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Will Electric Cars and Solar Power Make Gasoline and Utilities Obsolete?
cartechboy writes "Since the dawn of time (or modern civilization) two things have happened: utility companies have made money by selling us electricity, and oil companies make money by selling us gasoline. But is it possible we are on the verge of upsetting this status quo? Tony Seba, an entrepreneur and lecturer at Standford University, is writing a book in which he essentially predicts electric cars and solar power will make gasoline and utilities obsolete by 2030. How, you might ask? In his book, titled Disrupting Energy: How Silicon Valley Is Making Coal, Nuclear, Oil And Gas Obsolete, he predicts that as people buy electric cars the interest in clean energy will increase because who wouldn't want 'free travel'? Combining the use of solar panels and electric cars, consumers would be able to do just that. The miles electric cars travel on grid energy stored in their batteries eliminates the demand for gasoline, and it turns out many electric-car owners have solar panels on their homes while eliminates or dramatically reduces their dependence on utilities. So as the amount of electric cars on the road increases, the cost of both solar panels electric-car battery packs will decrease, right?"
No.
Sure. Just show me the batteries that match gasoline in terms of energy per unit weight/volume, cycle life, and charge speed.
Better bring that Coleman stove. Oh wait...
Who lumped nuclear in there? As long as a nuclear plant has US standards for quality and testing instead of Japanese standards, we're all set. I do still prefer solar and wind but I wouldn't lump nuclear in with oil and gas since it doesn't produce CO2.
I read it just fine. Started off just like the books I read to my kids at night "once upon a time...." there was this magical land where solar was economical and worked 24/7 and every nation on the planet jumped on board and there was no more pollution ever. The end.
He found a way to convert arrogance to electricity. That's how Silicon Valley will save the world. They have enough of it to power the entire planet.
The key here is the question specifically about *solar* power. When you look at the sum total amount of energy we consume, I think you'll find that you'd have to blanket a pretty significant portion of the usable surface of the earth with panels to provide all of it, if you went strictly solar.
(From a solar energy FAQ):
Q: How much roof space is needed?
A: A rule of thumb is 100 sq. ft. per every kilowatt (kW) of electricity the PV system produces. Module efficiency correlates with the power that is generated in a given amount of roof space. For basic planning purposes, a good rule of thumb is 10-12 watts per square foot.
10-12 watts of power generated per square foot just isn't a heck of a lot, in the grand scheme of things.
You have to couple that with the fact that battery storage isn't anywhere near 100% efficient. (Batteries "leak" power even when they sit idle for a while.)
I think electric cars will have growing usefulness, but not everyplace gets a lot of sunshine during the average day. So even companies setting up solar charging stations in parking spaces for people to plug in vehicles during the work day won't be an adequate solution everywhere.
Ultimately, I see a situation where we substitute some fossil fuel use for increased nuclear power (for the big energy generation happening at large power plants), some hydrogen fuel cell tech gaining acceptance, solar and batteries as supplemental power where applicable, a little wind energy (again where applicable), and in the shorter-term at least, more use of natural gas vs. oil or coal.
There is certainly a place for solar. But at 1 kw/m^2 at noon on a cloudless day, times whatever percentage efficiency of the cells... it isn't going to be the whole solution. Not even in California.
Thinking seriously about adding a solar panel + inverter + storage option for electric car charging and air conditioning, my biggest electricity usage needs. Each of these could be interrupted briefly for switchover to power company feeds without degradation in service, unlike using the solar electricity for normal household power. Since we live in an area that has abundant sunshine and high electric costs, this would seem to me to be the low-hanging fruit for solar electricity and would avoid policy and contract issues with our local power provider. So how about a few practical posts from people who have information to share, and less hyperventilating about politics and policy?
Did the mass adoption of electric heaters make wood-burning fireplaces obsolete?
There's your answer.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Many years ago, ice was very expensive and rare. It was cut from frozen lakes in the north and was shipped all over. Unimaginable now, and not everyone could have ice. Then, refrigeration came along and anyone, anywhere could have virtually unlimited ice for just the price of a machine, the cost of its maintenance, and electricity and water. Being able to preserve food (and medicine) is one of the single biggest contributors to lifespan and overall quantity of life the planet has ever seen. Being able to keep things arbitrarily and efficiently cool is also a key component of many manufacturing processes. Or anything else we currently take for granted -- imagine Google trying to keep their servers cool with harvested ice!
But what if the ice companies of the past were as powerful as the energy companies of today? What if they got laws passed that made creating your own ice just as expensive as the older, horribly inefficient methods, for no reason other than "we're rich and we want to stay that way, but we don't want to have to compete with progress"? Imagine if it was prohibitively expensive to buy a refrigerator, and illegal or expensive to make your own. Where would we, as a society and a planet, be?
