Slashdot Mirror
Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid
Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.
Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States.
Capitol is a proper name, originally of a temple and the hill it sat on, but now often of a building that serves as the seat of a legislature. Capital means the city that serves as the seat of government. It also means the chief city of a region, and is the metaphorical sense intended here.
Even if submitter didn't know the difference, a professional editor should have. Good thing we don't have any of those around here, huh?
And the brethren went away edified.
From some back-of-the-envelope calculations it seems that we already have enough power generation and electrical distribution in the Bay Area and in most places to charge Chevy Volt-like cars overnight on our existing 220V. It might be nice to charge faster than 8 hours, or at work as well as home, but I don't see this as a major technology adoption problem.
The grid and power stations are designed to deliver about 3KW average to each household during peak hours in the summer heat. A single 220 outlet typically can deliver 3KW continuously. A Chevy Volt will need no more than 20KW hours of juice to charge. The math works.
The grid is barley taxed during the night, so this is a match made in heaven. The build-out we really need is an interstate-HVDC grid to deliver renewable power across the country from wherever it's generated. This can't be done at the state level, and will require action by Obama.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
The energy shortages were artificially created by Enron to boost profits. No actual shortages occurred.
Actually, the difference between states and the Feds is that the states require themselves to balance their budgets. The Feds are actually in worse overall financial shape debt-wise, but are much more liquid by virtue of the size of their credit cards.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
California has an economy so large that if it were an independent nation, it would still have one of the top ten economies in the entire world. California actually has a larger economy than the entire nations of Canada or Russia. In other words, there's a lot of money in California, which means a lot of taxes being collected.
I'm not sure why you would say, "especially California," considering its economy is substantially larger than any other state in the union. Are you indicating that the state should spend its funds elsewhere? That we are suffering so much disproportionately more than anywhere else? I'm not sure.
Indeed. Modern Feeder-Breeder reactors are safe, environmentally friendly and efficient.
They can not only produce 10 times more energy for a given supply of uranium, but they could cure the worlds problem of disposing of long term nuclear waste by using it as recycled fuel. Not only this, but what little waste is produced has a short enough half-life to be a threat for a manageable few hundreds of years instead of thousands. They do not have the land use ecological impact that solar does.
Combined with balanced use of solar thermal and tapping Americas northern and offshore oil and natural gas reserves, it presents us the option of becoming completely independent of both foreign energy and dirty coal that we currently burn (fun fact: the average US coal plant releases more radioactive waste into the environment than a conventional nuclear power plant).
The infrastructure SF is implementing is admirable. The vision I have for a good future also includes electrified railways and highways with charging rails that allow drivers to run off of grid power on longer trips, allowing us to remove the use of oil as a significant factor in transportation cost throughout the continental US even with the current generation of relatively low power density batteries.
It's between 60-100 times and that is without taking into they can use the depleted uranium that is left over from the enrichment ( if you enrich the uranium from 0.7% to 2.5% you're left with a bunch of depleted uranium so the total quantity of natural uranium used is 3.5 times the content of teh fuel rods ).
Thus if you compare it with a PWR running at 2.5% enrichment and consuming 1% of the enriched fuel rod, then a breeder will be able to extract about 100 times the energy from the same fuel rod, but if you consider the consumption of natural uranium it's even more than that by up to a factor of 3.5. Now you could of course recycle the plutonium as MOX in traditional reactors, which would not be as efficient, but this is where the figure of 60 times comes from.
However, that only considers the heat generated, most breeder designs also operate at higher temperatures than present reactors so they get a better electric conversion efficiency ( 40%-45% as compared to 30%-35% for PWRs ) so you gain another 28% or so there.
Additionally most designs of breeders seem to be able to use thorium which is about 4 times as abundant as uranium. (thou some thermal designs, like CANDU , might have this ability as well ).
Thus depending on if you are interested in heat or electricity, and depending on which of the many designs used today you compare with, and depending on if you want to consider the possibility of using Thorium, breeders could produce between 60 and 1600 times as much energy from available fissile material as could traditional designs.
Of course in practice this is somewhat irrelevant since even the low estimate would easily cower present energy demand for thousands of years. Even the existing nuclear waste contains enough uranium to last a century or more.
You do realize that California's completely unique zero-emissions standards were instrumental in getting electric cars created in the first place, right? That California has been investing heavily in alternative car reasearch including pure electric, hybrid, and hydrogen technology?
SF is not doing this simply to cash in on a trendy idea. As far back as I can remember, alternative fuel stations have been a priority. While most states have 1 or 2 Hydrogen fueling stations planned for some point in the future, according to the National Hydrogen Association California has 28 currently active.
San Francisco has been pushing alternative vehicle technologies for years. Just because one aspect is now coming to fruition doesn't mean it is a cynically shortsighted cash grab. It may still be an underutilized overpaid attempt to slay a windmill, but it is completely in line with the bay area's ongoing and slightly quixotic idiom.
A calculation of the German version of the AAA, the ADAC, showed that the electric smart that is currently on the road, would actually create more CO2 per km than the combustion engine version, IF the power plant was solely coal based
This did not seem quite right, so I ran the numbers for the electric and non-electric versions of the MINI:
Electric Mini: 2.095 lbs CO2 * .233 kWh/mile == .488 lbs CO2/mile
Gas Mini: 13,400 lbs / 15000 Miles == .893 lbs CO2/mile
So it looks like a Gas MINI produces about twice the CO2 per mile... In the absolute worst case (For the electric version).
Thanks!