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Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2030

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Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2030

Unread postby Graeme » Mon 30 Jun 2014, 20:55:28

Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2030

Last year, in an interview with Stanford University’s Tony Seba, we foreshadowed the remarkable conclusions of his new book: that energy and transportation as we know it will be history by 2030.

That book, the Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation,tony seba book is now published, and it has even more dramatic prognosis: Silicon Valley will make oil, nuclear, natural gas, coal, electric utilities and conventional cars obsolete by 2030. And Australia – with its high solar penetration – will lead the way be the shape of things to come.

What’s more, Seba says it might happen even earlier than 2030.

He’s not the only person to predict this transformation. Jeremy Grantham agrees, and many in the utilities industry see the same risks. Paul Gilding has made similar predictions.

“Clean energy (solar and wind) is free,” Seba writes. “Clean transportation is electric and uses clean energy derived from the sun and wind. The key to the disruption of energy lies in the exponential cost and performance improvement of technologies that convert, manage, store, and share clean energy. The clean disruption is also about software and business model innovation.”

Seba says the energy architecture of the future will be completely different from the one today.It will be distributed, mobile, intelligent, and participatory and will overturn the existing energy architecture, which is centralized, command-and-control oriented, secretive, and extractive.


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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby Islander » Tue 01 Jul 2014, 07:33:19

Graeme wrote:Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2030


“Clean energy (solar and wind) is free,” Seba writes. “Clean transportation is electric and uses clean energy derived from the sun and wind..


And where would we all get these 'free' solar panels and wind turbines from? Perhaps from those factories that run on fairy dust and wishful thinking? Or maybe this article is just more technology-is-our-messiah nonsense from people that make money from selling naive people solar panels and wind turbines.
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby forbin » Tue 01 Jul 2014, 07:37:33

The key to the disruption of energy lies in the exponential cost and performance improvement of technologies that convert, manage, store, and share clean energy. The clean disruption is also about software and business model innovation.”

I think that they mean something like this .....

"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2674896/Working-ass-Turkish-farmers-charge-laptops-using-solar-powered-DONKEYS.html"

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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby Pops » Tue 01 Jul 2014, 08:15:23

forbin wrote:The key to the disruption of energy lies in the exponential cost and performance improvement of technologies ...


... that improve the extraction of fossil fuels.

Sounds familiar huh?

It's like saying humans can pedal faster than ever before, then finding out that humans have been improving their pedalling by taking steroids.

The question, when you take away the steroids, will human pedaling ability:
keep improving,
stay the same or
fall?

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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby Paulo1 » Tue 01 Jul 2014, 08:35:53

ha ha ha

“Clean energy (solar and wind) is free,” Seba writes.

Nothing is free in this world, especially one with shrinking options and declining resources. This is truly the definition of someone who speaks from an 'Ivory Tower', who probably thinks the education daddy bought and subsequent tenured position at an ivy league university was.......free.

I think in years to come statements such as these will be trotted out and put on display as examples of the extreme hubris and disconnect of our modern society immediately before the reset. (pick your doom level). Place it next to 'Sunday Drives' for something to do. Personally, I think these twits need to spend a little time on the end of a pick and shovel and less time pontificating in the 'free' cafeteria or interview site.

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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby efarmer » Tue 01 Jul 2014, 11:35:54

Why of course, I should have seen this coming, we'll simply tweet ourselves around whilst clutching our killer apps and seeing our bandwidth blossom until the venture capital plays lift us up on a wave and we surf into the next paradigm with a pang in our heart that we do not live in the solar paradise down under and dance among the kangaroos. I wish I would have made some money telling people that Silicon Valley has finally overcome the laws of thermodynamics with a clever algorithm. If this were a cookbook, one could learn how to make a bullshit sandwich on a sesame seed bun with virtual sauce. Did he say anything about fixing the weather, or do we have to wait for the next book?

I think this one deserves a theme song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKh6XxYbbIc
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby PeterEV » Tue 01 Jul 2014, 14:45:36

In some ways, this is a “no-brainer”. For instance, the purported cost of the Iraqi War so far has been $1.7 trillion (1.7 x 10^12). Disregarding whether we should have been there or not, what those funds buy us in terms of installing solar panels for recharging electric vehicles? What does a “back of the envelope” set of calculations indicate as to whether such an investment would be viable and possibly pursued further?

