[...] on energy efficient vehicles. When I first started my search, I came by the interesting concept of the air car. Seems like a really cheap way to run a car, but I think that the technology has a long way to go [...]

Isn’t one of the first questions to ask: How many psi (pounds per square inch, or the metric equivalent) does the compressed air tank in the air powered car require?

Isn’t this a key factor in how heavy the air tank will be. Is it 10 psi or a thousand psi (or a million psi, which is more probably what is needed).

You gotta have numbers folks, or else you can’t really understand it.

How much does the tank weigh for a 200 km range? We all have seen compressed air tanks (for welding) around. They’re not light.

And their contents don’t contain enought energy (in the compression alone) to do much. Of Course if the compressed gas is propane……, but that’s nothing new.

Jack

Would be great to see what the electrical usage of all that is and break it down to the gallon to see how the two might really compare.

I see alot of negative comments but they only look at it from a point of fossil fuel emissions not what all took it to get it the the car in the first place.

Tidal is a great idea. Basically it’s a variation on using hydro power. Of course it does require you to have big enough tides near where you live to use it. Otherwise you just lose too much energy in tramission trying to use tidal power from the east coast to power my house in Regina, SK. *grin*

That was what I’m trying to get at with needing to use a little bit or everything depending where you live. SK would be good place for solar/wind/geothermal/clean coal, but other areas would be better with hydro, tide, and wind.

Tim

Excellent points but I think we need to consider wind and solar energy as supplemental sources of power only. Tides are not subject to unpredictable fluctuations like wind or solar. Tides run on a wavelength that is very predictable and regular. Some tides shift every 6 hours and others less frequently…but both are extremely measurable. Am I missing something or does tidal power not seem like our best option for the time being?

Not sure where you got your data, but most sub-critial coal fired plants only get 36 to 38% eff. If you go to ultra critial designs you can push it to near 50%, but that would only be on the newest type of plants. Most in North America are sub-critial. It also depends on what coal type you are burning in SK we have lignite which is very poor in eff, but it is cheap.

In general renewable power is a good idea. The issue becomes on a grid wide planning case they aren’t great. The reason is you can’t predict sunshine/wind conditions so if your grid is 3500 MW total and everything is wind/solar you would still need an additional 3500 MW in backup power generation. So you have to build your power generation twice over. It becomes very expensive to do so.

I’m not against these things, I just want to point out the issues of them to people. There is no one single magic thing that will work. It’s going to be a little bit of everything and each combination will be different depending on where you live.

Good idea for a post.
Tim

I wrote a brief article on this as well in my blog here
http://bloggingthegreen.com/2008/solar-energy-mana-from-heaven/
Like I said I want it to work but unless you are in a sunny place with government subsidies its just not quite there yet. Lots of promising tech on the horizon though.

There’s actually a demo home in NY state that does pretty much what I’m talking about. Yeah, I’ve thought about the line of 12V batteries, but I’d really love to see a packaged solution.

Plus you’re missing the load balancer :)

You really want the “battery” pack to be integrated with the incoming power. Ideally, the whole solution lets you run your home for a day or two when the power goes out. The “load balancer” would balance out the incoming charge with the outgoing use and manage the drain on the various sources…

Either way, too many dreams, not enough money for a home, still working on it :)

There’s a large home south of Calgary at the High River turnoff on Highway 2. I believe that it’s a demo showhome for a company offering Wind Turbine generator services.

Worth a look if you’re in the area!

I was contemplating such a project for the new place, but I was thinking that the neighbors might object to a big windmill in the backyard. :)

The primary weakness in solar panels is that nobody has a home really configured for such use. If you’re sitting at the office all day while the solar panels generate, then what are you going to power?

You’re not there, the lights are off, the stove is off. Do you have a electric water heater? (most of use natural gas) Maybe you can run the AC or the heating, but you’d definitely need to rewire either or both of those items. Maybe you can sell it back to the power company, but that’s a whole different issue.

Now even at a base level, the solar panels generate DC and your house basically runs on AC. So just to hook up the solar panels you need a converter and you need to hook up the converter along-side the incoming power so that you can switch between the two. Then you need to hook up to go back into the power company or better yet hook up a battery and run off a mix of the battery and the grid…

And I believe that is the future, batteries! If we can put big batteries in the basement of homes (like a stack of ballard fuel cells) and “wire them in”, then we’ll start to see roofs covered in solar cells. Once you have the “battery” hooked up then you can start generating power in whatever way works. (waterwheels in your downward drain gutters?)

Of course, that’s just my guess, YMMV

http://bloggingthegreen.com/2008/bixby-energy-making-your-house-a-power-plant/

I think that when examining energy solutions, it is crucial to look at the end-to-end cost (Ex: is the extra energy required to obtain materials/manufacture CFLs balanced out by the reduced consumption over its’ lifetime? What if we get better at making CFLs?) This is not to disparage new products – it is just to point out that they are not solutions, just steps on a journey.

Ben, I agree that energy problems are often distribution problems. Because of the line losses involved in transmitting electricity for long distances, I think that the ultimate solution will include not only huge windfarms, but also smaller scale turbines, windmills and solar cells and co-generation solutions, especially for industrial / waste disposal.

Germany has had some success covering parts of buildings/homes with solar panels. More recent solar tech are flexible and sre significantly cheaper. I’m not sure if any are “cuttable”.

I’d think the biggest reasons for choosing shingles are cost and maintenance.

Even if the solar panel idea isn’t feasible…why aren’t we covering our roofs with some type of think plastic that does not rot in 15 years and is recyclable when replaced?

Anyone out there know?