Mekhong Kurt's Page
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- Are you interested in becoming an organizer in your area?
- Maybe--But Not Sure What to Organize
- Tell us about your experience with alternative energy:
- Almost none, as alternative energy sources in Thailand, where I've lived the last 14 years, is just now getting geared up. (I'm originally from outside Denton, Texas.) But I have a voracious appetite for reading about all the various alternatives, though I'm not a scientist or engineer. Through my reading, I've become a reasonably informed layman (I hope). I'm even mulling over the possibility of wind power as a supplement on the small ranch my Sister and I own in NE Texas.
- What excites you about this campaign?
- Any campaign with your name behind it is bound to make people sit up and take notice, particularly given the radical departure from your life-long base in oil to something as radical as your serious investment in windpower, and your admirable bluntness in saying, "The gig's up folks; we gotta change -- now."
- What do you want to do to help?
- I'm not sure *what* I can do in Bangkok. I do have fairly extensive writing and editing experience (I taught writing and business communications at unirsity level in the US, mainland China, Macau, and Thailand for many years), and I have run my own website for about ten years and written a [mostly] weekly column most of those years. Perhaps those skills might come in useful. I plan to rejoin the Foreign Correspodnents Club, though I should say I'm not sure where, because I am actively seeking a teaching post somewhee in East Asia this upcoming school year, so I might not even be in Bangkok -- another reason to offer something I can do from anywhere that has Internet connections.
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For (1), this spreadsheet compares ETT to the German Maglev train commercialized in China.ETTvTR_pp.xls
(2) The minimum energy (at 100% pump efficiency) of initial evacuation per mile of double tube ETT guideway is about 5 gallons of gasoline worth of energy (of course suppled by electricity -- not gasoline). Even at real world pumping efficiency of 30 to 50 percent, this is a trivial amount of the construction cost.
There is a slight power overhead to remove the small amount of air that will leak in to the system. This power overhead to occasionally run some of the vacuum pumps is what takes most of the energy needed for ETT -- about 1/50th as much energy per passenger-mile as traveling by electric train or electric car.
How much is slight you might ask? For comparison, there is a 52" tube (slightly smaller that the 60" ETT tube) that is a couple miles long for scientific experiments that is evacuated to a vacuum level a million times better than required for ETT, and it has no measurable leaks in two years. Old vacuum CTR televisions will not leak for years, and they require a thousand times higher quality vacuum than ETT. Most of the vacuum pumping requirements will occur at the airlocks where vehicles enter the system, the capsule displaces more than 99% of the airlock volume, and a pump removes the rest of the air before the airlock opens into the system. Some air sticks to the surface of the capsules, and will have to be pumped out of the tube.
TRANSPORTATION is the master key to basic survival, and the cornerstone of the economy. We all know that transportation presently depends on oil production, and oil production is peaking. We must focus first on transportation – it is the highest priority. The PickensPlan to transition vehicles to natural gas is a great start toward 100% energy independence, but is a stop-gap measure till we can transition to all electric transportation. Electric energy is strained without adding transportation demands; so we must focus on drastic efficiency improvement.
Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) is a patented technology where travel occurs without air friction or rolling resistance (like “Space Travel on Earth”); ETT can accomplish 50 times more transportation per kWh (or carbon credit) than electric cars or trains. ETT is silent, low cost, safe, faster than jets, less expensive than freeways, and is electric so it can make maximum use of wind or PV power. I thought you might want to learn more about ETT
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