Wrong spinel; there are several (just for manganese alone, there's LiMnO2, LiMn2O4, Li2MnO3, and combinations thereof). This spinel is the primary one being investigated for automotive applications. Read more about the differences and Argonne's work on the subject (they have their own version). For LG Chem's cells, accelerated aging tests suggests a lifespan of 15 to 40 years. When referring to automotive batteries, when someone says "spinel", it's cells like LG chem's that they're talking about.
Look, before you start spouting off, educate yourself. If you had to look up the terms on these most basic issues of battery chemistry, you're way out of the loop and need to get in the loop before you debate the topic. It's not like these are esoteric details; we're talking about the fundamentals.
The phosphates probably are the most widely known. These are what powered, among many other different vehicles, the Killacycle electric motorcycle, with its 0-60 in less than 1 second. Check into them -- A123 reports over 7,000 normal cycles on them, while independent testing by people on the RC Groups forum (they're becoming popular for RC aircraft) put them through over a thousand incredibly abusive cycles (3-4C charge, 6-8C discharge, sometimes all the way down to 0V) and only lost 20% capacity. And, heck, while you're at it, check out the titanates. They're even more impressive, IMHO, than the phosphates and spinels. AltairNano has done over *20,000 cycles* on a single pack. They're so stable that they're being used for grid load balancing, where the cells go from drawing 2MW from the grid to feeding 2MW to the grid, over and over whenever demand or supply fluctuates, to give peaking plants time to come online.
"Bzzt, you can build your own right now, because the cells are out there and readily purchasable by anyone." But you can not buy them in a car right now. You sure couldn't buy them in a car last year.
What sort of world do you live in where new car lines are created that fast? Bringing a new series of car to market takes years -- which is why I've continually mentioned "the next few years" as the timeframe for when a whole bunch of EVs/PHEVs with automotive li-ions will be coming out.
"Did I give a discount on insurance in the above numbers? Nope, try again." No but you didn't include it.
That's because I was computing *savings*. If the price of something is the same on both an EV and an ICE, its net savings is $0. It doesn't affect the calculation of savings.
You put down how much repairs and insurance was as a cost and wrote all of it off for an EV.
I distinctly did not. I credited EVs with $200 of electricity expenses, -$2000 of gasoline expenses, and -$500 of maintenance expenses. I gave them zero advantage over gasoline cars when it comes to insurance.
I did have a $500 repair on my Mazda 3. I was stopped at a red light and got rear ended. I don't count that in my calculation since it was in pay way a failure of the car. Those numbers don't seperate fender benders and such.
What, the census numbers? No, they don't. But accident repair costs are almost always dwarfed by accumulated maintenance costs -- every timing belt, pulley, pump, etc. An EV drivetrain has roughly 10% the moving parts. Doesn't even need oil changes. Heck, doesn't even have a transmission (have you seen how much a transmission failure will run you?). Even things unrelated to the drivetrain tend to wear less, such as the brakes (most braking work being done regeneratively).
And no we still have not seen the the first generation of mass market EVs yet. Notice the mass market part of that statment.
You apparently ignored what I wrote about the first generation. Electrics were initially the prime competition to gasoline cars in the early 1900s. In 1900, at the Paris exposition, there were 176 gasoline models, 40 electric, and 21 steam. By 1911, the Anderson Electric Car Company offered 21 different EV models -- and they were just one of dozens of EV carmakers. For example, in 1914, the Milburn Wagon Co sold 3400 EVs. Anderson sold 6,772 that same year. EVs were very popular among women, as at the time, gasoline cars had to be crank started. When Ford started mass-producing the Model T on modern assembly lines in 1913 (lower volume production began in 1908; between 1908 and 1910, Ford had only sold 12,000 cars), they had been losing market share to the electric runabouts. Their massive increase in production, advancing ICE tech, a stagnation in batteries, and the advent of the electric starter motor doomed EVs up until the 90s.
Even though the second gen was proportionally small compared to how many gasoline cars were on the market, it still involved thousands of EVs driven for years, racking up hundreds of millions of drive miles.
The indisputable fact is that you can not buy a good moderate priced EV today.
True! The ones remaining from the CARB ZEV era are generally so beloved that they sell for over double their purchase price; yet they're technological dinosaurs compared to what's being developed today. Which is part of why there's such a huge rush by virtually every automaker to bring more onto the market. GM alone plans to produce 10k Volts their first year, 60k their second year, and ramp up from there.
And the reason that you can not is the technology wasn't available three or so years ago.
Actually, it was. LiPs have been on the market for over half a decade. There wasn't as much of a demand, though, and companies weren't as willing to accept the risk on what was then a much newer product. Even Tesla wasn't; that's why they went with conventional laptop cells, despite their inferior properties for automotive applications.
Bzzt, you can build your own right now, because the cells are out there and readily purchasable by anyone.
Well you are. I am comparing a fuel-efficient IC vehicle to an electric vehicle. Of course in this market millage sells.
And EVs operate on a price equivalent of hundreds of miles per gallon. So, if you want to talk about reducing operations costs...
What you will not have to pay insurance tag and title on your elective vehicle?
Did I give a discount on insurance in the above numbers? Nope, try again.
Do you think it will never have issues?
Its drivetrain only has about ten percent of the moving parts of an ICE.
Also good modern cars are actually very trouble free.
Look at the figures above. They don't break down insurance versus repair, but I can assure you, the average person isn't spending close to $2k on insurance.
Not all mind you and I wouldn't bet on first gen mass market electric cars to be as trouble free as they will be in the future.
These aren't first gen mass market electric cars. First gen was in the early 1900s, and they were most definitely mass market (the Baker Electric being one of the biggest sellers). The second gen was from the CARB ZEV mandate era, from the late 90s to the early '00s. These vehicles, such as the EV1, were generally adored by their lessees for being low maintenance. What's coming up is the third generation of EVs.
Well lets take an honest look at this on. The Hummer has terrible resale value for a lot of reasons. A big one is that it is a terrible vehical with a terrible repair history. A Prius is a Toyota and has a great repair history.
It doesn't matter what comparison you do; guzzlers have horrible depreciation in comparison to fuel-efficient cars. Namely, because guzzlers continue to cost a lot to run, while a person who's buying used is doing so to save money.
Why not compare it to a Lexus, Honda, Acura, or Mazda 3 or 6.
Because we're comparing fuel-efficient vehicles with guzzlers, obviously.
"The average car on the road is now roughly nine years old, implying an average lifespan of 18 years. Ignoring inflation on gasoline prices and interest on the purchase, this would work out to a savings of $41,400 over the lifespan of the vehicle. That's a *Lot* of money. Saying it has to cost under $20k is just stupid." Yea you are ignoring the interest that you would have to pay on the extra money.
And inflation on gas prices. If you want more detailed calculations that include interest and inflation, go here.
The other thing you are forgetting is that car loans are limited to usually five years
And so one should pretend that economics doesn't matter because of this, right? Whether the money is coming from a car loan, a savings account, home equity, or whatnot, economics is still economics. All that changes is the interest rates.
and you are ignoring the cost of a battery pack replacement. I doubt that any battery pack will last the 18 years you are perdicting for a car life span.
1) That's covered by the linked calculations. 2) LG Chem expects their spinel packs for the Volt to last 30 years. A123 has already gotten over 7,000 cycles on their pack. AltairNano titanate cells have done over 20 *thousand* cycles.
"Let's toss in another $500 in maintenance savings -" $500 a year? On my Mazda all I have had to do is change the oil and get new tires.
