductor materials suitable for PVs.
... which have compatible chemistry and crystal structures.
... and have band gaps at just the right spacing that each one can grab a roughly equal fraction of photons in the incident light (whose spectrum changes with time of day).
... and can be deposited using cheap equipment that runs fast.
Just one or two of these requirements is a fairly tall order, as the PV market shows. Satisfying all of those requirements at once isn't going to happen for quite some time, and anyone making marketing claims is blowing smoke.
Right now the error bars on the climate projections are huge, something close to a 2.5:1 ratio between the best-case and worst-case projections. Even if the only accomplishment is to cut the error bar in half, that would be great progress.
It's kind of like knowing that you have a 60% chance of rain tomorrow, and knowing that the rain will be as heavy showers and will blow through between 1:30 and 4:45 PM. The latter information is far more useful for planning your day than the former.
Our nation is designed around the Automobile, not the reverse, as a result of it being so young. So except for a few exceptions, you pretty much have to have a car.
Definitely yes and no. Chicago and New York appear to be easier to get around without a car (parking is expensive and wastes time). Rural America, suburbs and the concrete wasteland that is Los Angeles, I agree with you.
But that doesn't address my point. To most people, gasoline is not a huge expense. The number of people who could not afford to get to work if fuel prices doubled is small (and the benefit of their jobs is probably marginal at best); the number of people who couldn't afford it if they got some kind of reduction in other taxes is smaller still. The cost of fuel is only a fraction of the total cost of driving, too; as a matter of public policy, do we even want people to take low-paying jobs so far out of their way... and drive solo?
The solution to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is to legislate it - our government exists to provide for us, and if we can make people realize this then our government can help the nation do the will of the majority.
Yet despite all the whining about how expensive fuel is, cars like the smaller Hyundais and Geo Metros and Ford Focuses are still subsidized as loss-leaders while the profit centers of the automotive industry are things like 4x4 pickups. The "will of the majority", as shaped by Madison Avenue marketing, is that we burn ever more dinosaur squeezings in ever-bigger engines. I don't see you offering a solution.
That is a solution often sought because it is relatively easy to implement, but something even easier (though less lucrative) to implement is to outlaw new production of things which we want to get out of our society.
To do that you would also have to (as good as) outlaw the occupations of people whose jobs require such things. In the case of pickup trucks, that includes farmers and building contractors. Know why there is a two-tier system of CAFE standards, one for cars and one for light trucks? You should have; you certainly do now.
You weren't around during the oil price shocks and "energy crisis", whereas I was just starting to become aware of the broader world then. The response to the perceived problem of dependency on imported oil was a fairly concerted program of energy efficiency overall, a development plan of alternatives including the Synfuels Corporation (more or less defunct), and CAFE standards (still kind of with us, though under attack). Have you noticed how much people take fuel consumption into account in their daily lives today? Not very much. Despite the gas-guzzler taxes and the CAFE requirements and everything else, the trend has reversed.
Why?
Because the whole scheme was supposed to "not hurt the poor" by keeping fuel cheap, and that removed any real incentive for people to save it. The result is that we are feeding a number of monsters, from Islamoterrorists to dictatorship in Venezuela and Nigeria to global warming. People are pretty reliably going to vote with their wallets for the cheapest source of a given commodity, and if you demand that something remain cheap as a matter of public policy it will be over-used. (I once read a story about cattle farmers in the former Soviet Union buying bread to feed their cows, because consumer subsidies made it cheaper than raw grain.)
The moral of the story is that well-meaning measures can create perverse incentives, and sooner or later people will act on them. The only solution is not to create them in the first place. If you are trying to get people to save fuel you have to make it more painful to burn it. Trying to give certain groups special favors or subsidies creates more perverse incentives (e.g. Texas state universities react to the elimination of racial preferences by admitting the top 10% of all HS graduating classes, which leads the less-successful white students to spend their senior years at inferior high schools where they are guaranteed to graduate in the top 10%).
Getting out of this mess requires reversing course from the way we got into it. Sorry about this long ramble, but it's late and I'm tired.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid that you're too late. Pumped-storage hydropower stations have already been cited for fish kills. I can only find indirect references; link, another link.
I stick MY paper receipts though a scanner and they go into a box. Nobody has ever offered to pay me for one (but I don't live in Chicago).
This has to be stopped now.
