Two Myths about Electric Cars
This is a quick post regarding this post from the main page. It is a quick post I felt compelled to write, so I won't have time to attach footnotes...
#1 - We need infrastructure improvements first.
No we don't! Now is the time for everyone to buy an electric car. You would recharge them overnight when demand is low. Our current power grid can adequately maintain increased demand as long as it is off-peak. We also need people to get used to the idea of having a car with less range than a gasoline car, but adequate range for daily driving.
Some say we need to wait for wind/solar power, but that is a "pie-in-the-sky" scenario which will take years (or decades) to accomplish. The time is now!
Also, we are the "Saudi Arabia" of coal. The time to start using it is now. Unless you are willing to live like the Amish, then you need to become realistic about energy; solar or wind just won't keep things going right now. Solar power may someday provide all our needs, but wind will never do that.
#2 - The Chevy Volt will be an electric car:
The Volt will be a hybrid with a gasoline engine. However, unlike the current crop of "parallell hybrids" it will be the first "series hybrid." All of the power delivered to the wheels will come from an electric motor, but it will also have a gasoline engine.
The Tesla is an all-electric vehicle. No gasoline engine involved.
I say we bail-out Tesla and let GM manage on their own.
Well one might say, the concept of a "affordable" mass produced electric car is a ways off. The Tesla is not what I would call affordable. The roadster is in the neighborhood of $100K. Their new sedan, now in development is projected to sell for $70K + Could this cost be brought down once in mass production? A bit.
Do nothing about infrastructure? I would say infrastructure improvement puts people to work. This isn't a Priority? Oh what the heck let the bridges collapse.
How about this concept, build hybrids that could be retrofitted to all electric when they really become, from cost stand point, viable.
November 17, 2008 4:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can you guess what a gasoline car would cost if essentially custom made? The Tesla faces startup challenges that are mostly lack of scale economies. It's also being made by Lotus, not Hyundai.
The costs should be reversed; a gasoline car is much more complex, requiring many more machined parts, as opposed to mass-produced parts. The Tesla really only needs one forward gear (it has two if you want go 150mph). No fuel pump, filter, injectors, spark plugs, no ignition system, no valves, no exhaust system, only a bunch of batteries and a solid-state switching system.
The motor is a work of industrial art, and even now electric motors are pricey, but compare the cost of a car's alternator, essentially an electric motor, and its AC compressor, the thing with a piston.
The reason we have gasoline cars is the fact that we had easy fuel before we had ubiquitous electricity. And it's easy to fill up on the road with liquids.
November 17, 2008 6:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't agree with not 'bailing out' GM and the auto makers. Our country is losing a huge number of jobs daily with nothing to replace them...
We need to create more jobs in our country before we can actually afford to let such a huge number of jobs to be lost. Essentially is will buy us some time. If you add a couple more million people losing their jobs, unable to pay their mortgages, bills, etc... it pushes further in the hole faster that we can dig out.
My understanding is that the money they are asking for is in 'loans' so it is actually a 'bail out'... or have they changed their request to be a 'bail out'?
November 17, 2008 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since you seem to be knowledgeable on the subject, do you have an opinion about the Aptera? It will be 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of the Tesla. I've been dreaming of getting one.
www.aptera.com
November 17, 2008 5:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right that we don't need major infrastructure improvements for the first million electrics or plug-in hybrids.
But way wrong on wind vs coal. You can absolutely supply the additional energy with wind. In fact, the entire utility industry is excited about the MUTUAL benefits of adding electrics & plug-ins on the car side, and wind & solar on the electricity side. Why? V2G - i.e. Vehicle-To-Grid. Renewable electricity's largest drawback is its "variability," i.e. it swings up & down in output. But what the Grid needs to accommodate that is... storage capacity. And what does a battery offer? Yep. Storage capacity. The utility studies are showing that if we add electric vehicles & plug-ins in large numbers, we can ALSO then provide as much as 50% of the total US electrical needs from wind & solar. This is the world-changer hidden in here, beyond getting off oil, and why Obama has been leading the drive in support of plug-in's. We need to eventually change the infrastructure to bring these larger amounts of wind & solar to market, and also to develop more of a Smart Grid, which can take & give power on a distributed basis.