(The same argument can be applied to stifling IP laws as well.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Here is my problem with your uncessarily abolutist view of the future of solar power.
http://www.akbars.net/images/b...
That's ridiculous. I live in Massachusetts, and we have a solar array that generates roughly half our annual electricity needs. If our house were oriented with solar in mind when it was constructed, we could easily generate enough for all our needs and our driving needs.
Granted, that doesn't take into account our use of natural gas for heating, but if we had a geothermal system, it would.
The problem is that solar power is not a factor when houses are designed.
There are two issues, with home solar.
Issue 1. Upfront cost. Solar panels are getting cheaper, however labor rates to install them will only get higher. So it will be a fair investment to get them installed in your home.
Issue 2. Trees. I live in Upstate NY, we have these 30-100 foot tall trees that blocks a lot of the sunlight. We could cut them down... however is it worth it cutting down our best method to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, in order to use less carbon?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1. One reason oil and coal appear to be cheaper is that the costs of CO2 emissions are completely externalized. Introduce a cap-and-trade system or a CO2 tax and suddenly those won't look quite as economically attractive. (Obviously, you'll have to ignore this point if you think that there are no costs of CO2 emissions, as some do.)
2. Another cost of oil that is mostly externalized and doesn't apply to solar are the military efforts to secure access to oil drilling locations. Again, less oil, less need for military ventures overseas that cost ridiculously large amounts of taxpayer money.
3. The cost per KwH for solar installations has been dropping steadily. That means that the capital investment that oil and gas are competing is going down, the time needed to pay back the investment in electric bill savings is dropping, which means more people will opt for solar panels, regardless of what happens to other markets.
4. There's a libertarian argument to be made here: If you have your own solar power plant that can power your house, then you don't need the heavily regulated utility companies. A power plant that doesn't exist has no government regulatory agency and the staff of bureaucrats that go with it. So by extension, you're reducing your own reliance on the government.
5. Even without addressing points 1 and 2, the cost of accessing oil has been going up over the long-term. That's going to affect demand sooner-or-later and push people towards alternatives.
It's sane, but I don't think it will happen by 2030. There's just too much money to be made in not having widespread solar power that I doubt we'll see a changeover anytime soon. And I'd expect homes to be converted before cars, since we know how to get a solar-powered home that works well, but electric cars have limits that are currently not as easy to adjust to.
I am officially gone from
Have you done any calculations on this? It seems wrong. Especially since my boss gets 90% of the energy his house needs with present-day solar panels on just a fraction of the roof.
Wikipedia says solar energy at the earth's surface is 3.5~7KWh/m^2 per day. An average American house uses just over 30KWh per day. Average house roof is 160m^2
Energy needed to drive 40 miles (average American daily driving) = 8kwh (using Chevy Volt)
So let's say your sci-fi roof has 90% efficient solar panels and you live in an area with low sunlight. (3.5*160)*0.9=622.22KWh per day. So unless your house is also an aluminum smelting plant you're very, very wrong.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
D'oh finger slipped, it's 504KWh (point still stands).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Two quick problems:
1. My solar panels on my roof give power to the utility company, not to charge my car. I then suck power from the grid at night from excess capacity of the power grid, who generates this power using -- yes, you know the answer -- oil, gas and coal, along with some hydro. Now it's not all bad -- the power I supply via solar panels reduces the need to build new power plants to support peak needs, but still, they are using oil, gas, coal and hydro to produce my electricity for my car (and house).
2. I can generate a lot more solar power than people farther north and those who live with crappy weather. But I still can't generate it at night when I need it. Almost no one is deploying solar panels and storing the energy locally, so this feature article is a bunch of hooey, as much as I wish it not to be.
It seems you are yet another person who thinks the primary purpose of "green" cars is to save their owners money. I don't know why that myth won't die. Their actual purpose is to reduce impact on the environment, at basically any cost to the owner. They're actually intended to address a whole different issue than you and many Americans apparently think they do.
>> Adapt. Because we're no longer going to subsidize your roads and your parking.
Oh yes you are. Several states are already looking at implementing an extra tax specifically only on electric & hybrid vehicles because those people aren't paying "their fair share" of the gas tax (even though in nearly all states, collected gas tax doesn't actually get spent on roads, which was the justification used for its introduction).
The IRS already knows that the vast majority of motorists are already used to and semi-OK with paying at least $n per mile. If enough people find a way to pay less than n (say because they aren't buying gas any more), the government finds ways to get its greedy hands on your cost savings instead of you. They just introduce a new tax on the cost-saving method itself to bring its net cost up to n again. (the level most people have already shown they will put up with). Consequently they eliminate any financial benefit to making changes in the status quo. Thats why many people will still be driving gas cars decades from now.
