Posts by AlfaFoxtrot

The true, tragic cost of British wind power

This is true, if you don't care about CO2 emissions.

Assuming that reducing CO2 is a good thing, then moving transport + heating to be all electric is good, as it is not only more efficient (heat pumps, electric motors) but it will all eventually come from zero emission plants (hopefully mostly nuclear).

Mitsubishi commuter e-car goes on sale

Electricity has to win

Surely they're more efficient overall?

The electric motors transfer vastly more of the input power to the wheels than a combustion engine can (90% vs 30 or so).

Large scale electricity generation is more efficient, although there are the transmission losses. But the big difference is that a petrol powered car will always have the same emissions, but as the Grid (hopefully soon) starts to move to more nuclear/renewable sources, all the electric cars already sold also become cleaner.

F1 waves goodbye to KERS

Allow it to store proper amounts of energy and give it another year...

There was a very good presentation by the head of a company developing the flywheel based KERS, he was saying that the rules were ridiculous - his flywheel system was very simple and pretty efficient, but because of the F1 limiting the power to such a ridiculous level, it would only gain teams fractions of a second per lap (therefore not really worth the investment, extra weight) and actually encouraged them to use LESS efficient designs, as you could then get more braking per kJ stored.

Also, saying that this technology has no use on road cars is rubbish. If you can capture energy from braking, and store it efficiently in the short term - then that is 'free energy' which can help when you next accelerate - again in the presentation this is reckoned to give ~30% increase in efficiency. Scaling the flywheel up to tube trains gives almost 50% saving because of the very stop start nature.

It just annoys me that the tech is being thrown out after a year when it's capable of an awful lot more and has just been limited to near uselessness by short sighted rules - so much for the innovation of F1.