You guys are doing it wrong
 

Instead of worrying about fuel economy and aerodynamic desinsg you guys should leave well enough alone. Instead work on a "tractor beam" like in star wars so you can beam onto the car ahead of you and let them pull you along. Kind of like drafting. Let him worry about his mpg while you just coast along behind with the engine off

If that idea is to futuristic at least have some telescopic electromagnets that you can attach to the car ahead of you and use high test fishing line to connect

I have entertained the idea of an electromagnet attaching to a big rig for freeway travel. The driver would probably not even notice the extra load on flat ground. It's those pesky laws that I'm really worried about though.

True. Plus the fact that for a lot of us, it's not really our personal fuel consumption that's the fundamental issue, it's the effects of burning petroleum. Thus if I reduce my consumption X amount by causing someone else to increase their consumption by the same amount, I've achieved nothing.

PS: Though drafting a semi should also produce a small aerodynamic benefit for the semi...

For highway travel, it doesn't make sense that thousands of vehicles moving in the same direction and roughly the same speed should individually power themselves. It would be like having an engine attached to each boxcar of a train. Gasoline engines are incredibly inefficient when operating at such low sustained loads.

Attaching your vehicle to a truck and turning the motor off would save a lot of fuel, even when considering the loss of MPGs experienced by the truck.

...big problem with a "train" is that if/when somebody in the middle needs to turn-off for gasoline or potty break, everybody behind him are suddenly gonna be "coasting" much to their surprise!

Vactrain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Evacuated tube transportation technology.

A ride in a 0 atmosphere tube after being fired by a magnetic rail gun, slowly enough to keep you from disintegrating on your way to 5000 MPH.

regards
Mech

I've always thought it would be quite efficient to send satellites to space using an evacuated tube and rail gun. I just don't know what kind of heat shield would be needed for when the craft exits the tube, or if the sudden impact of hitting 1atm at ~20,000mi/hr would pulverize everything. Build this gun on top of a tall mountain near the equator and you can cut it down to 0.5atm and reduce the required velocity.

Why bother with a tractor beam when you can just make a transporter?

Oh, I don't know... maybe tear around less?

Why bother going anywhere at all? You're already someplace.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Grappling hooks fired from compressed airguns mounted in the front bumper. Sounds more like a Bond film than a Ecomodding tool.

Yes I've always thought that by reducing personal consumption, one is just getting out of the way of someone who cares less. By reducing the demand, we make it easier on those who are cost-constrained in their consumption.

I'm not sure you meant it this way, but it comes across as "there is no point to reducing personal consumption".

By reducing personal consumption you ARE reducing demand, proportional to your percentage of the population under consideration.

I believe what james was referring to was borrowing someone elses fuel (a-la grappling hook or?).

double post

How do you get the tube to remain vacuum while the much-needed opening at the end is at 1 atm, or say 0,8 atop a mountain ?
The moment the tube is opened, the air will violently rush in while your spaceship is doing 9km/s going the other way.


Space shuttles were going relatively slow until they gained altitude, air became less dense, and much of the launch weight was already burned off. It's doing some 3000mph when 25 miles up.

I don't believe that demand is proportionally reduced by personal reduction over time.

If the US cut consumption of fossil fuels by half, this would have the short term effect of reducing demand, which in turn would drive prices downward, which in turn makes demand for fuel in poorer corners of the world increase.

Any resource I don't use will surely be consumed by someone else eventually.

The worldwide reduction of fossil fuel consumption will not occur due to a growing environmental awareness, but instead due to cheaper alternatives.

In other words, economics will guarantee consumption of fossil fuel, and economics will eventually move us away to alternatives.

Money- The universal religion.

The vacuum may be economically or physically unviable, but my idea is a seal at the end of this tube that is pyrotechnically breached at the last moment before the payload exits. I have no idea what G forces would be experienced by the payload as it smashes suddenly into a wall of air, but I suspect it would be too extreme.

