111–120 of 399 posts
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I assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but just pulling up close to you and springing out a charging cable arm would be more efficient.
Could you charge a car while driving it? I guess you can charge a laptop while using it. Why not!
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> Just embed some wires in the road... No offense but that is the most loaded phrase I've heard this week. That would be a major overhaul of both roads and electric car designs.
A somewhat more practical approach: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/9/18538030/germany-ehighway-...
The most spectacular example of regenerative braking are trains that are used in Scandinavia, heavily loaded with iron ore that is transported to the coast: "In Scandinavia the Kiruna to Narvik electrified railway carries iron ore on the steeply-graded route from the mines in Kiruna, in the north of Sweden, down to the port of Narvik in Norway to this day. The rail cars are full of thousands of tons of iron ore on th…
The heavy iron ore is essentially a large battery storing gravitational energy. In a way it's just another natural energy source. Maybe in the future clean power can be generated from pulling down mountains.
You run the trains up the hill when energy is cheap or, for example, when the sun is out and solar works. Then when you need it, you run the trains down hill to generate electricity. Similar to pumped hydro where they do the same by pumping water up hill and then draining it downhill later. Super cool!
What if they had a Tesla merry-go-round where instead of charging your Tesla, you connected it to this giant horizontal ferris wheel that spun it around and charged the battery? It could be wind powered!
I had a similar idea which involved a large amount of gerbils in a giant wheel. They can convert sunflower seeds (which are of course solar powered) into energy 24/7. Thanks to your stroke of genius instead of using a generator and charging your EV you can just put a wheel next to it and leave the Tesla on it now. I haven’t worked out what to do with half a ton of gerbil corpses, shit and sunflower seed shells yet th…
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Maybe this could be applied to water towers? That's a lot of potential energy just sitting there.
So I did the math and the average water tower holds something like 1/2 kWh worth of power. (50m tall, storage of 1m gallons, efficiency of 90%) Hydro power storage is fantastic but needs truly ridiculous amounts of water and height deltas to make sense.
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Maybe this could be applied to water towers? That's a lot of potential energy just sitting there.
So I did the math and the average water tower holds something like 1/2 kWh worth of power. (50m tall, storage of 1m gallons, efficiency of 90%) Hydro power storage is fantastic but needs truly ridiculous amounts of water and height deltas to make sense.
3.8Mg * G * 50m ~ 1700M Joules which is about 500kWh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe this could be applied to water towers? That's a lot of potential energy just sitting there.
So I did the math and the average water tower holds something like 1/2 kWh worth of power. (50m tall, storage of 1m gallons, efficiency of 90%) Hydro power storage is fantastic but needs truly ridiculous amounts of water and height deltas to make sense.
I got 450 kWh? Maybe you meant 1/2 MWh
Normally, you'd either have to have to call a tow truck or have someone with a generator come along and recharge. However, towing for awhile (probably at much less than 70 mph for safety reasons) to recharge the battery enough to get to the next town is something that could presumably be done by just about any passing car if you have a tow strap (which could be stored in the EV for such an occasion).