Why do I think perpetual motion machines will be appearing frequently in the news? Because, with today’s focus on clean and efficient energy, we are going to find numerous good-willed, if scientifically challenged, inventors producing machines that seek to defy that little, old field we like to call “physics.”

Background Reading

Perpetual Motion (Wikipedia)

History of perpetual motion machines (Wikipedia)

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

Powertread: Stealing Power from Cars

The first PMM post is highlighting Powertread, a device for capturing energy from cars in traffic and converting it into electricity.

It’s literally a series of tubes filled with water that, when run over, force their contents through a turbine to generate electricity. One car driving over one of the things generates 580 watts of electricity at 36 amps. That’s not an awful lot power, but imagine a dozen of the things lined up at a busy off-ramp, run over by thousands of impatient drivers every day, and you can see the potential. The Singaporean government does too, providing grants to fund the project and two shopping malls there have already signed up to purchase the results.

via Powertread turns gridlock into electricity with a series of tubes from Engadget.com

Here’s what’s wrong this idea:

Any energy that is captured by this device must be taken directly from the vehicle crossing its tubes. If the device captured, say, 100 Joules from a passing car, the car itself will end up with about 300 Joules less energy, once the efficiency of electricity generation is considered. (These numerical values are assumptions for the sake of this post.)

In essence, what’s been created is a very roundabout method of electricity generation. Gasoline is converted from chemical energy to kinetic energy in a moving vehicle. This energy is then transferred from the vehicle to water to a turbine blade to a generator. The overall efficiency of this system can’t be greater than 10%, and it will certainly be expensive, to boot.

Now, the argument of the inventors is that cars in traffic will be braking anyway, and this device will slow down vehicles rather than allowing the vehicle’s braking energy to be wasted as heat. From an energy standpoint, that is a more defensible. However, the device is still worthless from a practical standpoint.

First, we are growing our fleet of hybrid vehicles which have built-in capabilities to recapture braking energy and store it in batteries. If cars already have the capability to capture braking energy everywhere they drive, why try to capture energy outside the car only where you’ve placed Powertreads? Second, the energy captured by these devices will be very intermittent-not a continuous flow of steady wattage-and that creates practical challenges for inverters and storage devices. Third, driving over these tubes will feel like hitting a speed bump, and drivers will certainly hate the experience.

I’m glad these inventors are working to help save energy, but I’m sorry to say that they should tread away from the Powertread idea today and start working on something a bit more practical for tomorrow.

The utility industry has some serious work ahead to prepare for the emergence of plug-in electric vehicles from the development pipeline. Customers will be expecting high-voltage power in places where it’s not available today, like parking lots at the office. Customers will also need a way to pay for this electricity, with a new metering and billing system. In the long-run, a smart-grid that can pull power from vehicles, as well as charge them, could help smooth out the variation in solar and wind power.

It’s not surprising that one of the utilities working at the edge of electric car infrastructure is in California — the state leads in renewable energy and energy efficiency deployment as well. Southern California Edison isn’t blanketing its territory with upgrades, an unaffordable venture; rather, it’s using innovative measures to estimate where electric vehicles will be parked in the future and beginning the upgrades far in advance.

It’s refreshing to see forward thinking like this in the utility industry. Between the Smart Grid deployments funded by the recovery act and these preparations for electric vehicles, we’ll have much more flexibility to take advantage of renewable energy and next-gen vehicles in coming decades.

Electric Vehicle-Ready Smart Grid

Find more details at FastCompany:

One utility that thinks it will: Southern California Edison. The utility covers a massive swath of land that includes 5 million meters, 14 million residents. By 2020, the utility’s customers could have up to 1 million EVs on the road. But SoCal Edison is already gearing up for the early adopters, explained Pedro Pizarro, the executive vice president of Power Operations for Southern California Edison. “If you have a block with three or four Priuses, that’s probably an early adopter neighborhood,” he said. SoCal Edison is in the midst of surveying its customers to find out which ones plan on buying EVs early. The zip codes with the highest amount of early adopters will likely receive upgraded wiring and circuitry that can handle all the excess pressure on the grid from EVs.

