…and I wanna talk some more… about energy.
I have previously on here mentioned the young lad who hops on a Honda C90 and rides to as far away places as the arctic circle and the middle east.
85cc, 8 bhp, 50 mph top speed, 4 litre fuel capacity giving 90 odd miles range, 90 kilos with fluids topped off.
A top pro cyclist can output 400 watts, few can aspire to that, a labourer is usually outputting 75 watts for his 8 hour day.
The measly Honda C90 puts out a measly 8 bhp PEAK, 8 x 746 =5,968 watts, it’s putting out about 3,000 watts at 30 mph, the equivalent of 7.5 top pro cyclists, or 40 labourers, and the labourer is the better benchmark because the little Honda will do that all day every day for as long as you like.
It takes a man who could walk maybe 40 miles a day, Roman legionnaire style, if the roads were good enough, and allows him to travel over a significant proportion of the globe, and do at least 400 miles a day, and carrying his own body weight again in gear.
DMJ in his post apocalyptic novel missed a trick, the survivors on mechanical transport will be running Honda C90’s, and nothing else… except maybe the odd wood gasifier 4 wheel job, or a cow/pig/chicken shit methane eater, but they will be rare.
I will freely admit, my modern socket 2011 i7 PC sips power compared to the 300 MHz Pentium 2, and delivers *vastly* more computing power, I will also freely admit that my Samsung SGS3, Note2 and Note 10.1 all sip power, all wonderfully efficient things. LED lighting, wonderfully efficient… Even my Giant 46″ Samsung LED TV uses less power than an old 14″ green phosphor monitor.
But there it ends.
Back in the day, Lister made a 6 horsepower single cylinder diesel engine, unlike the little honda that displaces 85 cc, the Lister was nearly 1.5 litres, and everything else weighed accordingly, 300 lbs of flywheels etc, nobody cared, it wasn’t a mobile engine, it was a stationary engine, and massive construction = long life, low stress, minimal vibration, very smooth.
They coupled this engine, via twin vee belts, to a 4 pole 240 volt AC generator, capable of outputting 2.5 kW peak/continuous, it was the same thing to the old Lister.
What made this a trick, was they added a DC circuit to the alternator, eg added a dynamo, that and a few relays, you ran the DC through the mains circuit, when the user closed a switch to turn on the electrically powered item, this closed a rely on the lister, that took DC from the batteries to use the now DC motor in the alternator to spin the big diesel lump up, and when up to speed the DC was taken out of the mains circuit and 220 VAC was put in… and when the customer turned the switch off on the electrically powered item, this prompted “no load” on the alternator, and after a few seconds of this relay shut the rack down on the injector pump on the lister, and when it span back down, back to DC sensing on the mains circuit.
This then, was called the Start-o-matic, and it was hugely popular, but it didn’t sell to houses much, it sold to farms, farms in every country in the world, and the electric light it brought to those farms was incidental, it brought mains power for everything else, well pumps, refrigeration, shearing machines, power tools in the workshop, you name it.
2,500 watts.
Eventually they replaced the 6/1 engine on the startomatic with the 8/1, and the alternator on that would output 3,500 watts, heady days.
If I bought a car in my youth, chances are it would be producing 40 to 50 bhp, BMC A & B series engines and so forth, get medieval and buy a 3.5 litre Rover V8 based on the Buick block and an awesome 155 bhp was on tap.
Harley big twins were still 74 cubes, and plenty people arguing that 74 cubes was too much, not as nice as the 60 cube motors, same shit was being said of Triumph when they put the twins from 650 to 750, and the fucking Norton 850’s shook everything off every 50 miles, hell there were even jokes, as Triumph had gone to 750cc and unit construction and BSA A10 were still 650 and pre-unit, and a *lot* smoother, about Triumph riders being turned away from the blood donor rooms because their blood was too frothy.
Then the Harley’s went to 80 cubes, and the only good thing about that was the promo (put another six inches between your legs) and now from the factory they are 100 inches…. Not to be outdone the japs are now making 1,900cc vee twins, and the cunts riding them are more limp wristed than we were as youths, when frankly a 1 litre motorcycle engine was all but pointless…
Meanwhile things like the Suzuki 650 single Savage, a frankly lovely little bike, are seen as “a girl’s bike”…. WTF????
In short, what we TODAY take for granted as a “normal” personal energy budget, whether it be the electricity supply to our homes, how many horsepower our vehicles have, etc etc, is, even when compared to what was “normal” 30 years ago when I was a young man, completely fucking outrageous…. as indeed was *my* energy budget as a young man, compared to my dad, when he was my age, jack the lad he was, with his 500 cc ohv single Rudge, the only person more jack the lad was his mate Bob, but Bob’s family was loaded, so Bob had a Vinnie black prince… dad bought his own bike.
