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Ford Pulls The Plug on Electric Cars
Cytos writes "Apparently Ford has called it quits on their EV program Th!nk Mobility, stating "... we don't believe that this is the future of environmental transport for the mass market." Ford had purchased Think in 1990 and did a short run of advertisments in California for it's lease trial, even involving Hertz in helping out. I was really hoping to see this pan out, I guess our only hope for an EV now is the Toyota Rav4 EV." From the sound of it, most companies are looking at hybrid cars.
I know that I would never buy an electric car for a multitude of reasons...
1: How am i going to charge it in my parking lot at work? at my dorm?
2: It just wont get me very far here in Kansas
3: Lack of speed. When I need to merge, I need to get up and GO damn it.
4: Small. I like big cars, or better yet Trucks. You cant have an electric Truck - it just makes no sense unless you haul barbie furniture
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I hope you don't think this decision was reached without considerable input from the oil industry and its captains and advisers (one of whom happens to be a high ranking republican in a high seat...)
Eventually, we're going to be at a point where we deal with electric or bio-fuel whether we like it or not. There is just not an infinte supply of petroleum.
The hell of it is, if we were to start *now* working on getting all the kinks and problems worked out of things like bio-fuel or solar-panels with the same energy and resources that the auto industry spends on developing new models every year, when the time comes that petroleum is so rare as to inspire strife, war, and conflict, we will be far enough ahead of the curve not to be affected.
While hybrid cars may be a step in the right direction, they're only postponing the inevitable.
Luckily, I rather like bicycling.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Hybrid cars are much friendlier to the environment.
Many advocates of electric cars see the energy cycle as something like this:
1. (energy comes from somewhere)
2. Environmentally clean driving!
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants, we currently get almost all our power from coal and gas burning plants. These guys are not very efficient at making electricity, a least not compared to the super efficient engines in the hybrids. They produce much more pollution per watt. The end result, an electric car just moves the pollution it creates from the car to the power plant, and the power plant is very very dirty.
Until coal & gas are not used anymore, pure EV is bad for the environment.
I went to this website looking for specifications on the EV cars that they make and they are nearly the same specifications that I saw about 5 years ago. The top speed is still only around 55 mph. And the range is only 56 miles?!?! Come on. If it's going to take 4-6 hours to charge the battery only to 80% then I'd want to get more than 56 miles. I don't care who they are marketing it for. It's almost no better than buying a supped up golf cart.
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Incidentally there is a good articles in a recent Time magazine and Wired.
They are quite right. Car is not the future of environmental transport. There are dozens over dozens of cities in the world where the transport situation is totally unsustainable due to constant grows of the cities themselves and consequently the number of vehicles on the streets.
What city or country has the best public transportation system?
One of the problems that kills electric cars as a reasonable alternative is climate control - especially in winter. A normal gasoline engine throws off as much energy in waste heat as a it generates in mechanical power. This waste heat is easily used to heat a car interior. Since cars have really bad heat loss (lot of glass), it takes as much energy to heat a car as it does a small house. With electric cars you have a real problem because of the lack of the internal combustion engine heat.
As long as you are still charging the batteries from the national grid you're just moving the point the fossil fuels are converted into energy way back up the line, to the power stations.
By the time you total grid inefficency, battery inefficency and so on, the total CO2 emissions advantage is negligable. You'd do better to add more insulation to your house and drive a little Honda.
The Hybrids, though, are another kettle of fish entirely - they generate their electricity from gasoline, in situ, and that actually (surprisingly) turns out to be a smart thing to do for a long list of reasons.
So, over-all, no great loss and wait for Hypercars - cars that think they are power stations..... (no, I'm not making this up).
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I agree with you that most people think that electricity comes from nowhere, so it's automatically "cleaner". However, I have to question your claim that a single-user, commercial grade device is more efficient at generating electricity than a huge mass producing power plant. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that that would surprise me, and I'd be interested to see some hard numbers. Why don't the power companies junk their power plants and just order a boat-load of hybrid cars? Clearly I'm missing something. Thanks!
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
I wonder if hybrids (which seem to be the practical transitional cars) are only the stop gap till the real 'next' car, fuel cell powered vehicles.
i think ford saw ev as that stop gap, but they got the beta instead of the vhs in this case.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Go do a little research, heck, take a PHYSICS class before you make those statements. Try to understand the constraints involved, they ain't trivial.
I think that was the whole point. Pure EV cars are a dead-end technology. That's why everyone is looking into hybrids.
Go do a little research, heck, take a PHYSICS class before you make those statements. Try to understand the constraints involved, they ain't trivial.
No one, including him, has claimed that it's trivial. All he's stating are the minimum requirements before he would consider an electric car. And I agree wholehardedly.
Sorry, but you are not going to guilt me into buying a car that sucks. If it's not practical to build electric cars, then they aren't practical.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I would remind gentle /. readers that the electricity a Ford Think (or any electric car) would use has to be generated somehow. This was an attractive solution for California, as most of the electricity-generating plants that serve (my) state are in Arizona and Nevada.
Further, when the California power grid goes down again, not only will you have no TV, you will have no car.
Hydrogen, my friends. Dubya might be wrong about lots of things, but he knows the future of energy. Check out the new developments in extracting hydrogen from shale and rock, much like natural gas. Its only pollution is water vapor, which can be electrolyzed back into hydrogen fuel and ozygen if required.
Hydrogen can also be produced by the electrolysis of seawater using solar cells for power or by heating coal dust in the presence of a catalyst using solar collectors.
California simply tried to legislate a market that will never exist, and, if by some freak it did, would shift the pollution to other states.
... for several reasons. Let's go through some of them:
1) Batteries suck. Even the best ones are expensive, don't hold enough charge per unit weight or volume to come within an order of magnitude of gas, and take a long time to charge.
2) Electric engines suck at high RPM. Gas engines suck at low RPM. Electric engines are horrible on the highway unless your car is really light.
3) People don't want light cars, even if this is best for the environment, because all the mother-trucking heavy 3-ton pickups and SUVs out on the road will crush them like a VW Bug in an accident.
4) Electric engines are expensive and not as efficient as gas ones. The industry has a hundred years of experience in making gas auto engines and not nearly as much in electric.
5) It pollutes just as much anyway. Most people get their power from a coal or oil-fired plant, or maybe natural gas. Since charging and then discharging the battery is fairly inefficient, especially at high speeds, it can even pollute more than a gas engine.
6) Those EVs on the site are ugly, as are the Prius and the Insight. People don't want to buy ugly cars.
7) The cars are more expensive than gas cars. The decreased fuel cost does not offset this completely, and it doesn't help the environment much unless you have a nuke plant in your neighborhood, which you probably don't, because evironmentalists hate nuke plants (even though they are probably better for the environment). They have crappy performance on the highway and they are ugly. So what is your motivation for buying?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
All you want is the moon from the sky? The only way you're going to charge batteries in 5 minutes for 2 hours of driving is by using liquid acid batteries and actually replacing the acid in the cells. And the liquid batteries ain't that great otherwise.
Anyways, here in Finland they actually have a punitive tax for any alternative cars. If you try to dodge gas tax by driving an electric van, they slap you with a fat annual tax to cover up the "loss". Delightful.
"Grid-provided" electric just isn't the way to go. Most folks that are looking to eliminate fossil fuel engines from cars are now working on hydrogen-based fuel cells. The reasons for this are fairly simple:
"Electric cars" that charge off the power grid are just moving their fossil fuel consumption over to a power plant (unless the power is provided by nuclear generation, which has its own huge set of problems).
With a non-material "fuel", there is a wait time associated with recharing. It takes a lot less time to fill up a hydrogen tank (or even swap an empty one for a full one) then it does to recharge a big bank of batteries.
