“This essay is in response to this post” Want to Know How Out of Touch With Reality the Greens Are?” where there was a congressional review of the idea of all military vehicles being electric.
photog”
It’s worse. Just heard some of the testimony and the idiot is talking about an all electric Navy by 2030.
Thar is so far beyond current technology as to be beyond fantasy. The current peak of battery tech resides in a Ford pickup and contains around 110 kW hours. This is approximately the equivalent of 140 HP hours or 14 HP x 10 hours or some equivalent multiple. The Ford pickups have proven worthless for towing any load more than a few miles.
The current US Destroyer, the Arliegh Burke class, is powered by 4 gas turbines with a combined out put of 78,000 kW, or about 105,000 HP. That’s just propulsion, in addition there are generators on board totaling 21,000kW for misc electric power. So we’re talking about right at 100,000 kW of power generation onboard.
If they get into wartime mode, I’d expect they would need the great bulk of that. A Ford PU battery would power that for around 3 seconds, 1000 Ford PU batteries would push it for an hour.
But a deep water war vessel has to be self reliant for weeks. Even just patrolling at cruise speed, the power requirements must be in the 20,000 kW range. Your hypothetical 1000 Ford batteries would power it for 5 hours then.
And you may think you’ve heard of what happens in a battery fire.
Lets say that battery tech has increased 50X, allowing an Arleigh Burke to do it’s normal 5100 mile cruise at 20 knots and you pull into some South American port on your last couple of kW and looking to recharge 4,400 megawatts hours. And that powered by windmills that aren’t working right now. Yeah, right.
Charging at sea? How’s that going to work? The replenishment boat is running on batteries too.
We are no longer a serious nation. We’ve collapsed into a silliness and stupidity forced on us by, what?
It’s almost as if they’re pranking us.
But…but…the Swiss have electric flying boats with a range of a whole 100 miles!
” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow ugc”>Jetka-Aviation-750×337.jpg (750×337) (urbanairmobilitynews.com)
And we haven’t even begun to explore the potential of really, really long extension cords.
Considering power loss is calculated as Power Loss=I^2 x R, you’ll meet a lot of resistance to the long power cords.
Based on my experience vacuuming the living room for Camera Girl from time to time, I believe the real danger is accidentally pulling the plug out of the socket while still in mid-air. To my mind a 10% safety factor should be used when evaluating the length of a flight versus the length of the extension cord. Maybe 15%.
Hummm, Miami to Seattle + 15%. But what if it catches on a tree over Omaha? Have you thought about that, huh? You’d need a branch manager.
Branches, mountaintops, the extension cords of other planes going in different directions. All kinds of problems. But with the likes of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg on the case there is no technical problem we can’t overcome. Or we just give up on motored vehicles and go back to horses, sailing ships and carrier pigeons. Whichever works.
“But with the likes of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg on the case there is no technical problem we can’t overcome.”
No doubt, no doubt!