Power/weight, sure. Energy/weight... um, looked at the numbers lately? There's a reason that the Li-ion Prius+ conversion has a 30 mile electric range, and the lead-acid Prius+ goes 10 miles.
The prices for large lithium ion batteries are still a bit insane
But things are looking up! When AC Propulsion re-powered their tzero with Li-ion batteries (less than 2 years ago), they put 60 kWh of laptop cells into it; IIRC their cost was about $60,000 for the cells. Today, you can buy 60 kWh of Li-ion cells for about $43,000; that's a price decrease of about 19% per year. At that rate, prices fall by half every 4 years. A Prius-equivalent battery pack of Li-ion cells would be a couple thousand bucks today, and under $1000 in 2009. That's definitely the future.
I wish I knew where this "hydrogen more practical than batteries" propaganda was coming from, it would make it easier to refute. It's true for lead-acid batteries in long-range applications, probably for NiMH, certainly not for Li-ion especially after the nano-particle electrode advances of Altair and Toshiba.
If you want to see what's out there, check battery suppliers. I look at batteryspace.com every so often. They've got a special on laptop-pack cells right now; if you built a 60 kWh pack out of those, you'd get a tzero-equivalent battery for about $43000, or about 1/10 of what a car-sized hydrogen fuel cell is going for these days. Peak discharge rate on those cells is 2.5C, so you'd get about 150 kW (200 HP) out of them. If you wanted to cut cost and were willing to accept less power, you could cut the size to 15 kWh, max electric power to 37.5 kW (~50 HP) and cost to ~$11,000. At 250 Wh/mile the big pack would let you drive ~240 miles on juice alone, the small one about 60 miles.
It's mighty pricey, but compare to a PEM fuel cell at multiple hundreds of thousands. Even if they come down in price at the same rate, guess what's going to be in showrooms first?
These cells weigh about 43 grams each and hold ~7.2 Wh; the small pack would have about 2100 cells and weigh ~90 kg, the big one 8330 cells and weigh ~360 kg. As I recall, the Ford Focus FCV weighs close to a half-ton more than the conventional version; 800 pounds of batteries is about the same, maybe a bit lighter. Then there's the bulk. 8000 cells at 18 mm diameter and 65 mm long could be stacked in an array to form the floor of the car; arranged widthwise, you'd get 23 cells in 1.5 meters of width, 120 along the 18 mm dimension in 2.2 meters front to back, and a bit less than 54 mm thick stacked 3 tall. That's a bit over 2 inches of vehicle floor, and it doesn't impinge on the trunk or the engine compartment. You're not going to get 10,000 psi tanks into a space that small if your life depended on it.
Neither hydrogen fuel cells nor Li-ion batteries are practical as the sole power source for a vehicle these days. Batteries are a lot closer, and deserve the bulk of the attention.
You misunderstand; it's what's upstream of the electrical part that's important. If you have an electric car, it can get energy from any electrical supply of suitable voltage/frequency. You can change battery technologies all you want without affecting the supply network. If you have a fuel-cell car, you have to find a way to supply it with what the fuel cell wants. If you have a fuel-cell infrastructure, you have a good fraction of a trillion dollars invested in supplying that particular variety of fuel cell with its needs (like gaseous hydrogen) and any energy supply that comes along (say, wind) has to be converted into that form first. It doesn't matter if that energy was already in a form that the car's motors could have used directly; if you build an infrastructure around hydrogen fuel cells, you commit to converting energy to hydrogen to get it onto the car and back again to run the car.
When gasoline becomes a non-option, it will be hydrogen.
Lithium-ion batteries are currently smaller, lighter and cheaper than fuel-cell systems and their high-pressure hydrogen tankage. Zinc-air is even better. Why do we want to fix on hydrogen when we have (a) technologies which are better today and (b) the energy supply already has very wide distribution?
Advanced [batteries] are little more than reversible fuel cells.
I've got a hint for you... all secondary cells are little more than reversible fuel cells. If you can recharge them in five minutes and then go drive 300 miles, what's the big difference? Plug instead of nozzle?
Electrolysis is more like 90%, and usually even higher.
That isn't what UCSD says. This source agrees, and has some pretty dismal figures for the cost of hydrogen vs. its gasoline equivalent.
Electricity at even $0.10/kWh is so much cheaper than gas it's not funny.
there's nothing stopping [fuel cells] from also being 90% efficient.
