Sweden Tests World's First Electric Road For Trucks (inhabitat.com) 106
Kristine Lofgren writes: Electric vehicles are cool, but for industrial vehicles it can be a challenge to get very far on just electric power. That's why Sweden is testing out an electric road where e-vehicles can jump on, get juiced while they travel, and get back on the road. The country just opened a two kilometer test stretch in Sandviken on the E16 where electric vehicles can connect to an overhead system that is very similar to light rail. It's another exciting step towards a fossil fuel-free Sweden. Trucks can use the electric power while riding on the special electric road system -- on regular roads they operate as hybrid vehicles. The testing is scheduled to take place until 2018, which should give the country enough time to see how the technology functions in the real world. Sweden's energy and sustainable growth agencies will fund the project in addition to the transport administration.
That's all great, but there's (Score:1)
One place you can't drive to on that road ... the UK!
LOL
Trump 2016 (Score:1)
Yes we can
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Of course not.
We're talking about trucks here, not boats.
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That or freaking solar aquatic truckways!
Congratulations (Score:4, Insightful)
Congratulations. You have invented the train.
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It's just like a plug-in hybrid, but instead of having to stop and plug into a socket these trucks can just drive through these special stretches of road.
You get about 1 minute of "fast-charge" per mile.
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I assume you mean the San Francisco airport Airtrain. It got rubber tires on concrete(?) rails and a central metal rail.
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This one doesn't have rails, it's a normal road, just with wires overhead.
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels. If you had retractable electrical things on the top of the engine to connect to overhead wires you could use grid electricity for the steep grades and other fuel demanding portions of the trip (like the first couple miles out of major rail yards where you are still getting up to speed) and then spin up the diesel as you get into the long stretches of mainline where you only need to overcome air and rolling resistance which are both minimal for a train.
In addition to this you could do regenerative breaking on these same stretches of tracks to feed power back into the grid when slowing down. Many locomotives already use electrical generators in the wheels (basically just using the motors as generators) as this avoids wear on the wheels and brakes by avoiding the older mechanical brakes. However on long down grades they still have to use the mechanical brakes since they have no way to get rid of the excess energy; the electrical generator brakes just heat up an onboard tank of water which can only take so much heating before they have to fall back to the mechanical brakes.
So basically all of the things you need to do a hybrid system like this are already onboard a modern locomotive, the only thing missing is the wires above the tracks and the thing on top of the locomotive to connect to them. The thing on top would be a very small cost to add, the wires would be a lot more expensive per mile, however you can choose which sections of rail to electrify since you are going for a hybrid approach which lets you only electrify the most beneficial parts of the rail network.
Overall I think it is a very good idea and I am surprised I have not seen it implemented or at least discussed. Maybe I am missing something but it seems like it would work well. I guess the main issue would be the large power surge to the grid from regenerative braking and the huge temporary draw when getting up to speed but it seems like this would be addressable without too much difficulty.
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Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels. If you had retractable electrical things on the top of the engine to connect to overhead wires you could use grid electricity for the steep grades and other fuel demanding portions of the trip (like the first couple miles out of major rail yards where you are still getting up to speed) and then spin up the diesel as you get into the long stretches of mainline where you only need to overcome air and rolling resistance which are both minimal for a train.
It's more expensive then the current system and there's no incentive to do so because of other issues. You're talking about laying thousands of miles of electric lines and in some cases you then run into issues requiring environmental impact studies, complaints from NIMBY's and so on. This has actually been tested in the past and was found infeasible. On top of that most diesel engines in use today are DC output only, and unless you're then dumping more equipment onto the engine to make a conversion fro
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most diesel engines in use today are DC output only
This is done through rectification, so the equipment is already on board. The generator is definitely AC.
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Huh?
Nevada is no bigger than an average European country. I assure you we have overhead electrified lines here.
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Japan't rail network is mostly electrified and the trains are electric only. There is a bit more up-front investment but it quickly pays off. It's much better for urban environments in particular, and of course the underground.
