Solar Powered Mobility Networks
Request: Leadership support for building solar powered mobility networks at
Benefits:
- Self-reliance.
- Change our economic lifeblood from oil to ingenuity.
- Powered by abundant locally available source, sunshine.
- Economic lifeboats. Each instances of distributed power generation becomes an economic lifeboat, making civilization more durable against uncertainty and terrorism.
- Mobility regardless of age, ability or wealth.
- Housing. Housing/Transportation burden is major factor in the mortgage crisis. Cut transport costs for working families by 65%.
- Inflation. Remove inflationary pressures from food and fuel.
- Trade Deficit. Local manufacture cuts import of cars and oil while expanding export of JPods.
- Jobs. Local manufacture and infrastructure build.
- Security. High value targets (trains, buses) disperse into low grade targets.
- Foreign Policy. Remove accusation that America’s is in it for oil.
- Climate Change & Kyoto. Comply by profiting from preempting waste.
- Food. Oil-independent food distribution network. Limit ethanol programs.
- Avoid Famine. Price spikes and fuel shorages can collapse our long distance food distribution networks.
Action: Re-tool highly repetitive transportation for on-demand mobility of people and cargo within a solar budget.
- Apply Deming, Six Sigma, Just-in-Time process practices to energy/mobility.
- Drive out sources of variation
- Zero defects. Take care to make each item/trip within high quality specifications. You cannot manage quality in a batch; it must be by individual. Buses and trains are batch processes. The best service is to move the person/cargo from origin to destination on-demand, non-stop.
- Excellence is the process of relentlessly improving.
- Ingenuity. De-monopolize transportation and power generation.
- Simplicity. Only simple things will be possible once the looming crisis impacts.
- Scaleable
- Darwin economics, try a lot of things; keep what works.
- Lifeboats, "Feed In Tariffs", "many hands make light work"
- Germany's 5 year old Lifeboat program has created 250,000 new jobs, $12 billion in exports in 2007 and they are ahead of schedule to generate 12% of power needs from renewables by 2010. In 2006 they produced 202 Terrawatt hours, enough for 10 million homes.
- California moving to follow German lead. Current central planning resulted in 242 MW add in the last 5 years.
- Ontario has adopted a partial program
- Profit. Doing must add strength. Target 10X improvement. Incentives for performance will accelerate viable solutions. Subsidies are not sustainable.
- Leverage what works
- On-demand, personal mobility is the answer
- Cars are the right answer. They have a 97% market share (80% in Europe). Cars are just the wrong mass and random behavior in the niche of repetitive travel. JPods provide the convenience of cars using 4% of their energy, and thousands of times more safe.
- Elevators, based on riders per day, are the most successful form of public transportation.
- Build a network of Horizontal-Elevators™, JPods/CargoPods/TrashPods/MedicalPods/etc...
- DOT’s solution to Oil Embargo is Personal Rapid Transit and Automated Guideways
- Modern deployments
- Synergy between transportation’s distributed need for power and sunshine’s ability to deliver it across a network. JPods require 200 watt-hours (5.4 hp engine) to travel a mile a 30 mph. Solar collectors 6-foot wide, gather 2.5 million watt-hours in a typical day (12,500 vehicle-miles).
- Power is used where it is gathered.
- Distributed power generation is durable.
- Power source is locally available.
Background:
- Economy
- Amplifying natural resources
- Held together by abilities to Trust, Transact and Transport
- Confederation of up-side-down pyramids
- Individuals, communities, industries, nations
- Base, resources consumed
- Top, value added and risk acceptance
- Vulnerabilty, famine, inadaquate Trust, Transact or Transport, 20th Century's Top 10
- Economic Stability = Work * Churn * Vulnerability Containment
- Opinion_Personal
- Vulnerability Containment is often called energy efficiency.
- "Efficiency" is an elective nicety, not a mission critical imperiative
- An astute Senior Coast Guard official noted, "We have no culture for efficiency."
- Fuels are allocated
- Missions are allocated
- No profit feed-back mechanism as in commerce
Vulnerability is increasing
- Even if we have oil, we cannot use it without Depression Consequences
- People who made $billions being right about oil supplies and price: Pickens, Simmons
- Supplies are at risk
- Access to oil is destabilizing. GAO report on Peak Oil, 2007
- Current supplies 62.8% medium or worse risk of delivery
- 84.9% medium or worse risk to investments required to develop reserves into deliveries.
- Suppliers have problems
- Venezuela, 4th largest supplier openly hostile “Not a drop to America” was a recent campaign speech by Venezuela’s President.
- Mexico, 3rd largest supplier (12%) will no longer export by 2012.
- Saudi Arabia, 2nd largest supplier, long supply lines in a hostile region.
- Canada, largest supplier, environmental damage from oil sands, Kyoto.
- EIA conference Dec 5, 2007
- BusinessWeek: “Some 37.5 million barrels a day of additional oil-production capacity is needed by 2015, but only 25 million barrels a day are planned, International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol said.”
- “If supply turns out to be less than this (25 mb/d), we are in serious trouble. If these projects do not come online, the wheels will fall off our energy system.” Mr. Birol, Chief Economist, EIA.
- An economic Titanic needs economic lifeboats
- Retooling transportation and energy is an overwhelming task. Take the ant approach to eating an elephant, small bites, lots of friends.
- End monopolies
- Oil risks increase risks to the electrical grid.
- Oil is a finite resource.
- Transportation (personal and economic mobility) is less than 1% efficient.
- Congestion costs a work-week per year (48 hours)
- Moving a ton to move a person?
- Parasitic Energy Consumption (PEC)
- Ratio of moving mass to cargo mass times start-stops.
- “Beam me up Scotty” would be a prefect 1. Move only what you want to move, non-stop origin to destination.
- JPods PEC is about 4. 350 pound vehicle, 1 start-stop.
- Cars PEC is about 280, 2,000 pound vehicle, 20 start-stops
- Train PEC about 300, 6,000 pounds of train per passenger, 10 start-stops.
- Congestion costs a work-week per worker per year (48 hours)
- Efficiency/conservation have the greatest immediate affect. In short distance, repetitive travel we are less than 1% efficient.
- Re-tooling mobility will take 50 years, much longer than cheap oil will be available to fuel the transition.
