Once someone develops an EV that can be fully charged in 5 minutes, and someone develops a service station charger that can charge up that vehicle, then you have something serious to offer.

ExDemo: Please do not engage in use of defamatory words like "libtard". You come across as every bit as much a buffoon as left wingers who sling around defamatory rhetoric like "racist" and "teabagger".

"Hydro power plants, with their huge water reservoir (energy storage units) and easily varied power output, are ideal companions to fill in for Solar/Wind low power production periods. To take full advantage of Solar/Wind energy production, those two intermittent power sources have to be used for base loads and hydro for peak and fill in periods." That doesn't always work, though. Look at the situation in the Pacific Northwest. With > 20 GW of hydropower in the region, it is probably as good as anyplace in the world for hydro to serve as a fill-in for the intermittency of wind. But this spring the Bonneville Power Administration had to tell wind producers in the area to shut down their turbines because the huge spring runoffs necessitated the dams being run at full capacity.

I'm not familiar with automotive HVAC technology, but just off the top of my head I would think using a heat pump for heating would have limited use since heat pumps only work well for moderate delta T's. I imagine whatever the constraints are on heat pumps for home heating would be valid also for automotive. Unfortunately, ground source heat pumps, which are a great way to get efficient heating in cold climates, are only viable for heating a stationary object.

This strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. I would think it would be a whole lot simpler to just stick an "electrical nozzle" into an "electrical tank" than to have to drive onto a specific location to charge your car. Advice to Volvo: Your engineers would be better utilized working on improved performance of electric vehicles, than coming up with novelty items.

Prototype 3.6 kW. I hope this is scalable to a lot higher. We should hope that cars with 50 kWh battery packs chargeable in 10 minutes will exist eventually. (i.e. a car with enough battery energy to run 200-300 miles and recharge at a service station) That would require a charging rate of 300 kW. If inductive has any problem with that, you can always just go with old fashioned wires and contacts.

I'm also skeptical about V2G. The big problem with EVs so far is insufficient battery capacity to allow an EV to provide similar functionality to a gas car. That anyone would want to dump their EV's charge into the grid seems really farfetched for the forseeable future. Furthermore, it would stand to reason that EV batteries will always be much more expensive than fixed energy storage devices. Stationary batteries don't have the constraint of having to be low weight like EV batteries do. And, lower-cost mass storage approaches other than batteries are likely going to be the mainstay of a renewables-based energy economy, e.g. molten salt storage systems accompanying "power tower" solar thermal plants.

I wonder about the environmental tradeoffs to using high tech composites for the car body. I can believe it makes sense to use composites for aircraft- weight has a lot bigger penalty when you are trying to keep something in the air rather than on the ground. Furthermore, I would expect that airliners get many hundreds of thousands of miles of life before they are scrapped. That means the environmental impact of producing the composites is amortized over a lot of miles of use, much more so than with automobiles.

Great, an impressive advance in the technology of buggy whips.

Now that the leftist regimes in Sacramento and the cities and counties of California have finally demolished the economy to the point where it has no hope of recovery: They couldn't even lie their way into passing the "stab the taxpayers yet one more time" ballot measures. Now, after the regimes have inflicted all the pain they could extract from the taxpayers without a popular uprising, they realize they have run out of games to play, and in some cases are beginning to begrudgingly take the actions they should have taken decades ago. Sorry, Californians, it's all a day late and a dollar short. Put a fork in it, your state is headed toward economic parity with Bangladesh. And those of us who fled California, realizing that the leftist wackos that run the state and local governments would not rest until they had demolished any remaining vestige of a civilized and prosperous society, well don't expect us to bail you guys out from the consequences of electing extremist wackos to office for all these years.

It seems to me this research is on the wrong track. I believe there is a substantial consensus that barring some breakthrough allowing solar energy to be converted to hydrocarbons at a far greater efficiency than you can get from photosynthesis, biofuels will only be able to provide a fraction of the energy we have previously obtained from fossil fuels. Thus, biofuels will need to be devoted to uses where hydrocarbons are irreplaceable- chemicals for example. And, things like aircraft fuel, barring someone coming up with a revolutionary new way to run an aircraft. As an energy source, the primary virtues of biofuels are its storeability and its energy density. You wipe out those benefits when you convert it to electricity. Yes, we should run cars on electricity rather than hydrocarbons, but the electricity should not be produced from biofuels, it should come from wind or solar or nuclear or whatever. Hydrocarbons will be a far more rare and expensive resource in the future than electricity. Consequently it will make no sense to convert hydrocarbons to electricity.