Live-fueling Resources to Reduce Strain by Batteries on Range & Velocity

Building the Green Economy, Zero-combustion paradigm ::

24 October 2008 :: by J.E. Robertson

The electric car has long been plagued by the problem of its range and the need to recharge a battery, which takes time, before continuing. So the implementation of new “live-fueling” technologies, like solar panels that help maintain the car’s charge and extend its range, will be key to bringing a shift toward viable, mainstream, clean-running automotive vehicles.

Based on present technologies, solar or photo-voltaic cells are the only energy-producing technology that could feasibly fit into a genuine live-fueling automotive system. But the “jump generation” —not those ideas and advances that grow out of the current generation, but a mindset and a paradigm apart— will bring technologies that allow a vehicle’s momentum to contribute to its energy reserve, so we get closer and closer to real-time live-fueling.

An entire industrial base will grow up around these technologies and will provide the next horizon in major economic expansion. It will also fundamentally alter the central conceptualization of transport as an industry and as a part of the fabric of society, making it easier to calculate the real costs of infrastructure and the real value of contributing factors, such as fuel, maintenance, industrial output, consumer spending and depreciation.

The efficiency of self-powering or live-fuel vehicles could be enhanced by a new generation of ultra-lightweight “batteries” whose role is more to transpose energy than to contain and preserve it. They may be radically different from anything now conceived of as batteries, and their role in powering the vehicle will be both more complex and more subtle than the vision of fuel-cells running on hydrogen.

If we keep in mind that combustion is just one of the countless ways to produce or “encounter” energy, we can begin to move away from the much-too-literalist burn-to-energize conceptualization of automotive power. Light, momentum, vibration, magnetism, impact and chemical phase transition are all energy-releasing or “energy-revealing” processes, which can be used to build the next new energy option, beyond the heat and combustion paradigm.