Electric cars are a pipe dream

On energy useage (and after a bit of googling).

The total amount of energy from sunlight striking the Earth is more than 100 petawatts. 100,000,000,000,000,000 watts.

In 2008, the total amount of energy used by humankind was 15 terawatts. 15,000,000,000,000 watts.

So sunlight alone contains nearly 7,000 times as much energy as humans use.

That does not take into account other sources of energy. Nuclear fission, fossil fuels, nuclear fusion, geothermal, and even extending sunlight energy by putting giant solar cells into orbit.

The world's oceans contain enough deuterium, that if we had energy from fusion of deuterium, it would last over a billion years at current rate of use.

The problem is not lack of energy. It is developing the technology to use it. And we are doing it. Every decade that passes, we have access to more energy than we had the decade before.

For example : Uranium today can be extracted from ores that contain 80 parts per million or more of the metal. However, with improving technology, we can extract it from poorer and poorer ores. It is worth noting that a lot of granite contains 20 ppm Uranium. Granite is the most common rock on planet Earth (it underlies all continents). The total amount of rock with 20 ppm Uranium is virtually astronomical. Nuclear fusion energy from Uranium extracted from granite would last humankind for thousands of years.

So instead of moaning about lack of energy, we should be supporting those who develop the new, and extremely abundent sources that are waiting for us.

 

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#1 Wow somebody who understands.This is exactly my thinking too.Also we are still in the infancy of this great change and of course it will take longer than is necessary due to many fighting it.It really is just a matter of technology and will power to change over.THE ENERGY IS ALREADY HERE! Happily though as a whole momentum is building a little quicker and quicker with each passing day.Hold on it's going to be a wild ride.

 

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You have some error here. Sunlight striking the earth is measured in watts, but that is a unit of power, not energy. It could be that the peak power ever used on earth was 15 terawatts but that is not man's daily or annual energy use so your sunlght has "7000 times as much energy as humans use" is not correct. You are dividing apples by oranges and getting nonsense.

I am too lazy to google the numbers and do it correctly and also quite sure that each day the sun delivers to Earth much more than 7000 times as much energy as man uses on that day.

 

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Well we don't really have a choice but to take the best ball we have got and run with it now because it will take at least three decades to change out/ replace the oil energy system. If we don't start to change now and oil becomes $80 a gallon, not per barrel, then the modern world collapses and most people die.

For example, there was a study of the cost of an Idaho potato eaten in NYC some decades ago when oil was cheap compared to today. More than 80% of its cost was traced back to oil cost. Fertilizer, pesticide and transport being the major components. Probably today one could say an Idaho potato in NYC is 98% made of oil. Thus it is not an exaggeration, to say than most people will die if current oil energy discovery rates (and their costs) and energy use trends continue for three decades.

Also note that China, not the US, has the money to buy what oil is for sale and has already locked some up in long term contracts. For example a few years ago China lent Petrobras 10 billion dollars and will get oil, not money, as pay back at rate of 200,000 barrels per day for 20 years, as I recall. Many much larger oil delivery repayment contracts exist between China and some other countries, especially Venezuela.

India will be larger than China in population then and many will be driving the cheap Tata motors Nano. - Probably about the current US demand for liquid fuel, but they should mainly be using sugar cane alcohol as Brazil does. Some countries, not able to grow their own sugar cane, can see already what is coming and are now changing to adapt, but not the US. Japan has bought some part ownership in Brazilian alcohol plants. For example, San Martinho's largest and newest plant is half owned by Japan.

That is true but irrelevant - what they will lack is time to make the conversion when oil prices are climbing a few percent each month.

Not if we don't seriously start now.

Correct it MAY be possible to make mass produced electric cars to displace the IC engine in a couple of decades, but that is not certain and I doubt it (for reasons about the economics of light weight batteries and electric motors as well as just the inertia in any dominate energy system like oil.)

We are sure alcohol can work as our new, post-oil, energy (and plastics) system and for cars that is still an IC engine with only a couple hundred dollars and a day of car out of service as the conversion cost. Or less than 1% of the cost of converting to electric car system - even much less than just the cost of installation of charging station in numbers comparable to current gas stations... Many more will be needed as gasoline refill of tank takes only a couple of minutes, not a couple of hours.