Yeah, there is. If you generate entropy in your process you have to get rid of it as waste heat, and that's energy you can't convert to work. Second Law, no way around it. The aforementioned sources claim a theoretical maximum of 83%. I haven't worked the numbers, but you're in no position to dispute that unless you have.
Easier for whom? Easier for the people whose homes are demolished to make way for the coal strip mines?
Easier for the people who own the big energy-supply companies, that's who; do you think that people's homes stand in their way now? Go hydrogen, and they'll mine coal, gasify it to CO and H2, steam-reform to H2 + CO2, and sell the H2.
Go electric, and people will be able to make their own "motor fuel" with panels on the roof or some airfoils in the breeze (someone else's panels or someone else's airfoils will work just fine too). They won't have to buy another expensive piece of hardware to take water apart so that the car can put it back together again, and they won't have to pay for the losses of the double conversion. As for batteries, the iron lithium phosphate chemistry has gotten rid of the cobalt and thermal runaway issues in Li-ion, and the price has been coming down steadily year over year. They'll be ready before hydrogen fuel cells will, and then we won't need hydrogen fuel cells (unless we want them to be one more source of juice for the grid, rather than the sole source for the car).
Batteries with enough performance to go 300 miles cost too much today, but that's not a problem. Outfit hybrid cars with enough batteries to go 20 miles before they have to start burning gasoline, and you can replace something like 2/3 of all gasoline with electricity. Batteries enough to go 20 miles are fairly cheap.
What if the global warming nuts turn out to be right?
I'm already betting on it. What's more alternative-friendly: hydrogen with no infrastructure to speak of and economics that favor production from coal and natural gas, or electric that people are already making themselves and charging their own vehicles?
The thing that fuel cells give us (with most of the designs being put forward) is that the powertrain itself in cars becomes based on electricity.
Actually, fuel cells take that option away. If you have a pure electric vehicle you can recharge it from anything that makes electricity. This can be a fuel cell in your basement (with the waste heat warming your morning shower), or it can be watts from a PV panel on the roof or a nuke plant halfway across the state. Doesn't matter to the car, a watt is a watt. If you stick the fuel cell in the car you're suddenly limited to feeding the car whatever the fuel cell wants. Maybe you can use nuke or solar juice to make that, but you've got two pieces of hardware now (a fuel-maker as well as a fuel cell) and the extra expense and efficiency hits.
Electricity has the advantage of being a near-universal medium of exchange, and one more feature: we've already got a huge distribution network for it, so we can get started immediately.
Uh-huh. And the EROEI on this process is what, exactly?
Where am I gonna find a 500mi cord that'll fit in the trunk[?]
You use this clever little device that stores electricity to carry with lets you carry gasoline with you instead of having a reeeeeealy long hose from the pump.
Electric isn't going anywhere for most of America's driving requirements
You don't seem to know what those requirements are. How many people drive 200 miles on every trip? Most commutes are less than 20 miles, and if you only powered the first 20 miles of each day's driving with electricity you could eliminate well over half of all gasoline use. (Since you seem to need me to draw pictures, the extension cord is to re-charge the battery when you're parked somewhere.) See WorldChanging for an intro.
Electricity is easy to handle? Batteries are way too heavy and expensive. I don't quite know what you mean by that.
Comparison of incommensurables. You don't yank batteries in and out of an electric car any more than you swap hydrogen tanks in a FC car. Batteries are a heck of a lot smaller than the 10,000 PSI, fiber-wound hydrogen tanks and platinum-coated fuel cells which are the best we can do today. They're getting cheaper at a pretty good clip too.
By the way, what's the solution you're offering?
Lithium-ion, either with zinc-air batteries or alone. You can make a car go 300 miles (500 km) on lithium-ion batteries a lot more cheaply than you can make a car go 330 km on hydrogen, and in an emergency you can "fuel" from any electric outlet (albeit not as quickly as you might like). Why spend a trillion dollars on new infrastructure when we could spend it on actual energy sources and get a lot more done sooner?
Gas engines have low efficiencies, between 30 and 10%. FCs have higher, about 50+%. So what you lose in the refinery you more than make up in the engine.
Oil's not going to last forever. Why do you want to spend $billions for brand-new infrastructure only to tie automobiles to depleting energy sources? (It'll be good for the oil companies... it'll give them maximum return on their reserves. But what's in it for you and me?)
