I suspect fast chargers need high-voltage power lines, so they are most definitively not to be everywhere.
You suspect wrong. They use internal batteries to store up charge. They generally either take 240V or 3-phase.
As for solar panels, they are overrated.
They most definitely are not, especially in remote areas (as in my example). I'm planning an EV trip through the most remote parts of the desert southwest, and you wouldn't believe all the places that have switched over from diesel generators to solar panels. Hotels, radio towers, ranger stations, landfills, etc. If you're in the desert southwest and the grid doesn't reach you, solar is probably the *cheapest* option. Yet, solar is only getting cheaper. Current panels average almost $5/W. About a dozen different CIGS manufacturers, each using a different production method, are promising ~$1/W. The odds of all of them failing are approximately zero. $1/W is cheaper than coal in Alaska.
Try doing the math for how many panels you need to charge a car
Easy. Let's take an Aptera Typ-1e (10kWh). If this is a "patch of dirt" in the middle of Utah (as described), where someone comes up to seldomly (say, 2 cars a day), assuming ~12 hours of sunlight a day, that's a demand for 1.7kW. Factoring in charger efficiency (~90%), that's ~1.9kW demand. Let's assume a derate factor of 0.8; that means you need a nameplate panel rating of ~2.4kW if the panels are mounted on a heliostat (~12 square meters). Using current panel prices, not future (cheap) prices, that's ~$12k plus the price of the heliostat, mountings, and inverter. Let's say $17k total. Let's say that it lasts for a mere 10 years (should last many times longer); that's $1.7k a year. Two vehicles a day, that's 730 vehicles -- $2.32 a charge for 120 miles (the price equivalence of 200mpg, given $4/gal gasoline). Feel free to size the array up all you want; it's still ridiculously cheap. And remember -- we're assuming it only lasts 10 years.
(Yes, you could make this more complicated by factoring in interest, inflation, calculating IRR, etc; I'm lazy, but I'll do it if you want)
Just so you know -- you'll never win on a price comparison between electricity, even expensive sources of electricity, and gasoline. Electricity is dirt cheap.
it is not that simple. The increase of going from a 1 minute stopover to a 15 minute stopover means that you'll need 15 times the real estate that is in use for current filling stations.
It's not *that* simple. With EVs, you don't usually charge on the road; most of your miles come from plugging in at home; you start each day with a full "tank". Only those going on long trips ever need to fast charge. Furthermore, since there's no centralized underground "tank", nor any risk of spills of flammable liquids, nor a need for managing liquids deliveries or any other such overhead, fast chargers can be installed literally anywhere -- the corner coffee shop, your driveway, a solar panel array on a plot of dirt in the middle of the Utah desert, etc. Anyone who wants to make a buck and has a parking space can add one to that parking space.
Not. First off, most people want to move off fossil fuels, not just switch which one they're using -- and landfill methane isn't exactly a massive source as an alternative. If your methane is to come through biomass decay, it's the biofuels problem but several times worse. If your plan is to make it via Fischer-Tropsch or Sabatier processes, heck, you might as well just make gasoline that way. Big energy waste either way.
Then let's look at the fuel cell. Fuel cells work by moving protons (hydrogen) across a membrane. So, either way, you're still going to need nafion and a hydrogen catalyst (platinum, paladium, etc). But hey, let's just go back to efficiency;) There's no reason to expect this *more* complex reaction to run more efficiently. But let's just say it does. The cell itself is still only a portion of the losses of in a fuel cell stack. Other losses -- "parasitic losses"-- include things like compressors, pumps, and heaters. In a hydrogen fuel cell stack, the fuel cell itself may be capable of getting 60-70% efficiency in optimal conditions, but in an FCV, a full stack (losses included) will generally get 30-40% efficiency in a normal drivecycle.
And what of Obama's support for illegal wiretapping indemnity?!?
Right! As you so astutely observe, there's absolutely no difference between caving in to an authoritarian policy when under intense political pressure and drafting said policies with the plan of getting them passed via creating said political pressure.
An $100k car isn't an option for the average family.
Which is why I immediately proceeded to talk about the low end.
Tesla has optimized for speed and range at the expense of interior volume
Tesla is a sports car -- is based on a sports car, designed like a sports car, and has space like a sports car. Sports cars are not family sedans.
The other 4 you mention are at the prototype stage, i.e. mostly vaporware.
Tesla's the only modern EV being shipped right now, but the others are hardly *vaporware*. There are whole factories being tooled as we speak for them. The MiEV is already in fleet testing in Japan. And this is just a tiny fraction of the EVs hitting the streets in the next couple years. If you want, I could list at least two dozen highway-speed BEVs and PHEVs, most from major automakers, and most low-end ($20-35k). Almost every major automaker has at least one. And, "other four"? You're counting the Wrightspeed X1 as a low-end piece of vaporware? Sorry, but the X1 most definitely exists, and it's higher-end than a Tesla (it's only a touch slower than a Bugatti Veyron). Its mass-produced variant isn't on the market yet, though.
and battery technology will need to go through at least another doubling of energy storage density and a factor of four in reduction of charge time before an all electric vehicle will be a real contender.
I disagree; I think we're there now. Example: I'm getting an Aptera Typ-1e. While I don't believe they're planning to support fast charging off the bat, I also know that the type of batteries that it uses are quite capable of it (lithium phosphate). If I were to add an appropriate port and import one to Oahu, which *already* has a network of 60kW PosiCharge chargers, I'd be able to fill it from dead to full in 15 minutes. And as for the more range part, it has 120 miles range, which is about two hours of driving. You're supposed to take a break every two hours of driving anyways, for safety reasons. And as for price, it's $27k, which is quite affordable, and well worth it when you consider the maintenance and energy cost savings in the long term. So, from my perspective, the pieces of the puzzle are already here. There's still a lot of room for improvement, mind you -- more range isn't a *bad* thing, and I think sticker shock on even $27k would keep many people away; plus, the continental US could use a fast charge network (thankfully, fast chargers don't cost any more than a gas pump, you can install them virtually anywhere, and you don't need many EVs on the road to make them economical to operate). But the tech has arrived. All that's needed for mass adoption are the incremental improvements -- mass production of automotive li-ions bringing their costs down, the new anode and cathode materials making their way into cells, and the early adopters that start hitting the road to pave the way for a fast charging network.
