John, interesting those Amoco "electric stations", How large are their solar cells? The flux of the sun is about 1000 watt/meter square, but I doubt you get more than 15% efficiency from their solar cells (the GaAs cells that yield 26% are quite unique, and very expensive, they should be dual cells including the GaAs for longer wavelength). Now a liter of gasoline contains about 2000 whr (I am taking the "low end") equivalent of energy, for a small European car with a tank of 40 liters, you need to store the equivalent 80,000 whr for a "refill", and to collect at maximum efficiency (15%) that kind of solar energy you'll need about 500 square meter of collectors. That is to refill one car every hour. Somehow, even if they put collectors, I doubt they will have any need to store the energy, it would probably be just a supplement to other sources. However, assuming you needed to store the energy, in an electric station you need to discharge the energy extremely fast and for that, Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage Systems (SMES) such as those of AMSC, or Maxwell type capacitors would be much better than batteries. Of course, in all cases, we are going to run into some major questions of costs. They got some dreamers out there in AMOCO. Or alternatively, they got some government agency to fund some far out dream.
Zeev |