This sounds like a significant technical challenge. If one desires to take advantage of aerodynamic gains, as the article suggests, the vehicles will need to be driving with very little space between (think NASCAR). Safely executing automated bumper-hugging driving will require nearly instantaneous ability for the auto to perform an emergency breaking procedure, in the case of the vehicle directly in front doing the same.

Better hope you’re not about to take a sip of hot coffee when your car decides to do that.

Excerpt:

Researchers in the European Union are using telematics to create “road trains” that join the benefits of carpooling with the freedom of driving alone.

The latest concept, part of the EU’s Safe Road Trains for the Environment initiative, groups cars with similar destinations into road trains over long stretches of highway. The lead vehicle will be driven by an experienced motorist — it may even be a bus that regularly travels the route — while the functions of each following vehicle will be automatically controlled and tethered to the actions of the lead car so that individual drivers can hammer out e-mails or eat breakfast. Despite the project’s name, cars can exit at any time.

While the project, which goes by the acronym SARTRE, sounds futuristic, all it requires are navigation systems that communicate with the lead vehicle and control acceleration and steering. The project’s lead agencies estimate that vehicles will begin testing in 2011 and say a full-scale rollout is likely within a decade.

With Road Trains, Highways Become Public Transportation | Autopia | Wired.com.

(For a concise summary of Detroits economic woes over the last few decades and through the recent loan requests, read here.)

The government has two fundamentally different questions on its hands in making these loan decisions.

Car Company CEOs at Bailout Hearing

For the Big (and shrinking) Three, the question is,

“Should the government bail out an industry that, regardless of the current recession, is responsible for driving itself to the brink of bankruptcy because of poor strategic decisions in product offering and labor management?”

For Tesla, the question is,

“Should the government bail out a high-tech startup that perhaps overreached in its goals for reinventing the automobile power system?”

Tesla Roadster

While all the companies concerned are “US automobile manufacturers”, the two questions are drastically different in reasoning.

Many have argued that bankruptcy is just the medicine Detroit needs to cure its financial woes. Others feel the painful restructuring process will do more damage to the local and national economies and related industries than is worth suffering, including the auto executives requesting the assistance.

I think the correct response lies somewhere in between. Now that the government has significant leverage over the auto companies, let’s use this bargaining position to our advantage. The EPA has always butted heads with auto industry lobbyists over fuel economy standards. Now the government can write the standards on its own terms. For example, we could model new standards after those in Europe with regulated CO2 emissions.

I’d like to avoid bankruptcies, if only for consumer psychological reasons. Consumers will avoid purchasing cars from bankrupt companies, and this will only exacerbate market share losses to foreign competitors.

But if Congress needs to send Detroit back home a couple more times (driving in their hybrids!) until they return with appropriately detailed and significant plans for their use of the loans, so be it.

Tesla is in a separate universe from the established companies. With its small size, it does not have the gravity in the national economy and its failure won’t send the US plummeting into an economic black hole.

On the other hand, its lofty vision of selling all-electric autos is a force far beyond its fleet size. While the sale of a few hundred Tesla roadsters will not make a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions, the same bunch of battery-powered cars will exert undeniable pressure on the Big Three to respond with similar offerings.

Sure, Tesla’s only product costs $100,000 and is far out-of-reach for most Americans. But consumers will look at that vehicle and then walk into a Ford, GM, or Chrysler dealership and ask for the same thing at a third of the price. They’ll figure that with the R&D capabilities and scale of a major auto manufacturer, a plug-in auto at a reasonable price should be feasible.

Let’s face it. History shows that American auto companies lack the foresight to take longer-term, strategic factors (like the inevitable rise in cost of oil) into consideration when they do research and design vehicles. So, if they don’t possess the internal initiative to develop cleaner vehicles, then maybe Tesla is just the thorn in their sides we need.

Is it worth $400 million in loans to keep Tesla in place as a carrot to lead Detroit?

I think that is some produce that will really produce.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

But this post isn’t about that kind of automobile noise. This is about the noise emanating from Detroit in regards to the future of our nation’s decimated auto industry and how we — yes we, the people and our government — will be responsible for keeping the industry afloat.