A reasonably-sized efficient fuel cell would be revolutionary far beyond personal conveyances. Rather than persue research that would result in, at best, a full-scale version of toys kids have played with for years, why not work on a method of power generation that could vastly change the way we physically structure our societies and make giant leaps towards restoring Earth's natural capital?
Groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute have been pushing fuel cell cars for a decade (search their site for "hypercar"). It's nice of the auto industry to catch up. :-)
I don't know about Kei cars, but I've read some pretty interesting articles on the GM Autonomy. It's currently vaporware, but there's about $1 billion in funding behind this hydrogen car already. See more here:c ars.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/fuelcell
Hopefully it will come out within the next 10 years - would be interesting to see.
I think it's important to note that Think wasn't really about electric "cars" it was about electric vehicles. The venture was very much an "outside the box" and it's product line makes that obvious. (Mostly they are small vehicles designed for short trips around town) Not surprisingly, people like cars and don't want
;-) )
That said... Here's a rejected slashdot story submission about what *I* think was a fairly interesting news. I post it because I think it's on topic and intersting and I put some time in typing it up--obviously, sometimes slashdot doesn't have the space... so no hard feelings. (Maybe I just spelled everything right
The jist is that GM is betting on fuel cells. Not electric and not "conventional" hyrbids.
Popular Mechanics is carrying an article (with pic's) of GM's latest fuel-cell concept car. The pictures are our first look (mine at least) at GM's new strategy to redefine the basic systems every car they make. It's called AUTOnomy and was written about a little while back in Popular Science. Essentially, because fuel-cells allow a radically different organization of cars' structures, GM is betting it can make cars cheaper. This despite the fact they'd be running on the famously expensive fuel cell. Wired wrote about this"billion dollar bet" in its August issue and quotes a GM exec: "If we're not there by 2010], we'll have dug too deep a hole to recover the time value of that money." In other words: call us stupid if you can't drive one of these by 2010. This is some good reading for those wanting to know more about what GM's plans to do with its fuel cell "platform" that it hopes to use for virtually every vehicle it makes in the future. Of course, as Wired notes, a fairly heavy dose of skepticism is NOT optional. Itís required.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
you can't fight the StoneCutters.
Who keeps the metric system down? WE DO.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
You've obviously never driven a BMW Z3 (or any other car with good power/weight ratio) on something other than busy city streets.
Why else do they want big engines with lots of power? Freedom. Choice. Not unlike the open software movement.
I'm a driver of the GM EV1, a great electric car. I've created a website about GM's treatment of the car: cleanup-gm.org. GM is pulling working EV1s off the road, even though drivers are willing to pay to keep driving them. (They returned the checks that we sent them.) Meanwhile, they falsely report that nobody wants electric cars.
The petrochemical industry hates EVs, for obvious reasons.
No car company in America has taken EVs seriously. Who wants to make a car that lasts 300K miles without any service?
Who wants to buy a car like the EV1, where odd batteries were scattered throughout the vehicle, making battery replacement a horrendous, expensive task? Most every commercial electric vehicle manufacturer in Japan or Europe uses a easy to replace battery pack that can be swapped out in minutes.
No, damn it, we want catalysts and fuel systems onboard every frickin car sold.
Forget batteries...it's surely impossible to increase the energy density of batteries; after all, they're basically the same technology that's been used for 150 years. Can't be done...technology just doesn't improve that way (riiiiigghht).
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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Hmmm.
.25 = 234 MJ.
Best solar cells you're going to see in "field use" are around 20% efficiency. Let's call it 25%. Let's set insolation to a very favorable figure of 1300 W/m2; this is what it is at 1 AU from the sun, but doesn't take into account axial tilt, clouds, nighttime, that sort of thing, so it's pretty much a maximum value.
How many solar panels can you fold out of the trunk? 100 square meters seems like a reasonable size for how big the array could be and still be manageable. Let's also assume total efficency in the other aspects of the system; all energy the solar cells manage to turn into electricy eventually ends up moving the car.
With all these favorable numbers, we end up with 1300 J/s/m * 100 m2 * 7200 s *
Merely to accelerate a 1,000kg car to 100km/h would take 784 kJ of this energy. I don't think you're getting 2 hours of driving time out of this array's charging the batteries for 2 hours unless the car in question is Matchbox.
Getting heat from an electric car should be easy. If your car has a 30 horsepower motor, it may consume over 20,000 watts (30*746). A small motor like that needs a lot of cooling. Its cooling system would be your heating system. That is a lot of BTU's. Add a refrigerant compressor on the drive for the hot days.
It just takes a small extra investment to add these creature comfort features to any electric car.
Government institutions, or at least state universities (my father works for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County), are already required to have 10% of their new fleet purchases be alternative fuel powered. My father is actually looking forward to this, as he likes hydrogen fuel cells quite a bit.
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Hydrogen is the future. They have horse power and water is the only thing that comes out of their tail pipes.
EVs are kind of lame.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
Sorry, this is almost impossible. You underestimate the tremendous energy density of gasoline. To move an equivalent amount of electical energy in such a short time would probably require conductors too heavy to lift, and refueling stations would require special high capacity hookups to the electrical grid.
Gasoline has an energy density of about 44 MJ/kg, and a density of 740kg/m^3. Let's assume you put 15 gallons into your tank in five minutes (which would be a pretty slow gas pump if you ask me.) That's 1.85 GJ of energy! Now, certainly not all of that energy is put to use moving the vehicle. Most of it goes to the atmosphere as heat. Let's say 20% of it does useful work. (Or, alternatively, that electric vehicles are 1/.2 or 5 times more efficient.) That means that our electric vehicle needs 370 MJ of energy for the equivalent fillup. If you want that in 5 minutes, you're looking at a rate of 1.23 MW (that's megawatts!) At 120 Volts, that would be over 10,000 amperes. Even at at 10,000 Volts, that's still 123 amperes.
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better. This completely ignores the fact that the "system voltage" of the vehicle is probably around 75 - 150V, so this refilling voltage would have to get stepped down again, and you're back to the problem of how to handle 10,000 amps. And of course there's the fact that the electrical grid probably could not handle short bursts of several megawatts for every person refilling a car. How many simultaneous people are refilling their cars at any given time? And how much extra headroom does your power company have?
This is one of the classic problems of the all-electric vehicle. I don't think you'll ever see charging times reduced to less than 4 - 6 hours. And that's for specialized refilling stations. Most households just aren't wired for anywhere close to that much power. Older houses I think had 150 amp service, newer houses are built to 200 or 250 amp service, if I recall.
Those numbers look pretty good to me. Maybe I missed something? According to your numbers, you could accelerate 0-100km/h 300 times from a two hour charge.
The RAV4 EV is more of a real product; you can buy the thing at ordinary Toyota dealers in California, and there's a reasonable network of charging stations in the SF Bay Area. But the range is still only 80 miles.
From your link:
Economists from the Clinton White House now concede that complying with Kyoto's mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases would be difficult -- and more expensive to American consumers than they thought when they were in charge.
Well if anything is difficult or expensive, then it must not be worth doing, right?
This is the typical Republican BS. Find a dissenter from the prior administration and then portray that as proof, beyond question, that the prior administration's policies were flawed. So, does Senator James Jefford's switch to the democratic party mean that the Republican party platform is "wrong"? Does Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott's (R) opposition to military action against Saddam prove that Bush is is wrong?
Check out the Corbin Sparrow. They are selling them as fast as they can make them.
Ok, so you and a handful of other people are willing to lease (maybe not even BUY) an EV-1. This does not mean that there is a viable market for them. You have no plausible reason to believe otherwise. For one, it is almost certainly economically unviable to run the manufacturing facilities in such small quantities. For another, honoring the warranties, training people, overhead, on going engineering, etc to support these cars also may very well be costing GM a lot more than they could ever sell.
