Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
I've seen inside of Chrysler a little, and they've done some very clever things over the decades.I figured maybe,if they couldn't pull it off,and were afraid of it,then it was worth mention.
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I'll allow that that's possible, but I don't think it's likely. After all, we have a history of 30-40 years of clever fuel-saving ideas coming out of the Big 3, all of which were abandoned in favor of the "build 'em bigger, and increase the advertising budget" theory. Hell, even the not-so-clever ideas like building smaller, lighter cars to compete with the imports (or putting your employees' retirement funds aside as you go, instead of using them to inflate profits) seem to have fallen by the wayside.
I've no doubt that there's a lot of engineering development still needed on flywheel power systems before they're ready for cars. But stationary systems would be a place to start: suppose every house with solar panels also had a flywheel system that could store a day's worth of energy. Such a system would be way more efficient than battery storage (which isn't all that efficient), and all of a sudden solar becomes a lot more practical. You no longer need to feed your excess solar generation to the grid, only to have to buy it back after dark. Add some intelligence to the system, and you can even use it for some load-balancing, making it possible to put more intermittent solar/wind generation on the grid.