No I'm not. I clearly stated the ENGINE's efficiency. I knew exactly what I was saying.
Then you were trying to distort the picture. You won't actually get those numbers driving a car in the real world, so mentioning them without pointing that out is going to mislead readers.
As for well-to-wheel efficiency, the GREET model shows no real difference between a hybrid gasoline-electric versus pure-electric car.
Um, what? And that's a lot more pessimstic than I've seen in some studies. Their most recent associated paper doesn't even cover li-ion batteries, which are far more efficient than PbA and NiMH -- yet li-ion are essentially the standard for new mass-produced EVs.
Furthermore, to top it all off, look at the direction things are trending. An increasing percentage of oil is being forced to come from syncrude. The future of oil isn't light, sweet saudi crude -- it's ultra-heavy crude, sour crude, bitumen, shale, coal liquefaction, etc. These are far dirtier and far more energy wasteful from well to pump. Electricity, on the other hand, is going in the opposite direction. Power plant efficiencies continue to rise, and the growing demand for cap and trade is eventually going to push coal (or at least non-"clean coal") out of the mix. Wind power prices and solar prices have plummetted in the past decade. Wind is now cost-competitive with coal in some areas, and solar should be there soon. CIGS/CIS solar could potentially become cheaper than coal even in Alaska. EGS is opening up a whole new front of baseload power. And on and on down the line.
In short, the trend is oil getting worse while electricity gets better.
It's hard not to talk down when you're making such elementary mistakes. For example, calling the Lupo a "~90mpg vehicle". Let us count the ways that's wrong:
1) That's per *Imperial* gallon, not US gallon. It's 78mpg per US gallon. 2) That's on the *NEDC*, not the revised EPA drivecycle. The NEDC uses lower accelerations and speeds. EPA ratings of equivalent vehicles generally get about 15% worse mileage than NEDC, so drop that to 68mpg. 3) That's *diesel*, not gasoline for which most Americans are most familiar with mpg figures. Diesel is, quite simply, a 15% denser fuel than gasoline. Per *unit mass* (i.e., per amount of petroleum or per unit CO2 pollution), that drops you down to 59mpg equivalent. 4) Not an equivalent car. You may argue that it's a "5 seater". Sure, if you can manage to cram five people into that thing. It's also underpowered, taking almost 13 seconds to do 0-60 (instead of 10 for a (much larger) Prius and 8 for the EV1). You can make almost any gasoline or diesel vehicle get better mileage by slashing its power output. 5) The Lupo swapped steel components for aluminum and magnesium ones. Directly, without replacing reinforcement. Sure, you can make any car get better mileage by reducing its crashworthiness. Not to mention the expense of aluminum and magnesium.
The VW 1L car plays even more sleight of hand. In addition to the above:
1) It's not even on the NEDC like the Lupo; that number is for a *steady state 45mph*. Let me tell you, I can drive a 12 year old Saturn SL1, whose mpg rating when *new* would only be about 30mpg, at a steady state 45mph and get 45-50mpg or so. If you want an excellent way to BS your mileage figures, you've got one right there. In my personal opinion, the only commonly used way to BS mpg figures that's even more dishonest than that is what some PHEVs do where they assume you'll use electricity for X percent of your miles, then ignore the electricity in the mpg calculations. 2) They threw out even the most basic creature comforts like AC to get it as light as they did. 3) Even *the frame* is made out of magnesium. Magnesium makes aluminum look like steel in terms of strength. Again, if you want to throw safety out the door, you can lighten a car to almost nothing and then cheer its ridiculous numbers. They do use carbon fibre, which has a great strength to weight ratio, but only a tiny amount of it, and is no substitute for having a proper frame underneath.
You might as well cheer the 1000-mpg eco-racers while you're at it.
Don't come on here and expect me not to call you out on it when you act like the energy used to build a car is somehow comparable to the energy used in its operation. Don't expect me not to call you on it when you post ridiculous efficiency figures or act like it takes a proportionally significant amount of energy to haul bulk freight on rails. If you want to play up your credentials, *show them* by what you write.
Are you kidding? Electric utilities *love*, *love*, *love* the concept of electric cars. They were among its biggest proponents back in the 90s CARB ZEV mandate era. When Kris Trexler organized his "Charge Across America" cross-country EV1 trip, utilities went out of their way to put chargers in the middle of nowhere in the desert for him.
For one, charging, period, creates more business for them. If our nation were to go completely electric, that'd be a *lot* more business. Even better, it's mostly off-peak charging. This means that they get to utilize their spare nighttime capacity, earning profit for little extra cost. Lastly is the potential for "smart charging", where vehicles ramp the rate that they charge up and down based on the needs of the grid. It's like a dream come true for an electric utility.
