Posted on 07/21/2008 9:49:54 AM PDT by CutePuppy
Edited on 07/21/2008 6:17:25 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
One of the Big Ideas that's gotten a boost from the recent oil price shock is the notion that the energy for transportation should come from the electric grid, not an oil well in the Middle East.
A number of big, established car makers have announced plans to produce cars that will pull from the electric grid all or part of the energy needed to make them go. They join a flock of upstart companies, such as Tesla Motors, trying to prosper by defining a new generation of mobility technology starting with a blank sheet of paper - or rather a blank video display screen.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
GM can pay the bill for battery research. The upstarts cannot.
This article is false; electric car batteries are finally starting to see some significant improvement. A California company will start selling its car capable of 200 miles on a charge, and that charge will not take too long to go back up.
Are there cars with 500-mile ranges? No, but 200 is pretty dang good assuming you also can take gas, making it a plug-in hybrid.
Even without that, the vehicle would work for virtually every trip you could possibly take except for the rare long ones. Having to buy no gas and only pay a little for charging up the car would be well worth having to rent a car for long trips and more than cover the cost.
I find this hard to believe.What company is this? Is there a web site?
How well are those ranges when driving in the northeast in the winter or the southeast in the summer. Combustion driven engines generate a lot of heat but where is that heat coming for the driver when it’s 18 out or the AC when it’s 90 with high humidity?
Just an FYI, I’m not sure our electric generation capacity is quite up to job either.
www.teslamotors.com
A bit pricey, but first-generation technology always is (remember what a DVD player cost when they first hit the market?).
don’t recall, but saw a thread here maybe 2 months ago
Don’t need a battery anymore...
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=batteries&id=20090&a=
Don’t let pie in the sky liberal promises of electric cars deter us from getting the trillion barrels of oil in oil shale in the Western United States, in ANWR and in the OCS.
The U.S. has 250 million gasoline cars. How long do you think it will take for Tesla to sell 250 million cars, 1 million cars?
Don’t let pie in the sky liberal promises of electric cars deter us from getting the trillion barrels of oil in oil shale in the Western United States, in ANWR and in the OCS.
The U.S. has 250 million gasoline cars. How long do you think it will take for Tesla to sell 250 million cars, 1 million cars?
The U.S. economy will depend on cheap abundant oil for decades.
Could you detail the shale-oil extraction process, and explain how it could possibly net oil at anything less than $150/bbl?
Not saying that opening up ANWR and off-shore drilling won’t help, but I don’t see it solving the whole problem by any means.
We will depend on it indefinitely as long as it is cheap.
The problem with electric cars isn't that they can't work; its the implicit assumption that the electricity grid can handle a shift from petroleum based transportation to electricity based transportation without significant cost. The energy needed has to come from somewhere. When you run an electric car, the fuel is burned in a central electricity generating plant. In other words, did you burn that fuel yourself or did you get someone to burn it for you?
A transition to a primarily electrically powered transportation system means, among other things, that you centralize the burning of fuel. Instead of a retail petroleum distribution system of gas stations, you distribute the energy via copper wires. Since the amount of energy used in cars is quite large, this requires a significant expansion of electric generating and distribution capacity, and a significant amount of investment.
- Is it an improvement? It depends on the answer to several questions, such as:
- Is the overall effiency of fuel to mechanical energy conversion better when it is burned centrally and distributed via electricity, or when it is burned in each car, assuming most efficient technology in each case, and equivalent vehicle performance.
- Is there an improvement in overall pollution profiles with centrally supplied electricity over distributed fuel burning?
- Are the environmental penalties associated with storage technolgies (batteries, supercapacitors, etc) significant and counted in the calculation?
- Could enough clean (i.e. nonpetroleum) energy (solar, wind, possibly nuclear) be added to the electric grid to take over the energy load now taken up by distributed petroleum burning?
Your added comments here.
I have no particular position. I am just tired of hearing people go on about how car companies are so stupid, because the technology exists for everyone to plug their new electric car in like a toaster without a consideration of what is required for a large-scale solution. The existing grid can't supply the energy, and the costs for electrcity would be higher if there were a substantial increase in electricity demand. It may eventually turn out that electric transportation is the way to go, but we won't get ther without major investments. There isn't any free lunch.
Royal Dutch Shell has announced that its in situ extraction technology in Colorado could become competitive at prices over $30 per barrel ($190/m3), while other technologies at full-scale production assert profitability at oil prices even lower than $20 per barrel"
I am just stating a fact : The world's economy is oil based and it will take at least decades to change to something else regardless what government does or doesn't do.