Of course, this is discussing BEVs and ignoring the interim alternatives -- 1) PHEVs, and 2) BEVs with range-extending trailers.
You know, you're not *supposed* to drive for 6 hours nonstop; it's not considered safe to drive for such long periods without a break. The general recommendation I've found when researching driver safety is every two hours (the length of the recommended breaks I've seen varies -- 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, etc).
Guess what? L3 chargers, such as the Aerovironment PosiCharge ones, can fast-charge an ev battery pack in that length of time, and modern automotive li-ion batteries, such as the phosphates, titanates, and stabilized spinels, can take it that fast.
Batteries are space-inefficient and don't provide enough power to make a fast car that has a decent range.
Wow... have you never heard of, like, half of the high-end EVs that are either already on the market or coming out in the next year or two? In Teslas, I've heard of them playing tricks on prospective customers such as asking them to change the radio station right before they slam on the accelerator to show how hard it is to reach forward when it's accelerating at full blast. I heard one person describe the acceleration on the Wrightspeed X1 as like being shot out of a cannon. And 200 miles, give or take in either direction, isn't "decent range"?
If you're talking lower-end li-ion EVs or PHEVs, at best I can give you "perhaps", and even then, only on the range issue (and even that, only until we get some serious volume on the automotive types of li-ions... the new microwave technique for rapidly producing LiP cathodes should probably do the trick). There's nothing lacking (although nothing *overly* impressive) about the performance of, say, the Aptera Typ-1 or the Mitsubishi MiEV, and the Chevrolet Volt is actually kind of sporty.
[quote]Horsepower is only useful to a very limited number of people, most of those are in the agricultural business and they'll use diesel for its torque long before they'll go and spend a lot of $ on high octane fuel to avoid looking 'wimpy'.[/quote]
The funny thing is that the modern li-ion EVs generally aren't wimpy at all. They're actually generally quite torquey, even the lower end ones, especially at low speeds. Battery power used to be a limiting factor, but with phosphates giving you ~2.5kW/kg, titanates ~4kW/kg, and so on (contrast with ~200W/kg for lead-acid), you really have more power available to you than you often know what to do with. One of my favorite things about EVs is that increasing the horsepower can actually *improve* range. Compare Tesla Drivetrain 1 to Drivetrain 1.5. For more peak power, you need fatter conductors, which means less energy dissipated as heat when you're demanding the same amount of output from the motor.
Now, one real issue with EVs is that, especially on the lower end of the price range, they're often very streamlined and/or have a very small frontal area. This allows them to use a smaller battery pack to get the same range, and thus save money. While some people (myself included) *love* hyperstreamlined looks, others hate them. Check out the range of reactions to the looks of the Aptera Typ-1, for example. By looking something like a cross between a dolphin and an airplane, it gets ~120 miles out of a 10kWh pack (contrast with ~230 miles from a 56kWh pack in the Tesla) -- and by keeping the pack that small, it can charge faster and sell for cheaper even without proper mass-production of the cells. To some people, it's a thing of beauty, like right out of sci-fi. To others, it's a hideous eyesore, like a Prius got beat with an ugly stick. To those people, all I can say is that style trends change. The crowd that grew up on Model Ts thought that the Airflow was hideous for using things like a raked windshield, curvy body, and tapered rear.;) Here's what their competition looked like.
Fuel cells are not "a good thing". They're an incredibly expensive boondoggle that's been leaching money from electric vehicles. Let's compare and contrast FCVs with BEVs that use modern automotive li-ions (phosphates, stabilized spinels, titanates, etc).
They're roughly a third the efficiency of EVs. Even if you use cleantech to create the hydrogen, you're still talking three times the coastline covered in wind turbines, three times the desert land covered in solar, three times the rivers dammed for hydro, etc -- not good. Even if your electrolysis was near lossless, as a couple techs in the lab are proposing to do, they're still nearly twice as wasteful as EVs. Even hydrogen from natural gas reformation compared to EVs powered by natural gas power plants is *still* significantly more wasteful for fuel cells ((25% efficiency versus 35%).
Hydrogen is expensive; electricity is dirt cheap. Hydrogen is fundamentally always going to be more expensive because it's such a PITA to handle -- leaks through practically anything, embrittles metals, is corrosive, etc -- and not to mention, poses safety and environmental risks.
Safety? Autmotive li-ions can be abused to heck and back without starting a fire -- discharged to 0V, overcharged, punctured, etc; the electrolyte is generally flammable, but no moreso than gasoline. Hydrogen is an incredibly combustible substance -- burns in almost any fuel air mixture, very vigorously, with a very pale blue, hard to see flame; rapidly evolves deflagrations into detonations in atmospheric conditions; pools under overhangs; can be ignited with less than a tenth the ignition energy of gasoline; enters pipes and tubes and follows them to their destinations, pooling there; etc. Liquid hydrogen is even worse; it acts like a high explosive. Check out NASA's safety guidelines for dealing with hydrogen to get an idea of how much of a pain it is to handle.
Fuel cells are ridiculously expensive. Here, go shopping. A good chunk of that price is due to the price of platinum, one of the rarest elements on the planet, although things like Nafion membranes don't help the price, either. Getting fuel cells for $10/W would be an outstanding price. Your average car will need ~10kW to maintain highway speeds, and more for accel/decel, so you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Automotive li-ions, except for the titanates, are usually a little over $0.50/Wh in bulk, and are projected to significantly decline with mass production, since they're not raw materials costs limited. A couple tens of kilowatts (a couple hours of driving at highway speeds) means $10-20k currently, and significantly less in the near future. And to top it all off, the batteries last longer, too. Nafion membranes tend to wear out over time in fuel cells, giving them around five years or so in typical FCV usage (some techs are proposed to raise that). And there are other components to break, too -- fuel cells have moving parts (compressors, pumps, etc), support parts (heaters, etc), and so on. Automotive li-ions will generally last for thousands to even tens of thousands (in the case of the titanates) of cycles. We're talking decades. To give an idea of how durable they are, the Volt is going to come with a 10 year warranty on its battery pack, and all of the other upcoming EV/PHEV makers are similarly talking about very long warranties. They should last the life of the car.