FYI- At 14,000ft pressure is ~0.6atm.

Carrying fuel is so wasteful though. Something like 90% of the fuel requirements of any given orbital launch is consumed just accelerating fuel. With a rail gun setup, zero energy is spent accelerating fuel. This cuts energy requirements down to 10% of a conventional launch.

Just so you are warned: I've been known to bull's eye womprats in my T-16 back home...

I don't believe that

The prices wouldn't go down so far that the poorer people that arn't buying much fuel now would end up buying too much fuel if the prices dropped.

In my line of work, if we lose half our business, we wouldn't cut our prices in half, we would keep the prices about the same and downsize and lay off workers.

Yeah, you can't underestimate the cost of scarcity, too. The more limited/exclusive a product becomes, the higher the price. Especially on products that get cheaper by volume to create.

In the short term, fuel consumption would indeed be reduced. While fuel prices may not plummet by half, they certainly would decrease substantially. The fuel that is not consumed now is merely shifted to future consumption.

I'm not saying conservation and efficiency is unimportant (I am on an efficiency forum after all), I'm just pointing out the fact that even widespread fuel conservation will do little good for the environment. This has been proven historically time and time again. Efficiency has been improved substantially over the years for most consumer goods. Think about how inefficient water heaters, refrigerators, TVs and vehicles used to be. We have much more efficient appliances nowadays, but are we consuming less energy?

Don't take my word for it though, lets see a practical example:

A Pentium 100 MHz processor from 1995 consumed 10 watts of power. Transistors continued to shrink at an astonishing rate, which had the effect of making each calculation take just fractions of the power the Pentium 100 required. Eventually the Pentium 4 3800 MHz processor was released, which consumed 115 watts.

100MHz \ 10W = 10Mhz per W
3800MHz \ 115W = 33MHz per W

While efficiency increased 300%, consumption increased 1100%!

Source: Wikipedia

You see this human behavior everywhere. A similar example can be made of cars (they just get more powerful over time). Efficiency will never result in less consumption, just expanded ways to use it.

As long as oil is relatively easy to produce, it will be consumed regardless of efficiency. Relatively cheap alternatives are the only way oil consumption will be permanently reduced. This will occur through a combination of increasing oil prices (scarcity), and decreasing cost of alternatives (technology advancement).

Yeah, more efficient refrigerators leads to the new one being twice as big- and having 4x the amount of energy using features- and everyone putting the old one out in the garage alongside the deep freeze, and running them all. And that isn't enough; the kids need dorm-sized fridges in their rooms too.

Of course a transporter needs to slice you up to make a pattern which is sent via the beam and a new "you" is assembled from that pattern when you arrive.

Of course to avoid any of that social complication associated with creating clones of yourself, you are killed and disposed of, and the new "you" allowed to continue.

There was a reason that the Dr would always prefer the shuttle.

But now Intel's up to the I7 processor series, the mobile versions of which consume a max of 17W, which includes a lot of functionality which in the P4 was relegated to separate chips. That 17W is also max: unless you're doing serious number-crunching (or gaming), the processor is going to spend most of its time in a low-power idle state.

Also, a newer system is probably going to be using an SSD or hybrid drive rather than a hard disk, the display is a LED/LCD panel rather than a power-hungry CRT, etc. So the bottom line is that although some applications can consume a lot more power (e.g. hard-core gaming systems), most will be using a lot less most of the time.

Then look at the larger picture: I do most of my work on a notebook+display+cable modem, router, etc that probably draws an average of 40 watts (plus my share of whatever the cable company uses to run its system). But that replaces upwards of 1/3 gallon of gas per day, because I don't have to drive to a physical office to work. It saves all the energy involved in making and transporting paper checks to pay my bills (and get paid!), gas I'd use to go to physical stores for shopping...

