5: FEED THE WEB FIRST
And what could be more industrial-age...
...than automobiles? Yet, chips and networks can take the industrial age out of cars, too. Most of the energy a car consumes is used to move the car itself, not the passenger. So if the car's body and engine can be diminished in size, less power is needed to move the car, meaning the engine can be made yet smaller. A smaller engine requires a yet smaller engine, and so on down the slide of compounded value that microprocessors followed. The car's body can be reduced substantially using smart materials--stuff that requires increasing knowledge to invent and make--which in turn means a smaller, more efficient engine can power it.
Detroit and Japan have designed cars that weigh only 500 kilograms. Built out of ultra-lightweight composite fiber material, these prototypes are powered by high-tech hybrid engine motors. They reduce the mass of radiator, axle, and driveshaft by substituting networked chips. They insert chips to let the car self-diagnose its performance, in real time. They put chips in brakes, making them less likely to skid. They put microprocessors in the dashboard to ease navigation and optimize fuel use. They use hydrogen fuel cells that do not pollute, and electric motors with low noise pollution. And just as embedding chips in brakes made them better, these lightweight cars will be wired with network intelligence to make them safer: A crash will inflate intelligent multiple air bags--think "smart bubblepak."
The accumulated effect of this substitution of knowledge for material in automobiles is what energy visionary Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, calls a hypercar: an automobile that will be safer than today's car, yet can cross the continental United States on one tank of hydrogen fuel.
Already, the typical car boasts more computing power than your typical desktop PC. Already the electronics in a car cost more ($728) than the steel in the car ($675). But what the hypercar promises, says Lovins, is a car remade by silicon. A hypercar can be viewed as step toward a vehicle that is (and behaves like) a solid state module. A car becomes not wheels with chips, but a chip with wheels. And this chip with wheels will drive on a road system increasingly wired as a decentralized electronic network obeying the network economy's laws as well.
Once we visualize cars as chips with wheels, it's easier to imagine airplanes as chips with wings, farms as chips with soil, houses as chips with inhabitants. Yes, they will have mass, but that mass will be subjugated by the overwhelming amount of knowledge and information flowing through it. In economic terms, these objects will behave as if they had no mass at all. In that way, they migrate to the network economy.
You are spot on except for the H2 fuel comment.
An infinite number of infinitely powerful chips will not repeal the laws of thermodynamics and diffusion of small molecules.
The problem with H2 is that it is too difficult to store, and ship economically. It also takes a lot of energy (which must come from somewhere) to make a small amount of H2.
Being the smallest molecule, H2 tends to diffuse out of any container or pipe. Thus storage at the gas station is difficult. Storage in a tank truck or in your car are equally problematic, pipelines that will hold H2 are too expensive. It doesn't help matters any that H2 burns with zero color so you have a MAJOR safety problem. Imagine walking into a fire that you can't see. For a fuel to become widely adopted I need to be able to refill my car in nowheresville, USA as I drive cross country. And that means it needs to be easy, safe, and Bubba proof.
If they solve the H2 storage via metal hydrides or nanotubes that will help.
More practical is a small onboard reformer that takes a liquid fuel (gasoline, biodiesel, alcohol) and creates a fuel that can be used in a fuel cell. You can put the reformer in your car or at the gas station depending on how small they can make it.
When you start measuring energy density (watts per lb) you quickly realize that gasoline and diesel are amazing. Alcohols are acceptable (just don't make them from food crops). Propane and Natural gas require large tanks in the back of your truck - ok for pickups but not for passenger cars.
If you can solve the H2 storage problem in your car then it starts to make sense to crack H2O in your local gas station. But it's important to remember that it takes a large amount of energy to create a small amount of H2. I think you'll find that if you do an energy balance of sunlight and windpower for an average gas station you don't have enough watts to make very much H2. So you are going to have to find the energy via nukes or coal or hydro or wind and put it on the grid.... at which point it may make more sense to store energy in your car via a battery as opposed to trying to store H2.
I don't think it will ever make sense to move H2 via pipeline. The materials of construction required to eliminate diffusion are extremely expensive when you start looking at laying pipe.
I've done extensive research into this subject with the Society of Automotive Engineers and my employer who shall remain nameless and my thoughts are my own and do not reflect the opinion or policy of anyone else.
Jim Coffey
licensed professional engineer
This is a good bit of engineering analysis, but neglects the simian marketing of automobiles. Since the 1970s, MPG/horsepower have roughly doubled, and auto manufacturers have responded not by building high efficiency cars, but by doubling the horsepower in the cars (and SUVs) that they're selling.
This keeps the fleet MPG averages just at the threshold of regulatory requirements and gives people the roaring huge metal boxes they crave.