As for range, it's roughly a draw. 200-250 miles is a typical range for a FCV that costs hundreds of thous
Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground Designed with mind to send protons around A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance Two beams of protons swing round, through the ring they ride Til in the hearts of the detectors, theyre made to collide And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room Becomes mass, particles created from the vacuum And then
LHCb sees where the antimatters gone ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind Theyre looking for whatever new particles they can find. The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.
Come on, let's drop some particle physics in the club!
If you're going with Tesla's motor, you'd probably be best off going with their inverter/charger as well, too (they do reductive charging, so it's one system for both). If not... hmm. Manzanita Micro makes a good 50A charger, although they don't go up to 80A. Not sure what'd be best for currents that high.
What's your budget?:) If you've got money to spare, I don't think anything out there (with the possible exception of Toshiba's SCiB, which while I haven't found a way to get yet, is supposedly out there) that beats AltairNano's "NanoSafe" titanate cells. But they're pretty darned expensive. If you're on a miserly budget, you can try ThunderSkys; you can get them in small orders for almost as cheap as the big players are getting A123s in bulk. The Valence and A123 cells are probably a good "middle of the road" compromise. The reviews I've seen of A123's cells are probably slightly better than I've seen for Valence's, but both are very well received.
Kudos to you for doing a conversion:) I'm curious -- what drivetrain are you going with (motor, charger, inverter, etc)? I'm getting an Aptera, which uses Azure Dynamics's AC24LS motor and DMOC445 inverter; I've seen Azure hardware used in several very nice conversions, and Azure has responded to all of my requests for more info very quickly (others have reported excellent support from them as well). But there are a lot of good options out there (AC24LS would, IMHO, be too small for a Wrangler, too... if you went Azure, you'd probably want an AC55). Also, what sort of connector are you going to use to plug in? Technically, in the US, you're supposed to go with some kind of Avcon setup, but given that there aren't very many Avcon chargers out there in most places yet, it's not really needed. One setup that I liked was to use either 30A or 50A 240V NEMA locking connectors and then adapters to hook up to different plugs to them -- NEMA 5-15 wall sockets, NEMA 10-30 and 14-30 dryer sockets, NEMA 10-50 and 14-50 range and RV sockets, etc. Are you ditching the transmission? If so, what are you planning to do about parking -- just the emergency brake? If you lost the transmission, unless you added a gearbox, you wouldn't have a parking pawl.
Sorry for all the questions; I just like to see what different people are doing with conversions and how things go:)
1. "even if you loose power on the deal". "Loose power"? I like that phrase; I can picture a mad scientist saying it. "Now, I shall loose power on my enemies!" (I assume you meant "lose power"?)
2. How come nobody is commenting about the elephant in the room -- namely, *how* is she doing this? They have almost zero details in the article. Even "what kind of solar cells are these"? Silicon? CIS? CIGS? CdTe? Organic? Nanoantenna? Come on, how can you omit something so fundamental as that? The first takes solar-grade silicon, the second and third indium, and the fourth tellurium -- not exactly things you can pick up at any corner drug store. The last case was only announced for the first time a couple months ago, and they still had a huge obstacle to overcome (namely, making rectifiers several orders of magnitude smaller than anything done before). Organic cells have been worked on for years, but they tend to be extremely inefficient; if she had figured out a way to make them more efficient, *that* would be the big news.
It'd be much cheaper for Iran to sell their oil and buy *coal*, have that shipped in in bulk, and burn that in their power plants, than to burn the oil. Oil is very expensive per unit energy. And Iran *does* need new power plants; most of its existing plants are old, while its population and power needs are growing rapidly.
Now, this doesn't mean that Iran *doesn't* want to make nuclear weapons. But the concept that there's no reason for Iran to want nuclear power because they could just burn their oil instead is simply erroneous.
If I had to credit Iran's nuclear and space programs to anything, it'd be "covering all the bases while at the same time trying to convince the world that you're not an uneducated, third-world backwater at the same time". National pride and all.
Some companies won't use "automotive grade" batteries, and I know that's exactly the sort of thing they'll use to cut corners and save money
There are only a tiny handful of them that aren't (Tesla being the most notable example). Aptera, GM, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Venture, Nissan, Toyota, and on and on are all using the automotive li-ions.
It's not in the best interest of the automotive companies to promote batteries that last a long time
People aren't going to buy an EV in large numbers that they have to regularly change the batteries on unless they're wealthy enough that it doesn't matter (see Tesla). They generally demand long warranties on the battery packs. GM, for example, is giving a huge 10 year warranty on the Volt's pack.
Now, further down the line, when EVs are more mainstream, I imagine that you're right -- people will cut corners for that lower price point. But for now, it's all about making it more comfortable to make that leap to a different drivetrain, which means long warranties and thus quality parts.
No, they're starting with the exact same (expensive) membrane used in fuel cells -- nafion. They've just taken this membrane and added a manganese-based catalyst to it.
I'm amazed that most people never point out the huge, glaring flaw in this notion of setting up big solar electrolysis plants in the sunny desert southwest. Let's ignore the problems of how corrosive the released hydrogen is to your system, which usually makes solar electrolysis have short lifespans. Let's do the same with the free oxygen. And the water. And let's ignore algae growth, which is a problem in most systems that mess with water. And let's ignore hydrogen embrittlement when it comes to raising storage and transportation costs. And let's ignore how huge hydrogen storage tanks have to be due to its very low density, a fact that makes the prior issue even worse. And let's ignore that it has a ridiculously low ignition energy, burns in almost any fuel-air mix, readily evolves deflagrations to detonations, pools under overhangs, enters pipes and follows them to their destinations, burns clear and vigorously, and so on. And let's ignore that leaked hydrogen destroys ozone. And let's ignore that fuel cell stacks are quite inefficient, and that a fuel cell stack strong enough to power a car will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're talking about *consuming lots of water in a desert* -- enough to power vehicles around the world. What the heck kind of plan is that?
