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I've long thought this is an obvious application for electric vehicles, what with predictable routes and whatnot. Another one would be the small local delivery mail trucks, especially as those things are constantly stopping and starting - a very inefficient way to use an ICE, and one which puts a lot of wear on the engine.

You would seem to be right about that.

EVs are very efficient compared to ICEs, the battery packs are warrantied for 8-10 yrs and falling in price,

WRONG the batteries are falling far short of their expected life span.

Level 2 / Level 3 chargers are being installed every day

Which will kill the life of the battery and still take hours to fully charge.

and Tesla battery packs are swappable by design.

They are not swappable if I have to return to the same place to swap the battery back.

I will take a real car while stupid people like you waste get scammed out of their money by buying a glorified golf cart.

I'd rather rely on experiment than speculation about how some of hydrogen's properties make it more dangerous.

Wind power energy cost is at grid parity right now, and is virtually CO2 neutral.

I mean, yeah sure, wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars, or you can fill in with a bit of fossil or biofuel when the wind doesn't blow.

Pumped hydro is about 70%-80% efficient. So wind would have to be about 0.7-0.8x grid parity for stored wind energy to be economically viable. Charging losses for an EV are about 25%. So if you also factor in losses converting the EV's DC back into AC for transmission on the grid, it's going to be worse than 70% overall.

Also, yeah wind doesn't melt down. But it killed more people in 2011 than nuclear, despite providing only about 1/10th the power. The difference is that those deaths caused by wind weren't splashed all over the TV for weeks on end. It's not that wind is inherently safer. Don't get me wrong, after hydro, wind is the most viable of the renewables and I fully support its build-out. But a lot of people are basing their support on incomplete or inaccurate information, colored by what stories make jucier headlines on the evening news.

For decades Iceland has been contemplating ways to export their cheap geothermal electricity, and aluminum batteries are one such idea. I'll leave it to someone not on a mobile phone to do a detailed search, but here is one link: http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=765&first=3858&end=3857 The gist of Slashdot's linked to adver.... uh, article, is they think they have improved the process. Of course it appears they do it in their own custom built demonstration vehicle. There are ways to make custom built gas cars get almost that range on a tank of gas, but they aren't anything most of us would want to drive, and wouldn't pass US safety standards. So although this is probably good news, it also probably isn't as exciting or new as the marketing hype.

Were you perhaps thinking of the article that claimed a Prius was worse for the environment than an H3 Hummer? That one was pretty thoroughly debunked.

Quote from the article to which Jeremiah linked, Tesla's 'Brick' Problem:

"The amount of time it takes an unplugged Tesla to die varies. Tesla's Roadster Owners Manual [Full Zipped PDF] states that the battery should take approximately 11 weeks of inactivity to completely discharge [Page 5-2, Column 3: PDF].

"However, that is from a full 100% charge. If the car has been driven first, say to be parked at an airport for a long trip, that time can be substantially reduced. If the car is driven to nearly its maximum range and then left unplugged, it could potentially "brick" in about one week. Many other scenarios are possible: for example, the car becomes unplugged by accident, or is unwittingly plugged into an extension cord that is defective or too long.

"When a Tesla battery does reach total discharge, it cannot be recovered and must be entirely replaced. Unlike a normal car battery, the best-case replacement cost of the Tesla battery is currently at least $32,000, not including labor and taxes that can add thousands more to the cost."

Hey. This guy can't make an $80,000 electric car that doesn't brick itself on deep discharge.

I don't want to trust his lithium-ion, bargain basement Mars mission! "Range-anxiety" on the road? That's one thing. "Range-anxiety" in interplanetary space? Quite another kettle of fish...

The travelling wave reactor concept appears to be basically a sodium cooled reactor that has a lot of extra U-238 , allowing it to go very long without refuelling as the enriched portion of the core "travels" along the U-238 ( this image explains the concept: http://evworld.com/press/IV_twr_concept.jpg ).

I have to say I am sceptical. The main economic issue with sodium cooled fast breeders is that they are very capital intensive due to the challenges of handling flammable sodium. Thus trading even more capital investment ( in the form of a larger core ) for less frequent refuelling seems like a bad idea. Furthermore, any design that is to see widespread deployment should make use of economics of scale. Fuel fabrication, reprocessing and so on can be centralised, with a few facilities potentially serving many reactors, or even multiple nations. It thus makes little sense to move capital costs towards the power plant and reactor, away from facilities that can be centralised. This is why I doubt all the talk about "Integral" facilities or on-line reprocessing ( as suggested for molten salt reactors ).

It's not very hard to build a breeder with a 2-3 year core lifetime anyway, and you probably don't want to run it much longer than that without shutting it down for servicing, repairs, inspection and so on.

Don't get me wrong. It's a cool idea technologically. I just don't think it will be economically competitive with other Gen-IV designs. The focus for breeders today should be on reducing capital up-front investment, improved safety and reliability. No utility is going to invest billions up-front in an experimental design that is unlikely to be economically competitive with other alternatives.