As long as you are counting in the hundreds, you are not going to appeal to GM or any other worthwhile car maker. Now I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe that this is going to happen, because Americans aren't willing to put up with EVs in any sizable number. The fact of the matter is that we have standard cars that get 3x times the gas milage of the most popular cars today, without half the drawbacks of EVs and most of the supposed benefits (I'd argue they're probably even better), and they aren't exactly moving swiftly. What's more, we also see evidence of unwillingess to make really measurable sacrifices for the environment in numerous other ways, from CHOICE of driving distance, to not carpooling or taking mass transit, to living in an inefficient house, to simply owning an obselete highly polluting car (like so many so-called environmentals), and so on.
Who, other then you and a handful of people that spend a lot of time fretting over such things, really want to put up with all the potential bugs (engineering 101, you make a lot of changes to time tested designs, you're going to have a lot more bugs), limited driving range, poor acceleration, costlier maintenance, numerous drawbacks of owning a lighter, smaller, and often weaker car, and so on just to save the environment a couple liters of pollution? A lot of people may clamour for it (mostly those on forums like this), but the money isn't following it. If there were a market there, or even one that could be easily developed, the major car manufacturers would have pounced on it (esp. those that are desperate for growth). What we have instead is a handful of companies that have made pretty damn impressive efforts...but they are all ultimate failures because there are not enough buyers.
Also, in the transition from Norway to the US, they should have (and could have) increased the range a little bit to match the longer distances in the US.
If this failure weren't adequately explained by the usual corporate incompetence, one might thing that Ford was deliberately trying to set Think up for failure.
You're forgetting about things like friction. Accelerating to 100kmh doesn't mean you *stay* at 100kmh, unless you're driving to the Moon.
Electricity can be produced by environmentally friendly means--we need neither oil, gas, or nuclear power. Furthermore, even oil and gas-powered plants can reduce emissions much more effectively than automobiles--they can use much better catalysts and filters, and they could even eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. They also avoid most of the pollution resulting from refining and transporting gasoline.
Another reason why electric cars are environmentally friendly is because they simply don't come in the kind of behemoths that gasoline powered cars come in. And they don't have to: if you want a lot of power in an SUV, you need a big engine and that's going to depress gas mileage. Electric motors give you a lot more flexibility.
Furthermore, even if there were currently an environmental disadvantage of pure EVs (which I don't believe there actually is if you work it all out), you wouldn't have to eliminate all coal and gas powered electric plants, you'd only have to replace a fraction of them with environmentally more friendly technologies, or upgrade a fraction of them to run more cleanly.
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants,
If only it were true. Nuclear energy is environmentally the most harmful energy source imaginable because it leaves behind waste that is both highly toxic and completely indestructible by chemical or biological means. We should eliminate it completely as soon as possible--we just don't need it.
Oh, wait, you could use photosynthetic bacteria, some of which make hydrogen and oxygen. But if that became economically practical, we could use it for power generation too...
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less? Electric cars are greatly simplified in many cases - hell most of them dont even need transmissions.
:)
Batteries are currently expensive. You'll have to wait quite a while.
Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
Why not go a different route? How about putting automatic charging stations in every parking lot in the nation? The charging stations themselves aren't all that complicated, but it would need something special to do it automatically (induction?, some robotics under the car that finds the charging socket on the parking stall?.)
This way the average use for a car is taken care of. You won't be able to go traipsing across the country, but a lot of us don't do that anyway.
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.
Seriously, think outside the box. With polymer batteries that can conform to many shapes, there is no reason why a car manufacturer needs to have that really big front end where the motor used to be. You don't need an axle, so you can stick the driver in the middle instead of off to the left (or right for your backwards countries.
As it stands, cars aren't exactly the most aerodynamic peices of equipment out there after all.
In fact, GM is doing exactly this with their fuel cell platform. It will be neat if they actually go ahead and fully back the project.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
IIRC, the current laws applying to car manufacturers require that their entire line of automobiles get a certain level of average fuel efficiency. An all electric car doesn't help the manufacturer in this respect. But adding a hybrid line can allow a manufacturer to also sell those mamoth SUVs that measure fuel efficiency in gpm (instead of mpg).
That's why I have a sneaking suspicion why they always make hybrid cars look butt-ugly. They don't actually want to sell many of these, they just want to be able to sell their cash cow SUVs.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
The American car buyer in particular will be a tough sell. American's aren't interested in diesel engines.
...providing more tax incentives and grants for research into AFVs? ...providing tax incentives to consumers who purchase fuel-efficient AFV's? ...mandating economy and pollution limits that force manufacturers to invest in AFV development?
So American car buyers were interested in pollution controls and that's why they are on cars now?
America's perception of diesel engines is that they are loud and noisy.
But that perception is wrong. VW TDI diesel Golfs, Jettas, and Passats certainly aren't "loud and noisy." I know. I own one and people are constantly amazed to find out that they are riding in a diesel-powered car -- that gets forty-some mpg in traffic. The fact that Ford diesel engines sound like 50lbs. of marbles in a clothes dryer doesn't mean that sophisticated diesels from VW, BMW, and other respected automakers are like that.
I encourage you, and anyone reading this, to try a VW TDI-powered car if you have not already. I bet it surprises a lot of you. It may not be the car for you, but it might give you a better appreciation for where modern diesels are today.
The battle of perception is key to moving people over to alternate fuel vehicles. People are only going to start buying alternate fuel vehicles en masse when buying one of those vehicles doesn't compromise the vehicle's utility and their pocket book.
So why isn't the government...:
1.
2.
3.
You have a catch-22 situation now. People won't buy many AFV vehicles because of the current crop's lack of sophistication and performance. Automakers don't invest enough to improve the breed because not enough people buy them. That's a perfect role for the government: To spur on development of technologies that will strengthen our country in the decades ahead.
There are several things wrong with this view - The previous post is self contradictory First it criticizes electric cars for requiring that the electricity be generated somehow, and then it advocate hydrogens, which has exactly the same problem
Both systems are energy inefficient (although I suppose electric cars are worse).
Electric cars are energy inefficient because you must generate electricity, then lossily transport it, then lossily convert it into chemical energy in a battery, then convert it back into electrical energy, then convert it into mechanical energy.
Electric cars are not unpopular because of some vast conspiracy, but because they are a lousy technology. The main problem is a result of the energy storage technology; it is extremely poor compared to storing the energy in gsaoline. Electric car batteries are very expensive, only last a few years, and have such a low energy density that they greatly constrain the size and power of automobiles. And in climates like here in Arizona, the power load of the required air conditioning (5 kW) reduces the range even more.
As a result, electric cars are a fine choice for a few people who are willing to pay too much (or extort the money from us via government subsidies), who have driving requirements/habits that can deal with the short mileage, and who don't mind small cars (read: more collision danger to the occupants) with limited air condition and storage capabilities.
OTOH, hydrogen cars require the liberation of hydrogen from a bound state in some existing compound. Electrolysis is inefficient, and still leaves you with power plants to deal with. Storage of significant amounts of hydrogen is also a problem. The biggest problem IMHO with hydrogen powered cars is the investment required to distribute the hydrogen. Retooling the civilized world to dispense hydrogen along with gas (I am not a fan of slash-cuts!) will cost many trillions of dollars, and hydrogen doesn't offer those advantages.
Fuel cells may be a better approach, depending on the fuel and cost. The car makers and the govmint are counting on them. Of course, there is the issue of what to do with the waste from fuel cells also. If you use a hydrogen fuel cell, you pick up all the problems of hydrogen mentioned above! If you use a fuel cell with something that reforms a hydrocarbon, you have to deal with whatever is left of the hydrocarbon. Hopefully you can put it into a tank and bring it back... but who knows.