Electricity is our common energy storage and usage medium. Why are we talking about "very low" efficiency, in-the-lab, probably horrible lifespan and very costly hydrogen-solar cells when we could put photovoltaic cells or solar thermal on the same land, get much better effiency from a much cheaper system, transmit the electricity efficiently (92.8% average in the US), rectify it efficiently (~93% charger efficiency), charge/discharge it efficiencly (96%-99.9% in li-ion), and convert that to kinetic energy efficiently (85-90% typical electric motor efficiency in a normal drivecycle), in a vehicle that uses batteries that cost *literally* an order of magnitude less than said fuel cells, can level-3 charge in as little as 5-15 minutes (depending on the type), and have longer lifespans to boot?
The "hydrogen economy" is just a silly concept; nothing about it makes sense in comparison to an EV economy with modern automotive li-ion batteries.
Instead of hydrogen, why not just make more efficient hybrids
Because you're still dependent on gasoline, obviously.
The technology is already there,
Hydraulic hybrids are less developed than even EVs and PHEVs, let alone hybrids.
without the need to worry about recycling the Li batteries in existing hybrids,
1) Existing hybrids use NiMH, not Li-ion (and certainly not Li) 2) Li-ion batteries, depending on the type, are either minimally toxic or nontoxic. NiMH should be recycled, although it's not a travesty if you don't. The types that are really critical to recycle are lead-acid and nickel cadmium.
and they are more efficient
Their regen is more efficient than NiMH regen, but not more efficient than regen with automotive li-ions or supercaps. Furthermore, regen is the *only* benefit they give you. Hybrids aren't all about regen, you know; that is just *one* energy-saving technique that they utilize.
Excuse me? Are you actually suggesting that the same battery chemistry that can't be relied on to power an iPod with greater than 80% capacity after a year and a half is suddenly going to magically become reliable and long-lasting in an automotive setting?
Excuse me, but you're apparently of the impression that automotive li-ions are the same chemistry as those in iPods. They are not. LiP and the stabilized spinels use a completely different cathode. The titanates use a very different anode. These are quite different chemistries. They sacrifice some energy density for extreme stability.
These things have been on the market for years. Just because *YOU* have no experience with them doesn't change this fact. Consumer electronics makers don't care that much about lifespan because consumer electronics on their own don't tend to have very long lifespans. They use conventional li-ion for the higher energy density and because of the more established production lines.
In my experience with batteries, the more complex and newer-fanged the chemistry, the faster it dies.
That's why NiMH lasts longer than PbA, right? FYI, the even the more modern and complex PbA versions, like the carbon foam-backed ones, last longer than the older, simpler ones.
both LiIon and LiPol)
Both of which use LiCoO2 cathodes and graphite anodes. That's a completely different chemistry than the automotive li-ions, so trying to equate them is just silly. You might as well pretend that nickel-iron batteries are the same as nickel-metal-hydride batteries because they both contain nickel. The automotive li-ion batteries still work by moving lithium ions back and forth between the cathode and anode through a membrane, but they vary greatly in the expansion ratios of their electrodes during charge/discharge cycles and how vulnerable they are to plating by metallic lithium -- the things that kill li-ion batteries.
Batteries die, and replacing them several times in the life of a vehicle that has such an otherwise elegant and simple design is a giant glaring flaw.
Jay Leno has a Baker Electric from the early 1900s that still runs on its original nickel-iron batteries. It is simply incorrect that all batteries must die during a reasonable lifespan of a vehicle. It's all about the stability of the chemistry, and the automotive li-ions are extremely stable. They have to sacrifice a third of their energy density to achieve this, but it's well worth it for the application (and they still have a notably higher energy density than NiMH).
Given that modern day hunter gatherers, except in a small number of special circumstances, get most of their calories from plant matter, not meat, why should we expect the situation to have been different for our ancestors? Because we love mental images of them spending all their time hunting big game, rather than the actual situation, where "meat" is usually a small bird, a rodent, or so on?
Even when the prey is big game, it's not nearly like you describe it. Stalking big game on foot generally takes days at best and extreme distances covered.
Nor is it right to treat all wild crops as a poor return on energy expended. For example, cattail pollen, a common food during the right season among natives who lived near where cattails grow, is almost pure protein, and is harvested merely by shaking the heads into a pouch. Doesn't get much easier than that, and often you get some of the "kittens tails" with -- those are edible, too. Cattail tubers are such a high density starch source that they're being investigated as an ethanol feedstock. You can also eat the shoots. I once read about a relative of bindweed (a common garden pest) that has an edible tuber sometimes weighing in at over 40 pounds, most of that starch. Acorns were a staple diet for many native american tribes. A cup of acorn flour has ~500 calories. Takes some work to crack them (dehydrating helps), and you have to leach the tannins, but it can be a ridiculously abundant food source in some areas. In the tropics, edible plants are even more common in large quantities -- coconuts, bananas, etc.
Meat may be the "glamorous" part of hunter-gatherer societies, but it's not where most of the calories usually come from.
You may be shocked to learn that I got my statistic about most hunter gather society energy coming from plants from a book -- "The Third Chimpanzee". Written by an evolutionary biologist who's studied hunter-gatherer societies. Sorry if it offended your dietary sensibilities enough that you felt the need to insult me for mentioning it.
Most calories in hunter-gather societies, at least modern ones, comes from plants -- not meat. Now, one could easily argue that meat added an influx of nutrients that were hard to come by in plant matter, but from a calorie standpoint, it's not usually a big player. We have this mental image of hunter-gatherers going from one big kill to the next, but in the real world, it's mostly the occasional bit of small game mixed in with a lot of fruit, nuts, berries, greens, tubers, grains, and so on.
"what exactly do you think happens inside the cylinders of an gasoline engine? "
I'm going to have to go with, "Carefully engineered vaporization of a gasoline aerosol, mixed with just the right ratio of air, and then pressurized to several times higher than atmospheric pressure to make it react in a way that it never would in normal atmospheric conditions."
Seriously. Gasoline has nothing on hydrogen when it comes to danger. Not even close. And NASA would know; they've used the stuff more than pretty much anyone else on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect fast chargers need high-voltage power lines, so they are most definitively not to be everywhere.
You suspect wrong. They use internal batteries to store up charge. They generally either take 240V or 3-phase.