B. S.
I am so sick of seeing Tesla touted as manufacturing anything other than painted hollow prototypes and Press Releases.
When all the car mags start doing long term testing then I'd like to hear from them, until then, they should fire their marketing dept and focus on BUILDING SOMETHING.
Royal Dutch Shell has announced that its in situ extraction technology in Colorado could become competitive at prices over $30 per barrel ($190/m3), while other technologies at full-scale production assert profitability at oil prices even lower than $20 per barrel" link and proof
Electric cars would cost you more than the cost of gasoline, period.
Way more. And 2 hundred miles is a joke for anyone commuting more than half that let along longer commutes.
As a city car these might be feasible provided that trillions of dollars was spent to upgrade the electrical infrastructure and pay for the enormous increase in the price of electricity to come.
Rolling blackouts and brownouts will be the norm.
- if you could ever do this on a large scale, and I maintain that we can’t on anything even remotely close to the present cost structure..
I am just stating a fact : The world's economy is oil based and it will take at least decades to change to something else regardless what government does or doesn't do
Keep your grubby hands off my gas vehicles!
If my electric bill goes up because you are charging your tonka toy i’m sending you the bill!
Let’s see, 100,000 electric cars all being plugged into the already strained electric grid at 7:00 pm each night.
My advise is “Buy candles, the lights are going out!”
Scale matters! Look what we got into with ethanol, because they didn't take scale into account. Just because one can run his car on vegetable oil or oil waste from nearby KFC with engines modified for biodiesels or flex-fuel, doesn't mean we have found a large scale solution for our energy needs. Amazing how many people don't even think about that. It's like flying toy planes or driving toy cars on batteries and assuming that same thing can be easily done for real planes and cars, without taking scale into account.
The energy needed has to come from somewhere. When you run an electric car, the fuel is burned in a central electricity generating plant. In other words, did you burn that fuel yourself or did you get someone to burn it for you?
Which also puts the lie to environmental claims of "clean" / "green" "cheap" electric energy. Exactly, electricity is the final product, not the source of energy. Add to that the energy loss inherent in converting A/C and storing it in DC batteries / capacitors. On a large enough scale right now it's neither "green" nor cheap, even at night. Without nukes, we will choke the grid, even without additional demands of electric cars. Add the loss of mobility (really, freedom of movement) for hours needed to "fill" your car with energy, unless they will develop a standard "drop-in" battery, so you can replace it in a few minutes with backup or buy/exchange from nearest 7-11 or Wal-Mart "station". Otherwise we would have to realign our way of life around the battery charge, the way some people do with their laptops or even some energy-hungry cellphones.
There isn't any free lunch.
Amen! TANSTAAFL.
Tesla Motors was expecting to produce between 1000 to 2000 cars a year, at a starting price of $90,000. And that’s before recent problems and layoffs. It has a long way to go to become even a glorified DeLorean of electric cars.
They don’t hide the break-even / profit targets or intended buyer profile. Wonderful collection toy for the rich and famous, not a car (or battery technology) for hoi polloi.
Well, there you go with a large scale again! Spoiler sport! :-)
Large Scale - n., see Corn Ethanol
Sooo all those emissions gadgets, unleaded fuel and safety requirements found on cars sold in the U.S. are the workings of a free market? Hmmm.
Tesla is financing their company by a flurry of paper press releases and vaporware.
At least DeLorean tried to raise money to fund his company by selling a real product...albeit white and powdery.
Well, what they have is really a battery or a ceramic "capacitor". The question always is cost relative to efficiency, not whether a battery can run off a particular chemical component.
FTA: But many experts have been skeptical, citing the difficulty of working with the material at the core of the company's system: a ceramic made of barium-titanate. A lack of news from the company has only fed the skepticism.
Also, costs of production, even beyond initial stage, must be huge, which is why about the only interested customer now is defense contractor, not unlike Quantum Fuel Systems (Nasdaq:QTWW) which survived by a hair with a small military R&D contract. Then again, Internet used to be Arpanet.
It's not like many others are not giving it a try. Witness the sad tale (and stock prices) of Ballard Power (Nasdaq:BLDP), Plug Power (Nasdaq:PLUG), FuelCell Energy (Nasdaq:CELL), ZAP Motors (Nasdaq:ZAAP), GM itself, and many others, such as Stirling Biopower (fmr. STM Power).
