Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
I was thinking about the latest breakthroughs that have been made in solar technology, wave-energy extraction, cargo carrying dirigibles, and using sails to improve fuel efficiency of ships (from my previous post). I was also thinking about all the nay-saying going on about these same technologies. The problem is that people want solutions that are either ‘This’ or ‘That’. They complain solar isn’t good enough to remove the average home from the grid, and that the sail isn’t good without the wind, so you’ll still need the engines. That is exactly the philosophy that we (the human race) needs to get past. The reason for the ship-pulling kite isn’t to replace the engines, but to supplement them. The purpose of the cargo dirigible isn’t to replace airplanes and trains, but to add another option for when it makes sense to use it. So what if solar energy technology isn’t good enough to fully supply an average American home? If we put solar on every roof in America, and that provided even 10% of the power the home used, think of the total reduction in energy generation that would represent. How many power plants that wouldn’t need to be built. It doesn’t have to replace the current system, as long as it makes a useful contribution towards the whole. And any kind of large scale use of any technology is only going to spur more research and better and better versions of that technology.
This in turn got me thinking about cars. There’s a fierce debate going on as to whether we should keep using gasoline cars, or go diesel, or go ethanol, or go all electric, or go electric-gasoline hybrid. The last is the one that makes the most sense, but even then it’s too limited for my taste in its current form. It’s basically a very complex system that runs on electricity, electricity and gasoline, or just gasoline depending on circumstances. But the batteries in these system are charged either via the gasoline engine or regenerative breaking. It’s all nifty, but it’s a closed system. There are some new versions now being developed that allow you to charge a much larger battery with household power and then drive up to 150 miles before switching over to gasoline, but these tend to keep the two systems separate. It’s either all electric, or all gasoline. Now, since I work about 25 miles from my home, this would be ideal for me. Charge it up overnight and then go to work and even stop and do a few errands, all on pure electric power. Only when I had to travel a longer than normal distance would I actually burn gasoline. But this could still be improved. Why can’t we make the roof/hood/whatever of the car out of photovoltaic material. Then, while I’m sitting at work, the battery would recharge from the sunshine. Maybe it would only charge 5%, but that would be 5% I wouldn’t need to pull off the national power grid. Add the regenerative breaking to this mode and you could grab a few more percent. Hell, put a little fan in the radiator grill and grab another 1% from that darn icy wind that’s alway in my face trying to walk from the parking lot to the building.
The point is, instead of thinking either/or, think, how can I pack it all in and get the best of all worlds? And yes, I’d want the systems separate so the failure of one won’t kill the whole car. But that’s just engineering, and we do have some of the best engineers in the world. So how about we hook our homes up to Solar, Wind, Wave-energy, geothermal sinks, and the national grid? Or at least which ever combination of those makes sense for where ever you are. We don’t need to have a silver bullet technology that will free us forever from the evils of petroleum. That may be the ultimate goal, but let’s grab the present with both hands and see what we can make of it.
If computers could evolve from the TRS-80 Model 1, running at a whopping 1 MHz, to what we have today in a matter of only 20 years, what could solar cells and batteries do if we actually decided make them the focus of national attention? With a little bit of thought and a little more experimentation, we might be able to brew up a stew of possibilities that nobody alive today could possibly predict, and yet in twenty years, nobody could live without.