And those are not available yet for a car sized battery pack
BZZT, sorry, try again! *Almost all* new PHEVs and EVs coming out in significant volume in the coming years are using one of those chemistries, and the prototypes are running on them. The only glaring exception to this is Tesla.
plus I question the very idea of charging a Li/Poly car pack in five or ten minutes.
I love how you confused LiP, spinel, and titanate cells with li-poly; that was just the icing on the cake.
That will out a LOT of heat.
Li-ion variants tend to be over 99% efficient at slow charging and ~96% or so efficient at fast charging. 60kW*4%=2.4kW -- 50% more power as heat than a blow dryer consumes. 250kW*4%=10kW, still the tiniest fraction of the heat released by a running internal combustion engine.
None of those technologies are available right now.
What part of "Already Installed Across Oahu" don't you get? What, do you need a link? Or two? How about a map? Or
With one gear, it's be a case of, "Want superfast acceleration? Want a top speed of well over 100mph? Pick one." There's only so fast of an RPM that you can safely run the motor at.
For a non-sports-car, one gear is plenty. And even for the Tesla, with powertrain 1.5, they're simply ditching the transmission for a more powerful motor. It'll improve efficiency a little bit that way (funny how that works... put in a more powerful motor and *increase* your efficiency... gotta love EVs;) )
and the cost? Under $20,000. That is what it would take to be a better car then a Mazda 3.
Oh, really? Your Mazda 3's gasoline costs a penny or two per mile? You can fill it up at home while causing minimal environmental damage and not exporting money to countries that hate us, and your vehicle costs almost nothing to maintain? Really?
No, you picked and chose gasoline's strengths and weighted it up against electricity's weaknesses, ignoring gasoline's weaknesses and electricity's strengths. First off, you simply cannot ignore the operations cost advantage. And this is something that will almost certainly hold over into resale value; there's a reason why a Hummer, which costs 1.5 times what Prius costs, depreciates three times as fast. The average person drives around 12,000 miles a year. At $4 a gallon and the average of 25mpg, that's ~$2k per year. Electricity is dirt cheap; let's say $200 a year. Let's toss in another $500 in maintenance savings -- a total savings of $2.3k a year. The average car on the road is now roughly nine years old, implying an average lifespan of 18 years. Ignoring inflation on gasoline prices and interest on the purchase, this would work out to a savings of $41,400 over the lifespan of the vehicle. That's a *Lot* of money. Saying it has to cost under $20k is just stupid.
As for fillup times, you may be surprised to learn that LiPs, spinels, and titanates *can* charge in 5-10 minutes. You, of course, need a fast charger, and hey, guess what? There's already a network of 60kW Aerovironment PosiChargers installed across Oahu, and Aerovironment makes them as big as 250kW. Epyon and several other companies are also getting into the fast charger market.
As for range, why on earth would you need to be able to drive 300 miles on a single charge? The standard recommendation for drivers is that you stop and stretch for five to ten minutes at least once every two hours of driving. Big gas tanks are only really a way for gasoline vehicles to compensate for the fact that they can't charge at home, a way to make it so that they don't have to drive by a pump every day. A range of 220 miles slow highway speeds and 150 or so at fast highway speeds should be more than sufficient for general usage. Depending on your aerodynamics, a four-seater car getting this range would require 20-50kWh of batteries to achieve this. If you're willing to accept the look of extreme streamlined vehicles, go for the lower end; if not, go for the upper end. LiPs are currently about $0.50/Wh, but unlike traditional laptop batteries ($0.30-$0.50/Wh) (which are limited by raw ingredient prices -- mostly the price of cobalt), LiPs are made of dirt-cheap ingredients (they eliminate the cobalt). Their prices are only high because they're new and aren't mass produced. LiPs should easily be able to get down to $0.15-$0.30, possibly even lower, with mass production. Let's go with $0.20. That's a pack price of $4k-$10k -- easily affordable. These packs could fully charge from 250kW in 5-12 minutes. Even from 60kW power, what's already available in Oahu, that's only 20-50 minutes for every 2-3 hours of driving. For the ability to charge on dirt-cheap power instead of $4/gal gas, that's quite the deal.
Oh, and did I mention that these batteries have incredibly long lifespans, that EV smart charging actually helps the grid, that we already have enough power capacity to convert most of our transportation fleet over to EVs, that only one in every few thousand vehicles on an interstate needs to be an EV for installing fast chargers nationwide to make financial sense (even ignoring tax breaks, green cred, customer loyalty, or using charging as a loss-leader), and that even running on coal power, an EV is cleaner than a gasoline vehicle?
An EV transportation system with fast charging just simply makes sense.
Exactly. GM was busily working to undermine and kill off the CARB mandate as fast as they could. The fact that they sold off their battery rights should speak volumes to how much they actually wanted to be in the business of building EVs. They had already shut down the lines at that point.
GM never wanted to be building EVs, and was all to happy to ditch the program and shuttle it down into the memory hole, only bringing it up in passing to spin it as a "failure" so that they wouldn't be pushed into doing it again. Their timing was impeccable... impeccably bad. Whether it's fears of global warming, fears of "running out of oil", high gas prices, a distaste for shipping oil overseas, a strengthening green movement, rapidly advancing battery tech, or just outright trends, virtually everything has been moving in the direction of EVs and PHEVs. And with hybrids reaching US shores from Japanese automakers, GM ensured that they had the worst image possible as they steadily lost market share from falling SUV sales.
cant name 5 patents but I CAN name one very important one. Try making and selling Nickel Metal Hydride batteries suitable for electric cars and see how far you get.
You mean like the large-format NiMHs in the Vectrix scooters?
You will likely be sued by a company you haven't heard of called Cobasys for violation of their patent on NiMH battery tech.
Cobasys has repeatedly made it clear that they will deal in large orders for large format NiMH, but not small orders. There haven't exactly been people lining up around the block wanting large orders of large-format NiMHs, however. It's old tech, inferior in about a dozen different ways to the modern automotive li-ions.
FYI, Cobasys only holds the patent rights on said large format NiMHs in the US, not internationally. Oh, and they've cross-licensed their patent portfolios with PEVE (who they initially sued for making NiMHs for sale in the US without paying them); PEVE now has the right to make large format NiMHs for sale in the US. The fact that they haven't should speak volumes for the demand of said batteries.
NiMH was top of the line tech back during the original CARB ZEV mandate. It no longer is.
Given that 5-10 minutes is pretty standard for automotive fast charging (phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc), when you factor in the time to get off the highway, to get to a station, to connect, to disconnect, to pay, to get back to the highway, and get back up to speed, an extra couple minutes is hardly a relevant difference. I certainly wouldn't pay 5-10 times as much for my fuel and do ~3 times the environmental damage in order to save a couple minutes. Who would?:And about efficiency: Where are those numbers from?
I gave you a peer-reviewed paper; read it yourself. I can give you a dozen more that'll tell you the exact same thing. Li-ion batteries are nearly lossless. Electrolysis and fuel cells are quite lossy.
And in terms of efficiency, what are they even measuring? efficiency from battery to drive train? from power source to battery?
Are you incapable of reading? The paper is linked, right above. Need it linked a second time? Here you go. Do you not know what "well to wheel" means? That means measuring the efficiency all the way back from the source of the energy used in the power plant, all the way to the torque imparted by the vehicle's wheels.