You should RTFA. The name may translate from the german into "street scooter", but the vehicle is a car. Oh, and here is a link to a site with a picture, which has not yet been /.ed http://www.evworld.com/news.cfm?rssid=26745

Once, under very specific circumstances, in 1996 (not '97):

http://www.foveal.com/ATdS_Report_1996.txt

They only made something like four of them, and never came close to managing even half that range in real world usage:

http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1737

And it not only looked hideous, it had hopelessly poor acceleration too (0-60 in 17 seconds), which together would've likely stopped most people even considering buying one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solectria_Sunrise

...which is all to say, you can't compare a completely uncommercializable prototype with a real-world production vehicle.

FCEVs are a form of electric vehicle so they get EV efficiency ~85%, while natural gas cars are still internal combustion so they get ~30%. efficiency ftw!

Do you have a source for this? I thought real world fuel cell efficiency was much less than 85% - like closer to 40% or even less

*unlike BEVs, FCEVs avoid the range anxiety issue, and can be filled up like a regular car instead of needing 8 hour charge. convenience ftw!

15 - 30 minute fast charge stations for BEV's already exist and i would expect that even faster options will exist faster than a large hydrogen creation and distribution network could be built.

Its nice, yea, but really, the only way to save our butt from peak oil/global warming is to decrease energy consumption dramaticaly.
Like live next to work, use bicycles, etc...

There are many who have no vision. I suggest that you read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The western world has a tendency to have entire industries disappear when new technology comes along.

There are a number of significant innovations under development that will make the oil industry (as we know it) obsolete.

I personally am expecting a Tesla-powered car:

Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was merely a question of time when men would succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: "Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe."#56)

This is light-years beyond what's offered by the pretenders to Tesla's legacy.

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1896

According to GM spokespersons Robert Peterson in Michigan and Shad Balch in California, GM decided in 2007 when it committed to series production of the Volt, to not seek California Air Resources Board AT-PZEV certification. Instead, the decision was made to certify the car in all 50 United States. ARB certification would have required, both GM executives explained, additional testing and since California's air quality regulators had yet to figure out how to classify the Volt, GM felt it was more important to continue the accelerated development program and get the car out by the Fall of 2010 then wait for ARB to come up with a way to categorize what will be for many drivers essentially an all-electric car, while for other who driver further distances each day, a hybrid.

Only One Thing I Dislike About Tesla Motors... Their cars run on DC motors (or at least get power from a DC source). Yet the company is named after a man who is acknowledged as the father of the alternating current (at least in the US).

/methinks Tesla himself would be disappointed that "Tesla" Motor's cars require batteries, when his Black Magic Touring Car ran on free energy delivered through a "dozen vacuum tubes -- 70-L-7 type -- and other electrical parts".

Around the turn of the century Tesla concluded that it would be possible to transmit electrical power without wires. To optimise results, he chose to experiment at high altitude, where the air was thinner and therefore more conductive. As a result he ended up building a research laboratory in Colorado Springs where he conducted some of his most extraordinary experiments; tests that even to this day are shrouded in mystery. Tesla theorised that unlimited amounts of power could be transmitted anywhere on earth, without wires and with virtually no loss of energy. It is not clear exactly how he intended to do this, but right up until the end of his life he maintained that it was quite possible and that he only needed sufficient funds to make it a reality.

The funds however were not forthcoming, and Tesla was eventually forced to abandon his Colorado experiments in what was to become a recurrent feature in his life; no money or insufficient finance to pursue an idea . . . but a constant stream of new ideas.

-Nikola Tesla: Maverick, Visionary and Master of Light

Most chinese factories work like this: You're hired at what seems like a good wage for eight hours. Only then you find out you are given quotas that you can't complete unless you work 80 or 90 hours a week, with unpaid overtime. In some slave labor camps, you are paid room and board and then given your wages at the end of a year contract, and they only need to find three infractions under the law to kick you out of your dormitory and not pay you a dime.

And if you're wondering why your wages are less than what your parents made, adjusted for purchasing power, then you are ignoring the answer. I do not want to compete with someone willing to work for $100 a month in such deplorable conditions, whose environment looks like this.

I'd rather have less stuff.

The scam of externalizing real costs to the next generation is worse than giving them a national deficit, because it could take hundreds of years to undo the damage, and much more money than we thought we saved.

Where do you get the idea that US car companies don't invest in long term research and development? I worked at Ford in the 1990's, developing advanced technologies for manufacturing. My projects included new ways to measure the quality and appearance of paint so we could ensure the cars we produced looked pretty in the showroom, stayed pretty on the road, and endured all sorts of hostile environments. That involved technologies like ultrasound, lasers, and robotics; things that weren't part of the cars themselves but were important for improving cars from the rust buckets of the 1970's to the durable bodies of today.

