A Curious Statistical Anomaly

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.

An article on slashdot.org the other day got me thinking about the past. This particular article concerns the SkySails company’s plans to retrofit a ship owned by partner company Beluga with a kite. Well, not just any old kite, but a 320m² sail-like kite connected to a 15 meter tall mast on the bow. With the kite flying about 300 meters in the air, the company figures that under favorable conditions, fuel costs could be reduced by about 20% ($1600/day is what’s quoted in the article). The company also claims that later versions of the kite (basically bigger models) will save even more (perhaps as high as 50%). So basically what we have here is a return to the days of sailing. Sure the technology’s been updated, and the application is somewhat different, but all in all, the idea is to take what nature gives for free and make use of it.

Sail power was eliminated back in the day when steam/diesel/gasoline/whatever power became cheap. If it takes a couple of dozen people to work the sails, but only a half-dozen to run the engines, and oil is dirt cheap to boot, it makes good economic sense to ditch the sails and just power your way through the waves. But now fuel costs are rising and computers can control things faster and more easily than people. Now, suddenly, the free power of the wind makes economic sense again.

This then reminded me of the German company Cargolifter (original company currently in bankruptcy, new version just starting to get off the ground but hampered by that old bankruptcy snafu). Basically they want to build a dirigible capable of carrying 160 tons of cargo. Filled with helium, this massive airship would float over rivers, mountains, and what have you and be able to deliver large and combersome deliveries to precisely where they are needed. Hydrogen would be even better, but the tragedy of the Hindenburg won’t die in people’s minds, even though we now know it wasn’t the hydrogen that was the problem. Moving at a speed of about 50 miles/hour, they wouldn’t be fast, but it could still cross the U.S. from coast to coast in about three days. And since trains run at roughly the same speed (slower inside of cities), they show great potential. The problem is that everyone “knows” that dirigibles are dangerous, and expensive, and just plain won’t work. That tends to make funding them difficult and, since they are expensive, cash flow issues tend to lead to bankruptcy for anyone trying to bring them back (see the first sentence in this paragraph). I think one of the most dangerous things to true progress in this world is all the facts that are “known”, but are not actually true.

While reading up on both these concepts, the thing that struck me most about the objections were things like: What if the wind isn’t blowing? Everyone is quick to jump up and list reasons why things won’t work, but most of them are specific objections for specific circumstances. The answer to that particular questions is: You use the engines. Are there problems with these technologies? Sure. But what happens when your car breaks down? What happens if you run out of gas? These are problems we face every day, but somehow we’ve learned to deal with them. New technologies will also have problems and we’ll just learn to deal with them too.

Perhaps the past still has something to offer the future, provided we’re willing to stop looking down our noses at it and accept the possibilities.