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Japan is smaller than California. http://mapfight.appspot.com/jp... [appspot.com] It would be a good deal more than a little bit of up front investment. A better choice might be to power them with natural gas or even hydrogen. It is not like you would have to worry about tank size.
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I've noticed that there's a lot of things America cannot do because it is larger than e.g. individual European countries. Thinking the individual states should figure out some of the infrastructure, they are separately small enough to be able to do stuff ...
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Overall though, electric trains are cheaper and more powerful if the infrastructure is there and most concerns ab
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"Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels."
I could be wrong, but I believe that Amtrak, LIRR, MetroRail do that for traffic in and out of NYC using diesel where electricity isn't available and switching to electric under Manhattan. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Congratulations (Score:2)
Most trains in Europe (local and intercity) are electric. Only in the US is this considered novel.
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Amtrak's Acela service uses an overhead caternary cable system running from Boston to DC.
The reason it's not used elsewhere is that in most places intercity train traffic doesn't have its own tracks; they use spare capacity on freight tracks. You need 20 feet track clearance for a double-stacked container train, and high speed rail power lines are typically about 5m above the track-- about a meter shy of that. In some places in the Northeast corridor there's just barely enough room to squeeze a double sta
there are hybrid locomotives (Score:2)
The problem is where to put the energy. The amount of energy recovered from a large train is just too large to store. So hybrid locomotives are used for switching, where the amount of energy is smaller.
Trains don't need additional power to climb grades, they just slow down. To go the same speed would requires not just more energy (fuel or electricity input) but more powerful electric motors to turn that energy into torque. And they just don't have those bigger motors. If they did, they'd just bring along a
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Take a look at this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Congratulations. You have invented the train.
Yeah. Why reinvent something that works? It seems like it might be good way to power large trucks. A good use case would be a road between a mine and a port. Roads are a lot cheaper to build than railways and can be built more rapidly.
The other obvious way of building an electric road is to put conductors in the road itself. This could work for regular cars as well as trucks and buses. These people are working on that: http://elways.se/?lang=en [elways.se]
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Rubber tired trains, that can leave their "tracks" like any hybrid truck.
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Congratulations. You have invented the train.
What I find really interesting is not the linked article itself, but the one right below it on Scania's new inductively-charged bus.If we can inductively supply power to buses, why can't we supply power to trains in the same way, even if just for urban light rail? Getting rid of the pantographs and that nineteenth-century tangle of overhead wires would make mass transit cheaper and more esthetically acceptable.
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Congratulations. You have invented the train.
What I find really interesting is not the linked article itself, but the one right below it on Scania's new inductively-charged bus.If we can inductively supply power to buses, why can't we supply power to trains in the same way, even if just for urban light rail? Getting rid of the pantographs and that nineteenth-century tangle of overhead wires would make mass transit cheaper and more esthetically acceptable.
The cost per km of track would be prohibitively high. It's cheaper to just use conductive propulsion with a third rail divided into isolated sections that power up when a rail vehicle passes over them.
Google "catenary free tram" for examples.
Re: Congratulations (Score:2)
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In Nancy, France, there are already trams which run on pneumatic tires and which connect to overhead cables. So I don't really see what was supposedly invented here.
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We should go back to the way it was before the Oil Rush. Electric and Steam power, they had it right all this time.
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Actually, no they are not, you are forgetting about a few factors including:
transmission losses
infrastructure loads required to delivery that much power to a significant percentage of the roading system
infrastructure loads required to add enough generation capacity to power the additional power draw
I refer to infrastructure loads here specifically because too often people hide behind infrastructure 'costs', but the cost is not pixie dust, it is much much more than that, it is its own mountain of pollution,
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I also wonder why you think the cost of wind generation is dropping - it is not as if building large structures is magically getting cheaper, and generators have been a well known science running at close to maximum efficiency for a long, long time. Base costs of wind generation stabilized quite a lot time ago.
I find that hard to believe. There's still economy to be extracted at least from the higher average size of the turbine fleet (unit efficiency, economies of scale, plus wind stability), and from improvements in lifetime/lower operating costs. If by "efficiency" you mean thermodynamic efficiency, well, in economy, that's not the efficiency you care about.
