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Mars_B4_Moon,
Energy and money are not significant issues for a "Lunar Land Cruiser". The tax payers are footing the bill for those vehicles, per usual. See how wildly the design changes if the engineering team has to pool their money together to pay for whatever design they come up with. The engineers can go nuts with byzantine over-complexity, and it really doesn't matter in the slightest. If they were forced to both purchase and work on the vehicles, then you'd achieve near-immediate practicality.
There's a reason that I will never own a BMW or Mercedes-Benz or any other German-origin vehicle built in the past 20 years or so. No matter how theoretically great their cars should be, it's an absolute nightmare wiring rats nest under the hood and even the passenger compartment, since there's not enough room in the engine bay and trunk to stuff all the nonsense they included.
Go back to the 1980s diesels that Mercedes-Benz built. They didn't skimp on metal or quality. If thicker steel was required to make it durable, then they spent the extra money on thicker steel. It wasn't the fastest or fanciest thing in the entire world, but it was remarkably well-built and well-thought-out. It had good fuel economy, too, because it wasn't a sedan trying to be a race car. For what it was, it was truly superb. When people said "German engineering", this is what they were talking about. Germans built refined no-nonsense vehicles that were the equal of anything else money could buy.
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It seems that synthetic fuels may not be the best for the new cars.
Here’s Why Synthetic E-Fuels Are Not the Answer to the Future of Cars
Sounds like blends may be about the right mix.
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SpaceNut,
There are no vehicles without oil, electric or otherwise, period. There is no "green energy" without coal and gas and oil, period.
There is not one solar powered solar panel factory on planet Earth that is anything more than a publicity stunt. Even the literal handful of publicity stunt solar factories with a few panels on the roof end up using electricity from hydrocarbon fuels when the Sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. Otherwise, they wouldn't be producing any solar panels.
There is not one wind turbine blade on planet Earth that was made without plastic.
There is not one battery on planet Earth that was made without diesel fuel to mine the material and transport it to market.
There is not one electric vehicle on planet Earth that uses tires made without Carbon and synthetic rubber from petrochemical refining.
The entire "green energy" scam revolves around mass over-consumption of fossil fuels to achieve greater over-reliance on fossil fuels. That's why Germany is burning coal like mad right now. All the "green energy" propaganda in the world can't solve the issue of Germany not being particularly sunny or windy.
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Not everything is about being "Green Energy" as when we know that it's got limits and predictions are that its will in time be no more fossil fuels to be had. Its surely is more than a delay to running out. Since its about chemistry used in the lowering of carbon dioxide.
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SpaceNut,
Given enough time, the next couple of centuries according to what I've seen, there will be no more fossil fuels. So... If we start building out the infrastructure to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels right now, then we will have practical replacements by the time we actually run out. Alternatively, we can consume these fuels at ever-increasing rates to prop up this "green energy" fetish that our math deniers are so enamored with, and then still wind up with no energy and no practical replacements, which we will still need to make plastics and lubricants and rubber and pharmaceuticals and fertilizers and cosmetics and synthetic fibers and the myriad of other products that no amount of electronics will ever create for us.
Why are these toherwise simple counting problems so difficult for "green energy" enthusiasts to grasp or accept?
Whenever a "new energy solution" to an existing energy problem requires 10X / 100X / 1,000X more materials to achieve the same end result, then said energy inputs to obtain those presently non-existent (in usable form) materials are absolutely baked into using that new energy solution.
It's not a simple matter of consuming more materials to achieve the end result, though. If such were the case, then we could easily make that trade. This new energy solution also attempts to use a power source with 50% availability at most, it's about 25% efficient in the case of photovoltaics or maybe 60% to 80% efficient in the case of wind (between the giant 3-bladed propeller and electric motor), dependent upon blade design (power extracted versus power available in the form of air currents, and this is 1% to 3% of the total available solar power, at most). On top of that you need an electrical storage system that's 84X less energy dense than oil or gas or maybe 42X less energy dense after combustion inefficiency is taken into account. If total energy storage per unit mass and volume mean anything, then electricity is abysmal.
Converting photons or wind movement to electricity is an inherently low-efficiency process with low availability in most places where people actually live. It's clearly not good for the environment if we don't have a plan to recycle the toxic electronics waste we've already generated, which is a tiny fraction of what we'd need to produce from scratch to actually run a technologically advanced civilization using more and more electronics. After adding in an electricity storage system to the generation system to remain more than mere minutes to hours from not having any power at all, and then the energy input requirements skyrocket. Electronics for energy generation have not and never will achieve gains that look anything like the advances in computing power. There are all manner of clever tricks to use to increase data processing efficiency in computer electronics, but no such tricks exist for generating or storing energy.
Example:
Someone came up with a new propeller design (basically a "box wing" for propulsion devices) that's claimed to be 105% more efficient than a normal / conventional ship propeller. In reality, the fuel economy improvement associated with this wildly more efficient design, even as claimed by the company marketing the new props, is only 20%. It's not actually a "new idea", but one perfected to the point of being a commercially available product. This is the part that, to me at least, seems "lost in translation" for most of our average futurism dreamers. They see the "105% efficiency improvement" headline and think there's a night-and-day difference between the old and the new. In reality they will save, at most, 20% on their fuel costs. In practice, the new prop is very expensive to make, despite only being a finely machined hunk of brass or stainless steel. In time, someone will figure out how to reduce its costs, but it will always be more energy intensive and therefore expensive to make one. That's the entire reason it costs more money. Dragging a heavy boat or ship through a fluid 1,000X denser than air is an inherently energy-intensive activity. There's only so much that a more efficient prop design can do for you.
The same principle applies to green energy and electronic energy generating devices like photovoltaics and wind turbines. Electricity is not a magic wand. It doesn't matter how theoretically great it could be "if only this / that / the other problem was solved". Most people have learned to accept that rocket powered cars are not practical transportation devices, so why is it not accepted that a battery is best used as a means to start a real engine? More simply, if the vast majority of the electronics waste generated accumulates in landfills, making the soil and water toxic, then increasing the quantity of that stuff by multiple orders of magnitude, might not be such a great idea. It's not affecting emissions in a positive way, either. Every year they go up, not down. How can that be? How is it not having at least some measurable positive effect on emissions?
Does anyone but me think that if you consign yourself to an inordinately more energy-intensive future, that maybe you'll have to expect a lot more pollution and emissions and toxic waste unless and until a plurality of evidence indicates otherwise?
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Just got my energy bill for the last month for a 21'F temperature which was on the increase due to that being the only source to create heat at $370. Normally it's still high during the cold but it was lots more due to that cold with the previous being 353'F for $260 for the month.
Of course, when warmer its much lower thankfully but the issue is we are normally consuming more energy generally. Hopefully during that warmer period of time, I will be able to make home improvements.
The same for vehicles as well as we are traveling more to get a good job these days and not with more economical models. Fixing the Prius is also on the list to reduce that energy cost as well.
The same thing is happening as we need more water there is more plastics being generated that is not ending back as more product but as an ever-increasing amount of waste.
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