BTW... anyone who wants to use electricity as either a primary (electric cars) or secondary (hydrogen cars) had better be an advocate of nuclear power. You can put all the nuke plants you want here in Arizona, and its fine with me. But don't put any more hydrocarbon plants here and screw up our visibility.
Oh, and solar.... fuggetabout it. It takes too much land area, produces unreliable power which must be stored somehow (probably inefficiently, even more reducing the energy efficiency of the system), and most solar cells take more energy just to produce and install than they will deliver in their lifetime!
The only good weather is bad weather.
The only way you're going to charge batteries in 5 minutes for 2 hours of driving is by using liquid acid batteries
Why not just manufacture the batteries to a uniform size and power grade. Then instead of charging them, swap them out. This also handles the problem of limited life cycle - add a surcharge to cover replacement after 2 or 3 years. In addition, this allows your car to take advantage of better technology.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better.
While a true recharge in under two hours may be out of the question,
a "fill up" at a station could be as quick as changing a battery pack.
If the batteries were cheap enough, then you could have one at home charging at all times.
(Or only at night, when the rates are lower.)
The real problem is energy storage, not energy transfer.
-- this is not a
The prices were also absurd: the Saturn EV-1 was available only by lease, at a montly lease rate that was TWICE the monthly rate for a regular Saturn ($399 vs $199, at that time), and at the end of the 36-month lease term, the EV-1 had to be returned -- there was no purchase option, since GM didn't want electric cars to be "out there." The net effect was that the "real cost" of an EV-1 was triple the cost of a comparable Saturn gasoline-powered car.
Later, the Honda and Toyota hybrids were marketed in a similar manner: not really available to consumers (most dealers can't get them), and priced at least twice the level of the comparable "regular" car sold by the same company.
So what's really happening? The car manufacturers are playing a combined political/legal game, in order to avoid meeting California's requirements. The task is simple: the auto makers pretend to seriously explore alternative power technologies, and they pretend to offer them for sale, but they deliberately set prices at unreasonable levels, and when demand turns out to be extremely strong anyway, they discontinue the vehicle model, falsely claiming that consumers don't want these vehicles.
If California ever sought to enforce its requirements (which seems quite unlikely), the manufacturers would go straight to court, claiming that the standards are unreasonable, and they will claim that they made all reasonable efforts to try to meet the standards.
It's a shell game, and Ford's decision to buy and then dismantle one of the few viable companies offering alternative-fuel cars, is just another clear sign that the automakers won't tolerate any attempt to "do the right thing."
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
It this world it's money that makes the decisions...
100 miles on the Mazda 626 will cost you about 100/26*1.35 = $5.19 in gasoline.
So if you can get electricity at $0.20 per KWh, the EV1 is cheaper to drive.
Now, take a quick look at your electricity bill. I pay less than that.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
either everyone on this board is ignorant or electric cars have taken a huge step back.
i tested drived an electric car about 4 years ago.
it went 85+ miles an hour.
it accelerated faster then any car you can buy from ford right now.
it had a range of 400 miles (300 with excessive use of radio/ac/heat)
it looked, felt, and drove, like a regular car. none of you could tell the difference from 20 feet away.
there were only 2 drawbacks at that time.
they were expensive.
they took a long time to charge.
its sad that so many of you have been fooled into thinking electric cars have to be small plastic toys or cant go faster then 55 miles an hour. go test drive one.
I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less?
By that same logic, laptops should be half the price of desktops. After all, they weigh less and they have less parts, right?
In reality, though, lighter parts cost *more* because they're made out of things that are more expensive. Take the car's frame or body - iron is cheap, aluminum is not so cheap, and composites are downright expensive.
What's your damage, Heather?
The Kyoto Accord would be very expensive, but worse is that for all its cost it would be completely inadequate to actually halt the buildup of greenhouse gases.
So you don't believe that slowing the buildup is worthwhile? Either halt it completely or just throw in the towel?
Doing the latter would be outrageously expensive and probably not worthwhile.
Right. We should just let the greenhouse gases build up until almost the entire surface of the Earth becomes uninhabitable, the ice caps melt, and countless species disappear from the biosphere. Because none of those things is as important as your precious money.
They're probably looking at something like this
Basically, a process that breaks down biomass from plants and produces hydrogen and CO2 as byproducts. They claim the CO2 produced will be less than what is used by next years crop of plants that are grown for this purpose. We'll see, I suppose.
But anyway, it's a promising technology, and probably what Ford is looking to for the future.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
1. Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less?
To put it simply... No. Not when the parts that are added back in (the motors) are non trivial to build.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
I suspect that a study of the laws of physics would benifit you here. 2 hours of driving is a lot of energy, and it's very unlikely you'll move that much energy, safely, that fast.
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.
Did you ever think there is a *reason* why EV's are small and not full sized? See the comment above energy requirements.
Actually, once the EPA mandates strict controls on sulfur compounds in diesel fuel, this will mean diesel vehicles stand a good chance to meet the strict Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) criteria. This is because with cleaner diesel fuels we can apply common-rail fuel-delivery and direct fuel injection on the intake side and modern particulate traps and catalytic converters on the exhaust side. Because diesel engines uses 35-40% less fuel than their gasoline counterparts, that means also lower CO2 output, too.
Now, combine a modern diesel engine in an electrical hybrid system like what Toyota and Honda achieved and we maybe talking a Toyota Prius getting fuel mileage over 60 miles per US gallon! I would not be surprised that companies like Ford are seriously looking at hybrid automobiles and trucks/SUV's using half-electric/half-diesel power; imagine a Ford Escape SUV with a diesel/electric hybrid powerplant getting fuel mileage around 40 miles per US gallon.
Yes, I do agree that the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Toyota Prius definitely steps in the right direction when it comes to improving fuel mileage and lowering emissions.
The next step before we go to hydrogen-powered fuel cells is the diesel/electric hybrid car. This is not as ridiculous as it sounds; with the EPA soon mandating strict controls on sulfur compounds in diesel fuel, we can easily apply modern fuel delivery and emission controls on diesel engines without worries about the sulfur compounds in diesel fuel turning into something akin to sulfuric acid and ruining emission control/fuel delivery systems. This means a diesel engine could finally meet the strict ULEV standard for exhaust emissions.
When you combine diesel's 35-40% better fuel mileage with an electric motor like what Toyota and Honda has done, the result could be quite spectacular. Imagine a Toyota Prius getting 60+ miles per US gallon fuel efficiency instead of 44-48 miles per US gallon fuel efficiency--that's how much better a diesel engine could improve the Prius' fuel mileage.
American's aren't interested in diesel engines. America's perception of diesel engines is that they are loud and noisy.
That may be true in the past, but technological improvements in the last ten years has pretty much eliminated the smoke and the clattering sound from diesel engines. The only reason why we don't see more diesel cars in the USA is that the current Diesel #2 fuel has too much sulfur compounds per million, which can turn into something akin to sulfuric acid and seriously damage the modern fuel delivery/exhaust emission control systems found on European-market diesel vehicles. However, with the EPA soon mandating that diesel fuel must elminate most of the sulfur compounds in the fuel, that will make it possible to have a diesel car meet even the strict ULEV standards for exhaust emissions.
Volkswagen has started sellling the Europe the amazing PD130 and PD150 diesel engines for their VW Golf and Bora (neé Jetta) models; these new engines offer superb fuel mileage and impressive acceleration. Once the US switches to cleaner diesel fuel we'll likely see the PD130 and PD150 engines on future variants of the Golf in the US market.
There are still some issues with the tank. It's heavily shielded and it sits in the trunk (it's a hybrid, press a button and it will switch between gas/hydrogen on the fly). The engineers believe it to be safer than gasoline, they might be a bit biased though. The real problem holding it up is that there are on two hydrogen fill up stations in the US.