As for solar panels, they are overrated.
They most definitely are not, especially in remote areas (as in my example). I'm planning an EV trip through the most remote parts of the desert southwest, and you wouldn't believe all the places that have switched over from diesel generators to solar panels. Hotels, radio towers, ranger stations, landfills, etc. If you're in the desert southwest and the grid doesn't reach you, solar is probably the *cheapest* option. Yet, solar is only getting cheaper. Current panels average almost $5/W. About a dozen different CIGS manufacturers, each using a different production method, are promising ~$1/W. The odds of all of them failing are approximately zero. $1/W is cheaper than coal in Alaska.
Try doing the math for how many panels you need to charge a car
Easy. Let's take an Aptera Typ-1e (10kWh). If this is a "patch of dirt" in the middle of Utah (as described), where someone comes up to seldomly (say, 2 cars a day), assuming ~12 hours of sunlight a day, that's a demand for 1.7kW. Factoring in charger efficiency (~90%), that's ~1.9kW demand. Let's assume a derate factor of 0.8; that means you need a nameplate panel rating of ~2.4kW if the panels are mounted on a heliostat (~12 square meters). Using current panel prices, not future (cheap) prices, that's ~$12k plus the price of the heliostat, mountings, and inverter. Let's say $17k total. Let's say that it lasts for a mere 10 years (should last many times longer); that's $1.7k a year. Two vehicles a day, that's 730 vehicles -- $2.32 a charge for 120 miles (the price equivalence of 200mpg, given $4/gal gasoline). Feel free to size the array up all you want; it's still ridiculously cheap. And remember -- we're assuming it only lasts 10 years.
(Yes, you could make this more complicated by factoring in interest, inflation, calculating IRR, etc; I'm lazy, but I'll do it if you want)
Just so you know -- you'll never win on a price comparison between electricity, even expensive sources of electricity, and gasoline. Electricity is dirt cheap.
it is not that simple. The increase of going from a 1 minute stopover to a 15 minute stopover means that you'll need 15 times the real estate that is in use for current filling stations.
It's not *that* simple. With EVs, you don't usually charge on the road; most of your miles come from plugging in at home; you start each day with a full "tank". Only those going on long trips ever need to fast charge. Furthermore, since there's no centralized underground "tank", nor any risk of spills of flammable liquids, nor a need for managing liquids deliveries or any other such overhead, fast chargers can be installed literally anywhere -- the corner coffee shop, your driveway, a solar panel array on a plot of dirt in the middle of the Utah desert, etc. Anyone who wants to make a buck and has a parking space can add one to that parking space.
Not. First off, most people want to move off fossil fuels, not just switch which one they're using -- and landfill methane isn't exactly a massive source as an alternative. If your methane is to come through biomass decay, it's the biofuels problem but several times worse. If your plan is to make it via Fischer-Tropsch or Sabatier processes, heck, you might as well just make gasoline that way. Big energy waste either way.
Then let's look at the fuel cell. Fuel cells work by moving protons (hydrogen) across a membrane. So, either way, you're still going to need nafion and a hydrogen catalyst (platinum, paladium, etc). But hey, let's just go back to efficiency ;) There's no reason to expect this *more* complex reaction to run more efficiently. But let's just say it does. The cell itself is still only a portion of the losses of in a fuel cell stack. Other losses -- "parasitic losses"-- include things like compressors, pumps, and heaters. In a hydrogen fuel cell stack, the fuel cell itself may be capable of getting 60-70% efficiency in optimal conditions, but in an FCV, a full stack (losses included) will generally get 30-40% efficiency in a normal drivecycle.
Boondoggle. Plain and simple.
And what of Obama's support for illegal wiretapping indemnity?!?
Right! As you so astutely observe, there's absolutely no difference between caving in to an authoritarian policy when under intense political pressure and drafting said policies with the plan of getting them passed via creating said political pressure.
An $100k car isn't an option for the average family.
Which is why I immediately proceeded to talk about the low end.
Tesla has optimized for speed and range at the expense of interior volume
Tesla is a sports car -- is based on a sports car, designed like a sports car, and has space like a sports car. Sports cars are not family sedans.
The other 4 you mention are at the prototype stage, i.e. mostly vaporware.
Tesla's the only modern EV being shipped right now, but the others are hardly *vaporware*. There are whole factories being tooled as we speak for them. The MiEV is already in fleet testing in Japan. And this is just a tiny fraction of the EVs hitting the streets in the next couple years. If you want, I could list at least two dozen highway-speed BEVs and PHEVs, most from major automakers, and most low-end ($20-35k). Almost every major automaker has at least one. And, "other four"? You're counting the Wrightspeed X1 as a low-end piece of vaporware? Sorry, but the X1 most definitely exists, and it's higher-end than a Tesla (it's only a touch slower than a Bugatti Veyron). Its mass-produced variant isn't on the market yet, though.
and battery technology will need to go through at least another doubling of energy storage density and a factor of four in reduction of charge time before an all electric vehicle will be a real contender.
I disagree; I think we're there now. Example: I'm getting an Aptera Typ-1e. While I don't believe they're planning to support fast charging off the bat, I also know that the type of batteries that it uses are quite capable of it (lithium phosphate). If I were to add an appropriate port and import one to Oahu, which *already* has a network of 60kW PosiCharge chargers, I'd be able to fill it from dead to full in 15 minutes. And as for the more range part, it has 120 miles range, which is about two hours of driving. You're supposed to take a break every two hours of driving anyways, for safety reasons. And as for price, it's $27k, which is quite affordable, and well worth it when you consider the maintenance and energy cost savings in the long term. So, from my perspective, the pieces of the puzzle are already here. There's still a lot of room for improvement, mind you -- more range isn't a *bad* thing, and I think sticker shock on even $27k would keep many people away; plus, the continental US could use a fast charge network (thankfully, fast chargers don't cost any more than a gas pump, you can install them virtually anywhere, and you don't need many EVs on the road to make them economical to operate). But the tech has arrived. All that's needed for mass adoption are the incremental improvements -- mass production of automotive li-ions bringing their costs down, the new anode and cathode materials making their way into cells, and the early adopters that start hitting the road to pave the way for a fast charging network.
