electric cars and ever higher electricity rates ????

[ensho]

a report I read today said more and more electric cars were being built.

will rising electricity rates make them impractical?

[Warpy]

1. Not while solar research continues to mature

Think about driving home at night and plugging your car into the storage from those solar panels on your roof.

[ensho]

4. I see the light - thank you

sun - solar - energy

[GreenPartyVoter]

18. Exactly. And add some solar film to the car, you can even recharge a bit while it's parked at the

market or whatever.

[CottonBear]

2. Solution: install free solar powered chargers mounted on light poles in parking lots. n/t

[jakem]

11. Better solution, make photovoltaic asphalt...

[DainBramaged]

15. Right, then you can get electrocuted during a rainstorm

:eyes:

[slackmaster]

3. Wind power, photovoltaics, and other alternative sources to the rescue!

I look forward to having the southern exposure of my house covered with PV cells, a bank of storage batteries in the garage, and an electric car in the driveway.

[DainBramaged]

5. Nope, even if it costs you $5 a day instead of $1 to charge them

Most people use way more gasolene in a day.


It is time for the electric vehicle.

[ensho]

8. ok, that's what I was wondering $ for gas $ for electricity , which is

lowest. you say electrity is lowest. but will it stay lowest? rates continue to go up.

solar panals are great for people who can afford them.

$$$$$ buys less and less

don't get me wrong, I'm pro solar. but there has got to be some way something solar can be affordable for most of us. some way to make everybody a part of it.

[DainBramaged]

10. GM predicts that the Volt will cost about $1 a day to recharge

by plugging it in (2010 release), but it will get over 600 miles range on it's gas engine/generator which will exclusively recharge the batteries and not power the car.

[wuushew]

13. there are many creative solutions to cash flow problems

I believe there is a company that goes around installing solar panels on large commercial buildings like grocery stores and factories at no cost to the business.

The catch is of course that most of the eventual profit goes to the owner and installer of the panels. Still it is a fine example of a win-win scenario.

[Occulus]

6. The Polywell

Image of WB-7 producing a test plasma using helium as fuel

Brainchild of Dr. Robert Bussard, the Polywell fusion reactor may- may- be the real deal. Being built in Santa Fe (with the project being run by Dr. Rick Nebel, who is on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratories) under a Naval contract, the Polywell could represent a working fusion reactor which generates net power.

Here's how it works, from the Wiki:

The polywell consists of electromagnet coils arranged in a polyhedral configuration, within which the magnetic fields confine a cloud of electrons. This configuration traps electrons in the middle of the device which produces a "quasi-spherical" negative electric potential and is used to accelerate and confine the ions to be fused. It was developed by Robert Bussard under a US Navy research contract as an improvement of the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor.

...

The magnetic field is produced by a polyhedral arrangement of coils, all pointing toward (or all away from) the center. The magnetic field vanishes at the center, and the magnetic flux that enters the volume through the coils leaves it again through the spaces between the coils. Thus the electrons are confined to the central volume by a magnetic mirror with a large field ratio, and all the cusps are points (rather than lines). Ions can be added to produce a plasma, but there must always be more electrons than ions in order to maintain the potential well. While this concept, in contrast to the original fusor, uses magnetic fields, they do not need to confine nuclei — only electrons, which are orders of magnitude simpler to confine.

The Polywell must be activated within a vacuum chamber. Here's the one the lab is using:



I believe the size of the coils used in WB-7 is 35cm diameter. One thing that needs to be proven as yet is the scaling law, which (according to Bussard) states that "the fusion power output of the device scales as the seventh power of the radius, and the energy gain scales as the fifth power." Dr. Nebel expects to present the device and his lab's research to peer review by the end of the summer; he has stated on talk-polywell.org that he is pleased with the data he's been getting, and feels they should go ahead and build the full-size prototype, which (if they are correct about the scaling laws and brem losses- bremsstrahlung radiation or "braking radiation"- are as low as expected) should generate net power.

We'll see. If it works, the Polywell will represent the end of the fossil fuel era.

[druidity33]

9. cool!

looks/sounds like that thing Iron Man puts into his chest to power his suit. Does Science follow comic books/science fiction?

Notice the vacuum chamber pic has EMC2 inscribed along the doorface?

:)

[Occulus]

12. That's the name of the company Bussard started

I think he's the one who started it, anyway. Energy Matter Conversion Corporation.

Here's the link to their site, not that there's much there at the moment. Most of the information is found on the Wiki and the web forum at www.talk-polywell.org (Dr. Nebel himself posts there on occasion, but he's very closemouthed about the exact status of the project; he wants to be as careful as possible and not raise expectations by jumping the gun- hence the peer review he wants done).

[IDemo]

7. The whole point of building and buying them is that they use far less energy

and result in much less greenhouse gases per mile than internal combustion. Electric rates would have to skyrocket to make EV's and plug-in hybrids less desirable from an energy standpoint than gasoline and diesel powered vehicles.

[wuushew]

14. Here, I ran some figures and made a chart

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html
http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/115.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car

[DainBramaged]

16. Nicely done

[ensho]

17. yes, agree

nt