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If by "efficiency" you mean thermodynamic efficiency, ...
Wind turbines have no "thermodynamic efficiency" anyway as the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to them. They are not heat engines
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Yes they are. What do you think makes the wind?
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The wind is produced by earth rotation and the sun.
That does not make a wind turbine a thermodynamic engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It is not so hard to read.
Hint: you don't need to read it at all if you grasp the picture in the upper right corner.
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Wind goes from a high pressure area to a low pressure area. If you had no heat you would have no wind. A wind turbine is part of a heat engine called the earth. It is that simple.
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That is an extremely far sketched interpretation of thermodynamics and a heat transfer.
If you would say that in a physics class you would get a bonus point for being "clever".
However regarding the topic at hand: you are wrong.
If I set up a billion of fans creating wind to move the wind turbines: then your analogy (albeit the fundamentals are correct) would fail. The wind turbines are not moved by the laws of thermodynamics. They wind that moves them is. That is a big difference. (And that is only true to a
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"f I set up a billion of fans creating wind to move the wind turbines: then your analogy (albeit the fundamentals are correct) would fail."
Yes and if you got a million trained hamsters to turn a steam turbine it would no longer be a heat engine.
A wind turbine is just the power turbine in a heat engine.
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A wind turbine is just the power turbine in a heat engine.
No it is not. Did you still not read the Wikipedia article? Wow, shame on you.
For starters: Thermodynamics is a set of rules of physics for closed systems. Earth is not a closed System ...
Then: everything thermodynamics is describing is the tripple between volume, pressure and temperature of "ideal gases" with a heat and mass transfer from the hot "reservoir" to the cold one. Best example is a Stirling engine. Second best is a steam engine (as it is
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY [youtube.com]
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Well,
first of all: energy processes are not lossy.
There is the law of energy conversion, perhaps you missed that in school. It was even added in a slight variation to the hand full of laws of thermodynamics later: "the sum of all energies in a closed system is constant." (loosely worded)
Secondly ... what has "lossy" or anything similar to do with thermodynamics? Again: nothing.
Perhaps you should google for the laws of thermodynamics and you realize: they handle a triple of volume, pressure and temperature.
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There is the law of energy conversion, perhaps you missed that in school. It was even added in a slight variation to the hand full of laws of thermodynamics later: "the sum of all energies in a closed system is constant." (loosely worded)
That is perfectly correct in physics but also utterly useless in engineering. Low-grade waste heat is generally disregarded as useful energy even though it's a part of that constant sum.
Perhaps you should google for the laws of thermodynamics and you realize: they handle a triple of volume, pressure and temperature.
I don't need to google anything to see that you've been confused by the ideal gas laws here. That's not what I was talking about.
If you don't believe it: read the laws up and find a formula that affects a wind mill ...
Easy. [researchgate.net] Also, the well-known four laws of thermodynamics do affect wind mills...simply because they affect everything! (Two of them, admittedly, are of little importance here, though.)
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that you've been confused by the ideal gas laws here.
Actually I'm not. As that is what thermodynamics is about.
Easy. Also, the well-known four laws of thermodynamics do affect wind mills :D
Unfortunately the link only contains the word "thermodynamics" and no physics according to its laws
Perhaps I should patent this phrase: "You should a) read the links you quote; and b) grasp/comprehend the article behind it".
There is no thermodynamics in windmills.
Thermodynamics describes energy transfer from the "hot si
Re:Great news for a fossil fuel free Sweden... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, no they are not, you are forgetting about a few factors including: ....... the USA. I suggest to read up on transmission losses, DC versus AC and voltage versus amperes to get a clue how power transportation works.
transmission losses
Transmission losses are neglectible. Every advanced nation has an electric grid for its trains, except
If you want any significant growth in electric transportation, the ONLY viable power source is nuclear - is that a pill you are willing to swallow?
... so your argument is moot.
