Guided Electric Highways
MIT Alumni Bruce McHenry, is looking to start a company to design "the dominant e-guideway design" for electrified guideways for electric (and hybrid) cars. A radical, and pretty cool idea.
Bruce will be giving a dry-run of his Business plan presentation (ppt 6MB) tomorrow at the MIT Entrepreneurs Club . 6-7PM in Room 56-114
His write-up of the idea is here in the MIT Alum newsletter.
Claims that this design will be fast (100MPH) , cheap (marginal cost, not capital cost), clean (energy generated from clean, efficient point sources vs. dirty, small internal engines), and safe (this is like a ride in an amusement park - on tracks so little risk of accident).
A big claim from the article
... Though transmission and electric motor losses may cut the gain from 100% to 50%, the running efficiency gains will provide an overall gain of three to six times in miles per gallon equivalent. At $0.11 per kWh, the cost to travel 100 miles at 100 MPH in a mid-size vehicle would be $2 to $4 depending mostly on its aerodynamics.
I don't know anything about Bruce, but I plan to go to hear what he has to say.
went to this presentation today.
Its such a mind boggling idea that its hard to write about succinctly. Overall impression is that I'm impressed. This guy is not a lone, mad maverick. There are quite a few people working on this idea in academia, government, and entrepreneurs.
My initial thoughts though...
- huge capital investment, looking in the Trillion dollar ball park.
- requires policy makers to "pick-a-winner", because they will have to subsidize this hard core. sometimes policy makers aren't to good at this...
- His estimates at the operation costs for the system might be rather high. He assumes 10cents per kWhr, using a typical residential rate. An e-guideway would be a huge consumer of electricity and would most definitely get a far lower, negotiated bulk power rate.
- it would take major cultural change for people to trust the control of their cars to a computer, while traveling at 100mph
- traffic sucks, pollution from burning gas sucks, pouring money into the middle east through oil sales sucks, 1000s of deaths annually from car accidents sucks.
- a bold solution may be what's in order, this is worth people having a look at.
Posted by: Adam | March 30, 2004 at 07:57 PM
About two and half years ago, I heard a presentation from a guy who was working at that time with FORD on this idea. However, he had only the concept and some animation. I will accept that this presentation does a better analysis.
I don't have the time to elaborate on all my gripes with the idea or the presentation of it. I am just going to list some of the once that I occured to me as I went through the ppt.
* Freedom car: 90,000 psi argument is misleading. 10,00 psi compressed H2 is sufficient for cars/trucks.
* About 90% of the trips in passenger miles basis are made by using cars. Displacement of air traffic under 500 miles is really not worth much.
* E-guideways:
End dependence on middle east oil? Perhaps partially.
Increase dependence on foreign/Middle East Natural Gas? YES!!!
* Projected demand increase due to e-guideways is 2.5 billion Mwh or about the current electricity use: Where is the energy going to come from? Could it possibally be used elsewhere in order to get more benefit?
* Solar?? Come on!
Wind, Some promise, but show me the 2B Mwh.
Nuclear: Too much baggage of its own. See here
* $1 trillan is just to build guideways! As with all major construction projects, this is probably underestimated by a factor of 2.
* Reduced highway maintenence. The e-guideways don't require any maintenence :-)
* How much will dual mode vehicles cost???? Don't even get started on the chicken and egg problem of builing dual mode vehicles or having the guideways!
* I believe that the real motivation here is get more R&D dollars to keep RUF or whatever company is involved. Would you consider 10B per year R&D on this effort? How much have we spent on the renewables in the last twenty years, can somebody tell me please?
Well, you can see that I am not buying this. There is a reason. Whether you like it or not, automobiles are a very convenient mode of travel and the people love it. Perhaps high costs of energy may end the love affair with the automobile some day, but I don't believe that e-guideways or any such similar scheme will be able to do it.
Posted by: Anup | March 30, 2004 at 11:28 PM
BTW, I should mention that Jesse Ausubel" whom Bruce thanks at the end of the alum newsletter is an extremely smart guy. Read some of his thoughts on his website.
Posted by: Anup | March 30, 2004 at 11:32 PM
One of the nice things that the DOE does is put up a fact of the week up on its Office of Transportation Technologies (Now called FreedonCAR and Vehicle Technologies). One of the last month's fact reveals:
Posted by: Anup | April 01, 2004 at 02:15 PM
I agree that this stuff is pretty out there. But I also think its better to do some blue-sky thinking rather then just accept that today's automobile system be the dominant means of transportation for the next hundred years.
If we do change and have a fast, safe, clean short/long-haul transportation system in 60 years... our kids will look back and wonder "How did you guys live like that? You actually let people drive 75mph with no help from a computer? You gave money to countries that fund terrorists just for oil? You put up with HOW many preventable accident and pollution related deaths ever year? Did no one have an imagination? Were ya nuts?"
From listening to Bruce's presentation, he was saying that solar and wind are not viable options. He was interested in new pebble bed nuclear technology proposed for South Africa. There's also good ole' American coal generation (with carbon capture and storage (if you're worried about climate change).
I can't imagine building a bunch of generation would be a problem if the financial incentives were there.
Posted by: Adam | April 01, 2004 at 02:53 PM
The New York Times says that our cars are getting smarter, and will be driving themselves some day. Another path that could improve safety and increase efficiency.
Posted by: Adam | April 04, 2004 at 03:47 AM