If peer-review isn't good enough for you, I can show you where you can buy these things yourself and test them yourself. Get, say, some A123 batteries from DeWalt power tool packs or any other LiP from the open market, a Manzanita Micro charger, and an Azure Dynamics Force Drive. The batteries are 96-99% efficient (depending on how fast you charge them), the charger is ~93% efficient, and the drivetrain is 85-90% efficient (actually a bit low for an EV). The power going to the charger coming from the US grid has an average transmission efficiency of 92.8%. What part of this are you having trouble with, so I can give you a dozen references on the subject?
also, the amount of energy produced by natural gas plants is much greater than 'just peaking' usage. yeah power companies like that natural gas can be turned off and on unlike coal and nuclear, but if they invest heavily in a natural gas plant, they want to make money off it, that means they will run it as much as they can
They can't underprice coal with natural gas. Coal is too cheap and natural gas is too expensive. Of course they want to run it as much as they can, but they're not going to generate power they can't sell.
pumping caves full of air creates wind based peaking capabilities.
That's not the Pickens's proposal, though. I agree, it's a good idea if they can get prices down and efficiency up enough. The other storage solution I've seen that's a bit more efficient is pumped water storage. It's trivial if you already have big hydro in the area (you don't have to pump anything, just not let it out of the reservoir). If you dont have hydro in the area, though (it is a rather destructive form of power), you can do a setup where there's no river, but you create an upper and lower reservoir and move water back and forth between them. China's a leader in this front, but they're hardly the only ones doing it. One clever version I read about is on Okinawa. Since Japan's islands tend to be quite mountainous, they built a pumped reservoir on a mountain near the shore and used the ocean as their lower reservoir.
Hydrogen on the other hand is extremely clean to produce from the grid (assuming that the grid is fed in a clean fashion) and extremely clean to dispose of, the planet handles it automatically.
By destroying ozone.
Didn't realize that, did you? Free hydrogen is a potent destroyer of ozone because it readily migrates into the upper atmosphere. And if you want to talk about clean, EVs are about three times more efficient than hydrogen vehicles, so if you go hydrogen instead of electric, you're talking about plastering three times more land in solar panels, damming three times more rivers, three times more coastline covered in wind farms, etc.
It's just a bad "solution". I hesitate to even use the word "solution" for it.
Using batteries is a decent solution as they run cleanly and can be charged from the grid. Unfortunately they are very dirty to create and dispose of.
Old myth based on stereotypes about all batteries being like lead-acid and nickel-cadmium. There's virtually nothing toxic or dirty to make in modern automotive batteries, such as phosphates and spinels. They're even less toxic than conventional li-ion, which is only mildly toxic. The raw materials for making lithium phosphate cathodes are not that much different than what you'd find in your average soft drink (phosphoric acid, sugar, etc, plus iron), a lithium salt that's merely extracted from brine pools and can quite affordably be extracted from seawater until the end of human civilization, the casing is generally aluminum or similar, the anode is graphite, the membrane thin PVC or similar, and so on. Contrast this with hydrogen fuel cells, which generally contain one of the rarest elements on the planet (platinum), which is mined in low ppm quantities (read: huge amounts of tailings for a tiny amount of platinum). Talk about environmental destruction! There's a reason why fuel cells generally cost several dollars per watt.
Oh, and modern batteries like phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc last longer than fuel cells, too.
[quote]True, but hydrogen is so light that it dissipates as fast, if not faster, than it evaporates.[/quote]
Hydrogen is flammable in almost any mixture with air. It also pools quite readily under overhangs of any sort. It also likes to undergo deflagration to detonation transitions, and only requires a tenth the ignition energy as gasoline to ignite. This is why NASA recommends buildings where hydrogen will be stored or used have roofs designed to be blown off them.
[quote]A ~200,000 cubic meter balloon filled with hydrogen, and where was the explosion?[/quote]
A wavefront propagating at 100 feet per second *without* pre-mixing of the gasses is very darned impressive.
[quote]The shell burned due to flammable paint[/quote]
Oldmyth. Heck, even the Mythbusters tackled this one. Only, they had to bias it way *against* hydrogen by only injecting the hydrogen slowly; if they started with their blimp already full, it outright exploded. And this was on small models, which -- due to the hydrogen scaling proportional to the volume cubed but the skin scaling proportional to volume squared -- was further biased in favor of the skin.
The claim that the Hindenburg fire was due to the skin is simply not true. The skin burned faster than untreated cloth and sparked a little, but this was dwarfed by how readily the hydrogen burned.
[quote]As long as the stationary refueling tank has a higher pressure than the tank in your car, no pump is necessary.[/quote]
Right. So you leave an even higher pressure tank of hydrogen in your garage at all times. See, nice and safe!
You know, you're not even supposed to keep cans of gasoline in your garage, and here you're talking about keeping a veritable bomb in your garage.
Hydrogen has a much lower ignition energy than propane, much more easily undergoes a deflagration to detonation transition, and can carry a deflagration or detonation in a far wider range of fuel-air mixtures. It also far more readily seeps through containers, which is especially a problem if there's piping over a hydrogen leak, as it can follow pipes to their destinations. Roofs and overhangs also tend to act as traps for hydrogen; NASA recommends that buildings where hydrogen is worked with have roofs designed to be blown away from their walls.
I think pure electric cars can work for a substantial portion of people, but electric cannot yet offer any method for rapid refuelling if you are going further than one charge can take you
That is incorrect. It was correct ten years ago, but not today. Just ignoring battery swapping, there are several companies now that make massively powerful fast chargers, all of which are cheaper than a hydrogen pump. Perhaps the most notable is Aerovironment, with their PosiCharge line. They already have a network of 60kW fast chargers installed across Oahu, but they make chargers as big as 250kW. For a ~10kWh battery pack (Aptera-sized), that's 10 minutes and 2.4 minutes, respectively. For a ~50kWh battery pack (Tesla-sized), that's ~50 minutes and ~12 minutes, respectively. Compared to the length of time you'd spend driving, these charge times are pretty trivial. An Aptera, for example, gets 120 miles per charge, so with just a 60kWh charger and a car like an Aptera, that'd be two hours of driving for ten minutes of charging. And heck, you're supposed to take a five to ten minute break every two hours of driving for safety reasons anyways!
On the battery side of things, the phosphates, titanates, and spinels can all take 5-10 minute charges, as can most upcoming technologies (some even less).
This is *meaningless* because when everyone plugs in their car into any plug, the power will go out.
Not according to a DOE study conducted by PNL. In fact, EVs can actually help the grid if they use a smart charger by adjusting their draw relative to demand, giving peaking plants a chance to come online. And the fact that they'll more often charge on offpeak power means lower rates for everyone, since power companies can get more utilization out of their existing infrastructure.
The funny thing? The efficiency is atrocious and the fear quite legitimate.
As for the fear: check out what NASA has to say about hydrogen. Some excerpts:
Ignition:
"Hydrogen-air mixtures can ignite with very low energy input, 1/10th that required igniting a gasoline-air mixture. For reference, an invisible spark or a static spark from a person can cause ignition."
"Although the autoignition temperature of hydrogen is higher than those for most hydrocarbons, hydrogen's lower ignition energy makes the ignition of hydrogen-air mixtures more likely. The minimum energy for spark ignition at atmospheric pressure is about 0.02 millijoules."
----
Mixtures:
"The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in air (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 75.0. The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in oxygen (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 94.0."
"Condensed and solidified atmospheric air, or trace air accumulated in manufacturing, contaminates liquid hydrogen, thereby forming an unstable mixture. This mixture may detonate with effects similar to those produced by trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other highly explosive materials"
"Explosive limits of hydrogen in air are 18.3 to 59 percent by volume"
"Flames in and around a collection of pipes or structures can create turbulence that causes a deflagration to evolve into a detonation, even in the absence of gross confinement."
(For comparison: Deflagration limit of gasoline in air: 1.4-7.6%)
Leaks:
"Leakage, diffusion, and buoyancy: These hazards result from the difficulty in containing hydrogen. Hydrogen diffuses extensively, and when a liquid spill or large gas release occurs, a combustible mixture can form over a considerable distance from the spill location."
