Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Would the distance traveled exceed that on a flat road with no generation?

No. Climbing the hill the car uses extra energy (compared to a flat road) because its fighting gravity. On the way back down the hill regen will recover some of that gravity-fighting energy but nowhere near all of it.

View on HN

This scenario is a little different than a car but a Swiss company is experimenting with a Komatsu Dump Truck that basically recharges its battery using regen braking on it's trip down so it has enough power for the trip up. It actually generates a surplus of an extra 10kwh because the truck is carrying a full load down.

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-e-dumper-world-largest-electri...

And going up it is empty. Its basically exploiting the fact that rocks at the top of a hill have higher potential energy than at the bottom. If you charged the trucks with wind/solar at peak times and used them to carry the rocks back uphill you could have yourself a very convoluted and mechanically fraught battery!

A good visual demonstration of entropy. Heat death occurs when all of the mountains have been leveled and there are no altitude differences to exploit.

That's excellent! I'm stealing that.

Like Pumped Storage Hydroelectricity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

That's actually pretty cool. It's kinda like a dam... harnessing potential energy stored by geologic processes and turning that into power? I'm sure there's some fancy physics word for it that I don't know.

What if you did this with passengers instead of a truck load of rocks? Carry passengers down a mountain, go up the mountain with an empty tesla.

I don't think the passengers would appreciate getting back up via plate tectonics.

I mean, you provide a service to bring skiers down the mountain. You can let regular taxis bring them up

Reply on news.ycombinator.com