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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.
Those were manufactured shortages thanks to the crooks at Enron, Duke Energy, and the sham Governor that was Gray Davis.
"You're just substituting one energy source for another. You're not doing anything about the energy shortage."
Yes you are. It's a lot more efficient to have convert all your chemical energy into electricity at one central spot than to have millions of engines that the vehicles have to carry around with them. I believe the efficiency factor is something like 60%. Besides, there are non-chemical ways to generate electricity.
State governments, especially California, just can't afford $1B projects. But the Feds sure can. Because they are trying to counter a deflationary spiral, they are printing money as fast as they can and giving it to banks.
Compared to what they've been giving away, $1B is nothing. They really should consider throwing some of that over to CA. [It will create JOBS and reduce foreign oil dependency, Mr. Obama!]
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
At least spending a billion for this will produce something useful and will provide some jobs. It sounds like a bargain compared to $700+ billion to keep the bankers from having to move to smaller mansions.
I've lived and worked in the Bay Area. Pollution from cars is a problem. Cars are a problem.
Electric cars are not the answer. (I don't even want to imagine sitting in deadlocked traffic, heater or AC on, tunes playing, battery draining...)
Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.
Mass transit first - electric cars (if they're still needed, really) second.
Fuck me, America - can we try fixing problems instead of fixing symptoms - just once?!?!
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
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.
Because the same people who promote electric cars, are also the people that recoil from even the word "nuclear"... and thus ensure that while the rest of the world forges ahead in power generation technology, we are stuck with 30+ year old inefficient uranium-guzzlers.
That's not true. Some of us promote electric cars, along with a renewable energy infrastructure which would include nuclear power, in a safe and responsible way.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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.
Really? Cause they had to pry the last EVs from the cold dead hands of their owners. Every salesperson who sold them had a larger waiting list than GM could manufacture. I bet that they discovered that EVs didn't need many replacement parts which is why all car companies are trying to avoid making EVs. There is a documentary about the EVs in the late 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ that you should watch. In fact, nothing in your post is factual correct about the situation exception for maybe the range problem.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
The energy shortages were artificially created by Enron to boost profits. No actual shortages occurred.
Either battery replacement, or plug-ins. We don't yet have a standard as to how to recharge these cars.
110v...220v...different plugs...different acceptable recharge times.
Replacement batteries will require some sort of mechanical/robotic system to do it. Your grandmother is not going to wrestle a 100lb battery pack out of the car. And none of the elec cars I've seen have easily (no more than 5 mins) replaceable packs.
Finally, we have the apartment problem. If I live on the 4th floor, how do I ensure my car won't be unplugged overnight by some miscreant on the street.
All of these can be overcome. But spending billions to build out a grid for this without the standardization in place will fail.
I really, REALLY want this to succeed. But this effort may be premature.
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 (which is a popular power plant in germany at the moment). I also find if fascinating that the hydrogen for hydrogen production is currently produced by transforming oil into hydrogen and ... CO2. It is the most efficient and economic process to do it like that. Sure, at one point in time you could do create hydrogen by electrolysis of water. But in the mean time, because money is an inevitable driving force, it will be made the CO2-producing way.
Or, how biofuels will end up competing the farming of food and might lead to difficult hunger problems. All in all, these are exciting times, and for every alternative the effects of the complete life circle on environment and society should be considered....
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
It's also interesting that this happened less than a year after deregulation. Doesn't disprove deregulation in theory, but 40 years of regulation worked great, deregulation worked less than a year, the utility companies are, as you said, crooks.
Deregulation is a nice theory though. Not quite as elegant as communism, but it's a nice idea.
The Bay Area would be perfect for bikes. They are far more energy-efficient than EVs (by like 2 orders of magnitude), the Bay Area is largely flat, it suffers from massive congestion (EVs don't even begin to address that), it doesn't get too warm, it doesn't rain much all summer long, the societal cost of maintaining the facilities to park a few million cars are devastating, a few of the people who live there could use some exercise...
I like bikes even in hilly, rainy country, but there they have some disadvantages. It's utterly absurd that somewhere as perfect as the Bay Area doesn't encourage cycling.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
They had to pry those EVs out of the hands of their owners because they were leasing them at a tremendous loss. The EV-1 program was done for research and to gain experience. The company subsidized every single lessee to the tune of something like 50%. When it became clear that the EV1 would never develop enough demand to be profitable, GM wasn't willing to continue massively subsidizing these people and supporting a miniscule fleet of cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.
No. Sorry. Mass transit is part of the solution, but it is not the solution.
The problem lies in the inherent difference between mass transit and public transit and most people don't recognize the difference.
Mass transit focuses on getting mass number of people between various high density locations. These are your medium to heavy rail systems. For the Bay Area that's BART and CalTrain.
In places like Japan, where they have high population densities, it works great. There's a reason places like Tokyo, Moscow, New York, London, etc., can have fantastically efficient mass transit systems: they have the population density to deal with it.
Public transit on the other hand focuses on being a 'vehicle replacement' so people in lower density areas can actually give up their cars. This is taxies up through light rail. Fewer passengers, but more convenient and more versatile.
Bay Area geography doesn't really favor Mass Transit. It's why BART basically sucks for commuting. With the exception of MUNI linking well to BART, most of the Public to Mass links suck.
The whole electric car infrastructure is an expensive idea, and it talks to the whole "chicken and the egg" problem. Without infrastructure, electric cars are useless. Without electric cars, no one will build the infrastructure. This is actively solving the infrastructure problem ahead of the cars.
Is it a good idea? Ultimately, yes. Is it the right idea? That's a lot harder to say. A massive bay area wide fleet of on-demand bio-diesel fueled hybrid shuttle buses might be better. But who's to say? Cars are a part of US culture partially because of our geography. We live in suburbia, which is inherently tied in with car culture.
Unless your mass transit plan includes re-arranging US cities and how people live in this country, it will never be the solution.
Cheers,
Bagheera
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
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.
Please don't forget those of us who promote nuclear power in an unsafe and irresponsible way.
I don't think you understand what this new electrical grid is all about. This project is about a dynamic grid, one that uses constant-update price changes and continuous feedback systems to self-stabilize.
Let's say that you plug your car in when you get home, at about 6:00 PM. You know, when everybody and their uncle is busy burning power for home heating, TVs, and getting ready for dinner. The price of electricity is high, and your car, in constant communication with the grid, doesn't begin charging until the price of electricity drops around 10 PM.
This continuous feedback loop can tie in through your home heating, your refrigerator, etc. so that they shut off during periods when the electricity is in peak demand, and work extra when juice is cheap.
This reduces strain on the power grid, and makes better use of existing resources which are today massively overbuilt simply to handle the 10 minutes during the year when load is at its highest.
This solves a number of very real problems. For example, Wind power is very bad for power grids when it supplies more than about 10% of the total power fed into the grid - wind gusts cause voltage surges and low-grade brownouts that destabilize the power grid.
However, if you had a large number of distributed, high-amperage charge/discharge power storage units (such as a bunch of electric cars!) you could use them to act as electrical inertia to absorb sudden spikes in power.
The net effect will be a cheaper, more reliable power grid, one that could even stay running for short periods of time even if the mains to the power plants are cut, simply because the affected area would see a dramatic spike in the price of electricity, causing everything non-essential to shut off, while the electric vehicles would start backfeeding electricity, earning a profit for their owners.
This is for real!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.