Of course, this is discussing BEVs and ignoring the interim alternatives -- 1) PHEVs, and 2) BEVs with range-extending trailers.
You know, you're not *supposed* to drive for 6 hours nonstop; it's not considered safe to drive for such long periods without a break. The general recommendation I've found when researching driver safety is every two hours (the length of the recommended breaks I've seen varies -- 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, etc).
Guess what? L3 chargers, such as the Aerovironment PosiCharge ones, can fast-charge an ev battery pack in that length of time, and modern automotive li-ion batteries, such as the phosphates, titanates, and stabilized spinels, can take it that fast.
Batteries are space-inefficient and don't provide enough power to make a fast car that has a decent range.
Wow... have you never heard of, like, half of the high-end EVs that are either already on the market or coming out in the next year or two? In Teslas, I've heard of them playing tricks on prospective customers such as asking them to change the radio station right before they slam on the accelerator to show how hard it is to reach forward when it's accelerating at full blast. I heard one person describe the acceleration on the Wrightspeed X1 as like being shot out of a cannon. And 200 miles, give or take in either direction, isn't "decent range"?
If you're talking lower-end li-ion EVs or PHEVs, at best I can give you "perhaps", and even then, only on the range issue (and even that, only until we get some serious volume on the automotive types of li-ions... the new microwave technique for rapidly producing LiP cathodes should probably do the trick). There's nothing lacking (although nothing *overly* impressive) about the performance of, say, the Aptera Typ-1 or the Mitsubishi MiEV, and the Chevrolet Volt is actually kind of sporty.
[quote]Horsepower is only useful to a very limited number of people, most of those are in the agricultural business and they'll use diesel for its torque long before they'll go and spend a lot of $ on high octane fuel to avoid looking 'wimpy'.[/quote]
The funny thing is that the modern li-ion EVs generally aren't wimpy at all. They're actually generally quite torquey, even the lower end ones, especially at low speeds. Battery power used to be a limiting factor, but with phosphates giving you ~2.5kW/kg, titanates ~4kW/kg, and so on (contrast with ~200W/kg for lead-acid), you really have more power available to you than you often know what to do with. One of my favorite things about EVs is that increasing the horsepower can actually *improve* range. Compare Tesla Drivetrain 1 to Drivetrain 1.5. For more peak power, you need fatter conductors, which means less energy dissipated as heat when you're demanding the same amount of output from the motor.
Now, one real issue with EVs is that, especially on the lower end of the price range, they're often very streamlined and/or have a very small frontal area. This allows them to use a smaller battery pack to get the same range, and thus save money. While some people (myself included) *love* hyperstreamlined looks, others hate them. Check out the range of reactions to the looks of the Aptera Typ-1, for example. By looking something like a cross between a dolphin and an airplane, it gets ~120 miles out of a 10kWh pack (contrast with ~230 miles from a 56kWh pack in the Tesla) -- and by keeping the pack that small, it can charge faster and sell for cheaper even without proper mass-production of the cells. To some people, it's a thing of beauty, like right out of sci-fi. To others, it's a hideous eyesore, like a Prius got beat with an ugly stick. To those people, all I can say is that style trends change. The crowd that grew up on Model Ts thought that the Airflow was hideous for using things like a raked windshield, curvy body, and tapered rear. ;) Here's what their competition looked like.
Fuel cells are not "a good thing". They're an incredibly expensive boondoggle that's been leaching money from electric vehicles. Let's compare and contrast FCVs with BEVs that use modern automotive li-ions (phosphates, stabilized spinels, titanates, etc).
They're roughly a third the efficiency of EVs. Even if you use cleantech to create the hydrogen, you're still talking three times the coastline covered in wind turbines, three times the desert land covered in solar, three times the rivers dammed for hydro, etc -- not good. Even if your electrolysis was near lossless, as a couple techs in the lab are proposing to do, they're still nearly twice as wasteful as EVs. Even hydrogen from natural gas reformation compared to EVs powered by natural gas power plants is *still* significantly more wasteful for fuel cells ((25% efficiency versus 35%).
Hydrogen is expensive; electricity is dirt cheap. Hydrogen is fundamentally always going to be more expensive because it's such a PITA to handle -- leaks through practically anything, embrittles metals, is corrosive, etc -- and not to mention, poses safety and environmental risks.
Safety? Autmotive li-ions can be abused to heck and back without starting a fire -- discharged to 0V, overcharged, punctured, etc; the electrolyte is generally flammable, but no moreso than gasoline. Hydrogen is an incredibly combustible substance -- burns in almost any fuel air mixture, very vigorously, with a very pale blue, hard to see flame; rapidly evolves deflagrations into detonations in atmospheric conditions; pools under overhangs; can be ignited with less than a tenth the ignition energy of gasoline; enters pipes and tubes and follows them to their destinations, pooling there; etc. Liquid hydrogen is even worse; it acts like a high explosive. Check out NASA's safety guidelines for dealing with hydrogen to get an idea of how much of a pain it is to handle.
Fuel cells are ridiculously expensive. Here, go shopping. A good chunk of that price is due to the price of platinum, one of the rarest elements on the planet, although things like Nafion membranes don't help the price, either. Getting fuel cells for $10/W would be an outstanding price. Your average car will need ~10kW to maintain highway speeds, and more for accel/decel, so you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Automotive li-ions, except for the titanates, are usually a little over $0.50/Wh in bulk, and are projected to significantly decline with mass production, since they're not raw materials costs limited. A couple tens of kilowatts (a couple hours of driving at highway speeds) means $10-20k currently, and significantly less in the near future. And to top it all off, the batteries last longer, too. Nafion membranes tend to wear out over time in fuel cells, giving them around five years or so in typical FCV usage (some techs are proposed to raise that). And there are other components to break, too -- fuel cells have moving parts (compressors, pumps, etc), support parts (heaters, etc), and so on. Automotive li-ions will generally last for thousands to even tens of thousands (in the case of the titanates) of cycles. We're talking decades. To give an idea of how durable they are, the Volt is going to come with a 10 year warranty on its battery pack, and all of the other upcoming EV/PHEV makers are similarly talking about very long warranties. They should last the life of the car.