I was working in short term R&D with a focus on technologies that would take 2 to 5 years to implement. But we also had long term R&D, Ford's Scientific Research Laboratories. They developed things like better catalytic converters and hydrogen-fueled vehicles. And they supported lots of university research on technologies that could take decades to reach the road. So I'd be interested to see what evidence you have that the foreign companies did research and the domestic companies did not.

There are many cyclists who are capable of traveling at or above the urban speed limits, and around here do.
Should they be banned from the bike lanes? what exactly is the bike lane speed limit?

No, they should be ticketed for exceeding the speed limit. Bicycles are vehicles.

Have you looked in the rear vision mirror of a parked car when bikes are coming past? they are VERY hard to spot, especially when going fast

No, they aren't. If your eyesight is that bad, you shouldn't be driving. There is one exception: rider without a light, at dusk or later. But that's illegal anyway, and will probably constitute fault.

And there is NO moped in the world that makes more pollution than an SUV

You are completely incorrect. The average motorcycle makes ten times more pollution per mile than the average car. The average SUV makes about twice as much pollution per mile as the average car. Most mopeds are two-strokes and are inherently polluting. In fact, motorcycles are more polluting than the worst SUV. Now we've got motorcycle emissions standards, but just as California smog-exemption has resulted in enthusiasts restoring old vehicles without emissions restrictions, the motorcycle emissions laws have resulted in a renaissance of motorcycle restoration specifically to avoid taking responsibility for emissions. While rare motorcycles offer very high mileage per gallon of fuel burned, these are represented by the most expensive and/or most gutless examples in their respective classes, and they are not appealing to the average rider. Motorcycles are designed and tuned for maximum output in most cases, not for maximum efficiency.

High temperature fuel cells like sulfur would be my suggestion also. Utilities use them, and there are practical examples of scaling down well below building-scale, like the ZEBRA mobile battery. (The ZEBRA is not sodium-sulfur, but is molten salt and shares the hot-insulated-box Nature.)

I don't see an insulated 300C box as much of a problem. Sure, they don't scale down to a single apartment, but at a building scale, no big deal. Counting in my head, I think I have seven appliances that regularly exceed that temperature, all perfectly typical.

The real issue seems to be the prices of the scaled-down stacks. ZEBRA batteries are expensive. So are sodium-sulfur batteries, even at utility scale.

As others have pointed out, lead-acid and iron-nickel batteries are also practical for sessile applications and already readily available at the home scale.

High temperature fuel cells like sulfur would be my suggestion also. Utilities use them, and there are practical examples of scaling down well below building-scale, like the ZEBRA mobile battery. (The ZEBRA is not sodium-sulfur, but is molten salt and shares the hot-insulated-box Nature.)

I don't see an insulated 300C box as much of a problem. Sure, they don't scale down to a single apartment, but at a building scale, no big deal. Counting in my head, I think I have seven appliances that regularly exceed that temperature, all perfectly typical.

The real issue seems to be the prices of the scaled-down stacks. ZEBRA batteries are expensive. So are sodium-sulfur batteries, even at utility scale.

As others have pointed out, lead-acid and iron-nickel batteries are also practical for sessile applications and already readily available at the home scale.

The active material in Li-ion batteries isn't metallic lithium, but lithium carbonate - A 2007 article from eworld.com claims that 1.4kg of lithium carbonate is required per kWh of capacity. For 100kWh, this gives us ~140kg per home. This article takes some information from a 2000 report from Argonne National Labs, so these numbers may be conservative.

A 2006 report on Lithium claims the naturally available lithium carbontate reserve base to be 58MT. Metallic lithium can be converted to Li2CO3, just multiply the weight by (3*2+6+8*3)/(3*2) = 6, which adds another 66MT of lithium carbonate.

So the simple estimate goes up somewhere in the ballpark of 880 million homes at 100kWh each.

http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1180&first=6240&end=6239
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/149.pdf
http://www.evworld.com/library/lithium_shortage.pdf

The active material in Li-ion batteries isn't metallic lithium, but lithium carbonate - A 2007 article from eworld.com claims that 1.4kg of lithium carbonate is required per kWh of capacity. For 100kWh, this gives us ~140kg per home. This article takes some information from a 2000 report from Argonne National Labs, so these numbers may be conservative.

A 2006 report on Lithium claims the naturally available lithium carbontate reserve base to be 58MT. Metallic lithium can be converted to Li2CO3, just multiply the weight by (3*2+6+8*3)/(3*2) = 6, which adds another 66MT of lithium carbonate.

So the simple estimate goes up somewhere in the ballpark of 880 million homes at 100kWh each.

http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1180&first=6240&end=6239
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/149.pdf
http://www.evworld.com/library/lithium_shortage.pdf

Too late. This is already part of Shai Agassi's plan according to an interview with him that I read somewhere (it's not mentioned in the linked article; I seem to remember the trademark may be "drive sounds".)