The fact that the government aren't providing any new or improved service to the people they collect the new tax from is not exactly going to keep them awake at night either.
However, one doesn't need to use solar cells in a vacuum --- add geothermal into the mix, and all one needs is the energy to run a heat pump.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
You'll probably still need a back up generator, unless you want your food to go off after a freak hail storm destroys your solar panels.
Versus the reliability of "the grid." Why, I've never heard of the power going out someplace because of a "freak" accident.
Oh wait. Here's one.
Don't get me, I don't disagree with you. The interesting thing is that the amount of money is trending down and I don't see much of anything to stop that trend.
The problem with electric cars is the battery: high weight, limited capacity and thus range, hazardous materials which make replacement and disposal a headache. But, electric cars don't really need a battery, they need a source of electric power. Turbine engines run a lot cleaner than piston engines, have better fuel efficiency and run on a much wider variety of fuels, the problem was always stepping down the shaft speed to something a physical driveline could use. It's a lot easier, though, to run a generator at the high RPMs a turbine shaft naturally runs at, and a generator supplies electric power. I get the feeling the next step won't be pure-electric cars, but a hybrid with the conventional piston engine replaced by a small turbine and generator. That would reduce the demand for high-priced fuels, and also reduce the size of battery packs since you'd only need one with a ~20 mile range to cover short hops where it wouldn't be efficient to spin up the turbine.
Turbine start would be easy: any generator is in principle also a motor, and since with no fuel being burned the turbine shaft isn't under load it shouldn't take too much power to spin it up enough to start. I'd imagine this'd make them really popular in northern latitudes where getting cars started in the winter is a bear. A turbine would be easier to start, plus would immediately start providing heat for the interior and defrosting.
Yes, solar power will eventually obsolete all other forms for non-industrial use.
Easily and demonstrably not true unless you invoke as-yet undeveloped technology of uncertain viability. I think solar is terrific and should be used much more but it's not a cure all solution for every energy problem.
For non-transport use, we could really switch to solar-thermal today (not photoelectric cells, but the less efficient black pipe, mirror, and turbine solution). It's simply more expensive than other power sources, and storing power for overnight use is still more expensive so we don't.
No we could not. Even if the technology were adequate (it isn't - we don't have adequate battery technology) the economics of it are prohibitive. When I say cost prohibitive I don't just mean that it is a little more expensive. I mean that given the current state of the technology the cost would be astronomical. There are all sorts of unresolved technical issues and the conversion costs would be outrageous. Little of our transportation infrastructure is set up for electric, gas is widely used for heating, you have to allocate space for the power generation. Not to mention that generation in the rather cloudier and snow prone regions can be problematic.
Since all that's required is ordinary technological process, the change to electric cars will inevitably happen, but over the course of several decades.
What about airplanes? There is no reasonably feasible flight technology that is not based on fossil fuels.
From what I've seen, the Tesla uses a LOT of electric power to charge. If you drive it during the day you won't be charging it at your home solar installation.
If I need to recoup 60 miles of range per night, I need 20kWh of power at night. Assuming perfect storage efficiency, I need something like 135 square meters of solar just to keep a minimal driving distance on my car. None of this says anything about my actual power consumption in my home, which might double my total solar area or larger once you factor in inefficiencies. At this point, I've already tripled the square footage of my actual roof space and am starting to approach something like half of my entire lot size.
I also live in Minnesota, so I could probably increase all this by a third to account for the lack of sunlight in the winter.
I think it will take a factor of 10 improvement in batteries and solar panel efficiencies to make any of this possible.
I have an electric car, and solar panels. The answer is still no. My electric car is so efficient that it's not the largest component of my electric bill. I have gas cooking, heating, and hot water; and the electric bill is three times the car bill, in December. In the hot summers, the AC can kick the daylights out of the Tesla in terms of power consumption. By the way, electric car travel is NOT FREE. There is significant capital expense, just another way of financing energy usage. My solar panels spread this capital cost over their usage period (I pay an "electric bill" for the solar power I use). It's all just a financing shell game. You can make one number $0, but you can't make them all $0. As folks have said, they want to charge my electric car a "gas tax" to pay for the roads. They even want it to make noise, so kids and folks don't walk in front of it. None of this transportation power shuffling does anything about industrial power consumption. You're not going to like the price of aluminum foil made with solar electricity. High power industries need the high power density low cost power that renewables can't provide.
There is no electric motor that can be provide enough power to match a diesel engine in an 18 wheeler truck that is so critical to national trade in every country.