BMW has various incantations of the 7 series hydrogen car for quite a long time now. I think it was the late 1970s (have to go find the Roundel magazine it was in, I think it was 1978 though) they had the hybrid gas/hydrogen engine first working well. It's just been sitting around for twenty years for the hydrogen distribution network to be built up.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
The real draw back is this: They are un-American.
The cars of Europe are built for handling and speed. Cars of the USA are built for maxium power from stop light to stop light. Not really a good idea eh?
Think about it: "American Muscle Car" says it all. There is no support behind a EV because you can't street race it, everyone would likely be driving about the same speeds. I mean, it really comes down to your feelings about your cock.
Of the people I know interested in EV's, they are all women. Why is this? I know for a fact because they want something that is practical, easy on emissions and safe. Men want fast, they want to show off and they need that car to show off their status (or their wishful status?).
I've always driven a small car. My first was a Honda Civic. Now I drive my girlfriends Aspire. Sure, the car sucks: But I don't feel ashamed of it because I'm actually smart enough to know the world isn't measured in horsepower. How I do in the sack or at work has nothing to do with what car you show up in.
The EV is unpopular because it's too much like a vehicle and not like a "Carrrrr". Really, this is plain stupid. One of the first posters noted that when he wants to change lanes he wants the thing to go. Well, if most people are driving EV's then you don't have to worry (duh?).
It's really about your cock people, admit it.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Actually the efforts date back to Republican President's Nixon and Ford, and to a lesser extent Democratic President Carter.
I never said that Clinton/Gore were the first to ever advocate AFVs. I just contrasted them to the oil tycoons that now occupy the White House.
The term "spurred on" refers to encouraging and accelerating something that is already taking place. It's a horse racing term. When one says that the horse was "spurred on" to victory, it does not mean that the horse was motionless prior to being kicked with the spurs.
First one must post something intelligent to debate. Sorry, but ignorant political propoganda fails to qualify.
Learn to spell "propaganda" before calling me ignorant.
What you posted was just a lame attempt to keep from addressing the issues of CAFE, government funding for AFV research, world pricing of oil, potential contributions from Alaskan drilling, etc. I'm guessing it is because you were in over your head.
Well, for certain we shouldn't gut the economy because of unproven theories and speculation.
.
It won't "gut the economy" and I defy you to show otherwise. The only thing that's gutting the economy is the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy.
Global warming is accepted by the majority of mainstream scientists as being scientific fact.
Would you rather reduce pollution and learn that it was unnecessary or keep polluting and then realize that global warming has spiralled out of control and will devastate the planet in the coming decades?
You remind me of the people that claimed regulation of automotive pollution and fuel economy would spell the end of the auto industry and make cars so expensive that only the rich would be able to afford them.
I know, I know. It feels good to ride on your bicycle and Mother Earth smiles down on you when you do. .
I almost certainly own more fossil fuel vehicles than you do, so don't go there. But my primary commuting vehicle is a VW Golf TDI (diesel) that gets forty-something miles per gallon in rush-hour commuting.
I have a 2002 Prius that I simply love!
Today I drove from Elgin, IL to New Salem Village (near Springfield) and back in it. 220 miles down and 220 miles back. Comfortable. Smooth. CD player making tunes. It was wonderful. And we did this 440 mile trip on less than one tank of gas, with an indicated MPG of 48.2 for the whole trip.
Nothing bare-bones about this car. It works like a dream. Mind you, it isn't designed for drag-racing, but it can accelerate well enough to merge without stress, can zoom along at 70 with traffic, and stops really, really well.
For those who might care; I got mine with cruise control, side airbags, and the single disc CD changer. I passed on the electronic map system. The color is Aqua Ice, and it is a pretty car!
Go test drive one.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Uhh, I call foul to your claims.
I call foul on your figures first. Emission levels are here. The carbon emissions for a modern coal-fired plant are 263gC/kWh. You are claiming 920gC/kWh. To compare, an oil-fired plant is 213gC/kWh and a gas-fired plant is 113gC/kWh! This is one THIRD of the Mazda 626's 350gC/kWh. I expect there's a mistake in your calculations.
But the problems in your argument aren't over. You're comparing coal-fired power plants against an oil-fueled 626! Coal is a poor alternative to oil. Energy densities here. Coal is at best 31MJ/kg. Oil is at worst 41MJ/kg. Gasoline in your 626 is 45MJ/kg. These energy densities influence CO2 emissions. To use a tired cliche, you're comparing apples and oranges.
Also I call foul with your conclusion. You only compared CO2 emissions per kWh and then concluded that the EV1 has better mileage!? If you want to compare mileage then you need to use the same fuels in the two cars and the plant and concentrate on the miles travelled!
But let's do some napkin calculations to get a feeling for "mileage". The electrical transport cost of overhead powerlines is less than 10%. Motors are 95% efficient. The best gas-fired plants are now exceeding 50% efficiency. So the fuel->wheel efficiency is 43%. Even the most efficient diesel generators as used on hybrids are less than 40% efficient. Cars range between 25% and 35% with petrol. So the plants use fuel more efficiently and therefore have the better "mileage".
We can also do some napkin calculations for cost. Cost calculator here. A car will typically cost 3x more per kWh than the plant. This is because plants get huge economies of scale and use much cheaper fuels. Cost alone proves nothing but combined with my previous arguments it proves that purely electric vehicles - not hybrids - are the best choice.
This project got dumped because its small vs SUV and till the war starts, SUV's will keep wining the market share. Of course once the shooting starts, no one will be able to afford to drive a motorcycle let alone a SUV but thats not a problem for today.
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That's the heat power you'd get if you completely burned the gasoline as it came out of the nozzle. That's a lot!
But for a more reasonable comparison we should multiply 20MW by the average efficiency of a car engine, say 15%. That gives us 3 MW, still a lot. (EV efficiencies are much higher; 70-85% is typical, and that's dominated by the battery since motors and inverters are so efficient).
So it's clear that EVs will never have charge times that approach the refueling times for gasoline cars, unless the batteries are physically swapped.
But is this really a problem? My EV1 spends most of its time parked in one of two places: my driveway, and the parking garage at work. I can charge in either place, and I have plenty of time to do it. So as long as I can get through a typical day's driving on two charges (one overnight at home and another during the day at work), I really don't have a problem.
Actually, I hardly ever charge at home anymore. And the electricity at work is free.
As an EV1 driver for the past four years, I will say that charging speed is the biggest drawback of the current generation of EVs. (In fact, it's the only drawback even worth mentioning.) I would very much like to see charging powers increased from the present 4-6kW range to perhaps 15-20kW, which can still be managed in most homes. But given the considerable convenience of being able to charge at home or at work without ever having to go to visit a gas station, there's just no compelling need for charging speeds comparable to those of gasoline cars, at least for cars used for routine commuting and shopping.
For long road trips, use a gasoline car. But for everyday driving, EVs are already entirely practical.
Actually, electric cars already have the edge. Despite there being more energy conversion steps in the EV, the overall energy efficiency is still greater than the gasoline car.
I know this is a naughty, but I am really curious. Do you have any references on this? Do you mean that electric cars are more energy efficient (total energy cycle) than equivalent gasoline powered cars?
Re; A/C - You live in San Diego - a mild climate. I live in Phoenix. In the summer you need about 5 kW to cool a car here.
As far as solar, again it depends on a lot of things. And, the cost per kw (if you ignore unreasonable subsidies, such as California and Arizona laws that force the power companies to buy your unreliable power back at your whim by running your meter backards) is much, much higher.
