Posted on 02/07/2012 2:00:54 PM PST by Zakeet
My granddad still has a T-shirt that says “Ask This Man To Show You His Wang” - with the Wang logo. Still funny today.
The problem, as EE’s have tried to explain to the “I love unicorns!” crowd for decades, is that batteries are a very inefficient energy storage device.
There is no battery technology that can compress energy into a density remotely near that of chemical fuels (eg, gasoline, much less diesel fuel). None. There’s nothing REMOTELY close to those energy densities on the horizon in battery technology.
Now, in addition to the energy density problems of batteries, there’s the additional problem that you can remove or replace energy into batteries only so fast without compromising them. If you want to see what I mean, just go get a 100 amp 12 charger (they’re used to rapidly recharge truck and tractor batteries) and put that puppy on a common car battery. You’ll find after you do this several times that the battery simply won’t hold as much power on each successive recharge. Batteries don’t like to have power rammed into them - they have definite maximum sustainable recharge rates, which when exceeded, cost you battery life.
Oh, BTW - be very careful because a car battery might explode if you try to dump 100 amps/hour into it. Want to recharge that battery safely? Recharge it overnight at 2 amps/hour - or maybe for a full day if it was really dead.
Then there’s the discharge rate issues. Batteries store energy in a chemical reaction, and as everyone knows, chemical reactions slow down in the cold. So cars like the Volt end up spending some of their energy to heat the battery in cold weather so they can get power out of it faster than natural rates would allow. Yea, that makes for really long ranges: Using battery power to heat the battery so we can discharge it faster... um, what problem were we trying to solve again?
The problems here are multiple. The electric auto advocates haven’t come close to solving even ONE of the multiple issues of: power density, discharge rates in cold weather, recharge rates, weight, etc. They’re still peddling the same ideas from 100 years ago (literally, no exaggeration) and they’ve made very scant progress in the meantime.
Now, compare that to the progress made in diesel autos, and the electric car advocates look like they’re backing the sloths in a three way race of progress between rabbits (diesels), turtles (gasoline engines) and sloths (electric vehicles).
You’re right that technology gets better over time, but the truth is that electric auto technology isn’t really getting all that much better. Sure, they’re more comfy, more stylin’, with sexier dashboards, etc. That’s true for all cars. The ONE thing that has to get better for the electric car to become viable is the battery technology, and it can’t get just a little bit better around the edges. It has to become “order-of-magnitude” better.
That simply hasn’t happened in the last 100 years. And from what I know as a EE, it ain’t on the horizon, either. If we had even one-tenth the rate of progress in battery technology we’ve had in sold state electronics (transistors and chips) in the last 50 years, you’d be able to power your car for 50 miles with a battery that is about the size of a wristwatch.
Look at it another way: Consider how much music you can now store on an iPad Nano. A huge leap forward in personal entertainment since the first portable transistor radios, right?
Batteries, relatively speaking, have progressed from a 12” LP vinyl record to the 45RPM single in the last 100 years.
Did you call?
And a new battery set does not cost your first newborn!
You can bet that for any problem with your battery set, they will write the warranty such that the customer pays 90% of the time. Just like tire problems.
Something like 3-4 thousand dollars to replace not counting labor. (no pun intended LOL)
I went to computer tech school at Control Data in the mid 80’s.. Was going to be hired by NASA at the Glenn Center, but they had to hire a minority woman. Went to work night shift in a sheet metal shop to pay my bills. Pretty bitter about that. The Control Data school was a complete gov’ment scam.
To develop man made flight or to buy a new technology that could be purposed for warfare? The comparison is not even in the same ballpark.
9/26/1998...that would have been a tough one to beat...lol
You never cease to amaze........
That goes without saying, of course.
I keep harping on this, and I’m sure I’m a bore on the topic, but it really is the brutal truth. Batteries are the crux of the matter.
Look at the people who want to use solar or wind power to light up their homes as another example. I used to help several families in central NV, where I was known as the only EE within 80 to 100 miles radius that could help straighten out their solar power systems.
These poor people would be sold a solar or wind power system from some bunch of Unicorn-fart sniffers in California, Reno or Arizona, they’d install it, get it up and going and the dealer would imply that they were all set.
Nooooo.... the batteries need minding. And then I’d have to come out to their remote ranch and start telling them how to equalize their lead-acid batteries, how to do tend to them, how they’d degrade if charged too fast, discharged too fast, etc.
And in every case, the people to whom I’d teach all this stuff would ask “Well, this is all news to me! No one ever told me about this!” or “They told me that that was all in the past!”
Then I’d have to tell them that the BEST person they could get to explain all this stuff to them would be a WWII submariner, because diesel-electric boats lived and died on these issues. I’d then add “I would have suggested a WWI submariner, but as far as I know, they’re all dead...”
And you’d see these people get ROYALLY pissed off... because they’d then realize that there wasn’t some “huge leap forward” in recent solar and wind power stuff... it was the same stuff from the 1970’s, and the little integrated inverter/control panel was really the only new thing on the scene. Most of these ranches, you see, had flirted with solar power during the initial wave of enthusiasm in the 70’s... and during the 80’s to 90’s, as diesel costs came down, they just went to gensets puttering along on the ranch during their waking hours. When diesel went up, they checked into solar power (again) and were sold the same stuff (basically) as they were in the 70’s.
Bwaaaahaaaaaaaaaa ...one of the few commercials I’ll watch.
They were making electric cars 100 years ago. The reason they stopped was the same reason they are a sh#tty idea now. Batteries are inferior to internal combustion engines.
Good post!
I have to disagree! The Volt was originally pushed as getting up to 60 miles on a single charge. When it debuted it was dropped to 40 miles. GM now says 35. I guess that’s in a controlled test without heater, A/C, lights or defroster. And probably going downhill. Bolling was actually being generous by saying it went 25 miles when he had to go 18 miles to his office according to his GPS. Since the car switched to gas before that despite a full charge I would have to say it does have a problem with range. Especially in light of the fact that an 1896 Robert Electric got 40 miles on a charge. Not much progress in 116 years!
Step away from the Kool Aid, lest ye be zotted.
Just what is the problem with a 19th technology that must be subsidized to the tune of $250,000 for Dolt by the taxpayer and then it’s still a piece of crap? No...no problem there. Why don’t you take a train...another inefficient subsidized crummy technology.
Wow. Asking a question is kool aid? You are a communist. You need to be zotted NOW.
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