LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

It looks like a Tesla Model 3 charges faster with a supercharger than the older Nissan Leaf.

The data above is with the Leaf for a full, 97% charge. My daughter says that for a partial charge, the commercial charger added about 60 miles in the first 20 minutes, and then slowed down. That's 3 miles added per minute of charging.

The Tesla Model 3 gets 263 miles per charge. With a 150 kW supercharger, it gets:

50% charge after 20 minutes. That's 7 miles per minute.

80% charge after 40 minutes. That's 5 miles per minute.

Suppose you want to drive 600 miles in a day, which is about my limit. You start off with a full 263 mile charge. You have to add at least 337 miles, but actually more like 370 because you don't want to arrive at the destination with zero charge. So that's about 74 minutes of waiting for the supercharger to reach 80% (5 miles per minute). You can eat lunch or rest while that is happening, but I think that is considerably more time than I usually spend eating and resting when I drive 600 miles. To fill a gasoline car enough to go 600 miles takes only a few minutes.

If superchargers can be made to go faster, or if the range of electric cars reaches about 600 miles, this problem will be largely alleviated.

Quote from interested observer

Just from personal experience, the new superchargers are quite a bit faster than your figures.

It must have been old data.

Quote from interested observer

I can get about 200 miles in 20 minutes.

10 miles/minute. 37 minutes in the example I gave above. That is a lot more reasonable than 74 minutes.

Quote from interested observer

Superchargers slow down as the battery pack nears full charge, but there is seldom any reason to fully charge, even on a road trip. It isn’t worth the time.

If you want to stop for a leisurely lunch, you might fill it 100%.

Quote from interested observer

To be honest, I have very little interest in driving 600 miles in day at all.

I do, 2 or 3 times a year. Many other people drive long distances, such as salesmen. Although I have read that in 2020 many salesmen found they can use Zoom for customer calls and it as effective as a personal visit. Some of them seemed surprised at that. I suppose there will be less business travel from now on.

Anyway, 600 miles is about the limit that most people are willing to drive in one day. It takes 10 or 12 hours.

Quote from interested observer

For that matter, making blanket statements about the utility of any car is foolish.

I think we can say with confidence that when electric cars reach a 600 mile range, gasoline cars will no longer have any significant advantage over electric cars. Gasoline cars have many disadvantages now. The last advantages they have are rapid refuelling, and refuelling anywhere, not just at superchargers.

600 miles is also the range of a Prius. A Camry gets about 500 miles per tank.

Quote from Alan Smith

That's a big country problem. It would be hard to drive 600 miles 'one way' in the UK or many other countries.

I saw a video documentary series by a British historian about the U.S. Revolutionary War battles in Virginia and Georgia. He drove from one site to another. It struck him that even with an automobile and modern roads, it took hours and hours. Far more than most trips in Europe. It took weeks for the soldiers to walk these distances. He said it was unimaginably spread out compared to European wars of that era, and conducted in impassible wilderness.

There are some long drives in Europe. Martin Fleischmann used to drive his spiffy BMW from the UK to Italy. Hundreds of miles with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Yikes!

Quote from interested observer

I decided long ago to not purchase vehicles on the basis of whether they could be used for something I only do once or twice a year. For example, I would not own a truck just so I could cart home some furniture that I might buy every few years.

That is wise. If I only had an electric car, I would rent a car to go on these periodic 600 mile trips to DC. It would not be a problem. However, last year we decided we needed only one car with the pandemic, so we gave the Leaf to my daughter and kept the older gasoline Prius. It is the most useful all-around vehicle. Also, bigger and better for hauling stuff around town.

The Leaf was old with such a limited range, we would probably need to rent a car several times a year, which would be annoying. With something like a 300-mile range, we would hardly ever need to rent a car.

I wrote:

"I think we can say with confidence that when electric cars reach a 600 mile range, gasoline cars will no longer have any significant advantage over electric cars. Gasoline cars have many disadvantages now. The last advantages they have are rapid refuelling, and refuelling anywhere, not just at superchargers."

What I am suggesting here is that the performance differences will gradually fade away until it will be no different having an electric car versus gasoline. Electric cars have only four important disadvantages now:

1. Smaller range (300 versus 600 miles), which may not matter to the owner.
2. Longer charging time, which can be annoying during a long trip.
3. Fewer chargers. This is bound to improve. Since you can charge at home, it is not a big deal for many people.
4. Electric cars cost more, but that is only because production numbers are lower.

I expect range will increase, and charging will get faster, until there is hardly any difference. Electric cars will then bifurcate into various types such as SUVs and trucks, until they are suitable for all markets. At that point, gasoline model sales will decline rapidly.

Electric cars will not only catch up with gasoline performance; I expect they will surpass it. They will eventually be cheaper. They will be more convenient for long trips, not less convenient, because you can plug in the night before you go, and again at your destination. I doubt they will ever refuel as quickly as gasoline, but the difference will be so small it won't matter.