The Volt will be a plug-in hybrid, and it may be the first pure 'parallel' hybrid... But the Prius already uses BOTH a series and a parallel architecture.
Tesla's cost $100k, but they're aimed at the high-end sports car market, so the price isn't that bad. Their sedan is likely $50-$70k, but the Volt should be $35-$40k, and a lot of other plug-in's & all-electrics are coming which will be $30k, $20k etc.
The Aptera is gorgeous, and may well be wonderful fun in parts of the country, but anywhere you have cold weather & snow, or bad roads, or have to haul any significant weight, it's probably not gonna do it.
November 17, 2008 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Plugging in is incremental, in that it directs attention to electricity storage. Using cars for storage at home is not sufficient, since much solar output will show in day hours, while cars are at work. Employers could cover a parking lot with PV, and sell power to employees for less than they would pay off the grid., while the employer is making more than it could sell it to the power company for.
The Pentagon, with its parking lot, could be a 600 megawatt solar farm. (3 Km X 200 watts peak output/sq.meter) It has plenty of customers among the employees and near environs.
But the flip side of using plugin cars as storage is buying batteries for your house. Buy cheap, high-efficiency power at night, and use it during peak day hours. Greener, cheaper, pays back fast, smaller investment than PV for home. Mainly it drives battery innovation. And it gets you looking for other ways to charge your batteries. You start looking at small wind turbines, too.
It is true that we could not switch at once, as a nation, to a non-fuel transport system. Supply would not follow instantly. But we should not wait for the "natural" market to catch up. It faces huge obstacles in the inertia that Detroit and Oil represent.
November 17, 2008 6:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Grid let's us get around some of these problems, Tom. (Sorry, I'm no solar PV whiz, but I've eaten Grid details for the last 7 years. Sigh. How boring is that? ;-)
Anyway, most utilities will take any energy you can offer during on-peak or daylight hours. So just feed your solar or wind into the Grid, great. And they have wonderful systems for backing down their quick-responding gas plants & such. If anyone's recharging during the day, well... it's a nice fit.
When wind runs at night, it may be tougher, because the extra juice has less value in the off-peak hours. Having car batteries recharging at home let's them stash the extra energy. In short, by adding distributed storage right across the entire system - in cars - the Grid itself becomes more conducive to self-generation from homes, parking lots, etc., and there's less need for anyone to have to add batteries to their home, but still enables them to produce power on-site.
PV parking lots, great.
November 17, 2008 7:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
The point is to have batteries soaking up the ups and downs. Cars or other, it's good.
On pricing I know that in Illinois you will only get paid 2 cents per Kwhr. You pay 10 cents for averaged, non-commercial. With hourly pricing it goes from 3 cents cost at night to 50 cents peak.
Also worth considering the power losses in transmission. They justify the sale/purchase differential somewhat. So power that can be used locally will be more valuable. The losses you accept in selling to ComEd could offset the conversion losses going into and out of your batteries.
Cars would like compact low-mass batteries, even at higher cost. Houses would prefer large-capacity low-cost systems, hang the mass. I like the flow battery, as used in a large installation on King Island, Tasmania. They store 750 Kwhrs, enough to run their town for a few hours and tide them over until the wind starts up again for their turbunes.
This type could be good for a house, taking up about the size of a washer-dryer to hold a few days of maintenance-level power use. It scales up and down easily, since capacity is tank size, and output power is the fuel-cell-like membrane.
But think more about PV, if you take an airplane flight and look down at acres of blank warehouse roofs and paved ground.
November 17, 2008 8:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can't wait for solar PV to cross into the cost-competitive zone, Tom! I keep telling my urban friends to make sure they build in solar orientation and such as they continue to develop. While they don't have much open land, they have tons of roofs, parking lots, etc. Out here in the flatlands.... it's likely wind.