What the hell, just for comedy's sake I'll give it another shot too.

First, I'd like to remind you of your original claim:

"A Prius can neither go 55 on electric only, not go cross-country on electric. On any significant trip, the electrics are doing nothing for you but weighing you down." - on Sunday September 13, @10:23AM

Ok, now stay focused and try to read this.

To dispel any counterarguments up-front, I'd like to say that yes, I know they're plugging it in. Yes, I know that where the additional power is coming from. Yes, I know all that. Yes, efficiency. Yes, it's not a fair test. Yes, yes, yes.

But. What I want to ask you is this.

If as you claim, the Prius can not do 55 on the electric system alone, and the battery/electric portion of the drive train is useless at freeway speeds...then why does the MPG jump to 150 with better batteries? By your claim they are disconnected at freeway speeds. How can these fine folks be getting 150MPG "under normal driving conditions" if these components are non-functional on the freeway as you claim?

Again, stay focused. Don't complain that they are using different batteries. Your claim was that the system is disconnected at freeway speeds. If it's disconnected it shouldn't matter if it has the original batteries, or lithium ion plug ins, or a Mr. Fusion.

I await your answer with baited breath.

Assuming a 15 Gallon tank, it holds approximately 541.665 kWH of energy (thermal). Assuming the gas-electric generator is 30% efficient (I don't really know that it is, but I'm guessing it's more efficient than a typical car engine, which Wikipedia lists as 25%), would give us about 162.4995 kWh (electric).

For those curious how I arrived at that number. . .

First, I googled "Joules in a gallon of gas", which took me to this pdf, which gave the Joules of energy in a gallon of gas. Take that number and divide it by 3 600 000 to convert from Joules to kWh. That number yields the thermal energy of the Gasoline, then multiply by the thermal efficiency (which I'm just guessing at, but seems a reasonable/plausible guess) of the generator, and that tells you how many 'gallons of electricity' the car can hold. :-p

Executive Summary
Lithium Ion batteries are rapidly becoming the technology of choice for the next generation of Electric Vehicles - Hybrid, Plug In Hybrid and Battery EVs. The automotive industry is committed increasingly to Electrified Vehicles to provide Sustainable Mobility in the next decade. LiIon is the preferred battery technology to power these vehicles.
To achieve required cuts in oil consumption, a significant percentage of the world automobile fleet of 1 billion vehicles must be electrified in the coming decade. Ultimately all production, currently 60 Million vehicles per year, will be replaced with highly electrified vehicles â" PHEVs and BEVs.
Analysis of Lithium's geological resource base shows that there is insufficient Lithium available in the Earth's crust to sustain Electric Vehicle manufacture in the volumes required, based solely on LiIon batteries.
Depletion rates would exceed current oil depletion rates and switch dependency from one diminishing resource to another. Concentration of supply would create new geopolitical tensions, not reduce them.
http://www.evworld.com/library/lithium_shortage.pdf

Advancements in motors has been pushed hard, and is still coming, same with batterys, that was my point.

Your point was that they're rapidly improving? I thought you were trying to argue just the opposite.

Expecting some huge cost reduction because the tech suddenly becomes used in "volume" because of cars is crazy,

No, it's not. You know how much ICEs would cost if produced in the volume that today's EV motors are produced in? EV drivetrains today are produced in very small volume. You need to quit pretending that, say, mass production of air conditioner blower motors or industrial hoist motors or whatnot has anything to do with electric vehicle drivetrains. They are completely different things. Most EV drivetrain components available on the market today are literally built by hand. If you don't believe me, contact, say, Manzanita Micro or AC Propulsion and ask them how they build their equipment.

Just because they work on the same principles (and often, not even that, depending on how much detail you want to go into) doesn't mean they're mass produced. Example: scientists mainly prefer to do microwave research with 2.45GHz magnetrons. The difference in price between a 2.45 GHz magnetron and one of a different frequency at the same power output is typically one or two orders of magnitude. Why? Because 2.45GHz magnetrons are what microwave ovens use. Exact same principle of operation, but one is mass produced and the others generally aren't.

From a raw component perspective, electric drivetrains should cost *less* than gasoline drivetrains. They're far simpler.

lithium is currently $300 / pound

Hahahahaha!!!! Oh, that's rich.

Um, no. About one to two kilograms of lithium carbonate goes into a kWh of li-ion batteries, and it's price has fluctated in the past year or two generally between $5 and $8 a kilo. Just a couple years ago it was 4.50 a kilogram.

Thank you for your scepticism, as it tests ideas and either validates or refutes them. Please see the following links: http://www.impactlab.com/2007/03/14/prius-outdoes-hummer-in-environmental-damage/ http://www.evworld.com/library/rmi_hummerVprius.pdf http://thesocialage.com/blog/2007/09/10/better-for-the-environment-hummer-or-prius/ and two articles that support your point of view: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9750840-1.html http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/10/01/forbes-says-prius-ben-and-jerry-s-ice-cream-bad-for-the-environme/ My contention is that several factors should go into whether to buy a hybrid or not.

its also very unsafe to be driving around with a tank full of highly exlposive gas... so in that right, the electric is more viable.