You can turn oil and natural gas to electricity in IGCC powerplants with efficiency greater than 50%; with coal, 40%. Charge batteries with this (95% or so for Li-ion) and you're talking close to 50% overall efficiency. On top of this, you get a whole bunch of advantages over hydrogen:
You get 90% or so end-to-end efficiency from wind or solar power, because you have no conversion to hydrogen and back.
You can use the existing electric infrastructure; much less new investment.
Lithium-ion batteries are already about 1/10 the cost of fuel cells, and can come down in price a lot sooner.
There is no point to using hydrogen unless you want to tie the future to oil.
onsite gas reformers could piggyback on the natural gas infrastructure.
North American natural gas production has peaked and will decline. Where are you going to get this extra gas from? Nobody wants an LNG terminal, and imported LNG gets us right back to the imported energy trap.
If I had a garage, I would _love_ to have an LNG or H car, be able to fill it myself overnight.
Get yourself an electric car and all you need is a cord that's long and fat enough. Buy a CalCar conversion when they become available and you'll be able to replace most of your gasoline consumption with juice delivered over a $10.99 hardware store cheapie.
The Bush administration sure didn't think the problem was serious 4 years ago, when the PNGV was killed. Wouldn't it be great to have 80-MPG cars rolling out of Detroit right about now?
The energy bill is a captive of special interests. It's all about pork; I understand that there will be NO subsidies for biodiesel produced from non-crop sources (soybean, rapeseed and waste cooking grease only), and ethanol from corn is preferred over ethanol from biomass. Why? Doesn't benefit the lobbies who are paying for the next campaign, that's why.
Hybrids and clean diesels only reduce oil demand; they can't substitute anything else for it. The plug-in hybrid (CalCar) can, but I understand that there were no programs or preferences for them until some people like James Woolsey pulled some strings. If you look at the numbers, electric has more potential to eliminate oil consumption than anything else out there.
The question ought to be, what are we going to power stuff with? Only then should we consider what to use as a medium for transporting and storing energy.
The rush to hydrogen is an attempt to pre-judge the issue. For instance, solar panels have an energy payback time of 4 years (single-crystal cells) or less; if you used them to charge batteries more or less directly, you'd be able to supply the energy for your typical personal vehicle with a relatively small investment. But if you insist on going through hydrogen, with 70% efficiency in electrolysis, 60% in the fuel cell and losses in compression, you're down to 40% overall efficiency and you need about 2.5 times as many solar panels. You get a similar answer for wind.
If you insist on hydrogen, it becomes much easier to produce it from coal, oil and gas than from most kinds of renewable energy (artificial photosynthesis excepted, but that's not even being done on a serious laboratory scale yet). That's why hydrogen isn't the answer. You can put enough lithium-ion batteries into a fairly small car to get 300 miles range, and the Toshiba electrodes have cut the charging time from hours to minutes. Why are we allowing our governments to waste money on this expensive, bulky, volatile and lossy gas?
Oh, sure, oil isn't the only source of energy. But what's the reason for choosing hydrogen as the way of getting energy into a car?
It's not compact, like gasoline.
It's not easy to handle, like alcohol or electricity.
It's not efficient to transform energy from e.g. electricity to hydrogen and back again; losses are something like 60%.
Nope, there's one and only one reason to settle on hydrogen as THE medium to replace gasoline, and that is because it's most easily and efficiently made from oil, coal and natural gas. It keeps the fossil-fuel companies on top by making sure that the infrastructure is built around the goods they supply best.
While you still need the initial input to create the solar plant, dam or windmills, the amount of hydrogen produced with very little impact on the environment would be astronomical!
You, sir, have a future ahead of you as an advertising executive.
Stay the hell out of science, engineering and economics, because you have obviously convinced yourself that an energy system with 15% end-to-end losses is inferior to an energy system with 60% end-to-end losses. You won't get published, nobody will offer you a job, and people will point at you and laugh.
It's hard to tell from the news reports if these are the Shinkansen trains or others, but that doesn't mean that rail is perfect - just that the best units ever built, running on very special rights-of-way, haven't had major problems yet.
Of course, it's difficult to start one if the rotor is completely demagnitized as it prefers that there's at least a tiny bit of a field, but nontheless...
You're thinking of a self-excited induction generator here, which needs either a remnant field or another kick to start; a motor gets its magnetizing current from its supply.