Finally, you seem to not use much energy. My home, in the summer, runs about 15kW for about 18 hours a day! That's a heck of a lot of solar cells, and part of that time it is dark out.
I would also be interested in the 2 year energy cost payback on cells in the southwest. Not that I disbelieve you, but I would love a source.
Finally, as one who frequently attacks environmental policies here, it might surprise folks to know that I would *love* to have an electric car if they could solve the battery problem. Electric cars are very low maintenance, quietnon-polluting (at the car... the non-nuclear power plant is a different issue), have excellent performance, and in general are just cool. But the caveat.... the battery problem.
The only good weather is bad weather.
(* What I am talking about are cars that are in capable of carrying more than three average adult passengers. *)
Electric does not have to also mean "small". Agreed, there is not much of a choice right now. I am thinking macro, though, not micro.
Vacations aside, most travel is simply going to work. You don't need a hunken' car for that. If you need a big car for a short period, then *rent* one.
Why drive a big car 100 percent of the time when you need that size only about 5 percent? Further, married couples could have one "larger" car and one small economical car, perhaps even a single or 2 passenger car.
"But it looks like cheap plastic" is a sorry excuse to murder the planet's atmosphere.
Table-ized A.I.
I do believe the current administration should push more AFV, AND dig for oil in Alaska.
According to the most optimistic estimates, the oil that we might extract from Alaska might, in ten years, reduce our reliance on foreign oil by 2%
By then, we'll be wishing we were digging up some oil underneath those carabou in Alaska.
So you advocate using up our oil reserves rather than the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia? And how is this in our national interest?
The government can't aford to pay for it, so expect oil companies to become "energy companies" and find ways to work with coal, hydrogen, nuclear, etc. power as alternatives if you ever want to see significant improvement.
The government could give tax incentives to companies researching alternative energy sources. They could give tax credits to citizens that bought more fuel-efficient cars. They could put the gas guzzler tax on minivans and SUVs to combat the trend of people who would have been well-served buying gas guzzling behemoths instead.
We could use hemp as an energy source, but I think you're smoking all of it.
Let the ad hominen attacks begin!
In the interim, take your tax cut and buy yourself a tree to hug, it might make you feel better.
And the ad hominen attacks continue... What would make me feel better would be if that money had gone to paying down the national debt. Not only have we not paid down the debt, but the budget surplus built up under Clinton is history, too.
Good lord, can you type this with a straight face? Aside from the ludicrous implication that tax cuts hurt the economy, there are just a few other factors that might possibly have something to do with it. First, we had some jackasses kill a few thousand people, scare the crap out of everyone, and inflict huge damage to the airline industry. There's also the dot-com crash as people realized that it's nice for companies to have actual income. Then there's the scumbags who looted large corporations thereby screwing the employees and shareholders out of billions. You'll note that the last two occurred before the Prince of Darkness took office, although I have no doubt you have a bit of tortured illogic to blame them on him as well.
Global warming is accepted by the majority of mainstream scientists as being scientific fact.
Pretending this is true for a moment, that still doesn't mean that Kyoto is a good idea. To do that you need to show that the benefits outweigh the costs. Environmentalists have not done this; instead they've resorted to the "we're all gonna die!" fear-mongering that they've been using for decades.
Would you rather reduce pollution and learn that it was unnecessary or keep polluting and then realize that global warming has spiralled out of control and will devastate the planet in the coming decades?
Yes, thanks for the example. This is just the environmentalist version of Pascal's Wager, and it's equally fallacious.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Actually, this particular tree-hugger (Ok, I'm not really a tree-hugger, but I do believe in taking reasonable care of the environment wherever feasible) doesn't have a problem with it. In fact, I kinda think it's a good thing - those Think "cars" are jokes and give a bad name to electric vehicles.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
That's the beauty of petrol--I can move twice that amount of driving in under five minutes. Electricity just isn't as convenient.
It might work alright in Europe. I understand that they drive much less and more regularly than we do here.
I don't want a car I cannot take a spin down to Florissant, Colo. in...
If you could chill out a moment and not rush to nonsensical defense of your country you would see that there is a certain amount of sense to the argument, even from your point of view.
If we had the balls to keep our military *out* of other people's disputes, they would settle the problem one way or another. The problem is in part, ours, our agendas, overt and otherwise, will not let us keep our noses out of it.
If they think they need the US to help them out, they can ask for our help. Until that, they can handle it however they see fit. From your point of view it means making their own bed and lying in it, from their point of view it means the US lets sleeping dogs lie and/or stops playing big brother.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
Good spotting. Lead-acid batteries lose 20% of what was put in. So the losses are 50% to the plant, 5% for transmission, 20% for storage and 5% for the motor. This brings a total efficiency from fuel to wheel of 32.3%. Still better than a conventional car.
I also missed the comparitive energy costs of transporting and storing gasoline for an ICE. I also missed transmission (aka gearbox) losses which might not even apply to an EV. I'm certain there are many factors that I've missed. I wish I was an expert but I'm not.
But at least we can dispute the figures instead of disputing each other!
I have a fundamental problem with the government using taxes as a form of behavior modification. That's not the role of government, never has been.
Says who? Reducing pollution, smoking, excessive fuel consumption, etc. while encouraging saving for retirement, purchasing a home, putting kids through college, and so on, benefits the country as a whole. And isn't the purpose of government to improve the lives of its citizens?
We used to throw things into the Boston Harbor over this.
No, that's quite true. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against the Tea Act of 1773. That act allowed Britain's own "East India Company" to sell directly to the colonies without paying any of the taxes that were imposed on the colonial merchants. With these privileges, the company could undersell American merchants and monopolize the colonial tea trade.
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There are many solutions to this- which dont involve conventional "Fill-up" scenarios. The most basic is to change the battery-or failing that pump out old electrolyte, swap the electrodes and recharge the old ones at the station.
The second is to have recharge points at any given parking space-where it is incorporated in parking charges should you use it. It would probably work out cheaper for companies to supply these than deal with petrol expense forms/claims anyway and much fewer tax oddities.
The third is having a built-in unit that acts like the secondary coil of a transformer, with the roads having an EM grid underneath them. The car on the road would be constantly charged from a field. Using superconductive materials- this could be HIGHLY efficient. I recharging by coil induction. This would mean that 90% of the time- the car may be running directly of grid, and only using batteries where there was no grid yet.
The 4th is the h2 fuel cell which is fairly well known-so I wont discuss this further.
The 5th is the attempt at using a flywheel for powering these- although I dont beleive it was entirely succesful- but suspending it with magnetic bearings, then engaging it when power was required. Charging would involving spinning up the flywheel.
I think the real problem here is that attitudes,politics and economies need to change before we would see people using EV's or alternative fuels. Until then-we can only speculate where it could lead us. I still feel the research done on this has been in no way conclusive-and although money has been spent on it- you can guarantee a great deal more was spent on the bodywork and ad campaign for the new mundano.
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
You're very presumptuous. I merely stated that according to the numbers, one could accelerate to 100km/h 300 times. Nothing in there about friction, the levelness of the road, the material of the road, the spin of the earth, windspeed and direction, the position of the moon, or any number of other factors which might have influence.
Your postings go against my understanding of the facts, but frankly you have more detail than my sources, and obiously have researched this in depth, so I have to tentatively grant you the facts :-( :-) ... It's always nice when one can learn something new, and I think I did. You should get modded up!
:-) Actually, we do supply a lot of your power now - the largest nuclear plant in the US is 50 mi SW of Phoenix (Palo Verde), and it sends a lot of power to California.
MOD UP THE GUY I AM REPLYING TO, PLEASE
A couple of comments... you should probably compare your car to best-of-breed gas powered small cars, which would have a mileage closer to 50mpg than 25mpg. But that still leaves you with a 2 x 1 energy advantage.
