The jobs are gone. Even if we lurch into a state that the experts label "recovery," the jobs still will be gone, baby, gone.
What can bring them back? Increasingly, it seems that we need a tech breakthrough akin to the creation of the internet. For a long time, people have sensed, or hopefully wished, that the breakthrough will concern energy and the greening thereof.
Maybe this is it: Wireless power transmission. Tesla's dream. Turns out all of that crank literature had something real at the center of it.
In contrast, Mr Giler said Witricity's approach could be used for a range of applications from laptops and phones to implanted medical devices and electric cars.I'm imagining driving down the street and the car charges itself. Then we can cast aside all those worries about driving range. Then and only then will the public fully embrace the electric car.
"Imagine driving in the garage and the car charges itself," he said.
Psychologically, people remain addicted to that image of the driver zooming down Highway 101 through Big Sur or down I-40 through the craggy wilds of New Mexico. Even if they never actually travel down those roads (I haven't done so for years), even if they spend all of their driving time in smoggy cities doing the back-n-forth to work, people want and need to believe that they could, on a whim, go out for that long spin through America's wilderness wonderlands. And as they take that spin, they do not want to worry about having only enough juice to drive for another hour before plugging in for the night.
The moment an electric car can meet that psychic need, the gas station becomes history.
Green energy -- that is, non-fossil-fuel energy -- is a lot easier to produce if we're talking about power plants instead of cars.
5 comments:
This could be without a doubt a very impressive technical breakthrough, however...
The electricity still has to come from somewhere. Hint : they aren't blasting away mountaintops in the Appalachian just for the fun of it.
Another well-known point : to build all those electric cars, you still need 1. energy 2. raw materials. It's not a given we could muster enough of those resources. And what is the point making all this huge effort just to allow people to live in the same brainless ways as before ? Less car, less mobility = more time to think.
The wireless energy transmission dream pops up every so often, but always slams into the unmovable wall of reality, in this case, the inverse square law.
To double the distance you wish to transmit power at any fixed level, you must guadpuple the power at the source. A few doublings of distance and it quickly becomes impossable to produce that amount of energy needed... From any source.
A one hundred thousand watt radio station in Mexico can barely deliver a 10 microvolt signal to an antenna in Colorado, even using every known method to "beam", or focus the signal in Colorado's direction.
Nobody has found a way around that.
Bob, we're not talking about wireless transmission across states. I'm talking about a matter of yards. As I understand the latest reports, we can now do yards.
Think: A transmitter attached to every utility poll. Or a transmitter placed beneath the road surface, every ten or twenty yards.
No more gas-powered engines. No more gas stations. No more gas.
Cars would get their juice from the local power plants -- which, over the course of time (hopefully not too much more time), can be greened.
Gasoline has a couple of other things going for it. The energy can be transported via pipeline very inexpensively and while it can be a gross polluter if spilled, it won't blow up in it's original form, whereas ethanol will.
Then when you put the stuff in your gas tank, your gas mileage actually increases a very tiny amount as your gas disappears because the car gets slightly lighter. Whereas with battery power, as the batteries lose their charge, the weight of the batteries remains the same which causes a greater and greater inefficiency to occur.
Then factor in that as the batteries age and get less powerful, the identical weight they possess begins to knock down their efficiency at an ever increasing amount.
Battery power should not be calculated at first life, but at the midpoint of its power cycle to get the true power they will deliver over the course of operating life.
Sandro, you have to be kidding.
We should keep on embracing the internal combustion engine because gas mileage gets a teensy bit better as the tank runs out?
Listen to yourself. That's nuts.
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