November 17, 2008 9:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hear there is a 300-turbine farm going up in Indiana. I'm familiar with those maddening constant winds on the Indiana prairie, they make I-65 a trial.
You can buy a 400-watt turbine with 4 moving parts for $600, 200W at 12 mph, peaks at 28mph. Mounts on a 1-inch pipe.
November 18, 2008 11:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
By the time Wind Power is a viable option, we should have mastered Fusion Reactors and Superconducting power lines...
Solar is much more "energy rich" than wind. Solar power is basically taking the energy directly from the photons which come from the sun. The photovoltaic cell is a simple and elegant solution. Power is harnessed in an efficient manner with low maintenance needs. There is still much room for improvement and if we can increase the efficiency it will become more practical.
Wind power on the other hand involves kinetic energy and mechanics. It requires expensive and complex machines that require maintenance and are inefficient. Men have been harnessing the wind for millennia, I think we have just about beaten that horse to death. Wind power just doesn't have enough power.
November 17, 2008 8:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Steevo, this needn't be an either/or. I love solar PV. But I also know it's at least another 5 years from being commercially viable on a wide geographic scale in the US.
Wind is available now, for an unsubsidized cost of 5 cents/kwh. And out here on the Plains & Prairies, there's an endless amount available to be tapped, with huge public support, and little in the way of visual pollution (in fact, in many places it's loved, as a replacement for the former grain elevators.) 5 cents, and that's with operating costs, maintenance, everything in. Cheaper than gas, cheaper than an awful lot of "mainstream" sources. As for quantity, the jurisdiction I live in is a major energy producer, largely from massive hydro dams, which produce incredibly cheap power. But it would take just 20 wind-farms to produce double the power we presently consume, and the cost is actually LESS than hydro's now.
So... not to argue against solar, just to say that the reality of wind today is stunningly attractive for a lot of places.
November 17, 2008 9:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Question. You say we can plug in at night when demand is low, but if everyone does that, do we have a problem then?
November 17, 2008 10:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
It will not happen suddenly, so the system will be adjusting to meet demand. If many more connect at night, that would likely be a fairly predictable demand curve, growing over time. It's the more random daily swings, due to weather mainly, that require quick-starting generators.
The closer we get to the same demand at night as in day, the more efficient our large-plant generation is, and the more money the utilities save by not having generators idle.
November 17, 2008 10:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, not for quite a while at least. (Possibly somewhat qualified by region.) Let's run a few numbers here.
In California, demand swings from under 20 gigawatts (nighttime) to somewhere around 45 gigawatts (peak summertime; it's been as high as 55 GW or so; winter peaks are lower, typically below 40 GW). (See CA-ISO web site for daily graphs.)
A typical electric car can use a charge rate of anywhere from about 5 to about 30 amps at 120 or 240 volts. (Technical battery limitations force you to charge more and more slowly at various points, so you want a fancy charge controller for best charging speed.) Let's just arbitrarily assign it a middle-of-this-range 12-amp circuit at 120 volts, for 1440 watts of charging current, and then round it to 1500 watts, i.e., one of those heavy duty hair dryers. (There is a reason hair dryers stop at this level. Anything more and you can no longer use a regular 15-amp wall outlet. For instance, electric dryers need 240V outlets. Admittedly, some electric cars use 240V outlets and will in some cases pull more current, but I am going for ballpark numbers, and many electric cars use lower charging rates to keep costs down.)
We see from the above that "the grid" in California has anywhere from 20 to 40 gigawatts of "spare" capacity at night. Let's use the lower number, and divide 20 GW by 1.5 kW. That's 20,000 MW = 20,000,000 kW. Divide by 1.5 kW and we get the number of cars that can be charged simultaneously: 13,333,333, or about 13 million.
There are more than 13 million cars in California, so eventually this could be a problem. But car turnover rates are nowhere near that high: you won't get 13 million electric cars in even a decade, much less a few months.
November 18, 2008 2:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
And here lies the real issue.
November 18, 2008 4:45 AM | Reply | Permalink