Re:Porsche's Idea for a Six-Stroke Internal Combustion Engin...
by fragmede on Saturday September 21, 2024 @04:07PM
(#41612351)
In addition to electricity and gasoline, there's also natural gas, which is shipped around in giant tankers and via pipelines, and then piped into homes to be used for heating and cooling in many places. Also for systems we transfer energy around on Earth, consider the infrastructure used to ship coal all around the world, on trains and ships.
Now imagine we came along and said we were going to add to the electrical grid a parallel system of transporting explosive liquid to billions of distributed combustion engines. Not only that, the explosive liquid is only available in a few politically charged areas in the world. Add all the tankers refineries pipes truck lines holding tanks pumps etc so that most people live at most a few miles from a holding tank that will distribute hundreds of gallons to them for their own micro power plant that only exists for their commute.
It seems crazy. We built both systems incrementally over time so we're in a massive sunk cost analysis whenever we think about replacing gas cars.