Finally it’s starting to dawn on a few people that battery powered cars are not the way out of our low-carbon energy conundrum.
Bolivia holds key to electric car future. In this piece, the BBC note that Lithium, the 3rd element in the periodic table, a major power source for everyone’s laptops and mobile phones, is actually a finite resource as well!
Within 10 years, lithium supplies will be hard to find….
So for transport, batteries are out because of the costs of materials and recycling, biofuels are out because we have to eat, nuclear is out because it’s too heavy and er..well, yes quite, hydrogen is too fanciful.
But as I’ve said several times in these pages, Guy Negre already has a clear concept of a clean and practical transport power source. Like all other solutions it’s dependant on another source, in this case electricty, just like battery cars. But the motive power is his highly efficient (because of the knuckled con-rod) and clean compressed air engine!
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Whatever happens or how we do it, the realities of inadequate resources to power transport for the global masses must be faced. The Air Powered Car is a good solution. It’s primary energy source is electricity, which can be made in a multitude of ways and can be best stored using the potential energy of water, pumped up a hill for controlled release through generators, to take account of diurnal and other fluctuations in demand. This is old, known technology that can be implemented now! The UK has had a facility like this at Dinorwig for years… This pumped storage system, even though it’s smallish and unique (with all the problems that that entails), paid for itself within 10 years. Stuff like this must be done on a global scale….
For example, the United States, huge, sunny, mountainous, large coastline and deserts. It also has the largest demand for transport and fuel…
The US is so fortunate! It has a bounteous resource in sunshine, wind and tides – more than enough to make as much electricty as they’ll ever need. There’s no need to keep digging coal in Pennsylvania or drill for oil in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico. They just need to open their eyes, use the energy of the sun and pump water up the Rockies! Air powered engines can easily use this energy.
Air powered engines aren’t new (they power torpedoes for instance), but Guy Negre’s patented engine has been developed almost solely by himself for a decade now, against huge industry opposition. The internal combustion engine (ICE) has been around for just over a century. Now who would (or could) have imagined the changes in engines and transport that have happened after looking at Benz’s first, very, very expensive car?
That’s the kind of conservative pessimism we have to overcome.
That’s the kind of potential we’ve got with the air-powered car!
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