SkyTran - Progress
By 2026, we completed our 100th city and had joint venture SkyTran SST franchises set up with Ford, Honda, GM, Toyota, Chrysler and others all over the world. It was brought to our attention that some of the cities were starting to tear down their old automobile parking structures and even were hauling in dirt to cover half of their old roads in order to plant trees and gardens. So much for the early visual pollution concerns of our overhead transportation system. SkyTran - Failsafe Operations
Portland, Oregon, our seventh customer, was the first to have a citywide power blackout. Their flood of 2022 was wicked. In early anticipation of the inevitable power outage each SkyTran vehicle already came with a built-in 14-pound backup battery and variable frequency three-phase inverter unit up in the hollow track and attached to the MagLev field generator. This served as nothing more than a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). In the event of any power failure, The UPS system would take over instantly and provide enough energy to travel an additional three miles at 100 mph. Since stations were never more than one mile apart, this was deemed satisfactory and acceptable to safety officials who did not want to ever see passengers stranded above. They should have thought it through further.Indeed, when all the power dropped out, all SkyTran riders in the Portland flood quickly got safely to the ground from up above. However, no power for two more days caused quite an ordeal for all the stranded people who still had 20 or 50 miles to travel to get home. Maybe it was time to think about becoming our own utility. Could we create a failsafe emergency power system that could be used to help in major citywide disasters, instead of just being a system that added to the confusion of the moment, even though it met the letter of the safety code laws? Could we possibly even save money by doing it?
At 100 mph, each SkyTran vehicle consumed 4 kW (3 horsepower) of electrical energy. While this was less than what three hair dryers consumed, it could occasionally add up to 1/2 megawatts per mile if both directions of SkyTran traffic were operating at full capacity (1/2 second spacing) with all vehicles at maximum gross weight. We had earlier looked into using solar cells covering the 1’ wide top of the exposed track. At best, a mile of the latest 28% efficient solar panels could provide a little over 1/10th mW at a cost of $1.2 million per mile. We needed 5 times the power for a lot less money.
Bruce Sargeant, President of Collinear Research came to the rescue. His company was developing a teeny 30 kW (40 horsepower) recuperated turbine generator (10" diameter by 22" long) that used mass produced parts from the new ceramic turbochargers used on the BMW Z-7 Ferrari killer hybrid-electric sports car. Bruce's units ran on natural gas and made 60% less pollution per kW/hr than the power plants that made the electricity for the supposed non-polluting pure electric cars. He changed the plain bearings to foil air bearings that never needed lubrication and was expecting 10 years of maintenance free operation when running on clean natural gas.
The dual fuel starter/generator could run on many other liquid hydrocarbon fuels as a backup, but would no longer be as pollution free or have such an extended useful life. Collinear's efficient, non-leaking recuperator combined with the 2800-degree F. capable ceramic components yielded extreme efficiency and very quiet operation. At 110,000 rpm, a 1" diameter, 3.5" long Neotrymium-iron high temperature 3 pole magnet was all that was needed to create the 30 kW of continuous power. Cost was projected to be $125,000 per unit if Bruce geared up to manufacture 500 per year. Our people got involved and got that down to $2,500 each - if we were willing to invest $237 million of capital in automation to produce the 200,000 units per year we would need.
Next we contacted our old buddy, Dr. Richard Post at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Labs) to see how his small 10-pound flywheel mechanical battery development was coming along. Yes, they finally solved the passive magnetic bearing problems and yes, efficiency was about 98% as predicted. This was important because we did not want to use chemical batteries for our rechargeable storage because you put in "X" energy and were lucky to get back 68% of "X" in useful output power. We wanted that 98%!
"Dick," I said, "is LLNL ready to license your technology? You know we’ll give ‘em a sweet deal to keep them motivated, so they’ll want to help us with future improvements. You can also be sure your mechanical batteries will be made to the highest quality standards and will be put into good use worldwide." Those LLNL flywheel stabilizers allowed us to use smaller generators and still meet the demand for occasional higher peak power. They were also the power source used to spin up the turbines to 70,000 rpm prior to ignition.
Our next task was to create conversion inverters that could take the weird high frequency power from Collinear's generator. That energy had to be used both to charge the flywheels and for SkyTran MagLev requirements. It was also planned that SkyTran power would occasionally be available by local cities for emergency purposes.
What we ended up with was a small, integrated 30 kW generator and energy storage unit. These were attached at the very top of a track support pole every 500 feet along the track. For $125,000 capital per 10 units we could now generate 0.3 megawatt per mile continuous (and 0.6 megawatt total for up to two hours with the electromechanical boost of the LLNL flywheel stabilizers). Small natural gas lines buried inside each pole fueled the generators. The top of the power posts were made into cylindrical liquid fuel tanks for redundant emergencies in the event the natural gas supply was ever interrupted.
Just like SkyTran itself, instead of one giant $30 million generator, we used a high volume of low-cost mass-produced units. And again just like the Internet, all the self-contained, independent generator sets were all interlinked together. If one or several units failed, needed power was obtained from adjacent independent units. The disastrous, 8 foot deep St. Louis, Missouri flood of 2028 never even slowed SkyTran service down!
C’mon grandpa, mom showed us a news clip of that on the holopedia. Not only did SkyTran survive, but it was instrumental in facilitating the rescue efforts. Why so modest all the time?
Well, Kimmy, you’re a born marketeer, and you’re right, we probably should have played that up a bit more, and maybe we still can, but back then there were just too many folks sufferin’ to feel too good about anything. Sometimes you just do what has to be done, regardless of the cost, or lost profit, and then you just want to forget and move on. Sure, we donated those pods and track time, and didn’t make a big deal about it, but hey, it paid off indirectly. That’s when we met the Park Service people.
