Electric cars are a pipe dream

Kind of a red herring, there. Arab exporters only account for a modest percentage of US oil imports - most comes from Canada, Mexico, South America, Africa, etc. The interaction is via the larger market - oil is a fungible commodity, so as long as the USA is consuming a lot (imported or otherwise), big oil exporters get a boost from that. Using natural gas wouldn't make much difference, since the Arab states are also major exporters of that.

More broadly, I don't think that screwing the Arabs (or whoever) is a sound or defensible goal of energy policy. And anyway, switching to natural gas would be a boost to the Russians as much as a hit to the Arabs.

The normal turn-over time of the US passenger auto fleet is around ten years. Which is to say that it's stupid to suggest a policy of turning it over in half of that: you're proposing that we throw away billions and billions of dollars worth of perfectly good cars, for the purpose of giving the Arabs a bit less of a boost (and the Russians a bit more) in five years' time (rather than ten). Doesn't seem worth the cost.

 

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Are you actually saying that no electricity is wasted at night?

found this on the net. Would be interested to here your take 'Billy'.

Also, why did you choose to ignore my other post? Do you really think that old fashioned 'it can't be done' attitudes have any relevance to this industry? I don't think so.

 

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Yes, it makes zero difference where the oil comes from - I think US could end 100% of car fuel in imports in three years s the US does produce a lot of oil still. I.e. converting less than half of the US car to run on NG would ELIMINATE OIL IMPORTS for car fuel.

BTW the world's largest exporter of NG is Indonesia. (They are also the world's largest exporter of thermal coal.) Russia has an new large NG pipe line to the Chinese border. The internal Chinese part of pipeline may be done soon. - China fell behind schedule as had higher priority uses for the steel like high speed rail, the world's longest large diameter pipeline bringing gas to coastal cities from the "X-istans" of the Mid East. - etc. Soon, Norway may be the only NG pipeline supply of NG for Europe - why France et. al. are fighting so hard to get Libya's LNG supply working again.

Not my intent, and impossible anyway. As you point out, oil is fungible and their's is the lowest cost to produce.

The Arab oil producer could sell it at half the price of Brazil's oil and still make big profits. There will always be more buyers for that "cheap to produce" oil than they will sell, even if the US is not importing any oil for car fuel, which is possible in three years with perhaps only half the US cars converted to NG.

Complete NONSENSE ! I DON'T WANT TO SCRAP ONE CAR. It is the Volt buyers who are scrapping their old IC cars. I spoke ONLY of CONVERTING, not dumping a used car on the market or the scrap yard.

I want to change their fuel fuel tank and fuel injectors to inject NG. - Done in mass with less than $400 cost and with less than 4 hours of a car mechanic's time, after the "learning curve level" of skill is reached.

 

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Misses the point, which is that a big shift in global demand from oil to natural gas, is necessarily a hit to oil producers and a boon to natural gas producers. For the Arabs, that's probably something of a wash. It's a boost for the Russians and a few other places.

Only those who are buying a Volt, but wouldn't have otherwise bought a new car. Which is to say, a negligible amount of them. The overwhelming majority are replacing cars they are finished with - only question is whether the replacement will be gas or whatever.

Sounds extremely optimistic to me. $400 and 4 hours of mechanic time is what routine, standard ICE car maintenance already runs. And what is the impact on performance and engine lifetime?

 

Most people trade their cars in Billy, none are being scrapped unless they are at normal end of life.

Honda has sold plenty of CNG cars to know the price of doing so, and it's $10,000 per car. Could it be a bit less, maybe? But your $400 estimate is total BS.

A little research shows that's not true at all.

http://www.greencar.com/articles/can-convert-natural-gas.php

A home refueling option (important to have) adds another $5,000 to the cost and they are important to have because there are only about 800 CNG fueling locations in the U.S (and not all of those are open to the public).

By the way, the Feds offer a 30% tax credit for the cost of converting your car to CNG.

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/laws/laws/US/tech/3253

Arthur

 

Basically, yes, but you do waste electric enegy if you fall asleep with the light still on.

Power companies have become very skilled at maximizing their profits, not their efficiency. Most of their cost is the cost of capital, not the fuel. almost all fuel types cost less than coal, some like solar or hydo-power have zero fuel cost - then it is all labor and capital cost.