"Hydrogen, in both the liquid and gaseous states, is particularly subject to leakage because of its low viscosity and low molecular weight (leakage is inversely proportional to viscosity). Because of its low viscosity alone, the leakage rate of liquid hydrogen is roughly 100 times that of JP-4 fuel, 50 times that of water, and 10 times that of liquid nitrogen."
----
It also covers how hydrogen likes to pool under roofs and overhangs, and that buildings containing hydrogen or hydrogen pipelines should have roofs designed to be blown away, as well as extreme caution on spark suppression. It also talks about how hydrogen can enter pipes and follow them to their destinations, and pool there.
As for efficiency, the efficiency of a hydrogen economy is atrocious. Don't take my word for it; listen to peer review. Check out the convenient chart. Electric cars have three times the efficiency of hydrogen cars from a given power source. Even if your power is renewable, this tremendous efficiency difference can't be ignored. This means, for hydrogen, three times the land covered in solar cells, three times the dammed up rivers, three times the coastline covered in wind farms, and so on.
Hydrogen is a complete waste of time. A fuel cell stack will weigh down and take up space in a typical vehicle as much as a modern li-ion battery stack, only give similar range, cost ten times as much, have less room for price improvement in fuel cell costs versus battery costs (platinum playing a big role in this), have a shorter lifespan (again, compared to modern automotive li-ions like phosphates, spinels, titanates, etc, not laptop batteries), more temperature sensitivity (yes, you read that right; modern li-ions are often good to -30 or less
The "scam" is that Pickens founded the Clean Energy Fuels Corporation which makes natural gas vehicles. Hence, his plan to use wind power to displace natural gas use and run the vehicles on the displaced natural gas (rather than any other alternative drivetrain, such as electric, which could use the windpower directly). Of course, one problem that immediately surfaces is that natural gas generation tends to be used more for peaking than for baseload, which is generally coal or nuclear -- that is, to say, that it ramps up and down quickly to adjust for sudden spikes in demand or drops in production. Wind power is precisely the opposite; it's unpredictable, so you need *extra* peaking generation to compensate, and overall you displace some baseload. Sounds to me more like Pickens will be displacing coal and nuclear, not natural gas. While that is good in other respects, few are proposing to make coal and nuclear cars**. But any influx of cash into natural gas vehicles, irregardless of sustainability or whether or not he's actually displacing any natural gas use, will certainly help his pocketbooks.
Don't get me wrong; natural gas is a potentially bigger resource than oil, has a lower carbon content per joule, and burns cleaner. Switching vehicles to natural gas isn't a bad thing (although electricity is much better). But the concept of displacing natural gas-fired generation with wind doesn't make sense on the face of it.
Well, aftermarket, that'd be a really big deal. A good, reliable lithium-ion battery pack that integrates well with the drivetrain isn't trivial to engineer, and you couldn't just borrow one from another vehicle. Also, you'd be cutting your range to about 150 miles or so. On the upside, it'd be able to take as much juice as you could pump into it. And Tesla already has a lot invested in their current architecture, so they'll probably be sticking with it at least through the Model S.
If fast chargers like the Aerovironment PosiCharge ones or the Epyon chargers start to make inroads in the continental US, I expect Tesla to be pretty much forced to switch. The market will demand it. Also, I can't see how they'd make an EV for the price of the BlueStar without switching chemistries; Tesla *needs* to have a big battery pack to reduce the number of cycles each individual cell goes through, but there's not that much room for improvement in prices on traditional li-ion batteries, while there's a ton of room for price improvement on the new variants. But for now, I expect Tesla to stick with their current packs. And as long as they're sticking with them, I really doubt they'll offer replacements using a different chemistry.
Tesla may end up skipping the new generation of automotive li-ions altogether. Lithium ion technology is advancing incredibly rapidly. Over the next few years, there's almost certainly going to be a huge jump in anode density (with the various vanadium, tin and silicon techs that are giving steller performances as a replacement for graphite), and a smaller but still significant jump in cathodes density (with the various layered or fluorinated cathodes). We realistically could see 2-4 times the energy density in the next 5 years or so. So, Tesla may end up moving directly to something like that.
Batteries -- especially Li-Ion ones -- begin to degrade as soon as they're manufactured, usually losing 40% or more of their charge capacity in 18-24 months. How is a station going to deal with customers dropping off old battery packs and picking up new ones?
I wasn't going to comment on your post, since I prefer fast chargers like the Aerovironment PosiCharge chargers and the various chemistries that can take 5-10 minute charges over battery swapping. However, this is a big misconception that needs to be remedied.
First off, you're thinking of conventional lithium ion. That is, lithium cobalt oxide cathode, graphite anode. There are many variants of this chemistry out there (in particular, the phosphates, titanates, and spinels) that change either the anode or cathode, usually the more expensive cathode, for a more stable version. This allows for fast charging, crazy power density, safety, and extreme longevity, for the cost of some of its energy density (going from ~160Wh/kg to ~100Wh/kg -- still way better than NiMH, mind you). Most upcoming highway-speed EVs are using these sorts of variants, not traditional li-ion. These techs weren't as mature when Tesla started, so they used more conventional cells. This is not the standard in the industry.
Now, focusing on Tesla... this means that their packs will degrade in a couple years, right? Well, no again. Tesla coddles their cells like crazy. They don't charge them to full. They cool them during operation. They cool them if they get too hot when the car is out in the sun. They practically refrigerate them during charging, and don't allow them to charge or discharge too quickly. They do extensive load balancing. All in all, this allows them to only be down to ~80% capacity in 5 years if it's minimally driven, and 50% if it's very heavily driven.
But anyways, I must reiterate: Tesla is the exception, not the rule.
Should I end right here? Meh, let's take care of another misconception: the "Long Tailpipe" argument:
There are many more reasons why this is a silly idea that will do little or nothing to help the environment. It may, in fact, actually harm the environment if we (meaning the U.S.) turn to our most abundant power-producing resource (coal) to provide the needed power.
It varies from one study to the next, but most peer-reviewed studies I've seen peg the energy consumption and CO2 emissions from producing a vehicle at around 20% of its lifetime emissions, the rest from operating emissions. Which, honestly, is what you'd expect; your average vehicle will burn through a couple times its own weight in fuel over its lifespan, and none of that will get recycled into other parts (unlike a lot of the body).
Of course, in practical terms, you'd have to consider the efficiencies of the two drive trains (and the loss of the AC-DC converter).
Which, of course, completely invalidates your above argument. ICEs only turn about 20% of the energy of that gasoline into wheel torque, while EVs turn about 80-85% of what they take out of an outlet into wheel torque.
Just ignoring all of your erroneous stereotypes (addressed in earlier posts, not worth a repeated debunking), an electric motor is generally only 85-90% efficient in a normal drivecycle. If the vehicle is averaging, say, 25kW, that's still ~3kW of heat -- the output of two large plug-in portable space heaters.
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Wrong spinel; there are several (just for manganese alone, there's LiMnO2, LiMn2O4, Li2MnO3, and combinations thereof). This spinel is the primary one being investigated for automotive applications. Read more about the differences and Argonne's work on the subject (they have their own version). For LG Chem's cells, accelerated aging tests suggests a lifespan of 15 to 40 years. When referring to automotive batteries, when someone says "spinel", it's cells like LG chem's that they're talking about.
Look, before you start spouting off, educate yourself. If you had to look up the terms on these most basic issues of battery chemistry, you're way out of the loop and need to get in the loop before you debate the topic. It's not like these are esoteric details; we're talking about the fundamentals.