When a new technology comes from behind and catches up, it usually keeps going. It surpasses the original. Transistors started off being more expensive than vacuum tubes, but by the mid to late 1950s, they were cheaper. Then cheaper still. Then with integrated circuits they got 8 orders of magnitude cheaper! That's the most extreme example. Wind turbines and solar panels took a long time to become cheaper than coal, but once they caught up, they did not stop falling in price. The price is still falling, and will continue for some time to come. Eventually, it will stabilize. I cannot predict when, but I expect experts can.

Quote from JedRothwell

I doubt they will ever refuel as quickly as gasoline, but the difference will be so small it won't matter.

I mean that as a practical matter, when the actual time to recharge falls enough, you will hardly notice the difference. Take a trip from Atlanta to DC, around 650 miles. With a 600-mile range Prius you have to stop and refuel completely, so you arrive with a mostly full tank. You get off the highway, drive to the pump, refuel, get back to highway. It takes maybe 10 minutes minimum, with 3 to 5 minutes of actual pumping. But you usually go to the bathroom, buy coffee, and so on, so it is 10 or 15 minutes. In the future with a 600-mile range electric car you stop and recharge once. You add about 150 miles to be safe. Instead of taking 5 minutes to pump, with a supercharger it will take . . . I don't know . . . 15 minutes of charging to add 150 miles? What with buying coffee, the extra 10 minutes of charging compared to pumping gas will hardly make a measurable difference. You would arrive in DC with only ~100 miles of battery charge left, but that's okay because you plug in at the destination and recharge overnight. The next morning you have the full 600 mile range.

With a Prius, having only 100 miles of gasoline when you arrive means you have only 2 gallons. That is not much. Getting gas in DC is a pain in the butt. If you want to go somewhere the next day, it is better to arrive with a mostly-full tank. So you have to plan more carefully and you have less flexibility. The point of this discussion is that a supercharger is not a one-for-one replacement for a gas pump. The way you use one is not the way you use the other. A gasoline car has to be kept fairly full if you want to go anywhere, because you can't recharge it at a motel or your daughter's house in DC.

When we talk about future technology, we often assume it will have the same limitations and problems our present technology does. A proposed early model of a portable PC included a built-in printer, because people thought you can't have a computer without a printer. That was somewhat true, because the screens were so small. It had a bunch of other stuff we don't need, because people did not know what would be needed. (It is shown on p. 62 here: https://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf) Actual future technology usually turns out to be simpler, stripped down, and more convenient than we expected it would be. To take another example, when portable computers came along, people fretted that it would be difficult to plug them into the internet at customer sites, hotels, and other places. It was becoming clear that a computer without the internet was not much use. Hotel rooms soon had ethernet connections. That was a problem until wi-fi came along. You can "plug in" as many computers in a customer site or hotel room as you like. No ethernet connections needed.

As I mentioned, early versions of a technology are often too complicated. We think of technology as evolving from simple to complex, but it often works the other way. A good example is the Blenkinsop locomotive of 1812. It solved a problem he did not have. Blenkinsop thought that friction alone would not keep the locomotive from slipping, so he designed a cog-railroad, with a third wheel with teeth that fits into a middle rail. It turned out that for most uses, the weight of the engine alone produces enough friction, and you do not need cogs. There are some exceptions. Cogged railroads are used on steep mountains in places like Switzerland. And, in some cases, friction is not enough. In the U.S., steam locomotives had large sand domes. The wheels would spin on rails with ice, or rails coated with locusts. The engineer pulled a rope to dump sand on the rails around the driving wheels.

Although I loathe Wikipedia, it does have a good brief description of Blenkinsop:

"John Blenkinsop (1812)

John Blenkinsop thought that the friction would be too low from metal wheels on metal rails, so he built his steam locomotives for the Middleton Railway in 1812 with a 20-tooth, 3-foot diameter cog wheel (pinion) on the left side that engaged in rack teeth (two teeth per foot) on the outer side of the rail, the metal "fishbelly" edge rail with its side rack being cast all in one piece, in three-foot lengths. Blenkinsop's system remained in use for 25 years on the Middleton Railway, but it became a curiosity because simple friction was found to be sufficient for railroads operating on level ground."

To my way of thinking, some forms of ancient orthography are other examples of complex technology that was improved by making it simpler. Hebrew is written without vowels. I have no idea why, but it seems confusing and difficult to learn. English and other languages were written without spaces until the 11th century. The burden was on the reader to figure out where one word ended and another started. This invites ambiguity. Some sentences run together can have multiple meanings. To this day, Japanese and Chinese have no spaces between words. This makes it harder to read, even for a native speaker. Children's books have spaces between words. The Japanese and Chinese borrowed modern punctuation from Europe in the late 19th century, adding commas, periods, question marks and so on, which was an improvement. What is far worse than the lack of spaces is the complexity of the characters (kanji) themselves. These are totally unnecessary in Japanese. In the 9th century they invented alphabets (kana syllabaries) that can be used to write anything in Japanese. Add spaces to them, and nearly all ambiguity goes away. Japanese people have the notion that they need characters to reduce ambiguity because they have many homophones with words borrowed from Chinese. This is incorrect. Blind people use only Braille syllabaries and they have no difficulty reading. They are, in fact, more literate than the sighted population, and they devote much less time in school to learning to read.