As for range, it's roughly a draw. 200-250 miles is a typical range for a FCV that costs hundreds of thous
Finding the Higg's Boson is the big prize
Well, that *is* the one that everybody talks about. If the Higgs exists, they ought to see it right away.
Come on, don't you remember the slashdot article about it?
Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground
Designed with mind to send protons around
A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France
Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance
Two beams of protons swing round, through the ring they ride
Til in the hearts of the detectors, theyre made to collide
And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room
Becomes mass, particles created from the vacuum
And then
LHCb sees where the antimatters gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
Theyre looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.
Come on, let's drop some particle physics in the club!
If you're going with Tesla's motor, you'd probably be best off going with their inverter/charger as well, too (they do reductive charging, so it's one system for both). If not... hmm. Manzanita Micro makes a good 50A charger, although they don't go up to 80A. Not sure what'd be best for currents that high.
Sounds like you've got a neat project underway! :)
What's your budget? :) If you've got money to spare, I don't think anything out there (with the possible exception of Toshiba's SCiB, which while I haven't found a way to get yet, is supposedly out there) that beats AltairNano's "NanoSafe" titanate cells. But they're pretty darned expensive. If you're on a miserly budget, you can try ThunderSkys; you can get them in small orders for almost as cheap as the big players are getting A123s in bulk. The Valence and A123 cells are probably a good "middle of the road" compromise. The reviews I've seen of A123's cells are probably slightly better than I've seen for Valence's, but both are very well received.
Kudos to you for doing a conversion :) I'm curious -- what drivetrain are you going with (motor, charger, inverter, etc)? I'm getting an Aptera, which uses Azure Dynamics's AC24LS motor and DMOC445 inverter; I've seen Azure hardware used in several very nice conversions, and Azure has responded to all of my requests for more info very quickly (others have reported excellent support from them as well). But there are a lot of good options out there (AC24LS would, IMHO, be too small for a Wrangler, too... if you went Azure, you'd probably want an AC55). Also, what sort of connector are you going to use to plug in? Technically, in the US, you're supposed to go with some kind of Avcon setup, but given that there aren't very many Avcon chargers out there in most places yet, it's not really needed. One setup that I liked was to use either 30A or 50A 240V NEMA locking connectors and then adapters to hook up to different plugs to them -- NEMA 5-15 wall sockets, NEMA 10-30 and 14-30 dryer sockets, NEMA 10-50 and 14-50 range and RV sockets, etc. Are you ditching the transmission? If so, what are you planning to do about parking -- just the emergency brake? If you lost the transmission, unless you added a gearbox, you wouldn't have a parking pawl.
Sorry for all the questions; I just like to see what different people are doing with conversions and how things go :)
1. "even if you loose power on the deal". "Loose power"? I like that phrase; I can picture a mad scientist saying it. "Now, I shall loose power on my enemies!" (I assume you meant "lose power"?)
2. How come nobody is commenting about the elephant in the room -- namely, *how* is she doing this? They have almost zero details in the article. Even "what kind of solar cells are these"? Silicon? CIS? CIGS? CdTe? Organic? Nanoantenna? Come on, how can you omit something so fundamental as that? The first takes solar-grade silicon, the second and third indium, and the fourth tellurium -- not exactly things you can pick up at any corner drug store. The last case was only announced for the first time a couple months ago, and they still had a huge obstacle to overcome (namely, making rectifiers several orders of magnitude smaller than anything done before). Organic cells have been worked on for years, but they tend to be extremely inefficient; if she had figured out a way to make them more efficient, *that* would be the big news.
So, what's going on here?
It'd be much cheaper for Iran to sell their oil and buy *coal*, have that shipped in in bulk, and burn that in their power plants, than to burn the oil. Oil is very expensive per unit energy. And Iran *does* need new power plants; most of its existing plants are old, while its population and power needs are growing rapidly.
Now, this doesn't mean that Iran *doesn't* want to make nuclear weapons. But the concept that there's no reason for Iran to want nuclear power because they could just burn their oil instead is simply erroneous.
If I had to credit Iran's nuclear and space programs to anything, it'd be "covering all the bases while at the same time trying to convince the world that you're not an uneducated, third-world backwater at the same time". National pride and all.
Yes, very professional indeed.
Some companies won't use "automotive grade" batteries, and I know that's exactly the sort of thing they'll use to cut corners and save money
There are only a tiny handful of them that aren't (Tesla being the most notable example). Aptera, GM, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Venture, Nissan, Toyota, and on and on are all using the automotive li-ions.
It's not in the best interest of the automotive companies to promote batteries that last a long time
People aren't going to buy an EV in large numbers that they have to regularly change the batteries on unless they're wealthy enough that it doesn't matter (see Tesla). They generally demand long warranties on the battery packs. GM, for example, is giving a huge 10 year warranty on the Volt's pack.
Now, further down the line, when EVs are more mainstream, I imagine that you're right -- people will cut corners for that lower price point. But for now, it's all about making it more comfortable to make that leap to a different drivetrain, which means long warranties and thus quality parts.
No, they're starting with the exact same (expensive) membrane used in fuel cells -- nafion. They've just taken this membrane and added a manganese-based catalyst to it.
I'm amazed that most people never point out the huge, glaring flaw in this notion of setting up big solar electrolysis plants in the sunny desert southwest. Let's ignore the problems of how corrosive the released hydrogen is to your system, which usually makes solar electrolysis have short lifespans. Let's do the same with the free oxygen. And the water. And let's ignore algae growth, which is a problem in most systems that mess with water. And let's ignore hydrogen embrittlement when it comes to raising storage and transportation costs. And let's ignore how huge hydrogen storage tanks have to be due to its very low density, a fact that makes the prior issue even worse. And let's ignore that it has a ridiculously low ignition energy, burns in almost any fuel-air mix, readily evolves deflagrations to detonations, pools under overhangs, enters pipes and follows them to their destinations, burns clear and vigorously, and so on. And let's ignore that leaked hydrogen destroys ozone. And let's ignore that fuel cell stacks are quite inefficient, and that a fuel cell stack strong enough to power a car will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're talking about *consuming lots of water in a desert* -- enough to power vehicles around the world. What the heck kind of plan is that?