BTW, speaking of Stirling engine, where is Dean Kamen's Ginger / Segway HT which was supposed to revolutionize the world of human transportation? ZAP also failed with a similar but much cheaper (tri-wheel, replacing expensive gyroscopes for balance) technology.
You prove the point. Intervention in the free market makes a bunch of product costs for features people didn't ask for.
“If electricity is in higher demand, investors will put their money into building more power plants and upgrading infrastructure to support it, because doing so will be profitable”.
That’s true except for one important factor...enviro-wackos.
They will continue to obstruct any building of anything on any reason their little minds can dream up. Pandering politicians and ivory tower idiots grasping grant money keep the game going. When you dig through all the BS, enviro-wackos are directly and indirectly responsible for many world problems. Think about it. Limiting use of domestic oil resources has led us to dependence on Middle Eastern and unfriendly countries oil imports. It provides funds for terrorist. Diplomatic crisis and wars we are not allowed to win keep popping up. Major industries have been forced out of the country or out of business over enviro-wacko pressures(ie, logging because of spotted owls). Private land owners denied use of their property under wetlands laws which make no sense. Even microscopic life forms can prevent construction of virtually anything. Wild fires destroy homes because clearing dead undergrowth is not allowed. You can come up with many more examples. It all leads back to rabid environmental extremist. Add equally rabid fanatics of PETA, ACLU, unions, corrupt politicians and educrat idiots. We tend to play by rules. These fools do not. We may run out of patience and violently deal with them all. Don’t hold your breath. Keep breathing out CO2. Maybe it will drive them nuts. Oops, too late. They already are. I guess we had better get the ropes ready and find sturdy tree limbs. Can’t you hear them screaming about using a forest they have protected to hang’m high?
Yeah, after talking to some Tesla Motors sales and marketing people I was wondering if they themselves run on white powder, and if it were not cheaper to run cars on the substance.
Elsewhere I read that virtually ALL the batteries for current electric drive vehicles come from Asia.
IOW just like hybrids where Toyota and Honda got way ahead of the notorious big three, same thing for batteries.
So strategically, if the US wants to AVOID being held ransom by some future form of jihadis, we might have a national energy policy which included domestic battery plants.
There are fields of OIL in the US not currently in production because they’re not profitable at $135/bbl.
In other words:
'Technologists' are marketing schmucks
And 'Skeptics' are engineers who recognize the realities and tradeoffs required to actually make things happen.
=)
Probably because they are too small for major companies to set up an operation, where much of the fixed costs are involved. These are left for small operators who don’t have much fixed costs and can do small retailing profitably.
It is better burned centrally and distributed, assuming you have an efficient distribution platform. The distribution costs for electricity are much lower than the distribution costs for gasoline. Natural gas has a much better efficiency of distribution than gasoline, but I think electricity beats natural gas distribution efficiency as well (not quite sure of that).
Electricity is not entirely centralized. The key is to have the generation in large-scale plants, but distributed to lower the line loads. There is a "size" which is optimal for a plant, one at which you get the most "economy of scale", above which you lose because of distribution costs.
- Is there an improvement in overall pollution profiles with centrally supplied electricity over distributed fuel burning?
Most certainly, pollution mitigation is much easier on small numbers of large-scale plants than large numbers of small burners. The Catalytic converter is both a large waste of material, and lowers the efficiency of energy use. Also, it bleeds off energy of it's own. Most of the pollution control devices put on cars suck the efficiency out of them, and drive up the costs.
- Are the environmental penalties associated with storage technolgies (batteries, supercapacitors, etc) significant and counted in the calculation?
This is probably the biggest unknown -- because we do NOT do a good job of capturing life-cycle costs to include environmental impacts. However, batteries do not HAVE to be environmentally destructive. We recycle a vast majority of the lead from led-acid batteries, for example, and there is considerable value in recycling the more modern metal batteries. Make it part of the expense of the battery technology (like the core charges for other car parts) and you will capture most of the environmental damage.
- Could enough clean (i.e. nonpetroleum) energy (solar, wind, possibly nuclear) be added to the electric grid to take over the energy load now taken up by distributed petroleum burning?
That is the hope. We don't really want to simply replace oil in cars with oil in power plants. We've moved away from using oil for power generation. Of course, in the short term, it wouldn't be bad if we brought petroleum generating facilities back online to meet demand, if that demand was due to decreased gasoline use.