For a short while I toyed with a home build Z1000 bored to 1200 and with a turbo with eeeek boost fitted, I can tell you for a fact those old Z bottom ends would handle 200+ bhp / 25 mpg no sweat, I can also tell you after shredding a
Meanwhile, boiling 2 pints of water in an electric kettle uses exactly the same energy as it did when my parents got one for a wedding present just after the war.
A 1 kW bar electric fire uses exactly the same energy as it did in 1950, and a 60 watt incandescent bulb ditto.
But the essential difference even back then as a callow yoof was the same as it is today, travel astride something exposed to the elements, or carry your own armchair, heater, air con, stereo and weatherproof box everywhere so you can travel in the same comfort and attire as sitting here on my sofa typing this, the latter vastly increases the energy requirement.
Nothing else has changed.
But it *could* have….
In my workshop I have a 1.5 kW one “bar” quartz tube heater, one of the pukka ones, most of the output is infra red, I still find myself reluctant to use the fucker, because it is hard to relate the heat output to the energy consumption, it looks sorta like a 1 bar electric fire, but the heat output is prodigious, 10 feet away from a bar fire I can barely feel anything on my skin, I can sense it with my face, but there is no actual warmth, 10 feet away from this thing it is like sunbathing in summer on the beach… waaaaarrrrmmmth… ten minutes later you start to sweat…. it is efficient because it heats ME, not the air around me.
Same with cars, ALL the energy expended in making them move is shed by converting it to heat, and the 50 bhp car of my yoof that is now 100 bhp, well yes, there is more safety shit to drag around, but also, the bulk of that extra goes on performance
The A60 austin cambridge I used to drive as a boy had 60 bhp, 24 seconds 0-60, the car outside (same engine capacity) now does 0-60 in under 11 seconds…. there isn’t actually any NEED for double the acceleration of the old A60, sure, I *use* it, tyres and diesel cost me nothing, but I don’t *need* it…. and if I was paying for tyres and diesel I wouldn’t be using it.
That was the old lesson from the blown zed thou, beyond a certain sedate point, fuel energy is used to chew up tyres and brakes, I really can’t remember the numbers or anything else except the conversation itself now, but one of my customer back in the day was a 747 pilot, before that he used to fly English Electric Lightnings, RAF interceptor squadron, I do remember him telling me that could drink fuel far faster than a jumbo, and I don’t remember the numbers, but when he said far faster he meant a LOT.
As an aside this guy was telling me that when BAE was testing the Concorde in the early 80’s, they offered it to various air forces as a test target, so the yanks brought F14/15/16 and Starfighters to the party, the French turned up with Mirages, but one of the lightnings from his squadron was the only plane able to make an intercept, but then they would do runway to 39,000 feet in 3 minutes.. >;*)
So, from the time when my dad was a boy, to when I was a boy (for variations of boy that mean under 20 but old enough to drive) it went from only the very very few having a 50 bhp motorcycle, to anyone who wanted one having a 50/60/70/80/90 bhp motorcycle.
And from when I was a boy, when only pub landlords and police had a 155 bhp car, to anyone who wants one having 150/200/250 on up bhp cars, I know a guy who just bought a used VW phaeton v10, chipped, a 400 bhp diesel car FFS.. he paid ten grand for it.
Even the fucking VW up, a one litre three cylinder jobbie, chucks out 60 bhp, and that’s not even “a girls car” it is a motorised shopping trolley.
Nobody, but nobody, but nobody, gives a fuck about efficiency.
Profligacy is the name of the game.
95% of what we call our current, normal, western standard of living is in fact nothing more than profligate personal energy expenditure on a scale that would have been simply unimaginable when I was a boy.
I have said this time and time and time again, the per capita energy budget of a nation denotes the technological progress and status of that nation, nothing else counts.
sure, we could *probably” maintain today’s standard of living and achieve and 30-40% cut in this current per capita energy budget (a 30-40% cut with no gains in efficiency would take us back to 1980, no internet, no personal computing, no mobile phones, no digital equipment) by going balls out for efficiency anywhere and everywhere we could…
the *average* standard car factory alternator is rated at 70 amperes… 70 x 12 = 840 watts, over a bloody horsepower, just to charge the 12 volt system…and run all those incandescent or xenon lights, and that 200 watt stereo, and move the windows up and down, and run the video game console instruments…
30 second 0-60 times are good enough.
regenerative braking could be done today, and do away with the engine powered alternator altogether as a by product.
every single vehicle could be factory speed limited to 50 mph
all lighting could be LED
There is just no will, and no awareness of what could be done, today, with today’s technology, not tomorrow’s unfeasible magical unicorn solutions.