It's just as unsafe to drive around with a tank full of very flammable gasoline, or a battery loaded with lethal voltage. Each requires some safety engineering, each has dangers, each has different fail modes. I found this interesting: http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=482 In it, a gas and hydrogen car have fuel line leaks that ignite- which car is destroyed? Not the hydrogen-fueled car.

How about the math then? I found energy efficiency figures for the Tesla Roadster here. Unfortunately, we're going to have to serve standard-sized vehicles, and the Telsa isn't exactly that. But they do say that the batteries are 86% efficient. That compares favourably to a typical internal combustion engine, which averages about 20%.

Okay, the fuel tank on my car holds 54 litres. It takes around 3 minutes to fill. Sometimes less, but let's use 3 minutes for a from-empty fill. The energy density of gasoline is 34.8 MJ/L. So when I fill my tank I'm pumping 34.8 Mj/L * 54 L = 1.88 GJ.

Now, after ICE losses, that 1.88 GJ turns into 1.88 GJ * 0.2 = 376 MJ, which is the amount of energy it actually takes to move my car the 600 km or so it goes on a tank of gas.

Okay, so what about the electric? It's more efficient. 86% if you're a Tesla Roadster... under ideal conditions. When I pump gas into my car it takes me pretty much the same distance in the winter as it does in the summer. Not so the electric. Actually, the electric would probably die horribly here during the winter, but let's compromise and use some more reasonable cold weather. According to this performance drops by about 40% in cold weather because you have to heat the battery. There's no citation, but it seems reasonable, knowing what happens to car batteries here in the winter. Not to mention I'm probably going to want the cabin heated as well. Plus car companies lie about efficiency, so Tesla's 86% number is probably high anyway.

So our non-ideal conditions EV efficiency is 0.8*0.6 = 0.48. Batteries are heavy and EVs tend to be heavier than their same-size gasoline equivalents. But let's call that a wash.

So to run my EV as far as my gas car I'm going to need 376 MJ / 0.48 = 783 MJ. To match the refueling performance of the gas station I need to transfer that energy in 3 minutes, or 3*60 = 180 s. That's 783 MJ / 180 s = 4.35 MJ / s.

A watt is 1 J/s. So we're going to need an electrical system that can handle 4.35 MW. We can get around some of the problems by cranking up the voltage, but that's got problems of it's own. Get the voltage too high and it will start arcing a fair distance through the air. So let's keep it to 1000 V. 4.35 MW / 1000 V = 4.35 kA. The biggest wiring guidelines figures I could find are here. According to the table, a wire 11.684 mm in diameter is safe for 302 amps. We need a bit more than that.

R = p*L/A, where R is resistance, p is resistivity, L is wire length and A is cross sectional area. When we're considering how big a wire we need, we're concerned about power dissipation. That is, P=R*I^2. We want our power dissipation to stay safe, as given by the guidelines in the table. So P1 = P2, or R1*I1^2 = R2*I2^2. Substituting in the formula for wire diameter, we get (simplified), I1^2 / A1 = I2^2 / A2.

From the table, I1 = 302 A. Area of a circle is pi*r^2, so A1 = pi*(11.684 mm / 2)^2 = 107 mm^2.

I2 = 4.35 * 10^3 A. So A2 = A1*I2^2 / I1^2 = 107 mm^2 * (4.35 kA)^2 / (302 A)^2 = 22199 mm^2.

Translating back into diameter, d = 2*sqrt(A/pi) = 2*sqrt(22199/pi) = 168 mm. That's about 6.6 inches for the metrically challenged.

When your conductor is more than half a foot in diameter it really ceases to be a wire. Oh, and the internals of your car, including the battery, has to be able to handle that 4.35 MW.

Oh, and my local gas station has eight gas pumps. 4.35 * 8 = 34.8 MW. I'll let you calculate how big a wire you need to transfer that. Another fun exercise would be to calculate the diameter of conductor needed to match the energy transfer of a tanker truck that delivers the gasoline each morning.

It's late

One of them might be the Henry Ford of electrical cars.

Ya never know...