No, the problems with exchanging batteries are standardization. It's trying to lock people in to a moving target. Does anyone remember the laptops of just 10-15 years ago? Notice how different our batteries are from back then? What about the cell phones from that era? Yet batteries are changing even faster now than they were back then. To force standardization would be to lock the tech in at a single point in time, which would be a death knell for electrified transportation.
Far better is rapid charging. It's here today and it works. They've been doing it on Oahu for years.
My nightmare is having an electric car during and evacuation for a hurricane
You do realize that gas stations need a sizable amount of three-phase power to run the pumps, right? Not as much as you'd need for a charging station, to be sure, but gas stations all across the Houston area stopped working after Ike. My sister had to drive 90 minutes to Katy to find a functioning gas station, and then wait in a huge line there. *On the other hand*, power losses were spotty; my grandmother's old house had power back up just 1 day after the storm (my parents' house took until the weekend before last).
You are mistaken. There's *already* a network of 60kW Aerovironment PosiCharge rapid chargers around Oahu, and Aerovironment makes them as powerful as 250kW. That's not "four hours"; that's minutes. Titanate batteries can take a charge in 5 minutes. Phosphate and stabilized-spinel batteries can take a charge in 15-20 minutes.
Essentially every peer-reviewed study on the subject has shown that the energy that goes into building a car is dwarfed by the amount consumed in the vehicle's operating lifetime. 70% coal is a ridiculous number; coal power only makes up half our grid, and since both presidential candidates are promising cap & trade, that number is only going to drop. Electricity generation is not 60% efficient; fuel to AC in coal plants is about 35% in coal plants and about 45% in natural gas plants. The energy required to move coal by train is trivial compared to the energy in it; the US *average* for trains is 436 miles per gallon of diesel per ton of freight (a ton of coal contains 15-30GJ of energy, compared to 45MJ per gallon of diesel). Electric power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficient. Li-ion batteries are nearly lossless. You, like many, left out charger and inverter losses. Chargers are usually 92-93% (rapid chargers, which can charge a battery pack in 5-30 minutes, depending on the type, are more like 90% efficient). Inverter and motor losses combined are usually 85-90% in normal driving conditions.
Lead-acid? What upcoming mass-produced EV/PHEV is calling for lead-acid? Li-ion is the name of the game, and those are usually 96-99% efficient. The average electric transmission efficiency in the US is 92.8%. You didn't include charger losses, usually 92-93%. You didn't include inverter losses, but your motor losses were too extreme; motor and inverter efficiency combined is generally 85-90% in real-world driving conditions. Your number of 40% for the power plant would be high for coal but low for natural gas, so fair enough.
0.4*0.98*0.928*0.925*0.875=29.4% efficiency. Well-to-wheels efficiency on an gasoline ICE vehicle is generally around 14%. Yes, the *engine* on an ICE vehicle isn't that inefficient when operating in peak conditions, but the combination of it rarely running in a peak operating envelope due to variations in torque and rpm needs, plus parasitic engine losses, means that those numbers aren't close to what you get in the real world.
As for ICE efficiency, Toyota says their Prius gasoline engine achieves 40% and Volkswagen determined their 3-cylinder Lupo diesel engines are at 50%.
You're confusing engine efficiency and well-to-wheels efficiency. Heck, even pump to wheels efficiency is a lot lower than engine to wheels due to all of the parasitic losses in a car.
Here's an interesting study comparing the well-to-wheels efficiency of various vehicle types in Norway. Check out the graphs.
As for the "long tailpipe" argument, it's busted here.
That $35-40k number includes risk. For example, even though their accelerated aging testing shows that the battery packs are performing out outstandingly, that number includes an assumed cost of one battery pack replacement in every single Volt, which is a forecast $10k. Ultimately, GM is planning to "subsidize" that cost down some, but one can question how much of a "subsidy" it is when you're making risk assumptions like that.
As many have pointed out to you, a PHEV doesn't need an electric "gas can" because it has a literal gas tank in it and can run on gasoline. But even for a BEV, there are many options if you get stranded in the middle of nowhere. For example, a 25 pound LiP backpack could, in 15-30 minutes, store enough energy to get you to wherever it was that you charged it. And unlike a gasoline car which needs to get specifically to a gas station, which may be dozens of miles away, almost any old farm house will do; in most places, you could fairly easily just push your car to the nearest one. Lastly, there's nothing to stop an equivalent of AAA, for example, from driving up with a high power generator or with a charged pack that they can quickly empty into yours.
But back to plug-in hybrids: no need, as you have a gas tank.