My comment on the reverse metering is that it is an unreasonable subsidy for your power. One could argue, as you do, that it is reasonable to jumpstart a better energy source, and you may be right. But the power you feed back to the utility definitely isn't worth as much as you get paid for it, because they cannot control it or count on it. Thus they have to build peak load and transmission capacity as if the photovoltaics weren't there at all (in fact, this in general is a problem with photovoltaics - outside of energy efficiency which I'll tentatively grant you).
So a major consideration of solar power (not to mention wind power) has to include the peaking/storage issue - i.e. the cost of energy storage. At that point, on a personal basis, you are down to batteries, which unfortunately suck. They contain lots of lead and production of them produces lead pollution. They have lifetime problems (although we have a mountain top radio repeater site running on 30 year old telephone company batteries - but we are *very* nice to them). They are heavy to ship, and contain and produce dangerous chemicals. The batteries are capable of extremly high currents, which means that they are more dangerous in some ways than primary power - and to get best energy efficiency you want them in series producing at least 40V or more. Oh, and they are really expensive. Submariners know well the dangers of batteries, as all submarines have huge banks of them - and most diesel submarines provided all underwater power via batteries (I believe there are now underwater combustion systems that can be used).
Large scale solar power could use more efficient systems. Of course, one of the best - gravity storage - runs afoul of the environmentalists (gravity storage, for other readers of this post who may not know, means pumping water upstream into reservoirs. You can then get the energy back - mostly - by draining it into generators when you need it). I don't know of any other good systems. People have talked about all sorts of things, but nobody seems to build them - stuff like superconducting magnetic storage (big BOOM if it overheats - nuclear bomb class energy release) - or big flywheels (same issue). Of course, you can produce hydrogen and store it, but again, that is not very efficient, and hydrogen, contrary to what some people here have posted, offers its own dangers: except at night, its very hot flame is invisible, so a leak can TOAST you with no warming. It is extremely good at embrittling metal (it adsorbs into it, permanently changing its structure). Hydrogen corrosion of steel has been studied for at least 140 years! In fact, the whole cold fusion approach was based on hydrogen adsorbtion into palladium, as are some hydrogen storage approaches. Not all of these are impossible things to overcome, btw... just issues.
Power systems have to be built for reliable peak power, and cheap base load. I happen to favor nuclear in this regard because done right, it can give you lots of power at a good price with no pollution. In fact, I believe in it so much that I wouldn't mind if all of California was powered by nuke plants here in Arizona - even upwind of where I live
Oh...re the power consumption in my home...
It is a big home (>5000 ft^2), built before the environmentalists killed the "too cheap to meter" nuclear power... i.e. energy inefficient. It has three good sized air conditioners, and in the summer, during the day *and* evening, their duty cycle is almost 100%. And, it is in the desert - the temperature here right now at 1725 local is 109 degrees F.
I have looked at making it more energy efficient, and other than replacing the air conditioners with modern high efficiency units (which I had to do anyway due to death of the old units), nothing makes economic sense. I have had two energy consultants out (one from the power company, and an acquaintance who is an architectural engineer specializing in alternative energy) and they agreed with me. Of course, as an engineer/nerd, I naturally had done all the fun stuff - calculating heat fluxes and heat storage in the brick and tile, measuring temperatures, measuring air conditioner power usage, etc, etc, etc.
I have considered retiring to nicer climes (I once lived on Malibu Beach - wonderful place!) but they are just too crowded and too expensive (So Cal), too far away (Hawaii where a relative lives), or too foreign (Mexico) - and besides, I still need to make a living just to get medical insurance (but that's a different subject).
The only good weather is bad weather.
in PA, they noticed that teens crash a lot, so instead of taking the bad ones off the road (you get 3 chances at the test per permit, but there's nothing stopping you from buying anothetr permit for $5 and taking another 3 until you get a nice tester that lets you pass). You now have to be 16.5 instead of 16.
Is it more expensive to build an electric motor or a combustion engine with transmission? I find it hard to believe that it is more expensive to build the former.
Research manufacturing processes. See which one is simple castings and machining, and which is not. Add into your analysis the fact that EV's require four electric motors to replace the one IC engine.
I wrote:I suspect that a study of the laws of physics would benifit you here. 2 hours of driving is a lot of energy, and it's very unlikely you'll move that much energy, safely, that fast.He replied:
Would you bet your life on it? I have few doubts about the ingenuity and brilliance of properly motivate researchers and inventors. Figure it out and the world will beat a path to your door.
I'll certainly bet my life on it. No amount of motivation in the world can repeal the laws of physics, none, nada, zip, can't be done.
Its not so much the size as the styling. There is no reason it has to be made to look the way they do.
No reason other than the simple *fact* that you cannot make a small car look like a large car, especially when you have to shave every pound possible in order to make the car perform at all.
Hobbyists have been converting stock cars to alternative fuels for decades. What is the problem with a major car maker doing the same?
Nothing other than the fact that the general public simply won't accept a car that does not match the performance level they are used to, or one that is far less convienient to operate.
I don't want to answer for the poster to whom you are replying to, but there are some flaws in your post.
As for the tax cuts hurting the economy, I'm not a economist, and don't really know a great deal about economics, so as a arguement from authority, I would like to present Paul Krugmen as person who does argue (with a straight face) that the taxcuts do hurt the economy. This NYT article [reg required etc etc etc] give some of his views on the Bush tax cuts.
Pretending this is true for a moment,
You don't need to pretend, the other posters comment "Global warming is accepted by the majority of mainstream scientists as being scientific fact" is factually correct (assuming that one assumes that s/he is talking about climatic scientists). It is the global warming skeptics who lack scientific experience (with only a handful of exceptions such as Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels).
that still doesn't mean that Kyoto is a good idea. To do that you need to show that the benefits outweigh the costs.
If you want to research more on this, I would suggest this report.
Environmentalists have not done this; instead they've resorted to the "we're all gonna die!" fear-mongering that they've been using for decades.
Perhaps you should stop basing your opinions on organisations like GreenPeace, who know how (and are willing to) play the PR game, and look at the work (preferable the peer reviewed stuff) done by environomental scientists.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
(Team of electrical and mechanical engineers with careers of experience building motor controllers, batteries, and automobiles put down their sliderules and listen with rapt attention to you.)
1. Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less? Electric cars are greatly simplified in many cases - hell most of them dont even need transmissions.Issues:
Battery technology is the limiting factor on price. Ideally, the battery would be no bigger than the gas tank, contain no caustic or dangerous chemicals, recharge in a few seconds, last thousands of charges, and contain enough energy to drive the vehicle for at least 500km. But batteries are a mature technology; unlike memory chips and hard drives, they don't double in capacity every 18 months. Exotic batteries used in current electric cars are expensive, partially due to weird chemicals, partially due to limited production.
Electric cars would remain expensive because they're not being mass produced, because they suck. They don't do the things that people have come to expect of modern automobiles. Therefore, consumers will never buy them.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.That would be, like, so kewl! Maybe you can call up our buddy Sol, at the center of our solar system, and ask him to increase the energy density of the light hitting our fair planet, so that even with a 100% efficient solar panel, this would be possible! (Unless you're gonna design a way of unfolding enough solar cells from somewhere in the car to cover a couple of football fields of ground?)
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.Ahem. All modern cars look like plastic toys. For example, you described a Toyota Echo perfectly (molded plastic with 4 tiny wheels).
Lightweight, flimsy tinfoil designs are essential to reduce the mass of the vehicle. Since accelerating a greater mass to a given speed requires more energy, lighter mass cars are more energy efficient.
While the car companies have to make these trade-offs, I don't. I continue to drive a full-frame all-steel American made vehicle, because momentum=mass*velocity, and I don't really feel like dying at the hands of some incompetent Honda Civic driver on his cellphone running a red light.