A Telsa/energy related article referenced last Monday off regarding Nikola Tesla's 'Black Magic' Touring Car got lots of follow-ups ;-) Telsa Pierce-Arrow

Apparently, the story can be summarized as:

"But, back to our electric automobiles - in 1931, under the financing of Pierce-Arrow and George Westinghouse, a 1931 Pierce-Arrow was selected to be tested at the factory grounds in Buffalo, N.Y. The standard internal combustion engine was removed and an 80-H.P. 1800 r.p.m electric motor installed to the clutch and transmission. The A.C. motor measured 40 inches long and 30 inches in diameter and the power leads were left standing in the air - no external power
source!"

http://uncletaz.com/library/scimath/tesla/teslacar.html
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Tesla's_Pierce-Arrow
http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1062
http://waterpoweredcar.com/teslascar.html
http://www.tfcbooks.com/teslafaq/q&a_016.htm
http://keelynet.com/energy/teslcar.htm
http://keelynet.com/energy/teslafe1.htm

"What utter rubbish"

He was definitely on to something, e.g.:
http://home.earthlink.net/~drestinblack/generator.htm

I am only saying what I said because I am talking about Tesla. If there's one person who could have done it, it is him.

You mean like this?

Or maybe you wanted a 150 MPG, 5 passenger car.

But then, manufacturers don't always want to sell efficient cars.

First off, reserves don't work that way. Here's a writeup concerning how this concept applies to oil, but the same thing applies to lithium. Reserves don't simply "run out"; there's many thousands of cubic miles of the stuff in Earth's crust and oceans (Earth's 1.65e23kg crust is 20-70ppm lithium for a total mass of 3.3 to 11.6 quintillion kilograms). All that changes is how much is mineable at *today's prices* with *today's technology*. I.e., either higher prices or advancing technology put more lithium into play -- and not just a little more, but literally exponentially more. Example: the oceans have And on top of this, unlike oil, lithium is an easily displaceable resource -- most lithium is used in glass, ceramics, and greases, and can be substituted for in all of them.

The scare articles ignore these basic facts. They also ignore other things inconvenient to them -- most notably, tailings. For example, listen to this quote:

"This means there is less lithium per volume of water, so competitors have to process more water, explained Tahil, adding that there is also the issue of the lithium-to-magnesium ratio. The more magnesium, the harder it is to extract the lithium."

Yes, but that means that you get *more magnesium* out of the process, which also has sales value. Likewise, other mining operations that are seeking various minerals can (and do) get lithium tailings. Currently, these are typically discarded due to the low price of lithium. As demand for a mineral rises, recovery circuits get added where appropriate. This is "value added" mining -- no new mining is going on, but you just get more product out of it. Production from almost any brine pond in the world will give you lithium tailings, but almost none bother to extract the lithium salts from them; they're going after other, currently more valuable minerals.

Some people have this silly notion of world mining operations as though the Earth was some big ball of "nothing" in the crust, and scattered around this "nothing" are little random deposits of one mineral (mixed in with "nothing"), and these couple deposits are all there are of that mineral. And, obviously, the real world doesn't work that way. *Everywhere* is minerals, and a given element can be found almost anywhere at least in *some* concentration, however minimal. All that changes from place to place is how cheap it is to extract (which can vary widely). Likewise, when you produce products from anywhere, you're going to get tailings that include all sorts of other minerals -- and you're mining, crushing, and concentrating them to boot, so half of the work is already done! But if the price of the minerals is low, it's not worth recovering further from the tailings. If the price rises, you recover them; it's as simple as that.

One thing to remember about lithium: it's cheap. It's currently very cheap. So? Well, people don't prospect for cheap minerals. Think for a second of how much oil our insatiable demand has continually turned up over the past century. Now imagine actual exploration for valuable lithium deposits. It's only reasonable to expect major growth in known lithium reserves, probably by orders of magnitude, should lithium suddenly gain any appreciable value.

Lastly -- and here's the real kicker -- lithium is only a tiny fraction of the cost of a lithium ion battery It's price could grow tenfold and you'd barely even notice it (and you better believe there'd be a *lot* of new reserves coming online with that much price growth!) 1 kWh of automotive li-ion batteries currently costs ~$300-$2000, depending on the type. This involves less than a kilogram of lithium carbonate, which currently costs about $4.50.

In short: Ignore the scare mongering. There's no world shortage of lithium, and never will be.

Sources?
Plenty of people disagree with you.
http://www.evworld.com/library/lithium_shortage.pdf
http://ergobalance.blogspot.com/2006/10/electric-vehicles-and-world-lithium.html

It might be splitting hairs, but most of our hydrogen comes from steam reformation of methane, not from electrolysis of water.

Your point about electric cars I don't really get. Sure you have a longer tailpipe with an electric car, but if your thermal efficiency and CO2 or whatever pollutant you care about per mile is less, you are still winning. There are other technical challenges for electric cars, and a lot of people might not see that you have to look at the bigger picture, but even when you do EVs look pretty good.

reference on EVs here

and yes I recognize that is an EV advocacy site, but their point is correct. IC engines have a thermal efficiency of about 15% or less. It's not hard to beat that with a stationary plant.

Now, about the present article - I'd like to see some analyses that say that you can actually fly a supersonic plane a good distance on hydrogen, and how the hell you think you can make that economical.

