Re: Self-Driving Cars *Are* Coming

Ed Pirrero <gcmschemist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 12, 9:58 pm, Ashton Crusher <d...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:06:50 -0600, tetraethylleadREMOVET...@xxxxxxxxx

How many
articles have you read saying "solar" is *just around the corner*???

I know a guy who is working on a solar collector that's organic-
molecule-based, rather than silicon-based. Making the silicon stuff
for solar collectors is very expensive. Making the organic molecule
film for that type of collector is stupid cheap in comparison. And
the organic-molecule collector is already more efficient than
silicon. He's working on the scale up.

Unfortunately, the "organic cells" don't last. Even the small-scale
test facilities are unreliable.

He seems to think it'll be production-ready in 3-5 years. From
what I know, I want to buy the stock of the company that licenses
his patent...

There's a sucker born every minute.

ISTR someone saying once that the energy of an hours worth of sunlight
hitting the Earth was equivalent to the entirely yearly expenditure of
energy all across the planet. This implies that capturing even 1 part
in 10000 of the solar flux would do a pretty damn good job of fixing
our nation's energy deficit.

It can't in practice. There's an somewhat inconvenient term that
defeats such fantasies: "practicality".

In the first place; solar energy available at ground level is highly
variable. Like wind energy, the _availability_ of the energy source
doesn't match the demand. This means that "conventional" sources of
electrical power have to be on standby to fill the need.

That's why "alternative energy" is systemically very expensive: you
need the conventional power anyway as a "backup" if you can't
control the load. (Residents of the People's Democratic Republic of
Kalifornia beware!) Wind/solar power co-generation capacity of more
than about 5% produces network instability; resulting in outages and
brownouts. (vis. Europe; especially Denmark and Germany)

The generating capacity is largely "wasted" as well if you have too
much that you can't use when you don't need it. You have to give it
away; like the Danes do to Norway.

Norway OTOH are smart: Their major electric production is from
hydro. They take the surplus electricity provided "free" by the
risk-ready Danes to pump water back up to storage.

Then there's the new nanowire Li ion battery tech. Couple that with
the solar collector, and all of a sudden, your car has enough "go" to
never need another drop of fuel, or another lump of coal, or a single
split atom of U238.

Any technology that includes more than one buzzword in the
description is probably a scam. :-)

I wonder what it would be like.

Science-fantasy.

A car battery would reasonably have to store about 60 MJ (~17 kWh)
for daily commuting (equivalent to the nett energy available from
burning 5 litres of diesel); be able to recharge in a few minutes at
the usual vehicle operating temperatures (-20C to 50C) in order to
be generally viable as a competitor to one driven by an internal
combustion engine in daily cmmuting use.

The battery would have to store about 5 times as much energy to be
viable for passenger vehicles in general. 10 times as much is
necessary to be on par in terms of vehicle range.
--
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign | Great minds discuss ideas;
X against HTML mail | Average minds discuss events;
/ \ and postings | Small minds discuss people. -- Eleanor Roosevelt
.

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