Actually, it's the opposite of what you'd expect. Hybrids stress their packs more than PHEVs, which in turn stress their packs more than BEVs. It comes down to capacity. Hybrids have little packs, PHEVs bigger packs, and BEVs bigger packs still. The more the capacity, the lower the charging/discharging current per cell and the fewer total cycles that cell goes through. That's part of how Tesla can get away with a five year lifespan using some of the least stable cells on the market (conventional small-format li-ion); there are just so many cells that each one is used very gently, even when the car is racing along.
1) The Volt has *always* been an ER-EV by design, not a BEV. They never "proposed something whiz-bang" that was a BEV for the Volt.
2) The Prius gets similar highway and city numbers. So will the Volt. Series and parallel hybrids each have advantages and disadvantages. Direct drive means that there's no battery/generator/inverter/motor losses, but it also means that the engine isn't running at an optimal RPM/torque envelope at all times.
The Volt's battery pack is $10k. The Prius's is $3k. So, an $7k difference. Let's ignore that battery manufacturers are looking at huge price custs as they scale up -- Enerdel, for example, expects their cell costs to get cut in half over the next few years. Let's just stick with $7k. The *average* driver goes 12,000 miles a year. With $4/gal gasoline and assuming 45mpg for the Prius, that's $1066/year. 12,000 miles at 200Wh/mi and $0.10/kWh is $240/year -- a savings of $826/year. This means a payback period of 5.5 years. Factor in interest versus inflation, and you could amortize those costs over 11 years. The battery pack is *warrantied* for 10 years, and should last the life of the vehicle. The average vehicle today lasts about 19 years. Plug-in wins; in this comparison, you spend the same in the first 11 years of ownership, and then you spend less after that. Compare it to a non-hybrid car and it's a blowout.
Now, if you're going to argue, "Hey, I don't plan on keeping my car that long!" Well, that's kind of beside the point. A hummer costs 1.5 times what a Prius does, but it depreciates 3 times as fast. Depreciation is strongly correlated to operations costs. If it costs a lot to run it, its value plummets like a rock, since those looking to save money on a used vehicle don't want to have to blow a lot of money on fuel costs. Now, buying *any* car new is generally going to be a money-losing proposition, but you can expect a car whose fuel costs less than a quarter as much as a Prius to hold its value better than a Prius. Furthermore, we haven't even discussed the "above average driver" case here.
That's not true. The electric motor in the Prius is incapable of driving the car alone except in "NEV" type conditions -- low speeds, low acceleration, etc. Otherwise, it needs gasoline engine assistance. Hence, in "normal" driving, there is no EV-only driving. In Google's experience with a small plug-in Prius fleet, they were averaging about 70mpg, not counting the electricity used. Some people report as high as 100mpg; it'll really depend on your driving style.
This is very different from an ER-EV configuration like the Volt uses, where *only* a powerful electric motor drives the wheels. It gets infinite miles per gallon (electricity only) in the first 40 miles, then switches to charge sustaining mode with the 1.4L gasoline/E85 generator. Such vehicles are far better for the environment than a standard PHEV.
I should point out that Toyota is one of the least bullish companies on EVs/PHEVs. Probably the only one more vocally opposing them is Honda. Pretty much everyone else is moving strongly in the direction of EVs/PHEVs. Check out an incomplete list of upcoming EVs/PHEVs.
Yes. A car like the Volt will use about 200Wh/mi. Your standard NEMA 5-15 wall socket can deliver about 1.6kW. Let's call it 1.5kW after charger losses. That's 9.75kWh, i.e., 50 miles. Assuming it only gets 6.5 hours every night, and there's never any charge left over. Yet, honestly, the current available to a 5-15 is pretty darn weak; it's barely enough to run a hair dryer. Just a washing machine/dryer outlet, which is only 30A, would be able to give such a vehicle about 42kWh in that time -- i.e. 215 miles. And that's not even the most powerful type of outlet in a typical home; a range outlet, for example, is 50A.
Power companies are ecstatic about the idea of EVs and PHEVs, because people can plug them in on a timer and get a charge during a time when the power companies have surplus generation capacity. They get to sell more power without building new facilities; it's a dream come true for them. Even better, in the future, is the idea of a "smart grid", where data is sent over the power lines as to the needs of the grid. You plug in your car, set the dial for how long before you're going to need it to be charged, and your car adjusts the rate it charges at according to the needs of the grid, so long as it ends up with a full charge within your specified time period. The more lenient you are, the less the power companies charge you for the electricity.
Unless you live in an area where the electricity is made from hydro/nuke/solar only. That electricity is made from oil/coal. So not so much savings since oil is still in the equation. Coal is still used in the US at least not sure world wide. I think that are natural gas electricity plants and geo-thermal ones too but I don't have those numbers. Not everywhere can have geo-thermal electric plants.
Oy -- lots to cover with this one.