The phosphates probably are the most widely known. These are what powered, among many other different vehicles, the Killacycle electric motorcycle, with its 0-60 in less than 1 second. Check into them -- A123 reports over 7,000 normal cycles on them, while independent testing by people on the RC Groups forum (they're becoming popular for RC aircraft) put them through over a thousand incredibly abusive cycles (3-4C charge, 6-8C discharge, sometimes all the way down to 0V) and only lost 20% capacity. And, heck, while you're at it, check out the titanates. They're even more impressive, IMHO, than the phosphates and spinels. AltairNano has done over *20,000 cycles* on a single pack. They're so stable that they're being used for grid load balancing, where the cells go from drawing 2MW from the grid to feeding 2MW to the grid, over and over whenever demand or supply fluctuates, to give peaking plants time to come online.
NiMH batteries dont lose 20% of their capacity a year just by exisiting.
Neither do automotive li-ions. Don't tell me you've confused laptop cells (LiCoO2 cathode, graphite anode) with automotive li-ions (phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc).
"Bzzt, you can build your own right now, because the cells are out there and readily purchasable by anyone."
But you can not buy them in a car right now. You sure couldn't buy them in a car last year.
What sort of world do you live in where new car lines are created that fast? Bringing a new series of car to market takes years -- which is why I've continually mentioned "the next few years" as the timeframe for when a whole bunch of EVs/PHEVs with automotive li-ions will be coming out.
"Did I give a discount on insurance in the above numbers? Nope, try again."
No but you didn't include it.
That's because I was computing *savings*. If the price of something is the same on both an EV and an ICE, its net savings is $0. It doesn't affect the calculation of savings.
You put down how much repairs and insurance was as a cost and wrote all of it off for an EV.
I distinctly did not. I credited EVs with $200 of electricity expenses, -$2000 of gasoline expenses, and -$500 of maintenance expenses. I gave them zero advantage over gasoline cars when it comes to insurance.
I did have a $500 repair on my Mazda 3. I was stopped at a red light and got rear ended. I don't count that in my calculation since it was in pay way a failure of the car. Those numbers don't seperate fender benders and such.
What, the census numbers? No, they don't. But accident repair costs are almost always dwarfed by accumulated maintenance costs -- every timing belt, pulley, pump, etc. An EV drivetrain has roughly 10% the moving parts. Doesn't even need oil changes. Heck, doesn't even have a transmission (have you seen how much a transmission failure will run you?). Even things unrelated to the drivetrain tend to wear less, such as the brakes (most braking work being done regeneratively).
And no we still have not seen the the first generation of mass market EVs yet. Notice the mass market part of that statment.
You apparently ignored what I wrote about the first generation. Electrics were initially the prime competition to gasoline cars in the early 1900s. In 1900, at the Paris exposition, there were 176 gasoline models, 40 electric, and 21 steam. By 1911, the Anderson Electric Car Company offered 21 different EV models -- and they were just one of dozens of EV carmakers. For example, in 1914, the Milburn Wagon Co sold 3400 EVs. Anderson sold 6,772 that same year. EVs were very popular among women, as at the time, gasoline cars had to be crank started. When Ford started mass-producing the Model T on modern assembly lines in 1913 (lower volume production began in 1908; between 1908 and 1910, Ford had only sold 12,000 cars), they had been losing market share to the electric runabouts. Their massive increase in production, advancing ICE tech, a stagnation in batteries, and the advent of the electric starter motor doomed EVs up until the 90s.
Even though the second gen was proportionally small compared to how many gasoline cars were on the market, it still involved thousands of EVs driven for years, racking up hundreds of millions of drive miles.
The indisputable fact is that you can not buy a good moderate priced EV today.
True! The ones remaining from the CARB ZEV era are generally so beloved that they sell for over double their purchase price; yet they're technological dinosaurs compared to what's being developed today. Which is part of why there's such a huge rush by virtually every automaker to bring more onto the market. GM alone plans to produce 10k Volts their first year, 60k their second year, and ramp up from there.
And the reason that you can not is the technology wasn't available three or so years ago.
Actually, it was. LiPs have been on the market for over half a decade. There wasn't as much of a demand, though, and companies weren't as willing to accept the risk on what was then a much newer product. Even Tesla wasn't; that's why they went with conventional laptop cells, despite their inferior properties for automotive applications.
Bzzt right You can not get them NOW.
Bzzt, you can build your own right now, because the cells are out there and readily purchasable by anyone.
Well you are. I am comparing a fuel-efficient IC vehicle to an electric vehicle. Of course in this market millage sells.
And EVs operate on a price equivalent of hundreds of miles per gallon. So, if you want to talk about reducing operations costs...
What you will not have to pay insurance tag and title on your elective vehicle?
Did I give a discount on insurance in the above numbers? Nope, try again.
Do you think it will never have issues?
Its drivetrain only has about ten percent of the moving parts of an ICE.
Also good modern cars are actually very trouble free.
Look at the figures above. They don't break down insurance versus repair, but I can assure you, the average person isn't spending close to $2k on insurance.
Not all mind you and I wouldn't bet on first gen mass market electric cars to be as trouble free as they will be in the future.
These aren't first gen mass market electric cars. First gen was in the early 1900s, and they were most definitely mass market (the Baker Electric being one of the biggest sellers). The second gen was from the CARB ZEV mandate era, from the late 90s to the early '00s. These vehicles, such as the EV1, were generally adored by their lessees for being low maintenance. What's coming up is the third generation of EVs.
Well lets take an honest look at this on.
The Hummer has terrible resale value for a lot of reasons. A big one is that it is a terrible vehical with a terrible repair history. A Prius is a Toyota and has a great repair history.
Okay, how about a Toyota Sequoia with a Honda Civic Hybrid? $26k versus $20k, but just over $17k 5-year depreciation instead of just over $8k 5-year depreciation.
It doesn't matter what comparison you do; guzzlers have horrible depreciation in comparison to fuel-efficient cars. Namely, because guzzlers continue to cost a lot to run, while a person who's buying used is doing so to save money.
Why not compare it to a Lexus, Honda, Acura, or Mazda 3 or 6.
Because we're comparing fuel-efficient vehicles with guzzlers, obviously.
"The average car on the road is now roughly nine years old, implying an average lifespan of 18 years. Ignoring inflation on gasoline prices and interest on the purchase, this would work out to a savings of $41,400 over the lifespan of the vehicle. That's a *Lot* of money. Saying it has to cost under $20k is just stupid."
Yea you are ignoring the interest that you would have to pay on the extra money.
And inflation on gas prices. If you want more detailed calculations that include interest and inflation, go here.
The other thing you are forgetting is that car loans are limited to usually five years
And so one should pretend that economics doesn't matter because of this, right? Whether the money is coming from a car loan, a savings account, home equity, or whatnot, economics is still economics. All that changes is the interest rates.
and you are ignoring the cost of a battery pack replacement. I doubt that any battery pack will last the 18 years you are perdicting for a car life span.
1) That's covered by the linked calculations.
2) LG Chem expects their spinel packs for the Volt to last 30 years. A123 has already gotten over 7,000 cycles on their pack. AltairNano titanate cells have done over 20 *thousand* cycles.
"Let's toss in another $500 in maintenance savings -" $500 a year? On my Mazda all I have had to do is change the oil and get new tires.
Um, no. In 2005, the average driver spent $2,013 in gasoline and motor oil plus $2,339 on other vehicle expenses (repairs, insurance, etc). Unless you have a magical car that never breaks, your car needs more than just oil and tires changed.
And those are not available yet for a car sized battery pack
BZZT, sorry, try again! *Almost all* new PHEVs and EVs coming out in significant volume in the coming years are using one of those chemistries, and the prototypes are running on them. The only glaring exception to this is Tesla.
plus I question the very idea of charging a Li/Poly car pack in five or ten minutes.