It all comes down to what is cheapest. Ocean shipping is extremely cheap via large tankers so even a 4% advantage of alcohol fuel production cost in the Southern Hemisphere is the cheaper system of liquid fuel for the Northern Hemisphere.

Alcohol, instead of gasoline, is slightly more powerful in any modern engine, especially the higher compression ones as it has a higher octane rating; however you can only go about 70% as far on a tank full. As far as efficiency is concerned, they are essentially the same. Your "power intensive consumption" is confused terminology, like I pointed out to skeptical in my just made post (his mixing watt with energy). You can apply power or consume energy. "power consumption" could be measured (and is with some rate of energy use electric meters but not the common ones that just measure energy consumption in kWh.) or for a car "power production" or peak capacity is meaning full but not "power consumption."

Yes, in charging rates, quite possibly but not in specific energy density. - That is limited by fundamentals of chemical atomic reaction energies and the mass of atoms, neither of which man can change. Man will never make much more than a 10% improvement in energy density over current Li-ion batteries and what he does make will mainly be by reducing the weight of the packaging.

Not much in either case.

On the IC as it has been refined for more than 100 years and they are not far from perfect for an open cycle engine (one that throw out hot exhaust) A Carnot engine could be a little more efficient but would weigh several times more for the same power capacity in part because it doesn't just dump the waste heat but has a massive "recuperator" not need in the IC.

On the electric car not much as they are quite efficient now in the use of electrical energy. Making the motors with twice the copper wire size might gain you 2 or even 3% efficient improvement but is not worth it in initial cost or increased car weight.

There is room for doubling the sugar cane efficiency however. Some as is being done now via genetics to increase the sugar content and a huge step forward if the crushed cane which is already at the distillation plant can be converted into "cellulosic alcohol" also - if it can it will be the cheapest "cellulosic alcohol" as cost of collecting it in the field and transport to the alcohol plant is zero, not the major cost of most other "cellulosic alcohol" proposals such as growing switch grass etc.

 

Billy

I admit to making a slight boo boo.

I should have used the word 'power' not energy.

Perhaps I should have said that in one year the sun delivers more than 100 petawatt years of energy, and humans use only 15 terawatt years of energy.

Either way, it does not change my point.

 

Yes 20 or 30 years for a complete changeout, but what about little changes each year, I see very few lately,,approx 20 million barrells a day oil for USA, so approx 200 ships per day of oil,, um thats a lot of ships..where do they unload them all? what if one or 2 got blew up or highjacked on the ocean? Notice Arnie calling washington a bunch of wimps (Treehugger.com) today cause they wont stand up to big oil and allow or help new technology. We tried to order a GreenGas.cc machine to make our own green fuel. They cant build them till the company is financed. Wonder if big oil holds government back on purpose? Status quo, 2000 big oil lobbyists, Status,Quo?

 

Total solar energy vs how much man uses is interesting but not very useful.

Total solar energy is drastically above potential solar energy as to be not worth discussing, and indeed, a huge proportion of that total solar energy is being used by us indirectly in the form of vegatation, O2 creation etc. We can't pave our cropland and forests with solar panels, nor is the ocean's surface a suitable surface area for solar installations.

The calculations of potential solar energy are actually fairly complex and anyone who does them with a sound basis in reality will conclude that only a tiny percent of the world's land surface is both available and suitable for generation of solar energy.

BUT

That tiny percent is also enough to satisfy all of our current Electrical energy needs and then some, but that's a big caveat because our energy needs are only about half satisfied by electricity and so at present, if we were to embark on a huge increase in solar energy what we would be displacing would be mainly coal and secondarily natural gas and almost no significant quanity of oil at all.


This paper, from 2002, about available solar power for the Western half of the US is very well done and uses conservative, but reasonable assumptions of the land that could actually be used to exploit solar power. See Solar Energy Potential pg 47 for details.

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/32160.pdf

That would require about 2.4 million acres of land, or roughly 60 sq miles.

Arthur

 

We once had a fairly vast electric car system in the United States, in the form of public electric train systems of transportation.

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These were destroyed by the enemy of public freedom by those having an interest in the oil addiction we still suffer from. :bawl:

 

Arthur,

Concentrated Solar Power techniques (e.g. solar thermal) use orders of magnitude less land and are more efficient than photovoltaic techniques.

The greatest enemy of electric transportation is propaganda, not technology.

 

Read the paper, it didn't suggest PV.

