Continuing Previous Post: Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal

In the previous post I posited the idea that cars serve as storage units for PV energy for deferred use, either as transportation energy or as reconversion to household power electricity.

PV is generated only when the sun shines. Power is used all hours of the day and night. Electric cars can serve as important storage units, either storing electricity as battery power directly, or conversion into hydrogen which can power fuel cell generators.

As a general rule the Continental US (CONUS) gets an average of 5.5 sunny hours per day (more in the sunbelt southwest summers, less in the dreary northeast or northwest winters). Every watt not captured and saved is wasted. Every watt captured and stored is 100% efficient compared to being totally lost. Efficiency of conversion is not any important issue -- convenience of power and costs are the issues.

Solar PV and cars have an identical problem to solve. Conversion of power as DC battery storage requires a device called an inverter for AC power conversion output. Both solar PV panels and electric cars have the same need when AC is the desired output.

Inverters have been expensive, bulky, and heavy. In cars these are undesirable traits, although somewhat less problematic for stationary placement as in PV installations. Improvements for cars translate into improvements for homes, so it is worth further investigations how to solve the probem for cars.

Cars outnumber homes two to one in the US (counting light trucks as part of the fleet). The financial benefit shows up first on cars by reducing the weight,improving the durability, reduction in size and lowering the costs.

Inverters have no real mystery inside. They use less heavy metal than washing machines, less complicated electronics than a $29 CDROM drive. There's no good reason they need to cost in the thousands of dollars. Most of the price reflects "know-how", not materials. Amortized over 200,000,000 cars, the know-how ought to be pennies per unit, and the materials and assembly likewise should be kaizened under $100.

I could do that, and I'm sure I am not unique in that, that many are capable of designing small, reliable, lightweight, cheap inverters.

The weak link in inverters is the capacitors trequired to make smooth sine-waves which integrate into the electrical grid seamlessly without conflict.

Any electric cars made from now on would have a number of supercapacitors included, and models on the road today of some hybrids already have supercaps onboard. With the knowledge and expectation of supercaps being reliably predictably present it is possible to make the rest of the inverters much cheaper.

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) also require thermal controls for the battery banks, particularly those playing with Lithium batteries, but also even Lead-Acid batteries. Modern 21st century knowledge tells a much different story about batteries than the dark age of prior century practices. You just can't recharge batteries the way they used to and expect them to last any longer than they used to. Prior century battery practices was a prescription for early death for batteries.

21st century batteries will be sealed units installed in the vehicle at manufacture time and never replaced through the life of the car. 15 year batteries are a basic requirement, not a luxury item. That means the average car buyer cannot be trusted to buy the battery charger because they will choose in ignorance last century devices and kill their cars in 5 years just to save some dollars on first costs.

The electric cars then require inverters and chargers both to be inbuilt and both to depend on the proximity of supercaps for their optimal working.

A fuel cell is an electrochemical device which also produces DC current like batteries, like PV panels. A nominal 60 kilowatt fuel cell is equatable to an 80 horsepower engine, not considered very powerful in the automotive world. Fuel cells in the homes could be stationary power plants generating electricity on demand. In 2007 the US average is 24 kWhs consumption per day, being higher in the south, southeast and lower in the northeast corner. That means on average a home uses a kilowatt-hour per hour (more when people are home and active, less when they are out or asleep). A three kilowatt fuel cell is fine for the home with a generous surplus.

A two-car household, which is statistically average (200,000,000 light vehicle fleet, 105,000,000 homes) with 120 kilowatts of fuel cells could power 120 homes for as many hours as they have fuel in the tanks.

A explosion-proof, leakproof, fireproof, vandalism-proof home hydrogen storage is zeolites which use absorption to hold the H2 gas. A concrete lined box of granules similar to powdered detergent grains the size of a cord of wood holds 25 kilograms of H2 gas safely as emergency backup. With about 34 kWhs per kilogram, that's three weeks supply of fuel for a home fuel cell.

Home fuel cells produce electricity, plus heat. The heat may be considered waste heat by many, but the reality is it is more than boiling hot, and hot water is one of the largest users of electricity in the home. Sometimes you want energy purely for the hea, and then the electricity is the waste product -- in the winter northeast the heating bills (gas, fuel oil) far exceed the electric bills.

There are solid economics cases for rapid deployment of hydrogen fuel cells in homes and cars, for residential PV installations, and for Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles with fuel cell range extenders. They are a synergistic combination where any advance in technology in any one aids the advances in the others.

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There is still an issue which won't go away. The 20th century lifestyles are toxic to the core.

Before 1970 there were no "deadzones" in the oceans. In 1970 the very fertile Mississippi delta (too "fertile" now) was identified first as an anoxic deadzone. BY 1990 there were 75 known around the world. By 2002 there were 150 identified by the UN.

All the scientists of all the countries, all the universities, all the governments in the entire world have never cured or reversed a single one of these deadzones. They are incapable of ever reversing even one because their paradigm is toxic to the core.

There are no technological fixes for toxic lifestyles. If cars were a penny a piece and ran on nothing but fresh air it wouldn't fix the gridlock on the roads, but just make it worse.

You need to fix your paradigm. You need to think of how to live on a planet without killing it.