Microsoft could easily release source to a maintenance company on a flat-fee or percentage-of-revenue basis, and then collect money for doing nothing at all. To prevent the maintenance company from cutting into their new business, they could restrict them from selling new licenses or improving the products to add new features. But anything that let people stay with the old product longer would cut into revenue from upgrades, both for the basic OS and for the various suites which run on it.
Your conclusion about competition is probably correct, though. When you are competing on cost at the margin, you can't cut your price below zero. Unless Microsoft can somehow buy legislation to outlaw free software, their money machine is not going to run for much longer.
(Support costs are a red herring. Auto companies don't re-engineer cars after the warranty/recall period, and they don't even stock parts after a decade or so. There is a large network of independent mechanics and parts vendors which support old vehicles long after the maker has stopped spending a cent on them. There is no reason that Microsoft couldn't do something similar with old software.)
We're looking at the same thing with software. The upgrade treadmill and patch-compatibility problems drive people nuts and impose huge costs, and they're looking to get off. But upgrades and maintenance are the only way that Microsoft can have a consistent and growing revenue stream; Microsoft's business model is directly opposed to the interest of their customers. Something's got to give under all this pressure, and right now the bulging inner tube poking through the rip in the tire sidewall has a smiling penguin on it.
If the batteries are paying their own way by e.g. buffering power fluctuations on the grid (and preventing events like 8/14), the cost of driving the electric car becomes the cost of electricity. Compared to gasoline, electricity is pretty cheap (10-20 KWH of electricity for a buck depending on the time of day rate, compared to 5-10 KWH worth of gasoline for a buck at typical efficiencies and pump prices).
I found it disconcerting that the car itself is rated at 70 MPG equivalent, while it only gets 35-40 MPG on trailer power. AC Propulsion does not publish hard specs on the efficiency, but my calculations showed that it consumed on the order of 0.64 pounds of fuel per horsepower-hour. A typical car at cruise gets 0.40-0.50, medium-speed diesels hit 0.32, and marine diesels can get 0.260 lbs/hp/hour, or about 50% thermal efficiency. I think they lose a lot by running a tiny engine at 6000 RPM; a Geo Metro engine and transaxle would probably do a lot better.
What the tzero lets people do is make a statement with their money. I think that most anybody who spends that much money on a vehicle just to make a statement is silly, but the same technology often winds up being used in mass-production vehicles at a tenth the price.
Some things you might have noticed had you been paying attention:
- Power electronics are cheap and follow a Moore's Law-like curve.
- Lithium batteries are the up and coming technology, and are also getting cheaper at a dizzying rate.
- Induction motors are dumb, cheap affairs of laminated steel and copper which are rugged and extremely cheap in quantity.
The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader. The first really insightful thing you've added to this discussion! I can't say for sure, but I'll wager a pitcher of beer that the engineering hassles of a dual-powered vehicle are not appealing to the kind of person who wants to be "green", and the costs defeat the purpose for people merely trying to save money. To be truly practical you'd need the efficiencies of mass production, and they appear to be coming.2450 pounds is not light in my book, though the lithium-ion version is reported to weigh a bit under 2000 pounds. The sparkling performance is due in no small part to maximum torque being available from zero speed, a characteristic of many types of electric motors.
You count the time your engine isn't working on a downslope when calculating your gas mileage, and your car gets its best mileage when putting along on the cruise control too. Not that the tzero's motor shuts off; the tzero doesn't have gears or even a clutch, so the motor is spinning whenever the car is moving.
If these vehicles were common you'd have charging stations everywhere, and you could always accept a partial charge from another vehicle. You know, like siphoning gas only without the risk of fire? (AC Propulsion used to list this as one of the features of their technology, but they've either removed it from their web site or made it very hard to find. It is implicit in the ability to generate AC to back-feed the grid; see the link named "Vehicle-to-Grid Demonstration Project: Grid Regulation Ancillary Service with a Battery Electric Vehicle".)
That's for lead-acid batteries. The lithium-ion version has a range of about 300 miles.
That's what hybrids are for. If you are using the hybrid battery in "depletion mode", you just switch over to engine power after you use the battery's non-surge capacity. If you run short distances between charges, that might be never.
Figures? The typical ICE vehicle runs around 20% efficiency or less on average. If the tzero is powered by combined-cycle powerplants burning natural gas at 50% efficiency and has 40% losses in transmission, batteries and conversion, that's still 30% net efficiency. Plus, the waste heat of the combined-cycle plant can be harnessed to do useful things; you can't do that with the heat coming out of the radiator, exhaust or brakes of the ICE car. And with electric cars and microturbines as co-generating heating plants, the net efficiency of the system can go over 80%.