Wind and solar are cheaper
I also wonder why you think the cost of wind generation is dropping
Because it is?
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No, not every advanced nation has an electric grid for its trains except the US.
Sure, there are many electric trains, even freight trains. But many countries still move friend with diesel-electric locomotives. That includes every country in North and South America, India, China, Australia and many many more.
It is disappointing the US doesn't have more electrified passenger rail.
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We talk about electrified rail grids.
And the EU is of noticeable size, and we are interconnected with Russia, Turky, Asia etc.
You are an idiot.
Your grid is peanuts.
And most of it is Diesel and probably even coal.
Perhaps you have a similar amount of miles, but not the interconnectivity.
Nevada as big as the UK? Hello? In what regard? Length and Width? How is that relevant for a rail grid when Nevada has what? 5million or 10million inhabitants? 75% living in Las Vegas? Where would the damn rails in Nevada go t
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actually we've reached the point where square miles of solar cells in desert are superior solution than fission power. The energy can be stored. That's a real solution with existing tech.
I've worked in nuclear power industry but now we can do better.
there is no longer a need for nuclear fission power
Re:Great news for a fossil fuel free Sweden... (Score:4, Informative)
Unless wind/solar/etc work when it's cloudy or windy like in other parts of the world nearly all the time it'll never replace other sources like hydro-electric or nuclear. And unless the cost is pennies people won't like their electric rates going through the roof like what we've seen in other countries or here in Canada either. Ontario has had a big push for green energy and as of today at peak you're paying just a bit above $0.17kWh for electricity for your home and double that for industrial uses. It's around $0.07kWh at peak just across the border in Michigan and half that for industrial rates. When nuclear costs under $0.05kWh to sell, when hydro-electric is $0.025, when coal and NG are $0.01-0.068kWh those green sources have to come a long way still.
And that's because in Ontario they decided to pay $0.80kWh for various forms of green energy. On the upside, it hasn't gotten as bad as Germany when it hit $0.43kWh for home use. Cheap energy is one of the greatest equalizers of civilization and one of the best providers in increasing the standards of living across the globe. Drive the price up too high and you see what happened in the UK a few years ago with the elderly on pensions dying because they froze to death during the winter.
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"Drive the price up too high and you see what happened in the UK a few years ago with the elderly on pensions dying because they froze to death during the winter."
You are aware that this has very little to do with production costs and very much to do with whatever the government of the day is wanting to push, right?
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So the government increased the price on electricity and it caused elderly people to freeze to death. Yeah some how that never happened especially since electricity prices in the UK are done like they are here in Ontario(and most of Canada), outside agency. The irony in all of this is they went hog wild and pushed for the "use less energy, it's great for the environment!" So everyone did. Now they're saying "we need to raise the rates, because people aren't using enough energy!" Enjoy that double edged
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"So the government increased the price on electricity"
That's not needed, specially if the government doesn't want to appear as the bad guy of the film. It just needs to set the rules on such a regulated and oligopoly-inclined market.
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Unless wind/solar/etc work when it's cloudy or windy like in other parts of the world nearly all the time it'll never replace other sources like hydro-electric or nuclear. And unless the cost is pennies people won't like their electric rates going through the roof like what we've seen in other countries or here in Canada either.
Just a few notes: 1) It's possible to build a hybrid hydro/solar/wind system to effectively extract more energy from the same amount of water, without reducing flexible load properties of hydro. 2) Sweden is nuclear to a significant extent. 3) Even if electricity price increased, I'm quite sure the lesser fuel costs (even expensive electricity is apparently a cheaper source of motive power than oil-derived fuels in most countries!) and perhaps even improved health care costs would act against it when it com
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Well you can look at Ontario, none of what you said actually stacks up to reality. Nuclear generates nearly 75% of our electricity, 21% hydro and 4% NG. Green energy generates between 1-2%. But the cost of including those via FiT programs has caused the price of electricity to increase from 0.05kWh at peak to just over 0.17kWh. So when you look for those net benefits they evaporate, what's the health costs of running nuclear, hydro? NG there is a small cost, but next to zero same as those green energy s
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A Teslar, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] with a range of 500km has a 85kWh battery.
