Nigel Goodwin said:See - if you look, you find
Your wonderful Prius only scrapes tenth!.
As they say, there are liars, damn liars, and statisticians. In the US, diesel costs roughly $4.00 per gallon and gasoline costs $3.00 per gallon. If those figures are corrected for the energy content factor or cost to a constant, equivalent basis, the Prius moves up several notches.
NASA has in use large Carbon fiber flywheels that spin at millions of RPM that store Solar power in the Space Station.
How about we try building better idiots. That would save a load of energy and problems in all aspects of life.
For instance 53,000 - 60,000 RPM, **broken link removed** , is far far far short of
I am just saying...
I think this topic has got out of my leauge.
My proffesor use to say
natural gas is going to last 30 yrs
petrol is going to last 90 years
and coal is going to last 200 years ... so
will the future be coal burned steam cars ?
or why dont we use nuclear cars that may become feasible after 100 years from now
When in school during the 1950 -1960's all the magazines like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics,etc said we would be driving flying nuclear powered cars in 2010 or so. Look where we are, still using petroleum. It will be around for most of us here's future. Maybe our grandchildren or great grandchildren will have something different, but wouldn't really count on it.
These types of flywheel energy storage units are actually starting to be used on the planet bound energy grid for frequency control on a few megawatt scale. The thing that sucks about them is if one of them ever mechanically fails catastrophically the amount of energy they can dump from the forces involved is enough to make high energy explosives look safe as a energy storage medium.
I work at a machine shop that has a Cincinnati centerless grinder that has a flywheel that weighs a few hundred pounds and spins at a few thousand RPM and just the instantly available energy stored in that little wheel terrifies me, the mechanical stresses are incredible.
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