I meant to say energy. If I'm not talking to another electrical engineer I tend to slip into layman's terminology.
I've learned to do the opposite; inaccuracy breeds misconceptions, of which there are already more than enough. Besides, this place IS supposed to be "News for Nerds" and it never hurt anyone to have a precise keyword or phrase that they can look up.
Then there are the people who say "kilowatts per hour" and arrogantly assert that they actually know something; they're either trolls or ignoramuses and I'm heartily sick of them. It's good to prove that you aren't one of them at the outset.
A battery with a capacity of 60KWH is not neccessarily fully charged if you run 200A @ 300V for an hour, as a significant portion of the incoming energy is dissipated as waste heat.
There are two factors to that: charging overvoltage and coulomb efficiency. If the cell needs.2 volts over zero-current to charge at your desired rate, you're dissipating 200 mW per amp. If you're also losing 30% of your charging current via pathways that don't charge the battery (70% coulomb efficiency), that's more power down the drain.
So, do you have any figures as to the charging efficiency of said batteries?
A quick google for "coulomb efficiency" turned up a bunch of things:
You can probably find more with a more targeted search.
I understand that lead-acid efficiency is particularly poor because of the need to overcharge them to prevent sulfation, but my cursory search found nothing on that. Familiarity with their web site did let me find the efficiency graph on page 41 of this paper, but I doubt that a search engine would have. Those figures are interesting, showing small-cycle efficiency no lower than 90% over the entire charge range even for lead-acid batteries.
You've got to be ready to cross-check numbers to be sure they're legit.
It's that I though that... batteries (and especially the charge cycle) are also rather inefficient.
Really? What facts brought you to that conclusion?
Do you have any figures as to how much power you have to put into these batteries to charge them up to 60KWH?
Kilowatt-hours are units of energy, not power. Your question is incoherent, like asking how fast you have to drive to travel 50 miles. I strongly suggest that you begin by learning enough physics so that you understand these issues thoroughly, and can answer the questions yourself (they aren't difficult).
A Newton is the force required to accelerate one kilogram at one meter per second squared (kg-m/sec^2). A Joule is a unit of energy equal to one Newton-meter. A Watt is a Joule per second. That's where you start.
So what is the theoretical fastest time you could have these batteries charged?
Until you hit the limit of the batteries, it's "how much charging capacity are you willing to put in?"
Because if it's just a few minutes, and the electrical systems in the home are not capable of it, then why not have dedicated "electricity stations" where you can recharge your car just as you would fill it with gas?
Indeed, why not have both? Most people's cars sit overnight, so a couple of 220 V 30 A outlets would be sufficient to keep the family's fleet topped off even if they ran long trips every day. You don't need the half-megawatt chargers except to stand in for gas pumps at service stations.
I don't get why everyone who craps on the idea of the electric car immediately assumes you have to charge it from the outlet on your house or garage.
Not everyone who assumes home charging is crapping on the idea. I like the idea of the CalCar as a near-term scheme, and the only thing you'd need to charge overnight for 30 miles of electric cruising the next day is an extension cord. Imagine not having to bother filling up the gas for a couple of months at a time; I really like that idea.
It's really easy to go off the rails if you don't check your facts.
If we assume that an electrical car is twice as efficient in terms of getting energy out of batteries (which is probably optimistic), 200KWH of batteries would be needed.
Batteries are more like 5 times as efficient. Your 35 MPG (6.72 l/100 km) car is going to use 865 watt-hours (equivalent) of fuel per mile, not including losses in the fuel cycle. Typical electric vehicles run 150-250 Wh/mile, between 3.5 and 5.7 times as good.
These are real-world numbers. The lithium-ion tzero carries 60 kWh of batteries and can run almost 300 miles on a charge.
To recharge your car in 1 hour, you'd have to connect it to the ditribution transformer with solid copper plates.
60 kWh / 300 V = 200 Ah. The house I grew up in has 300 amp service; if you charged the car over the same cables it would take 40 minutes, and if you kept the same energy storage but boosted the battery voltage to 480 volts you could cut that to 25 minutes.
Every time one of those idiots charges up their car from the grid, that's more radioactive soot thrown into the air.
These are Californians; their electricity comes from Columbia River hydro and natural gas. Every time they charge up, someone's job at an aluminum smelter or chemical plant gets moved overseas instead.;-)
the largest percentage of energy in the US comes from COAL.
