some comments on energy

Yes, we have thought of that at various times. The leader of our motorcycle group asked me that - he was talking about cars - if they're electric, where do we get the electricity from? I had thought of it years before that, and he asked me years ago.

There are several answers for electric car. First, the electricity can come from whatever we want to use, whereas an internal combustion is primarily fossil (I know some people argue about an 'alternative', I'll get to that in a minute.) So if the power comes from a dam or wind or solar, no fossil fuel. Second, an electric car uses less energy. When it decelerates, it creates power. Also it is more efficient - the motor turning the wheel is better than an engine, transmission, drive shaft, differential, and so on.

Batteries for electronics - when solar panels hit affordability, people will use them. Right now, for a small unit (under 5K$), it runs about ten to twenty dollars a watt. A thirty watt panel runs about three hundred, plus the stuff - installation, control panel, and of course a deep-cycle battery to store the electricity.

It is only a matter of time for solar energy to become cost-effective. It started out at about a thousand a watt, now it's down to about five dollars a watt. That is the cost of the panels. When you factor in what it produces, it runs about twenty two cents a watt. As we're paying about thirteen, it doesn't add up. But Hawaii costs about twenty two cents on the grid, so recently solar energy hit parity, probably the first time in a developed nation.

There are ways you can cheat - reflect more light on the panels using mirrors. (A mirror costs nothing compared to the same size solar panel.)

Hmmm...getting fuel from corn and so on - right now, it takes so much energy (the plow, for example, and harvesting, processing the corn and so on) to grow the corn, that in general you are not saving any fuel - it takes about the same amount of fossil fuel to produce the corn oil as the corn oil itself produces.

For most people, a crank generator beneficial - first, it produces heat, which most of the time you need, second, exercise, which benefits, third, you are not using fossil fuel, which is good.

The only exception is climate - if tropical or sub-tropical, the heat produced has to be removed. The answer is obvious - a water-based generator. The crank generator works in a swimming pool. First, even in the summer time, you need to heat the pool, so the heat produced generating the electricity is not only not wasted, it is beneficial. The other benefits are the same - exercise and not using fossil fuel to make electricity. So we need to develop a human powered generator that works in a swimming pool.

With today's engines, a 50cc, or three-inch engine, would produce at least three horsepower, or about 4kwatts. One tenth of that, 400 watts, is much more than what I'm producing pedaling the bicycle. So just a 5cc engine would be a good size for me - it would produce up to about 400 watts, which to me is a lot of power.

I guess all this is happening because of the new president - everything is changing, how we look at things.