1) Coal power plants average just under 35% efficiency from fuel to AC. On top of that, add 92.8% transmission efficiency (the average for the US), ~93% charger efficiency, ~95-99.9% battery efficiency, and a 85-90% electric drivetrain efficiency Gasoline engines, after all of the parasitic losses, average about 20% efficiency from gasoline to wheel torque. Let's assume the energy required to produce gasoline is the same as to produce coal (it's not; coal takes far less energy to produce than oil, but I don't want to have to dig up the numbers)..35*.928*.93*.98*.87=25%. Even coal electricity wins; yet it only makes up half of our power generation. The net change of everyone going electric with our grid's spare capacity would be a ~40% reduction in CO2 emissions, little change in NOx or SOx emissions, an increase in particulate matter, and the near elimination of VOCs and CO emissions. Don't take my word for it; take the DOE's.
2) Oil generates only a trivial percentage of our nation's electricity. Oil is way too expensive to waste that way in most circumstances. By contrast, coal is literally dirt cheap; some of the coal out west only costs $10-$15 per *ton*. The only state that gets a significant percentage of its power from oil is Hawaii.
3) Natural gas, nuclear, and hydro make up most of the rest of our power generation mix after coal. Natural gas is lower carbon, cleaner burning, and more efficient burning than coal. Nuclear is nearly CO2-free across its entire (not completely because of mining, processing, plant construction, plant decomission, etc but the contributions from those stages are dwarfed by the energy produced by the plant over its lifespan). Hydro varies. You have the contribution of greenhouse gasses from its construction, but the bigger issue is often anoxic decomposition in the reservoir creating methane instead of CO2. In a few cases, it can actually be worse than coal (although methane has a shorter atmospheric residency than CO2). Solar and wind are currently a small part of our grid, but their costs (especially solar's) are falling incredibly fast. The biggest issues with them are their intermittent nature. High altitude wind helps address this. Other renewables techs include wave, tidal, ocean thermal, ocean current, vortex generation (a solar thermal variant), and dozens of others.
4) Actually, you can do geothermal almost anywhere. All that changes is how deep you have to drill, and thus the cost. EGS is an interesting new technology that enables this. Normally for geothermal power you need an existing reservoir -- water, fractured rock, etc. EGS uses techniques developed by the oil industry to fracture the rock, and then they inject (and circulate) either water or a gas as the working fluid.
I wasn't talking about Li-Po. I was talking about two different techs -- lithium iron phosphate and the stabilized manganese-nickel (or other) spinels. These are both cathode techs, not anode; they're both paired with graphite anodes. Example manufacturers of each are A123 and LG Chem. Power densities are generally around 3kW/kg, much higher than traditional li-ion. Energy density is usually 90-110Wh/kg for cells, less for packs -- lower than traditional li-ion's ~160Wh/kg. Neither are subject to overheating, and can be abused to heck and back, including 100% DoD cycles. Both can be charged in 15-20 minutes and discharged in under 10. Both take many thousands of cycles to reach a 20% loss of capacity even at high charge rates, assuming a modicum of climate control on the pack.
Do note that this is 50Wh/kg small format. I'd expect them to get around the same ~70Wh/kg in large format that AltairNano gets. It's the same basic chemistry after all.
SCiB *is* titanate. As for what you have available, that depends on what you're buying. For laptops, yeah, I'm not aware of any alternative-tech li-ion packs. But if you're just buying cells, you can readily get phosphate and spinel cells. Better energy density than the titanates, and while not as ridiculously stable, they still blow conventional li-ion out of the water.
This is basically the same technology AltairNano uses -- a traditional LiCoO2 cathode and a nanotitanate cathode replacing the traditional graphite one. In large format, you get 70-80Wh/kg. It's a little better than NiMH in that regard, but not much. It's also a lot more expensive (AltairNano's are $2/Wh; hopefully a heavy hitter like Toshiba can bring prices down). Where the chemistry shines is everything else. It's incredibly stable, rapid charges, handles a very wide range of operating temperatures, has a ridiculously high power density (~5 kW/kg), fire resistant, highly efficient, and so on down the line.
It's one of a variety of relatively new, commercially available li-ion chemistries, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. When you hear of lithium ion battery packs in electric vehicles, with the exception of Tesla, they're usually these new chemistries, not traditional LiCoO2/graphite cells. The next-gen chemistries look even more impressive, but we'll have to wait for them;)
24V * 4.2Ah = 100.8Wh Assuming 80% charger efficiency, you need to draw 126Wh. Wall current is usually something like 117V (varies), meaning you need to draw ~1.1Ah ~1.077Ah in 10 minutes is 6 1/2A. A wall socket supports 15A.
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No I'm not. I clearly stated the ENGINE's efficiency. I knew exactly what I was saying.
Then you were trying to distort the picture. You won't actually get those numbers driving a car in the real world, so mentioning them without pointing that out is going to mislead readers.
