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194 comments on DrumBeat: July 22, 2007

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Engineer-Poet on July 22, 2007 - 7:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

expat quotes:

To operate a 40-horsepower car for one hour, the panel shown would have to charge batteries for 250 hours. Even to operate a golf cart, charging time would be unacceptable. The panel shown could operate the taillights, but certainly not the headlights, of a standard car.

You may find this understandable, but you don't understand why it's grossly misleading to the point of fraud:

  • The vehicle isn't a 40-horsepower car, it's probably more like 5 HP.
  • Even a 40 HP car doesn't run at full power all the time.  A small car at cruise probably uses 12-20 horsepower on the highway, much less at 45-50 MPH.
  • The proper measure is energy/distance, not peak power.
  • If the NEV ("golf cart") uses 100 watt-hours per mile, 120 watts to its batteries will yield about 1.2 miles of driving for each hour in the sun.

Either the author doesn't understand what he's talking about, or he's lying.  He has just blown any right to be taken as an authority on the subject.

How many cars are there in Arizona? And are the cars more important than AC/heating?

There are lots, and (to give proper credit) the author is correct about the rightly-maligned Arizona alternate fuel vehicle tax credit (which is not unlike the US flex-fuel CAFE credit).  However, if Arizona citizens covered their roofs with solar-thermal concentrators, they could produce all the heat and cooling (via absorption A/C) they could use while charging their electric vehicles.  There is no reason for Arizona to be obtaining most of its energy needs from oil and coal.

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expat on July 23, 2007 - 4:57am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Actually, other people picked up on the 40hp being the minimum lower limit for a car (which is absurd), but the seeming conflation of the golf cart with an automobile was another of his 'mistakes.' The understandable was in relation to the situation the author was trying to sketch - that a PV panel wouldn't be sufficient for 'normal' American transportation needs. Amazingly, a lot of people don't need a PV panel to move their feet to walk 20 minutes to a store, and the number that can physically ride a bike to do the same thing in 5 minutes is easily 90% of those that can walk. But no mention of that fact - though again, in most of Arizona, summer is brutal - and Arizona's citizens are unlikely to change how they live enough to actually make it possible - none of that Spanish life style will be imported into the good old U.S.A., regardless of how well it worked in areas with similar weather and a lot less air conditioning.

Or maybe the American lifestyle is coming to Spain instead -
'For much of Spain's recent history, the siesta made the long days bearable. A routine workday that begins at 9 a.m. and finishes at 8 p.m. can seem somewhat rational if it is broken up by a good nap in the afternoon.

Today, long commutes make a trip home for a nap impractical, at least in the major cities. But if the siesta is becoming a thing of the past, it has left a legacy of idle afternoons that is still very much a part of Spanish life. In a way, the siesta has not so much disappeared as it has morphed into an epic lunch, often a two- or three-hour extravaganza that can last until 5.

Now some Spaniards are beginning to ask if a divided workday, with morning and evening sessions straddling an afternoon of scarce productivity, is compatible with the modern world and Spain's growing integration into Europe. '
http://www.expatriatecafe.com/index.php?option=news&task=viewarticle&sid...

Facts are going to become increasingly difficult to agree on in the future, I think - especially since facts don't lend themselves to marketing.

But changing lifestyles seems no problem - as long as it go with the globalized flow, and not against it.

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