| Author | Message | ||
     Ezblast |
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/business/global/ 03japancar.html?_r=1&sudsredirect=true Are we next? EZ | ||
| Cataract2 |
If they can get the batteries to the point where they get equal to or more range that gas powered cars (Hybrids *spit* are gas as well no matter how they try to spin that) and they get the recharge time down to equal to or faster than it takes to fuel up a gas car. Then maybe we are next. For now, battery tech is still no wheres close. | ||
| Patches |
You forgot too add PRICE POINT! | ||
| Gentleman_jon |
New York Times = stupid liberal horsepucky. Clear?  | ||
| Johnnylunchbox |
gentleman Jon, at least it's well written liberal horsepucky. | ||
| Blake |
Seemed like a good article about the pro-active approach of Japanese auto parts businesses. Opening sentence acknowledges "more likely later". Most everything new and high tech is initially exorbitantly priced. Recall the first flat screen HDTV's, ten times what they cost now. Electric cars with solar charging stations in the work parking lot might some day make sense for the urban short commuter. Here in Texas we enjoy a good 1KW+ per square meter of sunlight. Lots of energy for the taking if we can figure an efficient way to do so. | ||
| Ft_bstrd |
Widespread electric care usage will require infrastructure expansions the like of which we have never seen. Unless the regulations on new coal and nuclear plants gets eased, I don't see the infrastructure keeping up. (unless we go ahead and kill off all these pesky baby boomer people) There was once a thriving industry around horses, carts, feed, livery, breeding, maintenance, and disposal. We'll adapt quite nicely. As sales of petrol cars wanes, suppliers will go out of business and be replaced with electric car suppliers. | ||
| Swordsman |
If you could get decent range, enough to commute back and forth every day, then a home-based solar/wind power station would take care of things, and offset part of that load on the power grid. Tesla Motors actually offered this as part of a purchase package in the beginning, not sure if they still do. ~SM | ||
| Aesquire |
The article has a very good point. Buggy whip companies will change products or die. If spark plugs are all you got, and the world goes electric, or Diesel, sucks to be you. After extensive research into solar/wind, I get 2 answers. Toy. Will charge your cell phone. A nice one keeps your car battery topped off. While it's parked. Enough power to actually feed back into the system, or notably reduce fuel costs to heat house/provide hot water.... ?? Costs $10,000 plus, takes 10 years to pay off. If it costs $50,000, takes 10 years to pay off. ( but replaces more fuel.... and takes up more roof/yard. ) Electric cars, as stated above, will take massive power generation improvements, as promised for decades by politicians. ( who couldn't wire a ceiling fan and think power comes from a pen, not falling water, steam, or vast collectors of diffuse energy ) You want solar for electric cars? Cover Texas with collectors. Don't want to kick everyone in Houston, etc out to live in New Orleans? Cover Arizona too. ( can't cover Kansas, the planet goes hungry. Seriously ) You also have to build nuclear desalination plants to turn Sea water into wash water, to clean the collectors. ( not enough for people, food, AND cleaning solar panels ) Don't forget the Liquid Nitrogen plants to cool the superconducting backbone to move power from Texas & Arizona to where it's needed. If it makes enough power to really make a difference, you can see it from orbit. And the ecological issues are not minor. | ||
| Hootowl |
I'm pinning my hopes on algal oil. There are strains that grow in sea water. It is dense. It is portable. You can use it to directly power engines, or burn it and make steam. They're making pretty good progress industrializing the process from what I understand. Neat stuff. | ||
| Greg_e |
The algae also makes oxygen and "removes" carbon, but don't forget that it is essentially also a solar power generation because without lots of light the stuff doesn't grow. | ||
| Johnnylunchbox |
In the very near future I see small diesels or diesel hybrids as the solution for the long average commute that most Amercians undertake everyday. I see electric as a solution for inner city/local travel. | ||
| Hootowl |
Aye. But then , so are fossil fuels. It all came from sun light at some point. | ||
| Crackhead |