Which a) is only true today, as the generating mix can and will change (Californians are particularly big on wind and solar), b) will get cleaner as better coal technology gets into use, and c) isn't imported oil regardless of what else you get it from.
You're right... today. Today's special is 2000 mAh Li-ion cells for $5.20 each, or about 72 cents/watt-hour. If the Civic needs 250 Wh/mile and you want 300 miles range, you'd need 75 kWh of storage costing about $54,000.
If you just want 15 miles of all-electric range to get rid of gasoline for all your local trips, the batteries would be $2700. As gasoline heads towards the $2.50/gallon mark and upwards, it would only take a few years for most people's investment in batteries to pay off. Best of all, the price of batteries keeps coming down.
The claim is absurd on its face. A 3000 pound car getting 30 MPG burns its weight in fuel in 15,000 miles; do you realize how little fuel it would take to melt the metal in entire car? Even if you postulate that the entire car is made of aluminum at 15 kWh/kg the 3000 lb (~1400 kg) car would only take 21,000 kWh to make. That electricity would cost about $2100 at current rates, and could drive a 250 Wh/mile electric vehicle about 84,000 miles. The typical car goes a lot farther than that before being scrapped, and I don't know of one that's 100% metal.
Of course, a search on "car manufacture energy consumption" would have turned up this page which shows that manufacture accounts for about 10% of life-cycle energy; fuel accounts for nearly 75%.
It wasn't practical then, it isn't practical now- it is estimated that Toyota (not to mention, the Japanese government) subsidized the Prius to the tune of at least $17,000.
Even if it was correct (CATO's impartiality is doubtful), it is four years out of date. Less than two years later Toyota was reporting per-vehicle profits on the Prius. Batteries and the like have only gotten cheaper since then, and it's not like Toyota has to offer incentives to move them!
It's a common myth that the hybrid system is what gives it such good gas mileage. It isn't. It's narrow, hard tires and good aerodynamics.
If you are talking about constant-speed cruise on flat highways, you'd be right; a car with only those features and no hybrid hardware would be lighter and get even better mileage (as long as it didn't have to climb hills). But that isn't "where the rubber meets the road"; hybrid drivetrains pay off big due to:
Regenerative braking in traffic.
Reduced engine friction due to smaller engine.
Reduced throttling losses, ditto.
Idling losses reduced or eliminated under many operating conditions.
Then there are the people putting bigger batteries in their Priuses and running off grid electricity for short trips. They may or may not be saving energy, but it's a fact that the juice is not coming from petroleum and it has the potential to come from non-polluting sources either now or in the future. That's going to be the next big thing.
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I wish I knew where this "hydrogen more practical than batteries" propaganda was coming from, it would make it easier to refute. It's true for lead-acid batteries in long-range applications, probably for NiMH, certainly not for Li-ion especially after the nano-particle electrode advances of Altair and Toshiba.
If you want to see what's out there, check battery suppliers. I look at batteryspace.com every so often. They've got a special on laptop-pack cells right now; if you built a 60 kWh pack out of those, you'd get a tzero-equivalent battery for about $43000, or about 1/10 of what a car-sized hydrogen fuel cell is going for these days. Peak discharge rate on those cells is 2.5C, so you'd get about 150 kW (200 HP) out of them. If you wanted to cut cost and were willing to accept less power, you could cut the size to 15 kWh, max electric power to 37.5 kW (~50 HP) and cost to ~$11,000. At 250 Wh/mile the big pack would let you drive ~240 miles on juice alone, the small one about 60 miles.
It's mighty pricey, but compare to a PEM fuel cell at multiple hundreds of thousands. Even if they come down in price at the same rate, guess what's going to be in showrooms first?
These cells weigh about 43 grams each and hold ~7.2 Wh; the small pack would have about 2100 cells and weigh ~90 kg, the big one 8330 cells and weigh ~360 kg. As I recall, the Ford Focus FCV weighs close to a half-ton more than the conventional version; 800 pounds of batteries is about the same, maybe a bit lighter. Then there's the bulk. 8000 cells at 18 mm diameter and 65 mm long could be stacked in an array to form the floor of the car; arranged widthwise, you'd get 23 cells in 1.5 meters of width, 120 along the 18 mm dimension in 2.2 meters front to back, and a bit less than 54 mm thick stacked 3 tall. That's a bit over 2 inches of vehicle floor, and it doesn't impinge on the trunk or the engine compartment. You're not going to get 10,000 psi tanks into a space that small if your life depended on it.