To achieve highest profits, they meet peak demand with low capital cost gas turbine units. By definition a Peak demand unit will be sitting unused most of the time. You must use your most capital intensive units as close to 100% of the time - call base load units, often nuclear plants. It is very rare that a coal fired plant would need to "dump steam" but that would be a waste. There is a lot of "spinning reserve" which can be briefly increased to offset a sudden, unexpected drop in demand. I.e. for a few seconds the whole gird could go up to making 60.1 Hz, then soon only 59.9 hertz to keep electric clocks correct. I.e. instead of dump steam add the demand drop to the spinning reserves, and then take it away when the steam generator production is reduced. Also until you can lower the fire, just let the boiler pressure rise a little and give the needed lower amount of steam to the turbines.

There are losses in the system, but they can not be called "wastes." A new transmission line built now will have larger copper (or aluminum) wires than one installed 10 years ago as the cost of capital is low now. It is strange, but the FED has much more to do with selection of the wire size than the electrical engineers do. - The transmission designer keeps increasing the wire size until the saving in reduced RI^2 loss with bigger wire do not pay for the capital cost of the bigger wire (all done with life cycle costs etc.)

Thus, part of the high current price of copper can be blamed on the FED's low interest rates policy!

Nor do I. In fact I seem to be the one suggesting an approach that few consider -NG powered cars, and doing the analysis to show why they are the better choice for the US now. Cheaper, proven, and can terminate ALL import of oil as car fuel in about three years! The Volt can't do that in 10 years and would require more than ten times the capital cost!

If I ignored you, it was because I chose not to defend myself against your FALSE charge that I was not able to accept the new EV technology. - I evaluated it and found it a very poor choice for reducing the imported US balance of payment problem (NG can do 15 times more reduction for the same $7,500 dollar per car subsidy) and would send a lot more money to China for lithium and rare earths for at least 10 years. Hell, I am a lot more "up-to date" in my thinking here than most - For example a strong supporter of he "super-flywheel" bus as THE urban public transport system. Over the years I have made severl posts on it. Mainly I don't just wish and dream - but do some cost analysis to decide what is best.

The "wish and dreamers" "solved" the 7 hour EV recharge time with automated battery swap stations. I did some economic analysis and so destroyed that idea that adoucette agrees it is a DoA idea except for one owner fleets of identical car (taxis). For one of several different reason why battery swap (except for taxi fleets) is DoA read this post:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2722369&postcount=1536

 

Think your last post needs an edit Billy. So are we in agreement that charging EV's at night is preferable to gas guzzling?

 

tell me more specifically where I error.

Yes if the US can afford the extra capital cost. I think only the short trip urban use makes sense for the EV with recharge mainly at home or work, but the super fly-wheel bus makes more sense, even then. Americans need to become more public transport oriented. Their way of life, built on the private car and cheap gas will change, like it or not.

PS, I also destroyed the wish & dreamer's battery swap idea here:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2729028&postcount=47 by pointing out that occasionally many out of town car will need a swap to get back home after the big rock show, football game etc.- either leaving their batteries that belong in their home town in that other town or most of the time be told: "Sorry, spend night in the hotel and I may have a charged battery for you in the morning." etc. (There are not enough charged batteries in the town for the surge of visitors to ball game or rock concert - The battery swap centers will hold back most charged batteries they have for their regular customers, not give them out to someone they have never seen before.)

 

Your post was half missing, and the quotes were messed up. But you know that; you did fix it.

The US are destined to drag their heels on this. They have had too cheap fuel for too long which has built up an ignorant ingrained affinity for petrol.

This doesn't destroy anything at all. It is simply a logistical problem. Batteries will be able to be swapped out in seconds. There is no reason why they can't be delivered into the stadium car parks. Automatic battery dispensers akin to security barriers would be an available option for patrons. Garages can also help supply this demand with realtime data on battery availability and location available to all drivers. These are not DOA problems, simply logistics. Are you saying that customers travelling to a ball game couldn't pay a slight surcharge (even double or more) for the privilege of having a battery waiting. Traffic flow monitoring would allow high speed trains or lorries to deliver units across country. Containers of batteries could supply the dispensers.

Whatever your preference it is ultimately more desirable for perambulation precluding CO2 release.

Biased approaches to science are irrelevant where will of the people is involved. We have to find the BEST way for the planet.

You still haven't addressed the idea of wireless charging as you drive??? Or even a clever contact charging as you drive (something like scalextric, that charges), would still be EVs.