I don't remember where I read the article, but it was describing how American's electrical power consumption is drastically lower than it was even just 10 to 20 years ago. The article stated that this was due to the increased efficiency of modern electronic devices. Though Americans tend to use more electronic devices than they did in the past, the difference in efficiency has lessened the overall load on the power grid.

Just thinking of my apartment: Tube TV replaced with LCD; 2x CRT monitors replaced with LCD monitors; incandescent bulbs replaced with new, low-power bulbs... And this list goes on. Using the same number of devices as I have used in the past, I'd say my actual power consumption is less than half of what it was before.

Now to see if this second job can lead to some telecommuting...

I would be interested in seeing that article because it runs counter to every article I've ever seen on it.

My 50 inch plasma consumes 200 watts. The 57 inch CRT big screen I use for gaming a lot less

Because plasma screens are energy hogs. Look at the energy use of a same-sized LED-backlit LCD instead.

Not sure about the article, but Google has some interesting data... following shows energy consumption per capita within the United States up to 2009, showing that usage has dropped from a high in 1978 and is lower than both 1990 and 2000:
World Bank, World Development Indicators - Google Public Data Explorer

uk.gov has just published a study into energy cost. By 2020 they estimate it will be less than it is now, which is an interesting stretch as it has gone up by 20% in the last 3 years.

However reading the small print you understand why, they estimate we will be using 50% less by then.

Which is of course entirely realistic. :(

The 17W CPU you reference is among the lowest power consuming processors that are available, not the average. The trend is that processors and even whole computer systems grow more energy thirsty over time. Average power supply wattage has risen over the years. My first PC in 1995 had a 150w power supply and was among the fastest you could purchase. Today, my PC has a 1100w PSU and is among the fastest. In 1995 most people didn't even own a computer. In 2012, we have multiple computers.

This doesn't just apply to computers. My old cell phone would run for 4 days on a charge; my new one won't go 24hrs without demanding a recharge.

Transportation: The best selling vehicle in 1908 was the Ford model T with a 20hp engine that returned 17mpg. A hundred years later the best selling vehicle is a Ford F150 with a 300hp engine and... it still gets 17mpg.

100 Years of Improvement?

TV: 10 years ago I owned a 32" CRT TV that consumed roughly 200w. Now I have a 60" TV that consumes roughly 200w.

TV sizes are growing

My point though is not that computers will always consume greater amounts of power, or cars, or phones, just that we will always find ways to spend the resources (energy) that are available to us.

Here (Page 2) is an interesting link that shows household energy use over the years. According to the graphs, overall energy use per capita has remained fairly constant over the past 20 years. However, electricity use has risen dramatically over the past 60 years.

Buy a house from the 50s and see how it handles modern electrical demands. Make sure you have plenty of spare fuses and a flashlight for the inevitable circuit overload.

I am quite excited for the day that I telecommute, and I see this saving a lot of energy as the practice is more widely adopted. The employee saves money by not having to commute, and the employer saves money by not having to power an office space (or even build the office space). It's a nguyen/nguyen situation. With all of the saved energy and income, I'll have to think of ways to spend it on something else. I've always wanted to travel Europe and Asia... a hot tub for our Pacific Northwest winters also sounds lovely.

Of course. Especially considering peak oil has probably passed us, and we'll find out by 2020 that today's estimations of what's left in the ground were optimistic.

So consider the average age of any OECD nation's vehicle fleet, it's probably in the range of 7-10 years.

That means we're driving cars designed for fuel prices 5 years ago or more.

I hope that the automakers are currently selling the cars we'll need in 2020.

If fuel prices alter too much within the cycle of fleet renewal, a lot of cars would be off the road.

I hope so. The study I mentioned was into domestic energy where the DECC (Department for Energy and Climate Change - like they can influence it) have published a calculator. The problem is that it assumes we all use 50% less energy due to insulation etc. I think this may be optimistic.

My current and next (in about 8 years - maybe) car choice will be determined by as little as I can get away with given what I may need my car to do.

As I don't live in the US I have only one car, so it has to do everything, like most of world.