One of the greatest challenges presented by the prospect of clean cars that run in part or completely on a renewable energy source is the three-fold issue of storing energy within the vehicle: storage device size, storage longevity, and recharge time. Though similar problems plague most intermittent energy sources, including solar and wind power, vehicles present a much greater challenge due largely to the physical constraints of their size. While wind and solar power plants typically use deep cycle batteries for this purpose, they are too large, too costly and too slow to cater to the unique demands of vehicles.
According to a new study announced by the University of Maryland in College Park, a new and improved electrostatic nanocapacitor could be the solution. According to the university, they’ve developed a means of high-density energy storage that’s both compact enough for vehicle use and up to 10 times more efficient than any technology that currently exists (Source: EnergyMatters.com.au). The basic idea behind the nanocapacitor is that nanotechnology is used to create many fast moving energy conduits that transport energy back and forth from the source(s) to the reception site, which in this case is the engine. The hope for this technology is that you would be able to stack these nanocapacitors in layers within the car and that they’d be able to deliver high-power energy quickly enough for the engine to function properly without the power storage drawbacks of the more traditional battery sources (Source: Eng.UMD.edu). This discovery holds a great deal of promise and could solve many of the issues that more conventional clean car battery technologies have been unable to.Efficient Vehicle Design
Another area of transportation research with potential is the so-called “hypercar,” which is a machine designed to eliminate the waste of vehicle function. There are many ways to accomplish this, including improvements to internal combustion processes, reduction of composite material weight, streamlined aerodynamics and other design changes. By eliminating this waste, these vehicles could be extremely efficient and pollute far less (Source: AssociatedContent.com).One of the more interesting such projects was championed by the Rocky Mountain Institute in 2007 and is called “MOVE,” which stands for “MObility + Vehicle Efficiency” (Source: Move.RMI.org). In a recent announcement from this project, Indiana’s Bright Automotive has released plans to produce a plug-in hybrid vehicle that would get 100 mpg in the next few years. The project claims that it would be able to manufacture 50,000 of these cars by 2012. The vehicles, which start in an all-electric mode for the first 30 miles of “tank” operation, then use hybrid technology to run on a combination of electric power and fuel for the next 400 miles (Source: Move.RMI.org).
I would argue that this model of vehicle design should be adopted for use with any clean-car power technologies that ultimately prevail in the marketplace. Imagine a vehicle that runs on a combination of renewable and electric energy that wastes the least amount of power possible thanks to intelligent engineering. You’d have a vehicle that rarely needed to be “plugged-in” because it could both drive longer using the same amount of energy and recharge itself to some significant degree. Though it may sound like a thing of futuristic movies, cars like these may be just one breakthrough away.
New Biofuel Study
Hypercars like those in the works by RMI could also become even more “green” if Exxon Mobil produces results in its’ new 600 million dollar, six-year study of algae-based biofuels. This study is aimed at developing biofuels from photosynthetic sources that could be refined into ethanol using existing oil-industry infrastructure for expediency (Source: NYTimes.com, July 14). There are several companies exploring the practical use of algae-based biofuels, which can be grown without placing a strain on existing agricultural food sources and grow in part by ingesting and processing CO2. Though this idea has a great deal of potential, existing studies of algae-based fuel are finding that growing the stuff is trickier than it sounds. Solix Biofuels, which is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, has spent the last five years trying to perfect the conditions and reduce the significant up-front costs of growing the algae (Source: PopularMechanics.com, March 2007). Among the challenges are water temperature controls and CO2 atmospheric controls, both of which currently require expensive materials and housing to combat. While Exxon Mobil will face these same issues, they have both funding and infrastructural advantages that may take algae-based biofuels from small-scale development to a fully realized, widely-distributed fuel source.
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