You nitwit. Just about everything you stated is completely wrong. Whether the electricity came from coal, nuclear, solar or wind doesn't matter for this discussion. What we are talking about is two ways to store energy. Batteries on the one hand, which store electrical energy in chemical bonds as you know. Hydrogen on the other, which store electrical energy by first converting the electrical energy into hydrogen (an "anti-bond" if you will) and then storing the hydrogen. Hydrogen can be converted back into electricity using a fuel cell or fed to a thermal engine for combustion. Either way, you are converting electrical energy into another form that stores and releases the energy as needed. The FA talks about one step in the process of storing energy using hydrogen, and that is the step of converting electricity to hydrogen with "80%" efficiency, which is damn good.

A battery is not a gas tank. Gas tanks take negligible energy to fill and empty whereas it takes considerable energy to store and release electricity from a battery. This energy loss is converted to heat which is dissipated. In electrical engineering, it is often referred to as the battery's "internal resistance" and is often represented by a resistor in series with the battery. That is why, for example, honda civic hybrids (and every hybrid, so far as I know) have a special ventilation system for their battery pack.

On how long it takes to refuel a hydrogen tank, it depends on the material being used to store the hydrogen. Some materials, such as molecular sieves, such as zeolite, can store hydrogen at impressive densities without much compression (which takes a lot of energy, btw) but it takes time to fill and empty, and may require heating the material to release the hydrogen. On the other hand, charging an electric car battery can take as little as 10 minutes (although that draws a lot of current).

And don't spam us with your equinox vaporware.

This refers to the UD effort that predates FCS by many years:

http://www.angelfire.com/art/enchanter/hybrid.html

Ralph Zumbro, Author of "Tank Sergeant", writes about the Hybrid drive M113 that United Defence have built:-

                "Phil, The one I was in, and it may be the only one, is state of the art. They steer it with a Bradley gunner's control and it will run for an hour at 30mph on two batteries which are in boxes sized approximately 18"x36"x48". Then a standard issue genset cuts in. The motors are rated at 250 hp each and are oil cooled. It is weird to see a 3 inch diameter drive shaft coming out of a motor the size of a 5 gallon can.
                The rubber tracks are soundless, and they've got 2500 miles on them with very little wear showing. That adds up to a VERY quiet vehicle for recon work. Put electric motors, rubber tracks and a two man turret with a 30mm gatling weapon on a standard 113 hull and you've got a recon Tankita.
                I mentioned to the people at United Defense that not needing air for the engine made the vehicle capable of running around UNDER water and was told that that had been thought of. That means that you could add enough armor to stop larger weapons, as long as you don't compromise the mobility."

More links:
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002338.html

Hybrid M113
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbWbkOkTydk

Hybrid HMMWV
http://www.evworld.com/archives/conferences/evs14/ humvee.html

As this goes to illustrate, If the Hindenberg was somehow filled with gasoline and had exploded, it would have leveled the entire zepplin field.

H2 tanks just dont go off in a massive Hollywood style kaboom, they ussually vent all at once, and you get a split second tower of flame.

See

http://www.evworld.com/databases/storybuilder.cfm? storyid=482

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimates that EVs operating in the Los Angeles Basin would produce 98 percent fewer hydrocarbons, 89 percent fewer oxides of nitrogen, and 99 percent less carbon monoxide than ICE vehicles.

In a study conducted by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, EVs were significantly cleaner over the course of 100,000 miles than ICE cars. The electricity generation process produces less than 100 pounds of pollutants for EVs compared to 3000 pounds for ICE vehicles. (See Table 3)

[...]

CO2 emissions are also significantly lower. Over the course of 100,000 miles, CO2 emissions from EVs are projected to be 10 tons versus 35 tons for ICE vehicles (5).

Many EV critics remain skeptical of such findings because California's mix of power plants is relatively clean compared to that in the rest of the country. However, in Arizona where 67 percent of power plants are coal-fired, a study concluded that EVs would reduce greenhouse gases such as CO2 by 71 percent (6).

[source]

From a pure energy efficiency standpoint (BTUs per mile), electric vehicles are about twice as efficient, even if the electricity generation process is only 39% efficient (about what you'd expect from coal, the lossiest form) (same source).

This doesn't even begin to cover the other benefits of electric cars, which I gush about elsewhere.

What is true for electric cars is doubly true for electric lawnmowers, which are about the most pollutingest things around. Unlike automotive ICEs, mower motors generally don't have catalytic converters. Thus, a little bit of mowing goes a long way.

I'd suggest going in on an electric lawnmower with the neighbors. Not because they're particularly expensive. There is an e-mower at costco.com for about $200, which is a hundred dollars cheaper than any of the mowers at sears.com. Froogle came up with one for $128 from ACE Hardware, and I found an old mower on eBay for fifteen bucks (supposedly it still runs). No, I suggest sharing because it's a way to put five or six mowers out of commission, while saving garage space.

Regarding the speculation that this particular car model might be vastly less efficient than normal electric vehicles, I don't see why you'd expect that. It's probably not that much heavier than a standard EV (fewer batteries, more motor, should just about wash out), and I can't think of anything else that would make this model orders of magnitude less efficient in EV mode.