As for well-to-wheel efficiency, the GREET model shows no real difference between a hybrid gasoline-electric versus pure-electric car.
Um, what? And that's a lot more pessimstic than I've seen in some studies. Their most recent associated paper doesn't even cover li-ion batteries, which are far more efficient than PbA and NiMH -- yet li-ion are essentially the standard for new mass-produced EVs.
Furthermore, to top it all off, look at the direction things are trending. An increasing percentage of oil is being forced to come from syncrude. The future of oil isn't light, sweet saudi crude -- it's ultra-heavy crude, sour crude, bitumen, shale, coal liquefaction, etc. These are far dirtier and far more energy wasteful from well to pump. Electricity, on the other hand, is going in the opposite direction. Power plant efficiencies continue to rise, and the growing demand for cap and trade is eventually going to push coal (or at least non-"clean coal") out of the mix. Wind power prices and solar prices have plummetted in the past decade. Wind is now cost-competitive with coal in some areas, and solar should be there soon. CIGS/CIS solar could potentially become cheaper than coal even in Alaska. EGS is opening up a whole new front of baseload power. And on and on down the line.
In short, the trend is oil getting worse while electricity gets better.
It's hard not to talk down when you're making such elementary mistakes. For example, calling the Lupo a "~90mpg vehicle". Let us count the ways that's wrong:
1) That's per *Imperial* gallon, not US gallon. It's 78mpg per US gallon.
2) That's on the *NEDC*, not the revised EPA drivecycle. The NEDC uses lower accelerations and speeds. EPA ratings of equivalent vehicles generally get about 15% worse mileage than NEDC, so drop that to 68mpg.
3) That's *diesel*, not gasoline for which most Americans are most familiar with mpg figures. Diesel is, quite simply, a 15% denser fuel than gasoline. Per *unit mass* (i.e., per amount of petroleum or per unit CO2 pollution), that drops you down to 59mpg equivalent.
4) Not an equivalent car. You may argue that it's a "5 seater". Sure, if you can manage to cram five people into that thing. It's also underpowered, taking almost 13 seconds to do 0-60 (instead of 10 for a (much larger) Prius and 8 for the EV1). You can make almost any gasoline or diesel vehicle get better mileage by slashing its power output.
5) The Lupo swapped steel components for aluminum and magnesium ones. Directly, without replacing reinforcement. Sure, you can make any car get better mileage by reducing its crashworthiness. Not to mention the expense of aluminum and magnesium.
The VW 1L car plays even more sleight of hand. In addition to the above:
1) It's not even on the NEDC like the Lupo; that number is for a *steady state 45mph*. Let me tell you, I can drive a 12 year old Saturn SL1, whose mpg rating when *new* would only be about 30mpg, at a steady state 45mph and get 45-50mpg or so. If you want an excellent way to BS your mileage figures, you've got one right there. In my personal opinion, the only commonly used way to BS mpg figures that's even more dishonest than that is what some PHEVs do where they assume you'll use electricity for X percent of your miles, then ignore the electricity in the mpg calculations.
2) They threw out even the most basic creature comforts like AC to get it as light as they did.
3) Even *the frame* is made out of magnesium. Magnesium makes aluminum look like steel in terms of strength. Again, if you want to throw safety out the door, you can lighten a car to almost nothing and then cheer its ridiculous numbers. They do use carbon fibre, which has a great strength to weight ratio, but only a tiny amount of it, and is no substitute for having a proper frame underneath.
You might as well cheer the 1000-mpg eco-racers while you're at it.
Don't come on here and expect me not to call you out on it when you act like the energy used to build a car is somehow comparable to the energy used in its operation. Don't expect me not to call you on it when you post ridiculous efficiency figures or act like it takes a proportionally significant amount of energy to haul bulk freight on rails. If you want to play up your credentials, *show them* by what you write.
Are you kidding? Electric utilities *love*, *love*, *love* the concept of electric cars. They were among its biggest proponents back in the 90s CARB ZEV mandate era. When Kris Trexler organized his "Charge Across America" cross-country EV1 trip, utilities went out of their way to put chargers in the middle of nowhere in the desert for him.
For one, charging, period, creates more business for them. If our nation were to go completely electric, that'd be a *lot* more business. Even better, it's mostly off-peak charging. This means that they get to utilize their spare nighttime capacity, earning profit for little extra cost. Lastly is the potential for "smart charging", where vehicles ramp the rate that they charge up and down based on the needs of the grid. It's like a dream come true for an electric utility.
No, the problems with exchanging batteries are standardization. It's trying to lock people in to a moving target. Does anyone remember the laptops of just 10-15 years ago? Notice how different our batteries are from back then? What about the cell phones from that era? Yet batteries are changing even faster now than they were back then. To force standardization would be to lock the tech in at a single point in time, which would be a death knell for electrified transportation.
