Slashdot Mirror
Electric Car Ferries Enter Service In Norway (bbc.co.uk)
AmiMoJo writes from a report via BBC: Following two years of trials of the world's first electric car ferry, named Ampere, Norwegian ferry operators are busy making the transition from diesel. It is thought that 84 ferries are ripe for conversion to electric power, and 43 ferries on longer routes would benefit from conversion to hybrids that use diesel engines to charge their batteries. If this were done, nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions would be cut by 8,000 tons per year and CO2 emissions by 300,000 tons per year, equivalent to the annual emissions from 150,000 cars. The Ampere uses an 800kWh battery, equivalent to 8 high end Tesla cars. According to a report from Siemens and environmental campaign group Bellona, long-distance ferries are not well suited to electrification, but about 70% of Norway's ferries cover relatively short crossings, so switching to electric power would pay for itself in a few years. The BBC report also mentions some of the challenges associated with converting the diesel ferries to electric ferries. For example, "during initial trials, the fast charging placed excessive strain on the local grid, designed as it was to service a relatively small population," reports BBC. "To lighten the load, high-capacity batteries were put on constant charge on either side of the fjord, ready to transfer the electricity quickly to the ferry's batteries whilst docked."
Lithium-ion batteries are 80-90% efficient at charging, meaning that if you have to charge a battery on the pier in order to charge the ferry (explained in TFA as necessarily to buffer to load on the grid), then your charging efficiency is about 72% (0.85**2). That means the 150KWH that you have to spend on-ferry means you have to draw 210KWH from the grid. YMMV, but here in the US that's gonna run $35-40, much more than "a cup of coffee and a waffle".
Other than the double charge loss, which stood out as kind of costly, this seems like a solid and sensible engineering project. What I'd really like to hear is someone to do a 10-year follow up on whether they met their cost estimates and what else was interesting (hopefully nothing).
Actually, in general, following up seems like a good idea. We do a lot of hyping about the future and the present, not a lot of the boring work of "hey, so what happened to $COOL_IDEA or $NEW_PROJECT?" Maybe there should be a /. category for that :-)
Of course it would be named after Andre-Marie Ampere, the next one will be named after Alessandro Volta, but there was a lot of resistance about naming the third one after Georg Simon Ohm.
AC
Yes - and externalising them is exactly the key to reducing them.
By putting them at the generating station, you allow that generating station to use wind, waves, gravitational potential energy, light, nuclear decay, ... to power the vehicle, rather than petrol.
Further, you also simply make the whole system more efficient - petrol motors are horribly inefficient, typically around 30-35%. The very very very best, used in Formula 1 cars only achieve around 50% efficiency. And that's ignoring all the other efficiency losses involved in a petrol vehicle, such as the efficiency of the gearbox, the transmission losses of petrol from having to drive a truck carrying it out to the petrol station, and the generation losses in refining the oil.
Finally, that's all assuming that you're right that the generation station causes emmissions... Which you aren't. Currently, 99% of electricity production for the Norwegian grid is from renewable sources.
Someone tell me why this is impossible due to such and such or something or other they read on the Internet!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.
Bullshit.
1) Not all generating stations cause emisions
2) Even if yours does - it still causes FAR less. The best ICE's are only about 25% energy efficient. Most electric cars are 2 to 3 times that. This means that, even from a dirty grid, the same amount of carbon burned will take an electric car two to three times further, or to put it another way - an electric car on a dirty grid still produces only between a third and two-thirds as much CO2 per mile as a car with an internal combustion engine.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And of course, the electric car is ALSO far more efficient than the ICE - so you got significantly more efficient work production at both ends - making the total emissions per mile MUCH MUCH less.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Your efficiency numbers make no sense. Same your ideas about "cost" ;D
I suggest to google a bit.
The point of the ferry is: don't have smoke/fumes/dust/soot in the harbor.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
*sigh*. Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.
Which usually given the electricity generation available in the country, tends to be much more efficient than the ICE in a car. (with a few exception like China, India and Australia - according to source which are easy to Google, but I'm too lazy to find yet again for the nth argument about the same subject).
Yes, the US burns fossils to create electricity, but over the life time of a car, even taking into account the initial manufacture (a battery is more complex to build), an electrical car in the US still causes less emissions than a gaz-powered one.
In TFA's Norway, electricity comes mainly from hydro. And even if it's not an Alpine region, the climate is more or less comparable and thus hydro has a very tiny output of green-house gazes and other pollution.
Electricity is *definitely* cleaner there.
You need to travel to a country that produce most of its electricity by burning coal (like China) to find a situation where there isn't much difference between an ICE car and an electric one.
(And in that last situation: well if China adds more clean energy production to its power offering, all the electric car suddenly get better emissions as a consequence. Whereas all the ICE cars would need an engine swap to suddenly have better).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Actually no, it's because heating is one of the few things electricity does really, really badly. It takes long to heat up (which wastes energy) and it does so inefficiently.
No that's completely wrong. There are many forms of electric heating: radiant, convection, fan heaters, underfloor heating, heat pumps, etc., each with their characteristics. For instance radiant heaters are very fast and an electric underfloor heater will be no slower than a gas powered one.
What's inefficient is not the electric heating it's most forms of electricity production.If you burn stuff (coal, oil, gas) to produce electricity you lose two thirds of the calories, whereas you could use more than 70% of them if you were burning the same stuff directly for heating. But that does not apply if your electricity source is photovoltaic panels, wind turbines or hydroelectric power. Also electricity makes it possible to use heat pumps which can let you recoup most of the losses incurred when generating said electricity by burning stuff.