 

Again I think a liquid battery like metal paste would be more viable to "swaping": you "fuel up" on fresh metal paste while spent metal oxide paste is suck/pushed out simultanously. The metal oxide paste is then reduced at the "gas station" back into metal paste for the next costumer. Zinc-air is the most developed and cheapest of the metal-air batteries and some underfunded development has been made to make them into cars.

 

UD, you completely ignore the huge barriers to the introduction of a new form of transportation.

You envsion an "End State" world where there are thousands of people swapping batteries at a given location and thus you extrapolate that you can support all this swapping with this sophisticated infrastructure.

But what you call "logistics" is pretty expensive, and thus doesn't work in start up mode.
You can't get to point B, because the cost at Point A is too high to justify anyone doing so.

The whole point of Batteries, when you get down to it is to reduce the cost per mile, and once you introduce the high costs of a Battery Swap system only drivers who put a LOT of miles on each day, like taxis and fleet cars and that operate in a confined area where the few swap stations are located, can possibly justify the expense of a minimum of two batteries per vehicle plus the additional cost needed to pay for the use of multiple swap stations.

It just doesn't work for normal consumers who don't drive nearly as much per day and also drive outside the confined area all the time. For the majority of those drivers a battery swap system makes no sense at all since most of the energy they would put in their battery would be done at night at their own home. Their use of the much more expensive swap option would be infrequent and that kills the business model for consumer use completely.

Arthur

 

Well duh, I was responding to Billy's comments which were within the context of a large number of batteries being required (to be SWAPPED). The infrastructure would obviously grow as it needed to. If it was planned cleverly it would be done in a sectional manner that would be very adaptable. This thread has already explored the ins and outs of many applications. To say that battery swapping is a dead duck is a bit premature. I am sure there will be greater minds than us working on this conundrum. I was just pointing out solutions that could be applied. Using lorries to deliver batteries into demand hotspots doesn't sound too space age to me.

I was merely pointing out where such ideas could evolve to if needed, though obviously charge times are going to be the decision maker. Obviously there seems to be a, lack of imagination, pessimistic combusion engine loving flavour here, and I don't like how it tastes. I really honestly think quick 10min charges are the actual solution. And I am not interested in science based on last 5years tech. The truth is these technologies are developing now, and will project into the future. I wouldn't be so short sighted to rule out the battery swap solution yet though. We will just have to see which way the industry chooses to take it, or more specifically, which areas of the technology advance quickest to make the decision (crystal ball needed).

Initially it is about cost, that is the push for consumers, but do not fool yourself, governments will always want to squeeze such a big industry. They have to make their books balance. But we are talking more about saving the planet, or did you overlook that? Initially there will be subsidies, but once it is all up and running and the combustion engine has faded away the EV system of transport will be being squeezed in the same way fossil fueled transportation is now. Don't be so blind to think big business and government is even remotely interested in saving you bucks/quids.

 

No one has said battery swapping is a dead duck, it's just that it isn't a good fit for CONSUMER use.

The current costs of batteries are way too high to justify two batteries per vehicle and that is the absolute MINIMUM you need to deal with in any swap system for consumers (I actually agree with Billy that it would indeed be higher than 2), not to mention the HUGE barrier to putting swap stations up between major cities.

Consider Atlanta to Charlotte, a not uncommon drive for a lot of businessmen, Four hours, 240 mile. But how would you ever afford the two swap stations you would need between these two cities unless the number of vehicles who could use it are at least several hundreds of thousands in each of the cities (remember only a small fraction of the people from each city are going to drive to the other city each day, so unless you have a HUGE number of Swappable cars in each city, there is no way to support a pair of swap stations in between the two).

Indeed, here's the kicker, how much do you think you could charge for a swap, not counting the cost of the electricity (because that's a pass thru from the Electric company), and still make it affordable?

Remember a 24 kWh battery in a small car (Leaf size) is only good for ~100 miles, so the Electricity cost is going to be about $4.00

A Prius (same size as the Leaf) can go 50 miles per gallon or can do the same 100 miles using 2 gallons of gas.

Assume $5 per gallon for gas, that means if you are charging more than $6 per battery swap, then you aren't saving money over IC technology.