And it is silly to think the oil companies had anything at all to do with surpressing electrical cars. Use of oil based fuel was driven by the fact that it was far superior to electricity, as it remains so today. That's likely to SLOWLY change going forward as oil fuel prices continue to climb and electrical propulsion technology slowly comes down in price. But this change won't have anything to do with what the oil companies want or don't want.

Arthur

 

Assuming you are not just the banded commercial spammer Mr Greeen, reborn who also directed us to his web site and suggested they need funds (perhaps a $100 contribution) to help convert US to self produced ammonia fuel, please tell me what you know about how that machine can make NH3. Or were you willing to "buy a pig in a poke" not having any idea as to how it was supposed to work? It can't except as explained below.)

I explained why making ammonia in small scale is not economical, is dangerous and illegal do without many governmental permits due to the hazards associate with the high temperature and pressure process and the very toxic nature of NH3 here: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2635199&postcount=573 where you can read the basic chemical formation requirements:
In 1909 Fritz Haber established the conditions under which nitrogen, N2(g), and hydrogen, H2(g), would combine using

medium temperature (~500 C)
very high pressure (~250 atmospheres, ~25,500kPa)
a catalyst (a porous iron catalyst prepared by reducing magnetite, Fe3O4).
Osmium is a much better catalyst for the reaction but is very expensive.

This process produces an ammonia, NH3(g), yield of approximately 10-20%.

Also explained and given there graphically are the FUNDAMENTAL LAWS for this chemical reaction, which GreenNH3.com = GreenGas.cc can not change:

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If you are not part of this scam to collect funds from well meaning, but ignorant people, read here: http://www.ausetute.com.au/haberpro.html
before you send them any money.

 

As I agree with you completely. I liked your entire post but this gem is the high point

I think the only thing to be said for the current system is that working from home makes "office romances" hard to achieve and they were fun. Perhaps once a month everyone could meet at a bar and get drunk together to see who went home with whom.

 

From a theoretical perspective, cost goes down with established designs, factories etc. Building them is not especially hard compared to combustion cars.

Range - we could eventually have powered roads. It's an option. Nuclear plants could provide the necessary power.

 

Powered roads is an intriguing idea, though I would not want to run power lines in the roads, but consider the radical idea of solar panels embedded in highways. There is 94,000 km^2 of Highways area in the USA assuming a very low average of just 10w or 32kwh of power per m^2, the highways would produce 3384 Twh or ~85% of the USA electricity production!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiZ5bSntwhM

 

Ain't that the truth, we were looking to move home, something with a bigger garden, out of town, but you get less and pay more, and nothing we've seen, despite adding £30k to our budget has anything I could use as a home office. Currently, I have an attic conversion, which spans the entire footprint of the building. I was looking at putting a wooden 'Summer House' and laying services in one property we looked at.

I guess it's not for everyone. I spend my days alone, and apart from a few weekly conference calls, don't speak to people. I haven't spoke to anyone today, for example. I wonder if anyone could adapt? I guess I too have dogs, and sometimes they sleep on the daybed in my office, and sometimes stand look out of the window, watching the world go by.

The problem working in IT and working from home though, is it's a job easily offshored to a lower cost country,.... so while environmentally friendly, potentially precarious. This may be why many managers empire build teams around themselves. Making ramparts from people, effectively.

 

Yeah, we have reaped what we have sown there. We drilled into our offshore workforce that they must follow procedure,... but of course, problems aren't caused by things going according to plan, and I deal with problems, security, mostly, and well, they get stuck often, because the procedures can't account for everything.

Let's be honest, we can't program a machine to vacuum our rooms, why would we expect to be able to give people perfect procedures? We need room to innovate solutions within procedures, or we end up with a program that sees us bumping off things, until we find the right path. Not good.

 

The follies of electric vehicles are many, including those cited by the OP.

In the U.S., 50% of electricity is generated by what, class?
YES! Burning fossil fuels! And that is bad.

And we have had brownouts over the past few decades why, class?

YES! Because the Leftist Luddites have opposed:

A. Building nuclear power plants
B. Building fossil fuel power plants
C. Building ANY kind of power plants

Lefties think everything is going to magically manifest itself into
environmental purity. All we need to do is hold hands and chant...
AL GORE AL GORE AL GORE.

You think those big, heavy batteries don't wear out faster than internal combustion engines? And they cost a little more than two D cells.