Electricity is our common energy storage and usage medium. Why are we talking about "very low" efficiency, in-the-lab, probably horrible lifespan and very costly hydrogen-solar cells when we could put photovoltaic cells or solar thermal on the same land, get much better effiency from a much cheaper system, transmit the electricity efficiently (92.8% average in the US), rectify it efficiently (~93% charger efficiency), charge/discharge it efficiencly (96%-99.9% in li-ion), and convert that to kinetic energy efficiently (85-90% typical electric motor efficiency in a normal drivecycle), in a vehicle that uses batteries that cost *literally* an order of magnitude less than said fuel cells, can level-3 charge in as little as 5-15 minutes (depending on the type), and have longer lifespans to boot?
The "hydrogen economy" is just a silly concept; nothing about it makes sense in comparison to an EV economy with modern automotive li-ion batteries.
Instead of hydrogen, why not just make more efficient hybrids
Because you're still dependent on gasoline, obviously.
The technology is already there,
Hydraulic hybrids are less developed than even EVs and PHEVs, let alone hybrids.
without the need to worry about recycling the Li batteries in existing hybrids,
1) Existing hybrids use NiMH, not Li-ion (and certainly not Li)
2) Li-ion batteries, depending on the type, are either minimally toxic or nontoxic. NiMH should be recycled, although it's not a travesty if you don't. The types that are really critical to recycle are lead-acid and nickel cadmium.
and they are more efficient
Their regen is more efficient than NiMH regen, but not more efficient than regen with automotive li-ions or supercaps. Furthermore, regen is the *only* benefit they give you. Hybrids aren't all about regen, you know; that is just *one* energy-saving technique that they utilize.
Excuse me? Are you actually suggesting that the same battery chemistry that can't be relied on to power an iPod with greater than 80% capacity after a year and a half is suddenly going to magically become reliable and long-lasting in an automotive setting?
Excuse me, but you're apparently of the impression that automotive li-ions are the same chemistry as those in iPods. They are not. LiP and the stabilized spinels use a completely different cathode. The titanates use a very different anode. These are quite different chemistries. They sacrifice some energy density for extreme stability.
These things have been on the market for years. Just because *YOU* have no experience with them doesn't change this fact. Consumer electronics makers don't care that much about lifespan because consumer electronics on their own don't tend to have very long lifespans. They use conventional li-ion for the higher energy density and because of the more established production lines.
In my experience with batteries, the more complex and newer-fanged the chemistry, the faster it dies.
That's why NiMH lasts longer than PbA, right? FYI, the even the more modern and complex PbA versions, like the carbon foam-backed ones, last longer than the older, simpler ones.
both LiIon and LiPol)
Both of which use LiCoO2 cathodes and graphite anodes. That's a completely different chemistry than the automotive li-ions, so trying to equate them is just silly. You might as well pretend that nickel-iron batteries are the same as nickel-metal-hydride batteries because they both contain nickel. The automotive li-ion batteries still work by moving lithium ions back and forth between the cathode and anode through a membrane, but they vary greatly in the expansion ratios of their electrodes during charge/discharge cycles and how vulnerable they are to plating by metallic lithium -- the things that kill li-ion batteries.
Batteries die, and replacing them several times in the life of a vehicle that has such an otherwise elegant and simple design is a giant glaring flaw.
Jay Leno has a Baker Electric from the early 1900s that still runs on its original nickel-iron batteries. It is simply incorrect that all batteries must die during a reasonable lifespan of a vehicle. It's all about the stability of the chemistry, and the automotive li-ions are extremely stable. They have to sacrifice a third of their energy density to achieve this, but it's well worth it for the application (and they still have a notably higher energy density than NiMH).
Given that modern day hunter gatherers, except in a small number of special circumstances, get most of their calories from plant matter, not meat, why should we expect the situation to have been different for our ancestors? Because we love mental images of them spending all their time hunting big game, rather than the actual situation, where "meat" is usually a small bird, a rodent, or so on?
Even when the prey is big game, it's not nearly like you describe it. Stalking big game on foot generally takes days at best and extreme distances covered.
Nor is it right to treat all wild crops as a poor return on energy expended. For example, cattail pollen, a common food during the right season among natives who lived near where cattails grow, is almost pure protein, and is harvested merely by shaking the heads into a pouch. Doesn't get much easier than that, and often you get some of the "kittens tails" with -- those are edible, too. Cattail tubers are such a high density starch source that they're being investigated as an ethanol feedstock. You can also eat the shoots. I once read about a relative of bindweed (a common garden pest) that has an edible tuber sometimes weighing in at over 40 pounds, most of that starch. Acorns were a staple diet for many native american tribes. A cup of acorn flour has ~500 calories. Takes some work to crack them (dehydrating helps), and you have to leach the tannins, but it can be a ridiculously abundant food source in some areas. In the tropics, edible plants are even more common in large quantities -- coconuts, bananas, etc.
Meat may be the "glamorous" part of hunter-gatherer societies, but it's not where most of the calories usually come from.
You may be shocked to learn that I got my statistic about most hunter gather society energy coming from plants from a book -- "The Third Chimpanzee". Written by an evolutionary biologist who's studied hunter-gatherer societies. Sorry if it offended your dietary sensibilities enough that you felt the need to insult me for mentioning it.
Most calories in hunter-gather societies, at least modern ones, comes from plants -- not meat. Now, one could easily argue that meat added an influx of nutrients that were hard to come by in plant matter, but from a calorie standpoint, it's not usually a big player. We have this mental image of hunter-gatherers going from one big kill to the next, but in the real world, it's mostly the occasional bit of small game mixed in with a lot of fruit, nuts, berries, greens, tubers, grains, and so on.
"what exactly do you think happens inside the cylinders of an gasoline engine? "
I'm going to have to go with, "Carefully engineered vaporization of a gasoline aerosol, mixed with just the right ratio of air, and then pressurized to several times higher than atmospheric pressure to make it react in a way that it never would in normal atmospheric conditions."
Seriously. Gasoline has nothing on hydrogen when it comes to danger. Not even close. And NASA would know; they've used the stuff more than pretty much anyone else on the planet.