I love how you confused LiP, spinel, and titanate cells with li-poly; that was just the icing on the cake.
That will out a LOT of heat.
Li-ion variants tend to be over 99% efficient at slow charging and ~96% or so efficient at fast charging. 60kW*4%=2.4kW -- 50% more power as heat than a blow dryer consumes. 250kW*4%=10kW, still the tiniest fraction of the heat released by a running internal combustion engine.
None of those technologies are available right now.
What part of "Already Installed Across Oahu" don't you get? What, do you need a link? Or two? How about a map? Or
With one gear, it's be a case of, "Want superfast acceleration? Want a top speed of well over 100mph? Pick one." There's only so fast of an RPM that you can safely run the motor at.
For a non-sports-car, one gear is plenty. And even for the Tesla, with powertrain 1.5, they're simply ditching the transmission for a more powerful motor. It'll improve efficiency a little bit that way (funny how that works... put in a more powerful motor and *increase* your efficiency... gotta love EVs ;) )
and the cost? Under $20,000. That is what it would take to be a better car then a Mazda 3.
Oh, really? Your Mazda 3's gasoline costs a penny or two per mile? You can fill it up at home while causing minimal environmental damage and not exporting money to countries that hate us, and your vehicle costs almost nothing to maintain? Really?
No, you picked and chose gasoline's strengths and weighted it up against electricity's weaknesses, ignoring gasoline's weaknesses and electricity's strengths. First off, you simply cannot ignore the operations cost advantage. And this is something that will almost certainly hold over into resale value; there's a reason why a Hummer, which costs 1.5 times what Prius costs, depreciates three times as fast. The average person drives around 12,000 miles a year. At $4 a gallon and the average of 25mpg, that's ~$2k per year. Electricity is dirt cheap; let's say $200 a year. Let's toss in another $500 in maintenance savings -- a total savings of $2.3k a year. The average car on the road is now roughly nine years old, implying an average lifespan of 18 years. Ignoring inflation on gasoline prices and interest on the purchase, this would work out to a savings of $41,400 over the lifespan of the vehicle. That's a *Lot* of money. Saying it has to cost under $20k is just stupid.
As for fillup times, you may be surprised to learn that LiPs, spinels, and titanates *can* charge in 5-10 minutes. You, of course, need a fast charger, and hey, guess what? There's already a network of 60kW Aerovironment PosiChargers installed across Oahu, and Aerovironment makes them as big as 250kW. Epyon and several other companies are also getting into the fast charger market.
As for range, why on earth would you need to be able to drive 300 miles on a single charge? The standard recommendation for drivers is that you stop and stretch for five to ten minutes at least once every two hours of driving. Big gas tanks are only really a way for gasoline vehicles to compensate for the fact that they can't charge at home, a way to make it so that they don't have to drive by a pump every day. A range of 220 miles slow highway speeds and 150 or so at fast highway speeds should be more than sufficient for general usage. Depending on your aerodynamics, a four-seater car getting this range would require 20-50kWh of batteries to achieve this. If you're willing to accept the look of extreme streamlined vehicles, go for the lower end; if not, go for the upper end. LiPs are currently about $0.50/Wh, but unlike traditional laptop batteries ($0.30-$0.50/Wh) (which are limited by raw ingredient prices -- mostly the price of cobalt), LiPs are made of dirt-cheap ingredients (they eliminate the cobalt). Their prices are only high because they're new and aren't mass produced. LiPs should easily be able to get down to $0.15-$0.30, possibly even lower, with mass production. Let's go with $0.20. That's a pack price of $4k-$10k -- easily affordable. These packs could fully charge from 250kW in 5-12 minutes. Even from 60kW power, what's already available in Oahu, that's only 20-50 minutes for every 2-3 hours of driving. For the ability to charge on dirt-cheap power instead of $4/gal gas, that's quite the deal.
Oh, and did I mention that these batteries have incredibly long lifespans, that EV smart charging actually helps the grid, that we already have enough power capacity to convert most of our transportation fleet over to EVs, that only one in every few thousand vehicles on an interstate needs to be an EV for installing fast chargers nationwide to make financial sense (even ignoring tax breaks, green cred, customer loyalty, or using charging as a loss-leader), and that even running on coal power, an EV is cleaner than a gasoline vehicle?
An EV transportation system with fast charging just simply makes sense.
Exactly. GM was busily working to undermine and kill off the CARB mandate as fast as they could. The fact that they sold off their battery rights should speak volumes to how much they actually wanted to be in the business of building EVs. They had already shut down the lines at that point.
GM never wanted to be building EVs, and was all to happy to ditch the program and shuttle it down into the memory hole, only bringing it up in passing to spin it as a "failure" so that they wouldn't be pushed into doing it again. Their timing was impeccable... impeccably bad. Whether it's fears of global warming, fears of "running out of oil", high gas prices, a distaste for shipping oil overseas, a strengthening green movement, rapidly advancing battery tech, or just outright trends, virtually everything has been moving in the direction of EVs and PHEVs. And with hybrids reaching US shores from Japanese automakers, GM ensured that they had the worst image possible as they steadily lost market share from falling SUV sales.
Such horrible management.
cant name 5 patents but I CAN name one very important one. Try making and selling Nickel Metal Hydride batteries suitable for electric cars and see how far you get.
You mean like the large-format NiMHs in the Vectrix scooters?
You will likely be sued by a company you haven't heard of called Cobasys for violation of their patent on NiMH battery tech.
Cobasys has repeatedly made it clear that they will deal in large orders for large format NiMH, but not small orders. There haven't exactly been people lining up around the block wanting large orders of large-format NiMHs, however. It's old tech, inferior in about a dozen different ways to the modern automotive li-ions.
FYI, Cobasys only holds the patent rights on said large format NiMHs in the US, not internationally. Oh, and they've cross-licensed their patent portfolios with PEVE (who they initially sued for making NiMHs for sale in the US without paying them); PEVE now has the right to make large format NiMHs for sale in the US. The fact that they haven't should speak volumes for the demand of said batteries.
NiMH was top of the line tech back during the original CARB ZEV mandate. It no longer is.
So when the Hindenburg burned, why didn't it explode?
A wavefront of about 100 feet per second on an unmixed fuel-air burn? That's *darned fast*. It only looks slow because the Hindenburg was the size of the Titanic. http://www.oldbeacon.com/beacon/airships/images/zmc-2-5.jpg">Another perspective.
That's *fast* -- way faster than batteries.
Given that 5-10 minutes is pretty standard for automotive fast charging (phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc), when you factor in the time to get off the highway, to get to a station, to connect, to disconnect, to pay, to get back to the highway, and get back up to speed, an extra couple minutes is hardly a relevant difference. I certainly wouldn't pay 5-10 times as much for my fuel and do ~3 times the environmental damage in order to save a couple minutes. Who would? :And about efficiency: Where are those numbers from?
I gave you a peer-reviewed paper; read it yourself. I can give you a dozen more that'll tell you the exact same thing. Li-ion batteries are nearly lossless. Electrolysis and fuel cells are quite lossy.
And in terms of efficiency, what are they even measuring? efficiency from battery to drive train? from power source to battery?
Are you incapable of reading? The paper is linked, right above. Need it linked a second time? Here you go. Do you not know what "well to wheel" means? That means measuring the efficiency all the way back from the source of the energy used in the power plant, all the way to the torque imparted by the vehicle's wheels.