Far better is rapid charging. It's here today and it works. They've been doing it on Oahu for years.
My nightmare is having an electric car during and evacuation for a hurricane
You do realize that gas stations need a sizable amount of three-phase power to run the pumps, right? Not as much as you'd need for a charging station, to be sure, but gas stations all across the Houston area stopped working after Ike. My sister had to drive 90 minutes to Katy to find a functioning gas station, and then wait in a huge line there. *On the other hand*, power losses were spotty; my grandmother's old house had power back up just 1 day after the storm (my parents' house took until the weekend before last).
You are mistaken. There's *already* a network of 60kW Aerovironment PosiCharge rapid chargers around Oahu, and Aerovironment makes them as powerful as 250kW. That's not "four hours"; that's minutes. Titanate batteries can take a charge in 5 minutes. Phosphate and stabilized-spinel batteries can take a charge in 15-20 minutes.
Essentially every peer-reviewed study on the subject has shown that the energy that goes into building a car is dwarfed by the amount consumed in the vehicle's operating lifetime. 70% coal is a ridiculous number; coal power only makes up half our grid, and since both presidential candidates are promising cap & trade, that number is only going to drop. Electricity generation is not 60% efficient; fuel to AC in coal plants is about 35% in coal plants and about 45% in natural gas plants. The energy required to move coal by train is trivial compared to the energy in it; the US *average* for trains is 436 miles per gallon of diesel per ton of freight (a ton of coal contains 15-30GJ of energy, compared to 45MJ per gallon of diesel). Electric power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficient. Li-ion batteries are nearly lossless. You, like many, left out charger and inverter losses. Chargers are usually 92-93% (rapid chargers, which can charge a battery pack in 5-30 minutes, depending on the type, are more like 90% efficient). Inverter and motor losses combined are usually 85-90% in normal driving conditions.
Lead-acid? What upcoming mass-produced EV/PHEV is calling for lead-acid? Li-ion is the name of the game, and those are usually 96-99% efficient. The average electric transmission efficiency in the US is 92.8%. You didn't include charger losses, usually 92-93%. You didn't include inverter losses, but your motor losses were too extreme; motor and inverter efficiency combined is generally 85-90% in real-world driving conditions. Your number of 40% for the power plant would be high for coal but low for natural gas, so fair enough.
0.4*0.98*0.928*0.925*0.875=29.4% efficiency. Well-to-wheels efficiency on an gasoline ICE vehicle is generally around 14%. Yes, the *engine* on an ICE vehicle isn't that inefficient when operating in peak conditions, but the combination of it rarely running in a peak operating envelope due to variations in torque and rpm needs, plus parasitic engine losses, means that those numbers aren't close to what you get in the real world.
As for ICE efficiency, Toyota says their Prius gasoline engine achieves 40% and Volkswagen determined their 3-cylinder Lupo diesel engines are at 50%.
You're confusing engine efficiency and well-to-wheels efficiency. Heck, even pump to wheels efficiency is a lot lower than engine to wheels due to all of the parasitic losses in a car.
Here's an interesting study comparing the well-to-wheels efficiency of various vehicle types in Norway. Check out the graphs.
As for the "long tailpipe" argument, it's busted here.
Erm, *8.5* years, not *5.5*. :P
That $35-40k number includes risk. For example, even though their accelerated aging testing shows that the battery packs are performing out outstandingly, that number includes an assumed cost of one battery pack replacement in every single Volt, which is a forecast $10k. Ultimately, GM is planning to "subsidize" that cost down some, but one can question how much of a "subsidy" it is when you're making risk assumptions like that.
As many have pointed out to you, a PHEV doesn't need an electric "gas can" because it has a literal gas tank in it and can run on gasoline. But even for a BEV, there are many options if you get stranded in the middle of nowhere. For example, a 25 pound LiP backpack could, in 15-30 minutes, store enough energy to get you to wherever it was that you charged it. And unlike a gasoline car which needs to get specifically to a gas station, which may be dozens of miles away, almost any old farm house will do; in most places, you could fairly easily just push your car to the nearest one. Lastly, there's nothing to stop an equivalent of AAA, for example, from driving up with a high power generator or with a charged pack that they can quickly empty into yours.
But back to plug-in hybrids: no need, as you have a gas tank.
Actually, it's the opposite of what you'd expect. Hybrids stress their packs more than PHEVs, which in turn stress their packs more than BEVs. It comes down to capacity. Hybrids have little packs, PHEVs bigger packs, and BEVs bigger packs still. The more the capacity, the lower the charging/discharging current per cell and the fewer total cycles that cell goes through. That's part of how Tesla can get away with a five year lifespan using some of the least stable cells on the market (conventional small-format li-ion); there are just so many cells that each one is used very gently, even when the car is racing along.