The oil-fired power plants were after all more efficient than car engines, and cleaner-burning.
In the end, it's not hard to compare costs -- just look at your monthly bill. If your total electric bill for your electric car is lower than your previous bills for electric and gasoline, you have probably achieved energy saving, or switched to a better use of energy at least.
In the end, it's not "saving energy" really that's the most important thing, it's getting energy from the cheapest and least damaging sources.
I drive one of our cars about 200 miles a week.
So 200 miles on a charge would be fine.
Yes, for people who “commute” more than 100 miles a day or longer, a 200-mile car is a stretch. Although a “commute” of more than 100 miles isn’t really a commute, it’s a road trip.
Cheap gasoline and a superior road system gave people the freedom to live in a different time zone from where they worked. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense to do so, or that at some point it won’t be very inconvenient and wasteful to do so.
You could put your refrigerator in the basement, your sink on the 1st floor, and your oven in the attic, but it would make it rather tedious to cook dinner. That’s why we co-locate those appliances — and why it would make more sense to try to live relatively close to where you work.
Wrong.
"In the end, it's not hard to compare costs -- just look at your monthly bill. If your total electric bill for your electric car is lower than your previous bills for electric and gasoline, you have probably achieved energy saving, or switched to a better use of energy at least. "
When electric cars are used by a few, an individual can make that determination in real time. For them to be in general use, everyone gets to make that determination, but only after the fact of very heavy investment. In that case, ("in the end") the investment might turn out to be massive malinvestment. That's why (as I'm sure you'll agree) its good to think this through as best and impartially as we can, and to make the resulting estimates known.
Hell, for all I know, the best way to run cars might turn out to be electric, but with catalytic fuel cells powered by petroleum fuels converted from coal. At least the necessary distribution system for liquid fuels is in place.
Heck. My taxes go up because people who drive big cars and commute long distances force the state to build bigger roads.
And my gasoline price has gone through the roof, and your argument could reasonably be applied to the reason why — too many people driving huge truck-like cars to transport their 180-pound loads to and from work.
But that’s america, and you are free to use all the gasoline you want, even if it drives up the price for all of us.
And if I decide to use up all the electricity, and it drives up YOUR costs, well — too bad. It’s a fake conservatism which demands freedom for oneself and then gets outraged if anybody else exercises their OWN freedom in a way that causes inconvenience.
We have the ability today (technology-wise, but not quite yet economically or in terms of a large enough supply of raw materials) to build power generation capabilities into each house. It’s even almost “cheap enough” if you manage to stay on the grid so you don’t have large storage needs.
Solving an “electric shortage” would be a lot easier for our country than solving a gasoline shortage. We can build local natural-gas fired plants pretty quickly using available technology (We have one close to my home), and if we were actually replacing gasoline cars we could build oil-fired plants quickly as well, and use a portion of the oil we aren’t using for gasoline.
For example, my local electric company just sent me an offer for a natural gas generator. One that would more than power my house would cost about $7000. It hooks into my natural gas line, kicks in whenever the power goes out, comes with everyhing I need.
I could walk outside, throw a switch, and run my entire house on natural gas instead of the electric grid.
Of course, if we all did that, the natural gas lines wouldn’t be large enough to supply all the natural gas we needed.
The cost of a usable unit of electric energy delivered to your door is much cheaper than the cost of a usable unit of gasoline energy delivered to your car in your garage.
Which means that, at some level, it is more “efficient” to get energy using electricity than using gasoline, if efficiency is measured by a market that correctly prices things.
However, most of us don’t care about efficiency, we care about cost. It generally matches, but even if it doesn’t, electric is cheaper than gasoline by a pretty substantial margin.
I admit I thought about it. Mid-life crisis car, I would have called it. I know people who spent that much on a car when they turned my age.
You had better watchout pup!
There’s a helluva lotta freepers who think the evil oil companies killed the EV1 so they could sell more oil!
God forbid the first thought might be that the problem was aerospace costs for an automotive market, and not a conspiracy.
Well, that's a useless response.
And advantage of an electrict drive train is that it is easily adaptable to different power sources. You can put in a gasoline generator (Prius), a natural gas generator, a diesel generator, a fuel cell, batteries, high-capacity capacitors, or a combination of these.
Also generally it’s easy to recover power (regenerative braking).
It simplifies the drive train, eliminating moving parts. And it allows for much flexibility in the control paradigm, for those who want to play with it.
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