Some logical part of me does understand that most people are going to put their immediate sense of need or convenience ahead of abstract concepts like conservation. But for the most part, when I hear someone whining about how they can't bear to part with their conveniences, as they hungrily sap what little is left on this increasingly dessicated husk of a planet, it makes me want to go on a random crotch-punching spree. So please, don't bother trying to convince me that you're just being realistic. Fifty more years of

The Wikipedia article on the RAV4 EV (which I saw cited earlier in the comments) says "Only smaller NiMH batteries incapable of powering an electric vehicle or plugging in are currently allowed by Chevron-Texaco."

I went from there to the Wikipedia article on "Battery Electric Vehicles", and from there to this:

http://www.evworld.com/blogs/index.cfm?page=blogen try&authorid=51&blogid=104&archive=1

The batteries in the Tesla have a much longer lifetime than this. That's because there's some newer technology that makes Lithium-Ion batteries perform much better. Tesla expects their batteries to last for at least 100,000 miles. (http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/faqs.php, click on "how long do the batteries last").

I know there are plenty of ethanol plants in S. America, especially Brazil, but are they cellulosic? It's a big difference, as the article explains.

Spain made the first plant of this type in 2006, and Europe is usually ahead of the Americas in regards to alternative energy.

100MPG+ Prius STOCK:
http://www.toyota.com/html/hybridsynergyview/2005/ fall/marathon.html

stock Honda Insights get close to 80MPG before you start tweaking:
http://www.greenhybrid.com/compare/mileage/honda-i nsightcvt.html

plugin-Prius @ 150MPG+:
http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=818

Note, most of these date from at least 2005. Welcome back to the future.

Boschert describes many obstacles hindering widespread production of PHEVs, but none are more important to her than the difficulties that EV developers encounter when they try to obtain large-format nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries.

Chevron then put the battery rights under control of a Joint Venture, "COBASYS," and decided to fund a lawsuit against large-format (electric car battery) competitors such as Toyota-Panasonic.
Chevron's lawsuit led to a settlement agreement with PEVE (and Sanyo, etc.) whereby Toyota paid $30M to Chevron, Toyota was granted the rights to use "small-format" batteries on the Prius, and Toyota agreed not to build "large-format" versions of its batteries (needed for plug-in cars) for export to the U.S. until 2014.

Please note that P&F "inquisition" was allegedly hijacked by the people who are getting billions of dollars per year to investigate "hot fusion".

Do a quick search for "Dr. Eugene Mallove" (RIP), who was the lead technical writer on the report for MIT, and who subsequently left, accusing them of obfuscating and downright tampering with results to make things look bad for Pons and Fleischmann. He also accused ALL the insitutions involved of debunking the research, then looking for grants to continue it.

Here's a good interview from 2000 http://www.evworld.com/archives/interviews2/mallov e1.html, that covers a lot of the basic background.

For the conspiracy theorists, Dr. Mallove was murdered in his front garden, but "little of value" was taken and the first attempt by the police to find a suspect led to a dead guy. Also interesting reading!

While I'm definitely one of the disbelievers of "cold fusion", it's disheartening to hear about this kind of jockeying, although not surprising. For the headline writers: There's a phrase to describe non-cold fusion in small devices, "Tabletop fusion" (the idea being that you can keep your fusion device on a table.

>Much of the time it is night, and storing that much juice in batteries is impractical.
Check out Altair Nanotechnologies (NASDAQ: ALTI). They have acheived a 20,000 useful number of cycles with their Nanosafe battery. (REF: http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=article&st oryid=1148) For those who don't subscribe, here's the quote: "The company is claiming that their battery is showing a cycle life in excess of 20,000 charges and discharges while still retaining 85% of its capacity to store energy."

If you cycle the battery 300 times a year, that's about a 70 year lifetime and you maybe able to avoid nuclear power to boot. Those in the sun could store and send electricity to cloudy areas.

If you use the battery in a pack that delivers a 100 mile range, that's 2 million miles on a pack. You trade in the **body** of the car and keep the pack. Finance the car, second mortgage the pack and pay the second mortgage off in 20 years. At a $1/watt for a 30Kwh pack (rough quess), that's 30,000/2,000,000 or $0.015/mile plus the finance charges. Check out: http://66.218.37.153/news.htm November 7, 2006 article.

Thats why the electric car died and why we still have no effective R&D material from the big 'energy' companies that are supposedly putting gobs of money, theirs and ours (grants from the government), into alternative 'energy' sources.
Instead what we get is better oil detection and extraction methods. Fine, but I want my R&D papers that proves other methods. Giving fat paychecks to managers of a supposed R&D project to ensure that X isn't viable isn't how I want my money spent.

It always has been the little guy that has the answer.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/45596/who _killed_the_electric_car.html