What are you talking about?
1) The Volt has *always* been an ER-EV by design, not a BEV. They never "proposed something whiz-bang" that was a BEV for the Volt.
2) The Prius gets similar highway and city numbers. So will the Volt. Series and parallel hybrids each have advantages and disadvantages. Direct drive means that there's no battery/generator/inverter/motor losses, but it also means that the engine isn't running at an optimal RPM/torque envelope at all times.
The Volt's battery pack is $10k. The Prius's is $3k. So, an $7k difference. Let's ignore that battery manufacturers are looking at huge price custs as they scale up -- Enerdel, for example, expects their cell costs to get cut in half over the next few years. Let's just stick with $7k. The *average* driver goes 12,000 miles a year. With $4/gal gasoline and assuming 45mpg for the Prius, that's $1066/year. 12,000 miles at 200Wh/mi and $0.10/kWh is $240/year -- a savings of $826/year. This means a payback period of 5.5 years. Factor in interest versus inflation, and you could amortize those costs over 11 years. The battery pack is *warrantied* for 10 years, and should last the life of the vehicle. The average vehicle today lasts about 19 years. Plug-in wins; in this comparison, you spend the same in the first 11 years of ownership, and then you spend less after that. Compare it to a non-hybrid car and it's a blowout.
Now, if you're going to argue, "Hey, I don't plan on keeping my car that long!" Well, that's kind of beside the point. A hummer costs 1.5 times what a Prius does, but it depreciates 3 times as fast. Depreciation is strongly correlated to operations costs. If it costs a lot to run it, its value plummets like a rock, since those looking to save money on a used vehicle don't want to have to blow a lot of money on fuel costs. Now, buying *any* car new is generally going to be a money-losing proposition, but you can expect a car whose fuel costs less than a quarter as much as a Prius to hold its value better than a Prius. Furthermore, we haven't even discussed the "above average driver" case here.
That's not true. The electric motor in the Prius is incapable of driving the car alone except in "NEV" type conditions -- low speeds, low acceleration, etc. Otherwise, it needs gasoline engine assistance. Hence, in "normal" driving, there is no EV-only driving. In Google's experience with a small plug-in Prius fleet, they were averaging about 70mpg, not counting the electricity used. Some people report as high as 100mpg; it'll really depend on your driving style.
This is very different from an ER-EV configuration like the Volt uses, where *only* a powerful electric motor drives the wheels. It gets infinite miles per gallon (electricity only) in the first 40 miles, then switches to charge sustaining mode with the 1.4L gasoline/E85 generator. Such vehicles are far better for the environment than a standard PHEV.
I should point out that Toyota is one of the least bullish companies on EVs/PHEVs. Probably the only one more vocally opposing them is Honda. Pretty much everyone else is moving strongly in the direction of EVs/PHEVs. Check out an incomplete list of upcoming EVs/PHEVs.
Yes. A car like the Volt will use about 200Wh/mi. Your standard NEMA 5-15 wall socket can deliver about 1.6kW. Let's call it 1.5kW after charger losses. That's 9.75kWh, i.e., 50 miles. Assuming it only gets 6.5 hours every night, and there's never any charge left over. Yet, honestly, the current available to a 5-15 is pretty darn weak; it's barely enough to run a hair dryer. Just a washing machine/dryer outlet, which is only 30A, would be able to give such a vehicle about 42kWh in that time -- i.e. 215 miles. And that's not even the most powerful type of outlet in a typical home; a range outlet, for example, is 50A.
Power companies are ecstatic about the idea of EVs and PHEVs, because people can plug them in on a timer and get a charge during a time when the power companies have surplus generation capacity. They get to sell more power without building new facilities; it's a dream come true for them. Even better, in the future, is the idea of a "smart grid", where data is sent over the power lines as to the needs of the grid. You plug in your car, set the dial for how long before you're going to need it to be charged, and your car adjusts the rate it charges at according to the needs of the grid, so long as it ends up with a full charge within your specified time period. The more lenient you are, the less the power companies charge you for the electricity.
Unless you live in an area where the electricity is made from hydro/nuke/solar only. That electricity is made from oil/coal. So not so much savings since oil is still in the equation. Coal is still used in the US at least not sure world wide. I think that are natural gas electricity plants and geo-thermal ones too but I don't have those numbers. Not everywhere can have geo-thermal electric plants.
Oy -- lots to cover with this one.