If peer-review isn't good enough for you, I can show you where you can buy these things yourself and test them yourself. Get, say, some A123 batteries from DeWalt power tool packs or any other LiP from the open market, a Manzanita Micro charger, and an Azure Dynamics Force Drive. The batteries are 96-99% efficient (depending on how fast you charge them), the charger is ~93% efficient, and the drivetrain is 85-90% efficient (actually a bit low for an EV). The power going to the charger coming from the US grid has an average transmission efficiency of 92.8%. What part of this are you having trouble with, so I can give you a dozen references on the subject?
also, the amount of energy produced by natural gas plants is much greater than 'just peaking' usage. yeah power companies like that natural gas can be turned off and on unlike coal and nuclear, but if they invest heavily in a natural gas plant, they want to make money off it, that means they will run it as much as they can
They can't underprice coal with natural gas. Coal is too cheap and natural gas is too expensive. Of course they want to run it as much as they can, but they're not going to generate power they can't sell.
pumping caves full of air creates wind based peaking capabilities.
That's not the Pickens's proposal, though. I agree, it's a good idea if they can get prices down and efficiency up enough. The other storage solution I've seen that's a bit more efficient is pumped water storage. It's trivial if you already have big hydro in the area (you don't have to pump anything, just not let it out of the reservoir). If you dont have hydro in the area, though (it is a rather destructive form of power), you can do a setup where there's no river, but you create an upper and lower reservoir and move water back and forth between them. China's a leader in this front, but they're hardly the only ones doing it. One clever version I read about is on Okinawa. Since Japan's islands tend to be quite mountainous, they built a pumped reservoir on a mountain near the shore and used the ocean as their lower reservoir.
Hydrogen on the other hand is extremely clean to produce from the grid (assuming that the grid is fed in a clean fashion) and extremely clean to dispose of, the planet handles it automatically.
By destroying ozone.
Didn't realize that, did you? Free hydrogen is a potent destroyer of ozone because it readily migrates into the upper atmosphere. And if you want to talk about clean, EVs are about three times more efficient than hydrogen vehicles, so if you go hydrogen instead of electric, you're talking about plastering three times more land in solar panels, damming three times more rivers, three times more coastline covered in wind farms, etc.
It's just a bad "solution". I hesitate to even use the word "solution" for it.
Using batteries is a decent solution as they run cleanly and can be charged from the grid. Unfortunately they are very dirty to create and dispose of.
Old myth based on stereotypes about all batteries being like lead-acid and nickel-cadmium. There's virtually nothing toxic or dirty to make in modern automotive batteries, such as phosphates and spinels. They're even less toxic than conventional li-ion, which is only mildly toxic. The raw materials for making lithium phosphate cathodes are not that much different than what you'd find in your average soft drink (phosphoric acid, sugar, etc, plus iron), a lithium salt that's merely extracted from brine pools and can quite affordably be extracted from seawater until the end of human civilization, the casing is generally aluminum or similar, the anode is graphite, the membrane thin PVC or similar, and so on. Contrast this with hydrogen fuel cells, which generally contain one of the rarest elements on the planet (platinum), which is mined in low ppm quantities (read: huge amounts of tailings for a tiny amount of platinum). Talk about environmental destruction! There's a reason why fuel cells generally cost several dollars per watt.
Oh, and modern batteries like phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc last longer than fuel cells, too.
[quote]True, but hydrogen is so light that it dissipates as fast, if not faster, than it evaporates.[/quote]
Hydrogen is flammable in almost any mixture with air. It also pools quite readily under overhangs of any sort. It also likes to undergo deflagration to detonation transitions, and only requires a tenth the ignition energy as gasoline to ignite. This is why NASA recommends buildings where hydrogen will be stored or used have roofs designed to be blown off them.
[quote]A ~200,000 cubic meter balloon filled with hydrogen, and where was the explosion?[/quote]
A wavefront propagating at 100 feet per second *without* pre-mixing of the gasses is very darned impressive.
[quote]The shell burned due to flammable paint[/quote]
Old myth. Heck, even the Mythbusters tackled this one. Only, they had to bias it way *against* hydrogen by only injecting the hydrogen slowly; if they started with their blimp already full, it outright exploded. And this was on small models, which -- due to the hydrogen scaling proportional to the volume cubed but the skin scaling proportional to volume squared -- was further biased in favor of the skin.
The claim that the Hindenburg fire was due to the skin is simply not true. The skin burned faster than untreated cloth and sparked a little, but this was dwarfed by how readily the hydrogen burned.
[quote]As long as the stationary refueling tank has a higher pressure than the tank in your car, no pump is necessary.[/quote]
Right. So you leave an even higher pressure tank of hydrogen in your garage at all times. See, nice and safe!
You know, you're not even supposed to keep cans of gasoline in your garage, and here you're talking about keeping a veritable bomb in your garage.
Hydrogen has a much lower ignition energy than propane, much more easily undergoes a deflagration to detonation transition, and can carry a deflagration or detonation in a far wider range of fuel-air mixtures. It also far more readily seeps through containers, which is especially a problem if there's piping over a hydrogen leak, as it can follow pipes to their destinations. Roofs and overhangs also tend to act as traps for hydrogen; NASA recommends that buildings where hydrogen is worked with have roofs designed to be blown away from their walls.
I think pure electric cars can work for a substantial portion of people, but electric cannot yet offer any method for rapid refuelling if you are going further than one charge can take you
That is incorrect. It was correct ten years ago, but not today. Just ignoring battery swapping, there are several companies now that make massively powerful fast chargers, all of which are cheaper than a hydrogen pump. Perhaps the most notable is Aerovironment, with their PosiCharge line. They already have a network of 60kW fast chargers installed across Oahu, but they make chargers as big as 250kW. For a ~10kWh battery pack (Aptera-sized), that's 10 minutes and 2.4 minutes, respectively. For a ~50kWh battery pack (Tesla-sized), that's ~50 minutes and ~12 minutes, respectively. Compared to the length of time you'd spend driving, these charge times are pretty trivial. An Aptera, for example, gets 120 miles per charge, so with just a 60kWh charger and a car like an Aptera, that'd be two hours of driving for ten minutes of charging. And heck, you're supposed to take a five to ten minute break every two hours of driving for safety reasons anyways!
On the battery side of things, the phosphates, titanates, and spinels can all take 5-10 minute charges, as can most upcoming technologies (some even less).
This is *meaningless* because when everyone plugs in their car into any plug, the power will go out.
Not according to a DOE study conducted by PNL. In fact, EVs can actually help the grid if they use a smart charger by adjusting their draw relative to demand, giving peaking plants a chance to come online. And the fact that they'll more often charge on offpeak power means lower rates for everyone, since power companies can get more utilization out of their existing infrastructure.
The funny thing? The efficiency is atrocious and the fear quite legitimate.
As for the fear: check out what NASA has to say about hydrogen. Some excerpts:
Ignition:
"Hydrogen-air mixtures can ignite with very low energy input, 1/10th that required igniting a gasoline-air mixture. For reference, an invisible spark or a static spark from a person can cause ignition."
"Although the autoignition temperature of hydrogen is higher than those for most hydrocarbons, hydrogen's lower ignition energy makes the ignition of hydrogen-air mixtures more likely. The minimum energy for spark ignition at atmospheric pressure is about 0.02 millijoules."
----
Mixtures:
"The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in air (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 75.0. The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in oxygen (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 94.0."
"Condensed and solidified atmospheric air, or trace air accumulated in manufacturing, contaminates liquid hydrogen, thereby forming an unstable mixture. This mixture may detonate with effects similar to those produced by trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other highly explosive materials"
"Explosive limits of hydrogen in air are 18.3 to 59 percent by volume"
"Flames in and around a collection of pipes or structures can create turbulence that causes a deflagration to evolve into a detonation, even in the absence of gross confinement."