Neither hydrogen fuel cells nor Li-ion batteries are practical as the sole power source for a vehicle these days. Batteries are a lot closer, and deserve the bulk of the attention.
Hydrogen is the energetic Bed of Procrustes.
Electricity at even $0.10/kWh is so much cheaper than gas it's not funny.
Yeah, there is. If you generate entropy in your process you have to get rid of it as waste heat, and that's energy you can't convert to work. Second Law, no way around it. The aforementioned sources claim a theoretical maximum of 83%. I haven't worked the numbers, but you're in no position to dispute that unless you have. Easier for the people who own the big energy-supply companies, that's who; do you think that people's homes stand in their way now? Go hydrogen, and they'll mine coal, gasify it to CO and H2, steam-reform to H2 + CO2, and sell the H2.Go electric, and people will be able to make their own "motor fuel" with panels on the roof or some airfoils in the breeze (someone else's panels or someone else's airfoils will work just fine too). They won't have to buy another expensive piece of hardware to take water apart so that the car can put it back together again, and they won't have to pay for the losses of the double conversion. As for batteries, the iron lithium phosphate chemistry has gotten rid of the cobalt and thermal runaway issues in Li-ion, and the price has been coming down steadily year over year. They'll be ready before hydrogen fuel cells will, and then we won't need hydrogen fuel cells (unless we want them to be one more source of juice for the grid, rather than the sole source for the car).
Batteries with enough performance to go 300 miles cost too much today, but that's not a problem. Outfit hybrid cars with enough batteries to go 20 miles before they have to start burning gasoline, and you can replace something like 2/3 of all gasoline with electricity. Batteries enough to go 20 miles are fairly cheap.
I'm already betting on it. What's more alternative-friendly: hydrogen with no infrastructure to speak of and economics that favor production from coal and natural gas, or electric that people are already making themselves and charging their own vehicles?Electricity has the advantage of being a near-universal medium of exchange, and one more feature: we've already got a huge distribution network for it, so we can get started immediately.
You can turn oil and natural gas to electricity in IGCC powerplants with efficiency greater than 50%; with coal, 40%. Charge batteries with this (95% or so for Li-ion) and you're talking close to 50% overall efficiency. On top of this, you get a whole bunch of advantages over hydrogen:
- You get 90% or so end-to-end efficiency from wind or solar power, because you have no conversion to hydrogen and back.
- You can use the existing electric infrastructure; much less new investment.
- Lithium-ion batteries are already about 1/10 the cost of fuel cells, and can come down in price a lot sooner.
There is no point to using hydrogen unless you want to tie the future to oil.The energy bill is a captive of special interests. It's all about pork; I understand that there will be NO subsidies for biodiesel produced from non-crop sources (soybean, rapeseed and waste cooking grease only), and ethanol from corn is preferred over ethanol from biomass. Why? Doesn't benefit the lobbies who are paying for the next campaign, that's why.
Hybrids and clean diesels only reduce oil demand; they can't substitute anything else for it. The plug-in hybrid (CalCar) can, but I understand that there were no programs or preferences for them until some people like James Woolsey pulled some strings. If you look at the numbers, electric has more potential to eliminate oil consumption than anything else out there.
The rush to hydrogen is an attempt to pre-judge the issue. For instance, solar panels have an energy payback time of 4 years (single-crystal cells) or less; if you used them to charge batteries more or less directly, you'd be able to supply the energy for your typical personal vehicle with a relatively small investment. But if you insist on going through hydrogen, with 70% efficiency in electrolysis, 60% in the fuel cell and losses in compression, you're down to 40% overall efficiency and you need about 2.5 times as many solar panels. You get a similar answer for wind.
If you insist on hydrogen, it becomes much easier to produce it from coal, oil and gas than from most kinds of renewable energy (artificial photosynthesis excepted, but that's not even being done on a serious laboratory scale yet). That's why hydrogen isn't the answer. You can put enough lithium-ion batteries into a fairly small car to get 300 miles range, and the Toshiba electrodes have cut the charging time from hours to minutes. Why are we allowing our governments to waste money on this expensive, bulky, volatile and lossy gas?
- It's not compact, like gasoline.
- It's not easy to handle, like alcohol or electricity.