1) Coal power plants average just under 35% efficiency from fuel to AC. On top of that, add 92.8% transmission efficiency (the average for the US), ~93% charger efficiency, ~95-99.9% battery efficiency, and a 85-90% electric drivetrain efficiency Gasoline engines, after all of the parasitic losses, average about 20% efficiency from gasoline to wheel torque. Let's assume the energy required to produce gasoline is the same as to produce coal (it's not; coal takes far less energy to produce than oil, but I don't want to have to dig up the numbers). .35*.928*.93*.98*.87=25%. Even coal electricity wins; yet it only makes up half of our power generation. The net change of everyone going electric with our grid's spare capacity would be a ~40% reduction in CO2 emissions, little change in NOx or SOx emissions, an increase in particulate matter, and the near elimination of VOCs and CO emissions. Don't take my word for it; take the DOE's.
2) Oil generates only a trivial percentage of our nation's electricity. Oil is way too expensive to waste that way in most circumstances. By contrast, coal is literally dirt cheap; some of the coal out west only costs $10-$15 per *ton*. The only state that gets a significant percentage of its power from oil is Hawaii.
3) Natural gas, nuclear, and hydro make up most of the rest of our power generation mix after coal. Natural gas is lower carbon, cleaner burning, and more efficient burning than coal. Nuclear is nearly CO2-free across its entire (not completely because of mining, processing, plant construction, plant decomission, etc but the contributions from those stages are dwarfed by the energy produced by the plant over its lifespan). Hydro varies. You have the contribution of greenhouse gasses from its construction, but the bigger issue is often anoxic decomposition in the reservoir creating methane instead of CO2. In a few cases, it can actually be worse than coal (although methane has a shorter atmospheric residency than CO2). Solar and wind are currently a small part of our grid, but their costs (especially solar's) are falling incredibly fast. The biggest issues with them are their intermittent nature. High altitude wind helps address this. Other renewables techs include wave, tidal, ocean thermal, ocean current, vortex generation (a solar thermal variant), and dozens of others.
4) Actually, you can do geothermal almost anywhere. All that changes is how deep you have to drill, and thus the cost. EGS is an interesting new technology that enables this. Normally for geothermal power you need an existing reservoir -- water, fractured rock, etc. EGS uses techniques developed by the oil industry to fracture the rock, and then they inject (and circulate) either water or a gas as the working fluid.
"How Do I Talk To 4th Graders About IT?"
Pretty simple. Just tell them to avoid clowns outside of circus, parade, and birthday-party contexts, and to never follow one into a sewer.
I wasn't talking about Li-Po. I was talking about two different techs -- lithium iron phosphate and the stabilized manganese-nickel (or other) spinels. These are both cathode techs, not anode; they're both paired with graphite anodes. Example manufacturers of each are A123 and LG Chem. Power densities are generally around 3kW/kg, much higher than traditional li-ion. Energy density is usually 90-110Wh/kg for cells, less for packs -- lower than traditional li-ion's ~160Wh/kg. Neither are subject to overheating, and can be abused to heck and back, including 100% DoD cycles. Both can be charged in 15-20 minutes and discharged in under 10. Both take many thousands of cycles to reach a 20% loss of capacity even at high charge rates, assuming a modicum of climate control on the pack.
Do note that this is 50Wh/kg small format. I'd expect them to get around the same ~70Wh/kg in large format that AltairNano gets. It's the same basic chemistry after all.
They're limited by both. And any numbers or stats you've seen for "li-ion" are only applicable to traditional, LiCoO2+graphite cells.
SCiB *is* titanate. As for what you have available, that depends on what you're buying. For laptops, yeah, I'm not aware of any alternative-tech li-ion packs. But if you're just buying cells, you can readily get phosphate and spinel cells. Better energy density than the titanates, and while not as ridiculously stable, they still blow conventional li-ion out of the water.
This is basically the same technology AltairNano uses -- a traditional LiCoO2 cathode and a nanotitanate cathode replacing the traditional graphite one. In large format, you get 70-80Wh/kg. It's a little better than NiMH in that regard, but not much. It's also a lot more expensive (AltairNano's are $2/Wh; hopefully a heavy hitter like Toshiba can bring prices down). Where the chemistry shines is everything else. It's incredibly stable, rapid charges, handles a very wide range of operating temperatures, has a ridiculously high power density (~5 kW/kg), fire resistant, highly efficient, and so on down the line.
It's one of a variety of relatively new, commercially available li-ion chemistries, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. When you hear of lithium ion battery packs in electric vehicles, with the exception of Tesla, they're usually these new chemistries, not traditional LiCoO2/graphite cells. The next-gen chemistries look even more impressive, but we'll have to wait for them ;)
24V * 4.2Ah = 100.8Wh
Assuming 80% charger efficiency, you need to draw 126Wh.
Wall current is usually something like 117V (varies), meaning you need to draw ~1.1Ah
~1.077Ah in 10 minutes is 6 1/2A.
A wall socket supports 15A.