I noted Rick's passing in a post below (19-Dec-2020). Sue just showed me a reprint she had come across in re-arranging and re-filing our personal papers and letters. It was a sort of "letter to the editor" I think, written by my friend Rick. Here is the text:
"If I had the wherewithal, I'd buy a Prius, strip the battery and all the other crap out of it, and convert it to CNG (compressed natural gas). I'd take the stuff I ripped out, hook it to a solar panel and run 12-volt house lights, and maybe have a little to supplement domestic hot-water heat. But hey, that's my Green. You might call it Hunter Thompson Green. To me, calling a Prius green is like calling a heated indoor pool a thermal heat sink. I call this Fashion Green.
What shade of green is cap-and-trade, or methanol? That's greed not green. Jetting into Copenhagen in Air Force One with Air Pelosi for escort; is that Obama Green?
How about cutting off the water to a whole valley of family farmers to save minnows? Is that Boxer Green or Sierra Mist?
In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", Robert M. Pirsig wrote, "The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work out from there."
I'll vote for a president who stays home and takes care of America. The air is cleaner because I voted to charge Congress for using the public's airplanes, so Pelosi quit flying. Now that's the Green I was looking for. I call it... Practical Green."
Typing "Use Prius battery for solar" into Google/Dogpile will get you plenty of hits and nice YouTube How-to videos these days. My friend Rick Brown was right, but a bit conservative in his speculative engineering-- with enough solar (cheap nowadays) you can use an inverter and stay with 120v regular house lights and appliances... and no need to "strip out all the other crap" from the Prius-- Folks can just park their "used-up" Prius; hook it to the grid through its charger (with some custom circuitry) so as to have battery backup for the solar main source, and "grid backup" to the (Prius) battery. People could then power their homes completely for years-- a "mainly solar" system with a Prius-based battery backup, backed up in turn by the grid, could be good for normal house power (avg 1–2 kw load, approx.) for a "long time" because the Prius was basically a 3-kw power plant when it ran as a car.