- It's not efficient to transform energy from e.g. electricity to hydrogen and back again; losses are something like 60%.
Nope, there's one and only one reason to settle on hydrogen as THE medium to replace gasoline, and that is because it's most easily and efficiently made from oil, coal and natural gas. It keeps the fossil-fuel companies on top by making sure that the infrastructure is built around the goods they supply best. You, sir, have a future ahead of you as an advertising executive.Stay the hell out of science, engineering and economics, because you have obviously convinced yourself that an energy system with 15% end-to-end losses is inferior to an energy system with 60% end-to-end losses. You won't get published, nobody will offer you a job, and people will point at you and laugh.
Even after the withdrawal of the EV-1, the number of electric vehicles in California is what?
The cost of Li-ion batteries for 500 km of range is what fraction of the cost of a fuel-cell system with 330 km range?
The media dog is barking up the hydrogen tree while the oil companies have gagged and trussed the real alternative and are sneaking away with it.
A "mactory" is a plant for transforming inputs, with mastication as its first operation upon them.
It's hard to tell from the news reports if these are the Shinkansen trains or others, but that doesn't mean that rail is perfect - just that the best units ever built, running on very special rights-of-way, haven't had major problems yet.
First time I've ever been foe'd by someone I went out of my way to help.
Then there are the people who say "kilowatts per hour" and arrogantly assert that they actually know something; they're either trolls or ignoramuses and I'm heartily sick of them. It's good to prove that you aren't one of them at the outset.
There are two factors to that: charging overvoltage and coulomb efficiency. If the cell needs- 70% coulomb efficiency for NiCd, nearly 100% for Li-ion.
- Another claim of 100% coulomb efficiency for Li-ion, and 85-90% overall efficiency.
You can probably find more with a more targeted search.I understand that lead-acid efficiency is particularly poor because of the need to overcharge them to prevent sulfation, but my cursory search found nothing on that. Familiarity with their web site did let me find the efficiency graph on page 41 of this paper, but I doubt that a search engine would have. Those figures are interesting, showing small-cycle efficiency no lower than 90% over the entire charge range even for lead-acid batteries.
You've got to be ready to cross-check numbers to be sure they're legit.
Really? What facts brought you to that conclusion? Kilowatt-hours are units of energy, not power. Your question is incoherent, like asking how fast you have to drive to travel 50 miles. I strongly suggest that you begin by learning enough physics so that you understand these issues thoroughly, and can answer the questions yourself (they aren't difficult).A Newton is the force required to accelerate one kilogram at one meter per second squared (kg-m/sec^2). A Joule is a unit of energy equal to one Newton-meter. A Watt is a Joule per second. That's where you start.
These are real-world numbers. The lithium-ion tzero carries 60 kWh of batteries and can run almost 300 miles on a charge.
60 kWh / 300 V = 200 Ah. The house I grew up in has 300 amp service; if you charged the car over the same cables it would take 40 minutes, and if you kept the same energy storage but boosted the battery voltage to 480 volts you could cut that to 25 minutes.If you just want 15 miles of all-electric range to get rid of gasoline for all your local trips, the batteries would be $2700. As gasoline heads towards the $2.50/gallon mark and upwards, it would only take a few years for most people's investment in batteries to pay off. Best of all, the price of batteries keeps coming down.
Of course, a search on "car manufacture energy consumption" would have turned up this page which shows that manufacture accounts for about 10% of life-cycle energy; fuel accounts for nearly 75%.
(I can't believe someone rated you "Insightful".)
Even if it was correct (CATO's impartiality is doubtful), it is four years out of date. Less than two years later Toyota was reporting per-vehicle profits on the Prius. Batteries and the like have only gotten cheaper since then, and it's not like Toyota has to offer incentives to move them!
If you are talking about constant-speed cruise on flat highways, you'd be right; a car with only those features and no hybrid hardware would be lighter and get even better mileage (as long as it didn't have to climb hills). But that isn't "where the rubber meets the road"; hybrid drivetrains pay off big due to:- Regenerative braking in traffic.
- Reduced engine friction due to smaller engine.
- Reduced throttling losses, ditto.
- Idling losses reduced or eliminated under many operating conditions.
Then there are the people putting bigger batteries in their Priuses and running off grid electricity for short trips. They may or may not be saving energy, but it's a fact that the juice is not coming from petroleum and it has the potential to come from non-polluting sources either now or in the future. That's going to be the next big thing.