In 1946 the Japanese tossed out many characters, and simplified others. They should have tossed out the whole system, in my opinion. That would be a huge simplification, and a good example of technology evolving from unnecessary complex to simplicity. I expect they will toss out the characters in the future, one person at a time. On the sly. The trend is already underway. Comic books replace many characters with syllabaries. Many people nowadays read mostly comic books, and not serious literature. Text input with computers is entirely done by syllables in Romanized format, which converts automatically to characters. People no longer remember how to write characters, which is the first step to forgetting how to read them. In the near future, most documents and newspapers will be in electronic format. It is easy to apply a software tool that converts the text from characters to syllabary or Romanized text. You can do this without anyone else knowing. I expect that by 2050 most teenagers will do this. Teachers in 2050 may be upset when their students do this, but by 2075 those students will teachers and parents, and they will have been converting text to a more readable format their whole lives, so it will not upset them. It will resemble the use of hand calculators. When they were introduced in the 1970s they were seen as cheating, but I doubt teachers forbid their use today.

As far as I know, Korean has as many homophones as Japanese, also derived from Chinese. It sounds that way to me. News broadcasts about "economic development projects" sound just like Japanese. Anyway, in 1946 the Koreans reduced the use of Chinese characters, in the 1970s they tossed them out, writing everything with their Hangul alphabet. They are fine.

In the 1940s, Japanese people hesitated to simplify the characters or throw them out because they thought this would make all existing books and documents unreadable to future generations. They had a valid point. It would have. But, with electronic text that does not matter. You can convert it another format instantly. Even today, an older book in Japanese is easy to OCR. I have converted several cold fusion books and articles from printed paper to electronic format. OCR works almost as well as with English. With a good quality printed copy there are practically no errors. You can Google translate it. It is amazing to me how well it works. Here is an example: a Playboy interview of A. Takahashi published in 1992. I corrected two OCR errors:

PB

今年の1 月高橋教授は、常温核融合の実験で日本で初めて大量の熱発生に成功され、日本はもとより、欧米で大きな反響を呼んだのは周知のとおりです。それがこの 10 月に名古屋で開催される、第3回常温核融合国際会議においても、もっとも注目を集めているわけですが、まずはご本人の心境からおうかがいできますか。

高橋

もっとも、というのはどうでしょうか。かなり重要なポジションにいることは確かだけど。まあ、熱が出るというだけでは科学者としてはそんなに喜べないけれども、その熱がいつでも、同じような形で出るようになってきた。

8 9 年3月にマーチン・フライシュマン、スタンリー・ポンズの両博士が常温で核融合を起こすことに成功したと発表して大騒ぎになったけれども、その後彼らは希代のペテン師などと言われて、常温核融合はほとんどゴミ箱の中に捨てられそうになっていた。それを寸前のところで拾い上げて、熱が出ることを事士大として示すことができるまでになったから、やれやれというところですか。

Google translate with no corrections; "fever" should be "excess heat:"

PB

It is well known that Professor Takahashi succeeded in generating a large amount of heat for the first time in Japan in a cold fusion experiment in January of this year, and received a great deal of attention not only in Japan but also in Europe and the United States. That is why he has received the most attention at the 3rd International Conference on Cold Fusion, which will be held in Nagoya in October. First of all, can you tell us from your own feelings?

Takahashi

But what about that? I'm sure he's in a pretty important position. Well, I'm not so happy as a scientist just because I have a fever, but that fever has always come out in the same way.

In March 1989, Dr. Martin Fleischmann and Dr. Stanley Pons announced that they had succeeded in fusion at room temperature, and there was a lot of fuss, but after that they were said to be rare scammers. Cold fusion was almost thrown away in the trash. I picked it up on the verge of picking it up, and now I can show that I have a fever as a university of affairs.

That's a very interesting and well-written paper. It helps explain something I observed many years ago. I found that use of a ferrofluid in the coil gap of high-power loudspeakers both reduced the acoustic efficiency and increased the heating over time of the coil and magnet. In one instance, the fluid actually caught fire and destroyed a speaker operated at well below its rated input power. This was at a college show with four punk bands, and luckily a nearby raver had an almost-full bottle in hand, and put out the fire.

Wind Power.

Earth Engines still around.

Quote from sam12

Wind Power.

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Earth Engines still around.

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Does anyone have a succint explanation of the physics of the earth engine?

Quote from Navid

Does anyone have a succint explanation of the physics of the earth engine?

If it exists, it violates the conservation of energy, so no physics can explain it.

Quote from Navid

Does anyone have a succint explanation of the physics of the earth engine?

What do you mean by the "earth engine"?