You can also hook the tzero up to a wind plant or solar panels. 500 watts of solar panels would give you about 12 miles a day. The I
If the developer cannot do his job, the company has no product and pretty soon neither of you has a job.
If you can't find a way for the developer's tools to run correctly without administrator priviledges for "everything", then your OS is fucked up. Microsoft had an example of how to do it properly (Xenix) in-house before they released Windoze 1.0, and ignored it.
And if two Windoze utilities conflict on your server and fuck it up, you're still stuck sorting it out. Sometimes the tools have bugs. Unless the developer has the source to the tool (gonna get the source to the interface for an in-circuit emulator? how about Visual Studio?) the developer can't control what it does to the system. They still probably have to use it, if for no other reason than it's the company standard. I don't know which is more ridiculous: letting anyone touch the company webserver, or insisting that cross-development source code files on a desktop workstation are in any way equivalent. Making it impossible for someone to do their job will do that; if it's your policy, it's your fault. You really want to make brownie points? Hose someone's computer with some magic update that blows away some essential driver that was working just fine the day before, then make them wait five days to get around to letting them do their job again. (That happened to me too. I don't work there any more.)As for my current situation, I've now got permanent local admin rights on my own desktop. The revision control system works as it is supposed to, I can actually use the editor to edit files, and the various tools are installed and running. The truly sick thing is, everything was working fine for the guy who had the same computer before me... so IT had to know how to set it up properly, they just thought that was optional for me. Is that your attitude too?
It's probably mutual. Today I wish that I could take the Fortune-50 customer for the project I'm working on that's been delayed because of IT's screwups and point them at the people responsible for making me run in circles trying to figure out why my tools didn't work instead of getting product out the door. If there's any resemblance to you, I'm sure it's just coincidence.- I fight the company IT department to get the permissions I require to run the software I need to do my job.
- I fight again to gain ownership of the files containing the source code I have to edit to produce the company's products. (It doesn't do anyone much good if the files are set read-only and owned by some administrative function other than me as they're checked out of the revision management system, but that's what IT's default settings did.)
- I fight the undocumented and idiotic conflicts between pieces of Windoze software. For instance, today I discovered that a certain serial port chip-programmer application is completely locked out of the use of a port if I use XP's Hyperterminal on that same port, and I can only use that port with the programmer app again if I reboot Windoze. (Bill Gates, you suck dead rotting donkey cock.)
- I fight the absurd and ridiculous limitations of test software, such as a hard limit of ten messages I can pre-define to be sent on the test bus when I have come to need a minimum of 11. (Even more ironic, the test hardware I'm driving is based on Linux and ought to be way more capable than the crippled Windoze interface I must use to talk to it.)
Talk to me next month and I'll probably have a new litany of complaints. I do thank ghu that I only have to deal with the reboot monkeys of IT rather than generic Windoze lusers, though.The total amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is the product of the rate of CO2 addition and its residence time; the faster CO2 is removed, the smaller the total effect. From the atmospheric rate curves it appears that the residence time of CO2 from coal and the like is on the order of decades; if the residence time of CO2 from a macademia nut hull is less than a year, that's quite an improvement. Or you could even use the nut farm to remove atmospheric CO2 as an ongoing operation.
Depending how you measure efficiency (energy per unit carbon prevented from entering the atmosphere, maybe?) you might be best not to burn the shells but to pyrolize them, perhaps with solar heat. The combustible gases driven off can run engines, while the carbon char left over can be used as a soil amendment. This would add to the ability of the soil to hold water and nutrients while increasing the net carbon inventory over time.
While the continued designation of the storm as a hurricane while it was over Ontario could have been an error, I'll grant you the point. (A storm surge alone wouldn't do it; any high wind on a shallow lake would be sufficient to create one.)
Big slug of warm, wet air, lots of rain; that's all Isabel will be if it gets that far inland. While it may flood some basements and ruin some farmers' crops, it's not going to be able to pack the triple whammy of rain, high winds and storm surges that makes a hurricane a threat on and near coastlines.
If I use that same mirror to bounce that same 100 watts of light in through a window and, say, a dichroic mirror which reflects the 50% which is infrared and keeps it outside, I lose 50% IR + 10% of the remaining visible light and get 45 watts of light. I have no hardware costs for the generator and my lamp life is increased due to being used less. I've replaced at least $150 in generator hardware and kept 105 watts of heat out of my building, which I don't have to pump out again. (If I need heat I can always slide that dichroic mirror out of the way.)
