Awl --
In the recent thread on solar powered homes, which displayed the Natural Divide of opinion on solar power, Salty actually posted an inneresting ditty on solar powered planes. His purpose was, of course, more one-ups-manship than anything constructive, but it was inneresting nonetheless.
The REALLY inneresting thing about it was that the plane had a whole 40 hp!!
What does this remind you of?
The old VW Beetle had a whole 36 hp, which was then souped up to... 42 hp! An air-cooled 4 cyl engine (no heavy fluid-filled radiator/cooling system).
Incredibly, that measly 42 hp was fully capable of doing 80 mph -- mebbe not up hill, and mebbe with a slight tailwind, but, still, 80 mph. And, iirc, it got about 40 mpg..... or more. I never had one, and gas was 27c/gal, so no one was really calculating mpg's then, but that was a figure floating around. Coulda been much better than 40 mpg....
The VW Beetle was for a commuting college student what a back pack is to grade-schoolers today..... when a whole city block of parked cars was nothing but VWs -- in NYC.... in Greenwich Village.... of course.....
Even the VW mini-bus, the 60's breadbox equivalent to our SUV (iconized on a Beatle album, iirc), used that same 42 hp engine.
Yet, in the rush for a viable electric car, I don't think a single design considers anything less than 100 hp. The Nissan Leaf is already at 107 hp. The stupidly over-priced Chevy Volt is at 160 hp.
And the ironic thing is, a small car with four 10 hp "hub motors" (like disk brakes) would yield an incredibly versatile useful car! With the most versatile 4 wd possible, and a potential turning radius of zero -- think military tanks.
All-solar homes are not practical, imo, simply because our lifestyles and "urban structure" won't *let* them be practical, even if the cost made sense. We engage in "spiraling habits", like air conditioning, which makes cities -- and the planet -- disproportionately and ironically hotter. Between the blacktop, cars (200 hp and up), and pervasive A/C, NYC is proly
10 deg hotter than surrounding areas.Now, a GRID of solar power WOULD likely be effective -- where *every* roof-top, *by law*, was mandated to have X% of it devoted to solar energy, both passive (hot water), and active (grid-connected PVs et al).
THEN, we would likely see real savings and utility.
Which will not happen any time soon, cuz such a scenario is more anathema to Big Bidniss than the Public Option was in this bullshit health care reform, which wound up being just a brilliant Insurance Scam.
So, the moral to the story is, if we cain't figger out that 42 hp that was "enough" in the 60's and 70s is enough today, and if "population control" has been essentially deleted from the dictionary, and if "bonuses" is de rigeur in the new Corporate Zeitgeist -- even for failing corporations -- then practical solar power is going to be a long time in coming.
Apropos of the "urban structure" mentioned above, we have a New Economic Structure, epitomized by the Big Box Motif (replete with bonuses) and the nylon Net Fishing of the Public, where we have been herded, painted -- checkmated -- into an economic corner where nothing is viable unless it's done on a massive scale.
This is by conspiratorial design, imo, but this doesn't really matter at this point, as this Net Fishing of the public is essentially irreversible, and here to stay. How it got started is just inneresting history.
The upshot of this will be the working class living in barracks, and all that that implies.
The good news is, is that barracks generally have a lot of roof-age, and would be tailor-made for solar cell arrays. And given that barracks are generally not air conditioned, and have just a few light bulbs hanging from their A-frame ceilings, there should be plenty of energy left over for The Grid, for the A/C's of those lucky enough not to be living in barracks.