85kWh would cost me 15 Euros. (20cents/kWh).
My Diesel car would use for 500km about 30l Diesel (it uses a bit more than 6l/100km), Diesel costs about 1,20 Euro per litter so that would be 36 Euros. Cars using gasoline would be about 25% more costly.
On the other hand, if you would have a second meter and charge mainly at night with discount rates, charging the car would cost about half of it, so roughly 7 Euros.
Bo
Re: Germany (Score:1)
In Germany, utilities are obliged by law to buy green energy from the producers. The price depends on the energy source and when the power plant went online.
That price is guaranteed for 20 years after the power plant goes online, but the compensation for new power plants is reduced every year and additional restraints are phased in, such as the utilities having the ability to throttle generation in times of high production.
The historical maximum was around 50 cents/kWh for photovoltaics installed up to 2001
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Unless wind/solar/etc work when it's cloudy or windy like in other parts of the world nearly all the time it'll never replace other sources like hydro-electric or nuclear.
Wind power works quite well when it's windy. Sorry, but I couldn't resist.
Your point is valid, but it's also arguably one of transmission. The sun is shining and the wind is blowing somewhere. Maybe not in your town/state/country...
The issue is how do you get that excess power from where the sun is shining to where it's cloudy and, in our capitalistic society, how do those people get paid for doing so?
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Doesn't matter very much, honestly. Even 100% coal powered electric vehicles are cleaner than gasoline or diesel, and electric vehicles will improve as the cost of wind, solar, etc continue to drop.
Maybe so in Sweden where coal plants are forced to install good smoke scrubbers and to double as district heat sources. That is not exactly the arrangement that they have in China or India. They just spew out the smoke with little to no scrubbing. A gasoline car will certainly be a lot cleaner than a 100% coal powered electric car under those circumstances.
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Electric vehicles are more efficient compared to ottomotors or diesels.
Found the Swede! :)
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http://www.worldenergy.org/dat... [worldenergy.org]
The railway system is already electrified.
So the only thing using carbon sources nowadays is the transport sector on roads. (cars and trucks). Which is why we are electrifying them as well
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...but where are they getting their electricity?
Traditionally close to 50% hydro power and 50% nuclear power.
Anything else?
(Now some wind, some solar, some bio-fuel, some garbage and also some oil not much and coal is likely very irrelevant in Sweden.)
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You'll learn lots of interesting facts about Sweden in Norway. :-)
this is the future and for cars too (Score:2)
This would also work for cars and would make electric cars a lot more practical. If you genuinely want to slow atmospheric CO2 buildup electrified highways powered by modern nuclear power plants (fission or fusion when available) is the only practical solution until or unless entirely new science is discovered. Combined with hyperloop vacuum tunnels for some stretches with compatible vehicles and this could be what our ground transportation might look like in 2116. Although I'd like to think that vacuum tun
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this is the future and for cars too (...) This would also work for cars and would make electric cars a lot more practical.
There's nothing even remotely practical about a complicated and expensive system to hook up cars to an overhead grid while driving at 50+ mph. Right now they're busy making the cars like the Tesla model 3 but I'm pretty sure that when they get a breather they'll design two forms of trailer range extenders:
a) Huge battery that can do on the road charging
b) Generator trailer that can do on the road charging
And since this would be a custom car accessory with a wired connection it could integrate with cameras/s
A simpler approach is roll on charging. (Score:1)
Being tested in sw London. Buses have recharging zones under vehicle at stops and traffic lights. No need to plug anything in.
On a side note isn't an electric road basically a tram line?
You're missing the most important thing (Score:2)
Now that sounds like an innovation I can get behind.
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Thanks for reminding us that there is no way to generate electricity other than by burning fossil fuels. This is a simple, True Fact that nobody ever seems to remember.
=Smidge=
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Question (Score:1)
How do you prevetn people form tampering with the road?
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