No Power! Again

Electrical power seems to be a bit of a pain in the butt. Using it. Generating it. Storing it. I know that everyone has their favorite ways of doing things, and they all claim, near to, or completely 100% up time. To that I say; good for you. I happen to live in what we call "Hell's Armpit". Nothing works here all the time and it seems like things often work in reverse.

I live in a geographic bowl, that was once a super volcano. It has some nasty "habits", that work against almost every form of electrical power production available. I would like to just toss out a solar panel and be done with it. That doesn't work. In the winter when everyone around me are using their heating stoves and driving their vehicles, the pollution gets so thick that the panels stop working. In the summer the same problem exists from increased tourist traffic and smoke from forest fires. I have had to go weeks without any meaningful output. Other times our output is OK, meaning that it will take a day to charge a battery that can charge in a couple hours when the air is clean. So it seems pointless to have huge panels covering everything.

There are alternatives, that could work. Peltier (TOC) units, or whatever you want to call them, could work in the summer, but what about winter? This last winter we were dealing with 56 degrees Fahrenheit, BELOW zero. That isn't very good for electricity generation. I could use a sterling engine, but that again, needs heat in the form of a flame, or in theory, the sun. I don't know about having an open flame on a robot. It just seems like a problem waiting to happen. I could use acid and make a Daniel cell. That might actually work except that to recharge them you have to replace the acid, which I can't get where I live and it would be hazardous to ship. Especially in the quantities needed to run a robot the size of ROB. Wind and hydro are also possibilities, except that ROB doesn't move about that much and waiting for the wind could be problematic.

That leaves hdyro. Pico-hydro actually. If I could figure out how, I've had this idea of a portable hydro generator. I finally found the equations that I need to at least get started, but I'm not sure if it would work. Theoretically, if I could keep it from freezing, I could build a 6' version and it would generate 960 watts at 12 volts. Which is way more than I need. I think I could scale it down and get about 60 watts. That would give me about the same number of amps that ROB produces via solar. Even if it wasn't portable, maybe ROB could just link up to recharge, that would kind of defeat his original purpose though.

I don't know what I will wind up doing, but it's a problem that not too many people bring up.