(For comparison: Deflagration limit of gasoline in air: 1.4-7.6%)
Leaks:
"Leakage, diffusion, and buoyancy: These hazards result from the difficulty in containing hydrogen. Hydrogen diffuses extensively, and when a liquid spill or large gas release occurs, a combustible mixture can form over a considerable distance from the spill location."
"Hydrogen, in both the liquid and gaseous states, is particularly subject to leakage because of its low viscosity and low molecular weight (leakage is inversely proportional to viscosity). Because of its low viscosity alone, the leakage rate of liquid hydrogen is roughly 100 times that of JP-4 fuel, 50 times that of water, and 10 times that of liquid nitrogen."
----
It also covers how hydrogen likes to pool under roofs and overhangs, and that buildings containing hydrogen or hydrogen pipelines should have roofs designed to be blown away, as well as extreme caution on spark suppression. It also talks about how hydrogen can enter pipes and follow them to their destinations, and pool there.
As for efficiency, the efficiency of a hydrogen economy is atrocious. Don't take my word for it; listen to peer review. Check out the convenient chart. Electric cars have three times the efficiency of hydrogen cars from a given power source. Even if your power is renewable, this tremendous efficiency difference can't be ignored. This means, for hydrogen, three times the land covered in solar cells, three times the dammed up rivers, three times the coastline covered in wind farms, and so on.
Hydrogen is a complete waste of time. A fuel cell stack will weigh down and take up space in a typical vehicle as much as a modern li-ion battery stack, only give similar range, cost ten times as much, have less room for price improvement in fuel cell costs versus battery costs (platinum playing a big role in this), have a shorter lifespan (again, compared to modern automotive li-ions like phosphates, spinels, titanates, etc, not laptop batteries), more temperature sensitivity (yes, you read that right; modern li-ions are often good to -30 or less
The "scam" is that Pickens founded the Clean Energy Fuels Corporation which makes natural gas vehicles. Hence, his plan to use wind power to displace natural gas use and run the vehicles on the displaced natural gas (rather than any other alternative drivetrain, such as electric, which could use the windpower directly). Of course, one problem that immediately surfaces is that natural gas generation tends to be used more for peaking than for baseload, which is generally coal or nuclear -- that is, to say, that it ramps up and down quickly to adjust for sudden spikes in demand or drops in production. Wind power is precisely the opposite; it's unpredictable, so you need *extra* peaking generation to compensate, and overall you displace some baseload. Sounds to me more like Pickens will be displacing coal and nuclear, not natural gas. While that is good in other respects, few are proposing to make coal and nuclear cars**. But any influx of cash into natural gas vehicles, irregardless of sustainability or whether or not he's actually displacing any natural gas use, will certainly help his pocketbooks.
Don't get me wrong; natural gas is a potentially bigger resource than oil, has a lower carbon content per joule, and burns cleaner. Switching vehicles to natural gas isn't a bad thing (although electricity is much better). But the concept of displacing natural gas-fired generation with wind doesn't make sense on the face of it.
** - Note that I said few, not none. Who can forget the Ford Nucleon, or the wood-powered car?
Well, aftermarket, that'd be a really big deal. A good, reliable lithium-ion battery pack that integrates well with the drivetrain isn't trivial to engineer, and you couldn't just borrow one from another vehicle. Also, you'd be cutting your range to about 150 miles or so. On the upside, it'd be able to take as much juice as you could pump into it. And Tesla already has a lot invested in their current architecture, so they'll probably be sticking with it at least through the Model S.
If fast chargers like the Aerovironment PosiCharge ones or the Epyon chargers start to make inroads in the continental US, I expect Tesla to be pretty much forced to switch. The market will demand it. Also, I can't see how they'd make an EV for the price of the BlueStar without switching chemistries; Tesla *needs* to have a big battery pack to reduce the number of cycles each individual cell goes through, but there's not that much room for improvement in prices on traditional li-ion batteries, while there's a ton of room for price improvement on the new variants. But for now, I expect Tesla to stick with their current packs. And as long as they're sticking with them, I really doubt they'll offer replacements using a different chemistry.
Tesla may end up skipping the new generation of automotive li-ions altogether. Lithium ion technology is advancing incredibly rapidly. Over the next few years, there's almost certainly going to be a huge jump in anode density (with the various vanadium, tin and silicon techs that are giving steller performances as a replacement for graphite), and a smaller but still significant jump in cathodes density (with the various layered or fluorinated cathodes). We realistically could see 2-4 times the energy density in the next 5 years or so. So, Tesla may end up moving directly to something like that.
Ah, wish I had that kind of money; that's a fun looking ride. I'm waiting for an Aptera instead -- not as much accel, but crazy efficiency ;)
What number Roadster are you reserved for?
Oh, hey, missed this part:
Batteries -- especially Li-Ion ones -- begin to degrade as soon as they're manufactured, usually losing 40% or more of their charge capacity in 18-24 months. How is a station going to deal with customers dropping off old battery packs and picking up new ones?
I wasn't going to comment on your post, since I prefer fast chargers like the Aerovironment PosiCharge chargers and the various chemistries that can take 5-10 minute charges over battery swapping. However, this is a big misconception that needs to be remedied.
First off, you're thinking of conventional lithium ion. That is, lithium cobalt oxide cathode, graphite anode. There are many variants of this chemistry out there (in particular, the phosphates, titanates, and spinels) that change either the anode or cathode, usually the more expensive cathode, for a more stable version. This allows for fast charging, crazy power density, safety, and extreme longevity, for the cost of some of its energy density (going from ~160Wh/kg to ~100Wh/kg -- still way better than NiMH, mind you). Most upcoming highway-speed EVs are using these sorts of variants, not traditional li-ion. These techs weren't as mature when Tesla started, so they used more conventional cells. This is not the standard in the industry.
Now, focusing on Tesla... this means that their packs will degrade in a couple years, right? Well, no again. Tesla coddles their cells like crazy. They don't charge them to full. They cool them during operation. They cool them if they get too hot when the car is out in the sun. They practically refrigerate them during charging, and don't allow them to charge or discharge too quickly. They do extensive load balancing. All in all, this allows them to only be down to ~80% capacity in 5 years if it's minimally driven, and 50% if it's very heavily driven.
But anyways, I must reiterate: Tesla is the exception, not the rule.
Should I end right here? Meh, let's take care of another misconception: the "Long Tailpipe" argument:
There are many more reasons why this is a silly idea that will do little or nothing to help the environment. It may, in fact, actually harm the environment if we (meaning the U.S.) turn to our most abundant power-producing resource (coal) to provide the needed power.
Nope.
Check your math. 35 / 0.13 = 270 gallons. At 30mpg, that's 8,100 miles -- for the average American, about 8 months worth of driving.
It varies from one study to the next, but most peer-reviewed studies I've seen peg the energy consumption and CO2 emissions from producing a vehicle at around 20% of its lifetime emissions, the rest from operating emissions. Which, honestly, is what you'd expect; your average vehicle will burn through a couple times its own weight in fuel over its lifespan, and none of that will get recycled into other parts (unlike a lot of the body).
Of course, in practical terms, you'd have to consider the efficiencies of the two drive trains (and the loss of the AC-DC converter).
Which, of course, completely invalidates your above argument. ICEs only turn about 20% of the energy of that gasoline into wheel torque, while EVs turn about 80-85% of what they take out of an outlet into wheel torque.
Just ignoring all of your erroneous stereotypes (addressed in earlier posts, not worth a repeated debunking), an electric motor is generally only 85-90% efficient in a normal drivecycle. If the vehicle is averaging, say, 25kW, that's still ~3kW of heat -- the output of two large plug-in portable space heaters.