You clearly haven't heard of diesel electrics then.
Many large ships are actually diesel electric - i.e. the diesel engines turn some generators that produce electricity that powers motors that in turn moves the ship.
This isn't to say that it will be easy to replace diesel for cargo, but it probably isn't as hard as you imagine once we get battery technology competitive with fossil fuels.
There is no electric motor that can be provide enough power to match a diesel engine in an 18 wheeler truck that is so critical to national trade in every country.
That's funny, electric motors work just fine in railroad locomotives and aircraft carriers.
"[E]ven if [fuel tax] funds were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007."
Therefore, if we want the roads to start paying for themselves, we'll need to raise the gas tax, increase other taxes or fees, and/or allow some roads to return to nature so we no longer have to maintain them.
Because air pollution is proportional to the amount of fuel burned, the gas tax is a good way to pay for air pollution, which costs us up to $1,600 per person annually in medical costs, lost days of work, and so on. It's also the least bad way to pay for global warming. Ideally, the gas tax should also vary according to the quality of the vehicle's emissions system, because older cars pollute more per gallon of gasoline than newer cars.
But the gas tax isn't a good way to pay for road wear, which is proportional to the 4th power of the axle weight. For that we'd need a mileage fee that varies according to vehicle type or weight.
And the gas tax also isn't an effective way to manage traffic congestion, which varies by the hour and the location. For that, we would need some kind of congestion pricing such as variable express tolls or a mileage fee coupled with information about when and where you drove (but there are privacy concerns with that option).
So if the goal is for the roads to pay for themselves, then the most efficient and equitable way to achieve this goal in a capitalist society where people pay each according to the benefit they receive and the burden they place on the system, is with not just a gas tax but also some kind of mileage fee and congestion pricing. Then we could lower transportation sales taxes such as Prop K in San Francisco or Measure R in Los Angeles.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Flywheels suspended in magnetic bearings spinning in vacuum have great duty cycle, fast charge/discharge times and very good efficiency. They interface beautifully with a motor/generator for charging and discharging. No chemicals or strange materials. Their main disadvantage is the angular momentum makes putting it in a car a little difficult. They can pack batteries in twin-packs with opposite spin to cancel the angular momentum. But greater danger is accidents. The containment is very poor. The heavy flywheel spinning at some 400,000 rpm delicately balanced in magnetic bearings would literally, yes literally not figuratively, explode in an accident. But for home use, you can bury it underground below some six inches of concrete. This can act as a super large capacitor to store the solar energy of night use and for cloudy days. UT Austin demonstrated a 50 Kwh storage unit.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The kind of status-quo-maintaining garbage you are spouting is nothing short of deliberate evil, given what a careful read of the relevant scientific literature would tell you. If we check back in 2025 and find the warming continuing, do you give us permission to banish you to the island of Vanuatu, where you can sink or swim on the strength of your convictions?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
In Texas all new highways will be privatized toll roads thanks to crony capitalism. Never mind that roads are natural monopolies the Republican lead Texas state legislature thinks it is a wonderful idea to confiscate private land and lease it corporations for 50-100 years who will then charge commuters per mile royalties with guaranteed profits backed by the government. In metropolitan areas the toll rolls will fluctuate based on traffic conditions. Near free energy for transportation would be wonderful but at least in Texas toll trolls will be there to extort their margins.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
"In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Because the $14,000 per year in combined fuel and other highway taxes does not come close to paying for the damage to roads and bridges caused by trucks, we all have to pay the difference in taxes. Eliminating that subsidy would encourage shipping companies to move more freight by rail in order to save money. This incentive doesn't exist today, and so we're all paying more taxes than we need to, and that puts a damper on the economy.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Not sure what you're referring to as "West", but if we look at California, the Tesla is no where near the best selling car. Prius is number 1, followed by the Civic, Accord, and Camry. Also the Prius is not an electric vehicle, it's a hybrid that still requires gasoline. Regardless Tesla's or Prius's still need roads and parking so I'm not sure how to interpret your last statement .
Industry uses enormous amounts of electricity. You're not going to have your fancy electric cars and solar panels without the factories to process the ore, manufacture the chemicals, fabricate the raw component parts and assemble the product. United States electrical energy usage for aluminum production alone is 45,700 GWh per annum (U.S. Energy Requirements for Aluminum Production, U.S. DOE, 2007). There will continue to be demand for an electric utility.
Have you ever driven a Tesla Model S? I reckon you'd be surprised at the instant torque, acceleration, safety, and silentness. Even if you have infinite money and don't care about the environment much, maintenance and noise is still a pain, along with the general poor air quality in busy cities, and those are factors which are drastically improved with an EV.
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