If 1 out of every 2,000 Swap battery car owners decides to drive between the cities every day (not real likely), and you had 200,000 swappable cars in each city then you would do ~200 swaps a day at each station, which at $6 per swap you are only making $1,200 net income per day which hardly justifies the huge cost of $6 MILLION in inventory per station. (~300 batteries at $10,000 each (note I've significantly lowered the price of the battery over current costs, estimated to be $750 per kWH or ~$18,000 for the Leaf battery))

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635204575242382820806878.html

Of course a swap station doing 200 swaps a day, with 80% of the swaps in the peak driving time from 8am to 8pm would need two swap bays and and at least 3 operators. How can you justify that expense when the interest on your battery inventory alone (@ 5% interest) is over $800 per day, and basic wages/benefits/taxes will cost you about $500 per day. Then there is the cost of the twin bay robotic station itself and the maint of the robotics and the 100 or so very expensive battery chargers you need to get the batteries recharged for the next driving day. Now to really make your costs go nuts, you would also need to suck in over 200 kWs of electricity every hour. That's a huge load and these stations are in the middle of nowhere. So somebody's going to have to front the cost to the increased power line capacity to get that much power to these stations. (the station would use the equiv electricity of ~180 houses each day)

So again, how much would you have to charge per swap to make money on these exactly?

But, this is END STATE, what are you going to do for the two decades or so that it takes until the number of swappable EVs in each of the two cities gets in to the 200,000+ range?

Go broke.

Arthur

 

In your reply, you are missing one of several point that kills the battery swap idea: The capital cost. (And even making the capital cost higher with more "Automatic battery dispensers" at more locations.)

Certainly with unlimited funds there are technical solutions to the fact that on some occasions, like big football game or rock festival, the demand for battery swap in that town could more than double with out of town visitors arriving for the event. These batteries are expensive. And the number required so there will be a charged battery waiting for all who want a swap anywhere the drive to is several times the number which are in the cars. I.e. the capital investment in BATTERIES ALONE, is greater than the cost of the EV cars. The automated batter swap stations, ABSSs, are also at least 10 time more expensive than the automatic car wash which has no precision positioning requirements – just squirts water and spins some big “rope like” cotton drums and then blows air on car. The ABSS must precisely remove the dead battery, without banging it into part of the car leaving big hole in floor of car thur which a basket ball or worse, a loose bolt could fall and then after several other precision moves replace the battery. For this to be feasible, all batteries must be the same size and shape and that “drop bolt” must not jam the automatic loading machine. Etc.
Now to the already prohibitive capital cost you want to add a fleet trucks (or long distance trains) and computer information system to project the surge of demand in cities across the nation and deliver extra batters to them. When the twice normal demand for recharge in the “surge cities” you expect the electric power capacity installed to be twice normal demand also so twice as many batteries as normal can be recharged over night. – Do you not understand that recharge capacity which is only used a few times per year is a low utilization of capital system? Etc for other economic considerations you total ignore

Yes I agree. But that will require examination of the economics as well as the technology. The best system will not be found by your “wish and dream” approach with needed economic analysis replacd by hand waving suggestions .

Typical “wish and dreaming” suggestions, with ZERO economic analysis and very little understanding of the required technology.

(1) Solid sliding contact transfer of electrical energy is feasible (and used both for trolleys and electric trains) for a very tiny fraction of the land surface and when not available for private vehicles to use. (This avoids user registration and ID reading, use metering and billing expenses.).However the capital cost to provide over head wire for all roads is more than 1000 times more than for just a few trolley lines in a city.

(2) As far as inductive (no-contact) battery recharge of moving EVs that is much to wasteful of energy. Just the RI^2 losses in the all roads distribution grid would make it too expensive – too wasteful of electric energy, with wire sizes small enough that the interest on the capital invested in copper wires does not kill the economic feasibility.
Inductive recharge via a moving pick up coil is quite a difficult problem, even if all crs are required to move at a constant speed with constant separation. If allowed to drive as they please, then many energized coils will not have any car’s pick up coil over them. The energized coils in the road bed are a huge inductive system which cannot just be turned off after the car passes – that would generate very high voltages – like the old inductive coils that once used in early cars to produce ignition sparks. Thus most of the energy energizing coils would be wasted – no car’s pick-up coil above the energized coils to pick up the energy. Even the car coil that is above and AC energized coil with not be able to absorb even half the energy in the AC magnetic field. That less than 50% efficiency is OK if you are only recharging the battery in an electric tooth brush, but not for system recharging car batteries. Also it is not just the car’s pick-up coil that will be taking energy for the in-road-bed energized coils, assuming that the car body is metal. There will be large “eddy currents” induced in the metal of the car body to make additional waste of energy.