Thomas Friedman opened an article in the New York Times, called “How to Fix a Flat”, on the subject with this:

Last September, I was in a hotel room watching CNBC early one morning. They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in other than innovation?” If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?

As usual, Friedman’s ideas were thought-provoking. He received 594 comments on the article before commenting was closed.

Friedman paints a picture where auto executives steered their companies away from any long-term competitiveness toward short-term fixes and Michigan’s legislators shielded the industry from the regulation that would have forced it to compete globally.

And now the industry just isn’t asking for votes in its favor it’s asking for billions in financial support. See the industry’s latest innovation below in a comic by Signe Wilkinson.

Detroit's Latest Plug-In Design

Or Nick Anderson’s comic take:

Catch Detroit

I think it is the gift of a truly talented cartoonist to create comics like these, images that make the viewer laugh out of one side of his mouth while he winces with the other. These comics are painfully entertaining.

Friedman unfortunately chose to close the essay with a tired cliche: that all the auto industries need for redemption is a year of leadership from Apple’s Steve Jobs.

While I have deep respect for Mr. Jobs and his achievements leading Apple to design some of the most popular products of this generation, the problems facing Detroit are larger than any one person can repair.

The fundamental, underlying market mechanisms that steer the behavior of the American auto industry are like, well, a buggy GPS system — they told the industry to turn left in the middle of a bridge and now the industry is through the guardrail and plunging headfirst into the abyss. (For a visual, refer again to Nick Anderson’s comic above.)

Why are the product offerings of the Big (but shrinking) Three so out of line with current consumer demands? Because the companies tuned their product lines to produce the greatest possible short-term profit, without regard to their long-term global competitiveness.

When oil was cheap and carbon even cheaper (aka free), it made economic sense to build the most expensive vehicle a customer would buy, because the pricier the vehicle, the larger the profits. And by the way, this is America, and in America, we like to get a lot for our dollar, so the bigger the vehicle, the better. It’s the same game that restaurants are playing with ever-increasing portion sizes, in a way.

Cheap oil refines into cheap fuel, and cheap fuel does not provide much financial incentive for consumers to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles.

Free carbon (dioxide) means that the emission of greenhouse gases has no cost, and this leads to a similar outcome as cheap fuel, because fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions are related (inversely).

The problem is that oil isn’t cheap (the falling prices are only temporary) and greenhouse gas emissions aren’t free. Ultimately, greenhouse gas emissions have a cost and the price is paid by the environment in the form of climate change.

So, Detroit has been shielded from economic reality in the US by a curtain of cheap oil and cheap carbon. Suddenly the curtain is pulled back and, uh-oh, Detroit is caught on stage with its pants around its ankles.

It turns out that where Detroit’s competitors live — primarily Japan, Korea, and Europe — fuel is a few times more costly and greenhouse gas emissions are regulated by the Kyoto Protocol. The competitors have been preparing for the automobile market of the future for decades, but the Big Three were thrown into reality over the course of about half a product development cycle, and what a cold shower of reality it was.

Yes, the US has Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, but I won’t even bother to dive into that controversy. Let us just agree that the regulations haven’t prepared Chevy, Ford, and Chrysler for today’s sudden market reality. After all, it was CAFE that laid the red carpet for the arrival of minivans and SUVs to displace place of wagons. Wagon, as “passenger cars”, were required to have higher fuel economy than minivans and SUVs, as “light trucks”.

In the end, the US was lacking the necessary indicators of cost to influence purchasing behaviors towards sustainable automobile designs. Additionally, the stock market rewarded short-term performance, so the auto companies had no incentive to take responsibility and guarantee their own long-term competitive strength. Since the industry was blind and could not look forward to plan for its own future, we — the US people and our government — are now responsible for taking the industry by the hand and saving it from running into a wall of bankruptcy.

The government may soon step in with financial aid, it looks like we the people might all be proud new owners of auto industry stock. Of course, that stock looks less like a stork carrying a bundle of joy and more like a burning, stinking bag on the doorstep.

Just don’t step on it.