From this I conclude that even in hardware, sometimes less is more.
If you are talking about overall energy consumption, you might well be better off by making some of those steerable PV thingies into little mirrors. You aim the mirrors to bounce sunlight back up and off the ceiling, which replaces the need for overhead lighting and all its electric consumption and heat generation.
Background: Photovoltaic cells are essentially semiconductor diodes with huge junctions exposed to light. Photons hitting the junction area can create electron/hole pairs, which migrate to the N and P sides of the junction respectively. The charges can either recombine through the junction or be drained off through external connections. The problem is that a junction has one and only one operating voltage, and if a photon is absorbed pretty much all of the energy beyond that required to create the electron/hole pair becomes heat. Photons without enough energy to create a pair tend to sail through the cell.
The stacked-junction cell exploits this low-energy transparency to reduce the losses. A high-energy band gap cell is put on top, and it skims the highest-energy photons and lets the rest through. Below that is another cell made of a material with a smaller band gap, which grabs some of the photons at lower energies to make more electron-hole pairs... and passes the rest through. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To get really high efficiency at reasonable cost, you'd have to have the following:
- A whole bunch of semiconductor materials suitable for PVs.
- ... which have compatible chemistry and crystal structures.
- ... and have band gaps at just the right spacing that each one can grab a roughly equal fraction of photons in the incident light (whose spectrum changes with time of day).
- ... and can be deposited using cheap equipment that runs fast.
Just one or two of these requirements is a fairly tall order, as the PV market shows. Satisfying all of those requirements at once isn't going to happen for quite some time, and anyone making marketing claims is blowing smoke.It's kind of like knowing that you have a 60% chance of rain tomorrow, and knowing that the rain will be as heavy showers and will blow through between 1:30 and 4:45 PM. The latter information is far more useful for planning your day than the former.
Not that it would accomplish much besides the nostalgia factor.
But that doesn't address my point. To most people, gasoline is not a huge expense. The number of people who could not afford to get to work if fuel prices doubled is small (and the benefit of their jobs is probably marginal at best); the number of people who couldn't afford it if they got some kind of reduction in other taxes is smaller still. The cost of fuel is only a fraction of the total cost of driving, too; as a matter of public policy, do we even want people to take low-paying jobs so far out of their way... and drive solo?
Yet despite all the whining about how expensive fuel is, cars like the smaller Hyundais and Geo Metros and Ford Focuses are still subsidized as loss-leaders while the profit centers of the automotive industry are things like 4x4 pickups. The "will of the majority", as shaped by Madison Avenue marketing, is that we burn ever more dinosaur squeezings in ever-bigger engines. I don't see you offering a solution. To do that you would also have to (as good as) outlaw the occupations of people whose jobs require such things. In the case of pickup trucks, that includes farmers and building contractors. Know why there is a two-tier system of CAFE standards, one for cars and one for light trucks? You should have; you certainly do now.You weren't around during the oil price shocks and "energy crisis", whereas I was just starting to become aware of the broader world then. The response to the perceived problem of dependency on imported oil was a fairly concerted program of energy efficiency overall, a development plan of alternatives including the Synfuels Corporation (more or less defunct), and CAFE standards (still kind of with us, though under attack). Have you noticed how much people take fuel consumption into account in their daily lives today? Not very much. Despite the gas-guzzler taxes and the CAFE requirements and everything else, the trend has reversed.
Why?
Because the whole scheme was supposed to "not hurt the poor" by keeping fuel cheap, and that removed any real incentive for people to save it. The result is that we are feeding a number of monsters, from Islamoterrorists to dictatorship in Venezuela and Nigeria to global warming. People are pretty reliably going to vote with their wallets for the cheapest source of a given commodity, and if you demand that something remain cheap as a matter of public policy it will be over-used. (I once read a story about cattle farmers in the former Soviet Union buying bread to feed their cows, because consumer subsidies made it cheaper than raw grain.)
The moral of the story is that well-meaning measures can create perverse incentives, and sooner or later people will act on them. The only solution is not to create them in the first place. If you are trying to get people to save fuel you have to make it more painful to burn it. Trying to give certain groups special favors or subsidies creates more perverse incentives (e.g. Texas state universities react to the elimination of racial preferences by admitting the top 10% of all HS graduating classes, which leads the less-successful white students to spend their senior years at inferior high schools where they are guaranteed to graduate in the top 10%).
Getting out of this mess requires reversing course from the way we got into it. Sorry about this long ramble, but it's late and I'm tired.