SUMMARY: I have only my technical understanding of the system, not detailed analysis, to guide me, but I would suspect the total of all these waste would be five times larger than the energy the pick-up coil in moving car does deliver to the battery. – a very inefficient system concept But of course, you are only ‘wishing and dreaming” about the system with zero economic analysis and little understanding of the technology required. As stated earlier a “no-analysis” “wish and dream” approach is NOT the way to find the best system.

The reason I did not waste my time in earlier reply, is these approaches are obviously impractical to anyone who understand in detail what they imply, either technically or economically. I do so now in hope you will terminate your "wish and dream" only approach and try to do some evaluation via analysis before making more silly suggestions.

 

You say you aren't saying it is a dead duck, then base your whole thread on trying to prove it is based on unimaginitive projections. Just because an industry needs subsidising doesn't make it impossible. The train system in England would never have been built under your mode of thought. Governments built it because it was a challenge, a challenge to move forwards into the future successfully, not because it was initially cost effective.

Like I said, the battery swap isn't necessarily the way forward, but instead of focusing on a negative view scientists must be 'can do' not 'can't do'. With that kind of attitude would men have gone to the Moon? will humans go to Mars? Will space exploration ever be viable if it 'can't be done'?

EVs are the best way to go forward. Governments of the world must work hard to facilitate its success.

 

That sounds like a practical and economically feasible* approach, but would require government mandate to get it introduced. Much more of total transform of the transportation system than other approaches which can be phased in.

-------------
* Assuming the capital cost of the material both in the cars and greater volume at the "de-oxidation" stations is not too high. What materials are technically feasible?

 

That is because you have essentially zero understanding of FUNDAMENTAL battery recharge processes, do not understand that FOR ANY BATTERY, rapid recharge requires significant "over voltage"(to make internal E field to accelerate the ion flow towards electrodes, etc.) and generates heat production.

These fundamental problems will not be removed by some more research any more than gravity will be reduced by some more research.

 

Silly suggestions Billy? All your analysis is based on technology that is swiftly if not already out of date. And neither I nor you have enough knowledge of the future to be pessimistic. All you seem to want to do is bury EV tech. I'm telling you now you are wrong. EVs are the transport of the future, why don't you just sit back, smoke a pipe, and watch it happen. Like I said to Adoucette, would you have put men on the Moon? Would you have built the British Railway System? I think not.

 

Again you are chewing on out of date data.

 

I said it wasn't a dead duck for the NICHE where it makes sense.

One more time, the swap system might work for Taxi and Fleet owners that operate in a relatively confined area and who put a lot of miles on their vehicles per day.

It doesn't work for the Consumer market and I showed why intercity is not practical and a car which won't go intercity is not useful in the US (or in much of the world).

That's true, and we ARE subsidising the initial roll out of EVs to the tune of $7,500 per vehicle, but that's not enough to make a dent in the cost of a swap system for consumers.

BS, the initial rail lines were HUGELY successful financially, there was nothing that could compete with them at the time for moving goods quickly and cheaply, and more importantly, they were NOT a consumer product. Meaning there was no need to worry about the usefulness to the consumer, meaning ONE rail line could be built at a time. Transportation systems don't work that way. Battery Swap systems are not at all useful to consumers if they can't find battery swap stations as frequently as they need them, and there is no way that can occur anytime soon. Indeed the places that are thinking of them are focusing on Fleet and Taxi use (the only actual real world trial so far of the technology involved all of 3 Taxis in Japan)

As the Better Place site points out (it's an Israeli company by the way)

So they aren't unaware that the fit is much better with Fleet and Taxi owners either.

Total RED HERRING. Going to the moon wasn't a consumer issue and on PER PERSON basis really wasn't that expensive if you compare it to the costs involved in changing our transportation system.

The Apollo program cost about $10 per person per year in the US over 10 years. A similar expenditure today would do NOTHING to subsidize/change our transportation system. Indeed the costs are so great that the government can't change it, it has to rely on the people to change it. Currently people on average spend 17% of their after tax earnings on DIRECT transportation so there simply isn't nearly that much available money in the federal budget to put a dent in the annual costs of our transportation system (they pay a lot more than 17% when you consider indirect costs included in all the products they buy).

Whatever solution we come up with will be the one that the PEOPLE choose. So your previous assertion that we have to come up with the BEST system is not actually accurate, we will come up with the best system that we can migrate to at a reasonable cost and that will have to take into account all of our existing infrastructure. Those solutions that make the best use of existing infrastructure are likely to be chosen by the people over those systems with severe usefullness limitations because of lack of supporting infrastructure.


Arthur