Give me those three things, and I will never look back.Give you those three things, and superluminal travel will seem easy.
Instead, what we get are 1000 pound plastic attempt-to-look-like-the-future pieces of junk. Not interested, thanks.Okay. Let's make electric cars look like my 1976 Dodge Ram. Why?
Does that make you happy?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I think that a subsidy is a subsidy, and in general I oppose such things. A subsidy means that politicians think they know a better way to do something than the market does, and history shows that this is rarely the case (look at Japan's big initiatives in the 80's for example, or Carter's various misguided programs).
BTW, I *do* pay demand metering on my power... the power company considers demand to be so important that with demand metering, I pay about 1/3 the normal KWH charge, plus a demand charge. Demand metering is very common, and I wouldn't be surprised if your utility also offers it on residential property. Demand metering works by reducing the amount of peak power that utilities need to generate, and peak power is always the most expensive. It time shifts their power production to base load power, often nuclear or big-time natural gas, which is very cheap.
Certainly your small 1KW is not a problem. But when lots of people are doing it, as you say, it does become an issue. Then I agree that time metering (and even the ability to refuse the power) should be the way to go. Also, in an area with air conditioning, the power peaks may more or less coincide (although there is a lag between peak insolation and peak usage, due to heat storage). My house reaches its top temperature around 9 to 10PM, well after dark, due to the thermal mass of the tile roof and stone and brick walls.
Currently all sorts of energy technologies are under extensive research. I really do want to see a lot of progress there... especially in mobile energy storage, because I *want* an electric car, but I don't want to sacrifice characteristics for it.
I have never been one to demand that a system meet all needs in order to be valuable. For example, there have long been cases where PV's were the way to generate power. We operated a ham radio site for years on a power-less mountaintop, using PV and huge batteries. Unfortunately, ice falls from the tower destroyed the PV's at some point, but by then power was available. Also, because at the time we had inadequate monitoring, our charger failed one time and we didn't detect it until many weeks later when these huge batteries finally discharged. I then had to spend a summer driving to the mountaintop almost every weekend to care for the batteries. This was over 15 years ago, and they are still there (as backup). But I also created telemetry for the system (which later became a business for me) so we would know when they system was operating on batteries!
I do believe that the market usually achieves better results than government policies - especially when balancing a complex of issues. Thus I think that PV, if it makes sense, will make economic sense without subsidies.
I had an acquaintance who was employed by the government to push PV. She proudly showed me her all-solar house (with reverse metering like you have). I asked a few questions, and it became clear (at that time) that her real cost of power, minus subsidies, was enormous. But she didn't know that, not being an engineer, and was paid to troop around the country telling people all sorts of nonsense about it.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Phil,
You are raising the issues of externalities. But surely, if the externalities are real, the way to deal with them is to force their cost onto those who create them, rather than to pick, by fiat, an alternative. There is no question that failing to account for externalities itself biases the economic system. However, even the cure I suggest above (put the cost on those who benefit from them) brings in the heavy hand of government, and unfortunately government usually does a really terrible job of that sort of thing.
I have nothing against PV. I also think that if the technology is worthwhile, the small difference caused by the reverse metering won't make much difference either way. It just isn't enough money, compared to system costs and other issues, to really push it over the top.
However, there have been all sorts of government environmental and energy regulations that have been much more significant, much more costly, and foolish. For example, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy rule - to raise gas mileage in cars - kills several thousand people a year, and has driven many folks like myself into buying RV's. No matter where you live in the US, it is illegal for you to be sold a shower head that will put out more than 2.5GPM. This is absurdly overbroad.
So I am extremely skeptical of getting the government into this sort of thing.
I think a better way in general is through government programs that need technology and select it based on need rather than ideology or market forecast. The best of breed there has been defense and space. It's very expensive, but the fallout has more than paid for it. I am sure one reason it has been valuable is becaue no bureaucrat was charged with *making* it valuable! Now that NASA tries to cost justify itself, it has turned into a pretty pathetic organization.
I refer you to Moore's Laws of Bureaucracy (http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/Lawsburo.htm) for my thoughts on the subject.
A final comment... the market is far from perfect, and as one who likes the free market, I am still ready to acknowledge its weaknesses. The market has a broad problem domain over which it is useful, but there exist other domains (for example, war and peace belong to the political world, not the market). However, the government is so terribly bad at "industrial policy," which is essentially what you are arguing for, that it should be used only when absolutely, totally necessary. I don't think we are yet to that position in the country where the government needs to steal my money at the implied threat of violence in order to subsidize one particular alternative technology!
PV's are good things. *Maybe* they will turn out to be broadly helpful in energy usage. However, the numbers I have looked at put PV still well in the marginal category for many years into the future.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Perhaps I don't know what demand metering is. I know that I get charged for my peak hour demand for the month - so many bucks per KWH for the peak load during the time of day. So it is time of day related, but the charge is based on measured peak demand.
I don't think real-time pricing is realistic at the residential level. At some point, the cost of having everyone process that information into their decision loops isn't worth it - it is too much burden on society. I think this is one reason consumers like fixed rates on many things - so they don't have to incur decision cost (or anxiety, or whatever you want to call it).
I used to work in the hotel reservations industry. We adopted the same tricks that the airlines did ("revenue management"). We looked at the implications of doing the same thing in grocery stores, etc. These techniques basically vary the price continuously, based on very sophisticated demand forecast models and constant updates of actual demand. I am sure there is a limit to how much of this sort of stuff the average consumer is willing to put up with! You can't spend all your time optimizing your costs, or you don't have time to live you life! So real-time variable electrical pricing is IMHO a nice theoretical idea, but not a practical one. Time of day/demand is a compromise that consumers can live with, and it achieves a lot of the goals of the full time market driven price fluctuations.
It is true that one of the major reasons for the electrical crisis in California was the lack of rational pricing. The utilities, due to political concerns, could not charge the cost they had to pay. The state put them into a position (which they agreed to, but then they act sort of stupid, since they are sorta like governments themselves) where they sold power at long term prices but were prohibited from buying it except at the spot price. Dumb is a kind description of this sort of government regulation!
As far as the rolling blackouts... there was never a shortage of generating or transmission capability. There was only a shortage of power to buy. It was not a matter of too much demand, it was a matter of market failure (and possibly some collusion on the part of suppliers)! The shortages miraculously stopped as soon as the purchasing rules were changed... no significant additional generating or transmission capacity was created to solve the problem.
Actually, the California power crises presents a great example of why I distrust governments messing around in markets, including the energy market. A true deregulation would have delivered power, but perhaps at a higher price. Since utilities are still monopolies (like Microsoft, ahem), regulation is required. But regulation is frequently stupid, and sometimes, as in CA, catastrophic.
Hence my objections to subsidies for PV (or burning camel dung, etc).
Personally, I am in favor of removing the enormous unnecessary obstacles placed in the path of nuclear power generation. Any rational analysis of the power situation would go for nuclear power as the primary electrical power source for the country. The fears that people have about nuclear plants are misguided (even Chernobyl, which could not happen with our kind of reactor, has killed at most 3 people outside of the fire crews). Waste is an easy problem if you don't get stupid about it. The biggest danger is terrorism, and that can be handled with proper design and protection.
So here we have one already proven low pollution, low cost energy solution that has basically been crunched by uneducated environmental wackos. But for some reason they love solar cells (but don't let anyone build the silicon processing plants near their houses!).
The only good weather is bad weather.
Sigh... no sonner did I send in the previous post than I came across an article in tomorrow's (west coast time) New York Times on revenue management moving into retailing (fortunately not yet real time).
O M.html
The link is http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/02/technology/02EC
and of course requires simple registration.
The only good weather is bad weather.