The future of travel and power?

About eighteen months ago my son Barry, who lives abroad, made one of his occasional fleeting visits to the UK and as usual spent much of it on the move – attending a business meeting, catching up with friends and family and doing some shopping in central London.

Sometime last summer he was over briefly again and we went for a meal during which he discussed some of his views and ideas about potential future developments in solar, wind and even wave-powered technology in the marine industry.

Even though I understand next to nothing about such things, it was certainly fascinating.

Presumably, going back in human history, people first took to water transport/travel in hollowed out tree trunks or similar and then propelled themselves about with primitive paddles; later someone, somewhere, figured out that sails would enable them to harness the wind and thus make savings on human energy and stamina; and then came the internal combustion engine.

These days, even with floating gin palaces, cruise liners and even most cruising yachts, never mind the really expensive ones, there are issues around how on board you generate and/or then ‘save’ energy (e.g. in the form of electric batteries) in order to run all your many systems, including computers, when undertaking any voyage that takes you away from dry land for more than a day or two.

It seemed from the dinner discussion with my son referred to above that one area of active scientific interest at the moment is that of harnessing ‘wave’ power.

I’d only ever heard of this in the context of some coastal harbour in Wales which is trying – and so far as I am aware, still failing because of the horrendous cost involved – to gain significant public funding towards build a massive lagoon-style circular wall off its coastline that (it is hoped) will ‘capture’ the wave power of the sea as the tide goes in and out and thereby generate significant amounts of electricity and power.

Barry himself is particularly interested in the possibility of ships being able to generate and store electricity from harnessing ‘wave power’. If you think about this – and I hadn’t before he mentioned and described it – it’s a pretty obvious and straightforward concept.

If you’re designing a vessel that is going to be ploughing through the water for mile after nautical mile, you start from viewpoint that you want a sleek bow in order to reduce resistance to the water and thereby maximise your speed and efficiency.

But, if in moving through the water you could somehow simultaneously ‘capture’ the ‘resistance’ power thereby available – e.g. by designing some sort of wing beneath the water’s surface that did that without slowing down the boat’s progress too much – then you’d potentially have an inexhaustible supply of renewable energy.

That was the theory anyhow, as I understood it.

At some later point during the meal, I ventured gingerly into the topic of electric cars, describing how in recent months I’d been reading pieces in the media about the Tesla organisation – a manufacturing company specifically set up to develop the idea of battery-powered vehicles in which visionary US billionaire Elon Musk (who, amongst other things, I believe is also proposing that human beings should colonise Mars) is heavily involved.

Barry then surprised me by announcing not only was he aware of them, but that on his previous visit to the UK the year before – on a trip into central London which I had though was for just clothes and computer-related shopping – he had included in his schedule a booked-well-in-advance test drive in a Tesla model S not long after they had first gone on sale in the UK.

He then described the course of the test and how impressive and revolutionary he had found the Tesla, most particularly its power and efficiency. The Tesla staffer accompanying him on the test drive had taken him to a straight track and invited him to ‘open up’ the vehicle in a Jeremy Clarkson (“Let’s see how fast this baby can go …”) fashion, but first warning him to prepare himself for the G-forces generated. Barry described the experience as truly astounding – he had been pinned back in his seat as if on board a NASA space shuttle hurtling into the stratosphere and he shot from 0 to 60 and beyond in a flash.

Since then I have noticed a growing frequency in the number of times I’ve spotted examples of the Tesla model S on the motorway and generally around London. One of the drawbacks of the S is that it’s pretty costly, starting from about £60,000 to buy and received opinion has it that electric cars won’t really take off until their range (about 250 to 300 miles?) increases and their purchase costs come down.

All that said – and I promise I’m neither a Tesla salesman nor being paid to write any of this – today I thought I’d provide Rust readers a link to a media review of the latest Tesla model (the 3) which, I believe is their attempt to enter the mass market via a hatchback design that in the UK will cost somewhere between £24,000 and £35,000 to buy.

See here for the most recent Carbuyer  report/review – CARBUYER UK