The algae also makes oxygen and "removes" carbon, but don't forget that it is essentially also a solar power generation because without lots of light the stuff doesn't grow. I bet the oil companies could figure out how to ship it using the oil pipe lines. Alge/ Biodiesel would be a sort of easy change for the long haul trucking industry. There isn't that many truck stops compared to consumer gas stations. Most trucks have multiple tanks and could switch over to regular diesel when up north in the winter. As far as solar power goes, covering flat buildings and parking lot should produce a nice chunk of electricity and reduce the sun load / AC usage on big buildings. Widespread electric care usage will require infrastructure expansions the like of which we have never seen. Sounds like more American jobs and Court would love the $ from the projects. There is an additional reactor being added to the Nuke plant by me. I have no problem with nukes. I wounder if the Navy could make money by tieing the reactors into the grid while the ships are in port. Electricity in Norfolk would be cheep. | ||
| Reepicheep |
I like the bio-solar ideas as well. I watch open fields near my house go from dirt to massive solar energy collectors every spring when they plant the soybeans. Amazing structures capturing all sorts of sunlight, and self constructing and self repairing. | ||
| S21125r |
Actually the electric companies believe they can absorb a big chunk of the electricity demand with the current infrastructure because most of the electric cars will be programmed to charge at night when present demand is low. They also believe there will be some incremental efficiency savings since they won't have to fluctuate output (by bringing generator on and off line) as much between night and day. Maybe some day we'll all have a home hydrogen fuel cell and a battery pack to supply our daily needs... | ||
| Swordsman |
Put these over the whole country.  Don't think it's real, but it's a damn good idea. Interstates generate their own wind from all the traffic. ~SM | ||
| Hootowl |
A CVN could (and has) provided emergency power to shore facilities, but you cound't light up a major modern city with one. They're just not that big. | ||
| Blake |
We reportedly use around 18.5E+18 Joules of gasoline energy per year in America. Gasoline engines might average around 20% efficiency the way most are driven. If electricity generation/storage/distribution from solar is around 10% efficient, then we'd need 37E+18 J of solar energy per year incident on solar panels, or a minimum on any day of around 1E+17J. Guestimating that the average worst case day (mid Winter) in a southern desert will see around 5 KWH (17.5E+06 J) per square meter of incident solar radiation, then we'd need 37E+18/17.5E+06=2.1E12 square meters or 2.1 million sq km (811,000 sq mi) of solar panel. Yikes. But... if we could store excess solar energy during the peak Summer generation period to later release/use in low sun periods, that would help. Think giant batteries?  If we can reduce power needed for transportation (don't waste energy when braking, put it back into the batteries as hybrids already do), that would help. Say good-by to the inefficient forms of vehicles, say hello to more motorcycles for instance?  That can help. So maybe we can get the required solar panel area down to 100,000 sq mi? That's still nearly the size of the entire state of Arizona! Bottom line though is that we need MUCH more efficient solar energy conversion. Maybe we should try and live closer to our workplace? Ya think? When you think about it, we're really crazy to have convinced ourselves that it's fine and dandy to commute more than a few miles to and from work. It's NUTS! | ||
| Sayitaintso |
Bottom line though is that we need MUCH more efficient solar energy conversion. We have a winner When you think about it, we're really crazy to have convinced ourselves that it's fine and dandy to commute more than a few miles to and from work. It's NUTS! I ride/drive 8 miles each way and think thats too far. When I hear about folks commuting from West Virginia to DC every day I shake my head in disbelief. I already dont have enough time in the day, I cant imagine throwing away 4 hrs each and every day. | ||
| Hootowl |
I have a 2.4 mile round trip to/from work. I worry about my engine oil not getting warm enough. | ||
| Spdrxb |
The commuting issue is whole different thread perhaps. Its not that easy to just say ok I will work close to home. It depends on your job. Back to thread electric power is coming like it or not. Look at recent advancements lipo batts etc. in power tools etc. Compare that to 10 years ago. I think as others have stated it will be the "recharge" process, that hampers the practicality of the whole thing. (Message edited by spdrxb on November 04, 2010) | ||
| Sayitaintso |
