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Comment by adamius | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or did anyone else see an opportunity for automating this? He seemed to be working up and down. A fully mechanical / hydraulic actuator could do this.

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He just has to go to a landfill and connect that balloon to a methane release port.

I would imagine a good use of a windmill could be use to pump and accumulate.

For moving a single human being 20km, you could easily use a solar panel and an electric bike.

I was trying to stay within the non-electric aspect of this. Solar isn’t exactly something you can make yourself. Methane however is vaguely doable given a bit of effort and skilling up.

Edit: when I write "make" I don't mean "install".

You can very easily do a solar installation yourself. But even more interestingly, even biomass-derived methane is more efficiently burned in a CCGT plant (>60% efficiency) to generate electricity for charging an e-bike than in an ICE engine on a moped (~20-25%?). And even better, a smart charger can charge an electric vehicle from an electric mix (NG/wind/solar/nuclear) optimally, so you can run from whatever is best at that moment.

From a global warming perspective, harvesting free methane and burning it is probably a net benefit given how much stronger methane is of a warming agent than the CO2 it burns into.

And we're already harvesting biomass to turn it into biogas. You can do it on a larger scale and it's still more efficient than running a moped motor.

> Solar isn’t exactly something you can make

I think “make” is the important part here, not buy and install.

Would you insist that you should be able to "make" the moped? Nobody will be as self-sufficient as the early Neolithic people ever again. For me, "making" things by building them from mass-manufactured components such as solar panels is perfectly fine. People don't shy from installing solar panels just because they can't manufacture them themselves from sand anymore then they shy from buying electric motors or CPUs.

The perspective I get from the article is of decentralized self sufficiency. Being able to harvest methane in their locality, and use that as fuel is quite appealing versus purchasing and installing solar panels or relying on power lines.

I’m not saying your math doesn’t check out; rather, the author is going for a different set pro/cons than just pure “efficiency”.

I bet you'd still be able to do this in a local municipal biogas plant more efficiently. It would also scale better should you wish to run more than several mopeds like this.

Again, that’s centralized. Less central than your previous example, but still requires a dependency on their municipal plant and power lines. Not sure why this is a confusing concept.

The concept is not at all confusing, it's just useless. For load balancing, efficiency, and reliability reasons, a microgrid is more desirable than isolated households in pretty much all circumstances.

He has footage of a Wind powered Gasmaaier on his site.

Although it's possibly CGI -

https://uitsloot.nl/infrastructuur/

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