Most life and all human civilizations until the last century have lived within a solar budget. We have vastly greater understanding of science, materials, engineering and technology than at any other time in human history. We can change the lifeblood of our economy from oil to ingenuity.
Wisdom from the founder of
commercial electricity
Thomas Edison underscored that sunshine was as
practical as electricity. We only have to engineer our tools to make it
so. A key aspect of solar is to use it where it is generated. JPods,
solar powered mobility networks, integrate the distributed nature of
transportation networks with the distributed power delivered locally be
the sun.
1910, Source: Interview in Elbert Hubbard's Little
Journeys to the Homes of the Great: "Some day some fellow will invent a way of
concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old,
absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I'll do the trick myself if some one
else doesn't get at it. Why, that is all there is about my work in
electricity--you know, I never claimed to have invented
electricity--that is a campaign lie--nail it!"
"Sunshine is spread out thin and so is
electricity. Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later.
Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as
you needed it. The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it
off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It
doesn't fetch up anywhere. My task was to subdivide the current and use
it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store
it. And we haven't really found out how to store it yet and let it off
real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have just begun to commence to get
ready to find out about electricity. This scheme of combustion to get
power makes me sick to think of--it is so wasteful. It is just the old,
foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon."
"When we learn how to store electricity, we will
cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You
see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power.
Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are
manifestations of energy."
"Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal,
as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters,
not as if we owned the property.
"There must surely come a time when heat and power
will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered
by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it
can not be destroyed.
"Now, I am not sure but that my new
storage-battery is the thing. I'd tell you about that, but I don't want
to bore you..."
(Little Journeys to the Home's of the
Great)
"I'd put my money on the sun and solar
energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait 'til
oil and coal run out before we tackle that."--Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
Energy savings pay for re-tooling transportation.
JPods get 183 miles per gallon in city
traffic. A gallon of gas contains 36,600 watt-hours.
Moving JPods/CargoPods a mile requires
200 watt-hours. Solar collectors, six foot wide mounted over that mile
of rail typically gather about 2.5 million watt-hours a day; enough
power for 8,000 vehicle-miles.
vehicle-miles of power
per day mile of rail per day
20
miles of rail
365
days per year
11,563,200,000
total generation
Put this power in personal experience.
Walking barefoot on sun-baked asphalt, you quickly get an idea sunshine
is a potent and widespread energy source. Harnessing this power to make
oil independent transportation requires three actions:
Convert the distributed nature of
transportation network into solar collectors.
Drive Parasitic Mass towards zero.
Current transportation, where we pay for moving a ton to move a person,
is too wasteful to take advantage of solar power.
Deregulate transportation so it is open
to innovation. Current regulations mandate delays, more highways, more
oil dependence and other restrictions beyond the ability of most
innovators to navigate.
California's Energy Commission has recommended adopting German Feed-in-Tariffs. In the
last year Germany's free market approach resulted in 4,000 mega-watts
of additional renewable power generation. California's centralized,
utility based approach has resulted in only 242 mega-watts being
deployed in the last five years.
There is harmony and synergy between
transportation's need for power across a network and sunshine's ability
to delivery distributed power. Elimination of Parasitic Mass and
power from natural sources is enough to stream resources to need
on-demand. At a 65% savings from oil-based transport, it is practical
to build a circulatory system for each economic community.