In Tallahassee the City runs its own electric utility (both generation and T&D). They are wrapping up a smart metering project that will allow customers to know their usage with a reading every 6 minutes. One of the next steps is to move to demand billing as an encouragement to get customers to shift their usage habits to non-peak times and delay the need for the construction of new generation capacity. In general there is plenty of generation capacity for AVERAGE usage...its the peak usage thats the killer. In the southern states 4-6 pm in the afternoon is a killer for electric generation. People come home, lower the thermostat on the a/c, start laundry, start dinner, fire up the TVs and computers...all before business start shutting their buildings down for the night. Far outstripping average consumption. Power generation folks worry more about peaks when planning than just about anything else. Peaking units are typically the least efficient and commonly use diesel...Blake mentioned storing power, if we could ever figure out a way to do it on a large scale it would be huge for addressing the peaks and valleys of daily usage not to mention seasonal variation. | ||
| Davegess |
Maybe we should try and live closer to our workplace? Ya think? When you think about it, we're really crazy to have convinced ourselves that it's fine and dandy to commute more than a few miles to and from work. It's NUTS Blake you are sounding like one of them there crazy LIBERALS!  Storage is a big issue of course. Using the excess summer electricity to compress a gas into a storage tank of some sort? Looking back at other transportation technology changes I suspect you would find that the old tech was cheaper than the new for quite some item. Horses had to far cheaper than those early cars and were actually faster and more able to negotiate the roads of the time. | ||
| Hootowl |
Screw "smart" meters. The white hat hacker community has already demonstrated that thy can be hacked remotely, and the utilities are rolling them out anyway, which is criminal negligence as far as I am concerned. Besides, we need power when we need it. I'm not going to wait to cook dinner until all the businesses have closed. That's just stupid. The answer is more capacity. We can't conserve our way out of a power shortage. Carter was/is a moron. | ||
| Blake |
T hydro-electric generating industry knows all about storing energy on a large scale. During off-peak hours water is pumped to the high reservoir. During peak hours, that same water is run down through the turbines. It doesn't get much simpler. Ya just need a lake on a hill is all.  Besides storing energy, we can also store the end product, cool for instance.  Water can be chilled or even frozen during off-peak hours and used to cool a building during peak periods. It's already being employed all over the place in large buildings. Pretty cool stuff. | ||
| Sifo |
A big problem with massive use of electric vehicles is that the batteries rely on rare earth elements. Currently China has the largest know reserves of these metals and they are already talking of limiting supplies. We are talking of trading our dependence on one less than friendly "ally" for another less than friendly "ally". This trade doesn't even do anything to alleviate the initial problem of the source of the energy in the first place. We would likely find ourselves at the mercy of the Chinese as well as the Saudis. Ya just need a lake on a hill is all. Have you got any idea how much of the country doesn't have a hill? Then out west where they have hills, they don't have water. I did see some calculations that showed that to convert to the amount of solar power that the Obama administration has talked about would require more square miles of land than the US has in it's interstate highway system. That wasn't the paved amount, but from easement to easement. That's a lot of land. I noticed this recently... Desert tortoise gets fast-tracked to the curb It's hard to come up that that kind of open land for these projects. Wind mills can't be spaced to close together either because the turbulence created destroys the gear reductions. | ||
| Blake |
>>> ... doesn't have a hill? No problem comrade, the workers of the world shall unite and with their picks and shovels dig big holes and create large hills. | ||
| Sifo |
I hope they put some twisty roads in while they're at it. Then I'm all for it. (That's exactly how the pork works!) | ||
| Fahren |
There is no single solution for future energy requirements. One thing is certain, though - petroleum is too important to be wasted on stupid commuting and other energy-hogging activities. We need to save it for riding obsolete, ultra-cool air-cooled v-twin motorcycles (as well as using it for all the myriad products we take for granted that are produced with petroleum)! We can harvest the sun, wind, hydro and geothermal power, where it makes the most sense. And all those other super-cool developing energy technologies. And small-scale nuclear plants, like the ones in France, can fill the gaps.... although disposing of the waste is really a sucky problem to deal with... And no, Carter was not a moron; conservation is as important as any other component of the equation. You can put all the solar panels on your roof you want, but if you don't spend a tiny fraction of the cost of the solar on really good insulation for walls, ceiling and foundation, you are just urinating into the breeze. |