Assume for discussion purposes:
1) Each panel is rated at 250 watts. (Ref: http://www.suncityenergy.com/solarpanelratings/) This is in a
common size (+/- a few watts). The rating assumes a standard irradiance of 1,000 whr /m^2.
2) Each panel costs $1250 installed which is $5/watt for a commercially installed panel.
3) Each panel receives an average of 2 kwhr/m^2/day. This is doable in almost all parts of the lower 48 States and Hawaii in December, the worse month for solar over all. The Puget Sound - Portland (OR) and Alaska areas are the two exceptions. Most areas referenced below are well above 2 kwhr/m^2/day; some with a factor of 3 or greater.
(Ref: http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/ns ... book/atlas)
4) How far will an electric vehicle go using 1 kwhr of electricity.?
• Pickups can travel roughly 2 to 3 miles.
• Sedans can travel roughly 3 to 5 miles.
• A Tesla Model S with an EPA rated range of 265 miles with a 85 kwhr pack onboard produces a calculated average about 3 miles per kwhr.
• A range of 3 miles per kwhr was used below as an average

To derive the amount of mileage that can be driven in a day electrically, the above panels and factors were multiplied together like so:

$1.7 x 10^12 * 250w panel * 1 kw * 1 hr * 2 kwhr sol m^2/day * 3 mi
$1250 panel 10^3w 1 kwhr std m^2/day kwhr
This produces a result of 2.04 billion miles.

How does this equate to miles driven per day using an equivalent gasoline powered sedan?
Assume for discussion purposes:
1) The USA uses 20 million Barrels of Oil Per Day (BOPD). In recent years, this figure has decreased to about 18 million BOPD.
2) Each barrel of oil can be refined to produce 18 gallons of gasoline. This is close to the actual production figure.

To derive the amount of average car miles that can be driven in a day using gasoline, the above factors were multiplied together like so:

20 million BOPD * 18 gallons of gasoline/BOPD * 20 Miles/Gallon = 7.2 billion miles/day

We drive roughly 7.2 billion miles per day.

21 million BOPD over 7.2 billion miles driven per day produces a rough factor of 3 (x10^-3). If we multiply 2.04 billion electric only miles driven times this factor, we would equate this to using about 6 million BOPD. This is roughly the amount of our oil imports.

While a $1.7 trillion dollar investment in solar panels will not be a substitute for all the oil we use, it would likely reduce our energy consumption by 6 million BOPD; enough for us to be ‘energy independent’.

How long would it take to pay this investment off?

If electricity, through net metering, is $1.00 per 10 kwhr and gasoline is $4 per gallon, and a vehicle can be driven the same amount of miles on either 10 kwhr of electricity or 1 gallon of gasoline, the difference is $3.00 which would be allocated to paying off the $1.7 trillion dollar investment.

We use 360 million gallons of gasoline a day, (20 million BOPD * 18 gallons/Barrel).

$1.7 x 10^12/(0.360 gallons x 10^9 * 3) = 1.574 x 10^3 days or 4.31 years. Not too shabby.

This is a very simplistic scenario where a lot of details and other costs that have to be worked out such as the cost of a pack; electrical storage, production, and transmission issues; (in)efficiency issues; weather related issues (the sun does not always shine); and utility regulatory/business issues. The bottom line is that this looks like it is doable financially with potentially solvable issues.

As we see increases in solar panel efficiency, better batteries, and better integration with electric utilities, electric cars will be on the increase and fossil fueled cars and vehicles will be on the decline.
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Tue 01 Jul 2014, 19:25:56

Ah, infrastructure. Always the issue.

Since the late 1800's, we have been building the infrastructure of petroleum energy. We have 600,000+ retail fuel stations, dozens of refineries, thousands of oil wells, and transportation of both crude oil and refined fuels via ship/train/truck/pipeline. Not to mention, 260 million ICE cars, trucks and motorcycles registered for the road in the USA. We have invested trillions of dollars and millions of man-hours in petroleum infrastructure and vehicles. We have built streets, roads, highways, and parking lots.

Given a few trillions more dollars and another century, we should be able to replace that infrastructure. I suppose we can reuse the streets, roads, highways, and parking lots.

Although the power grid already exists, do not forget that it is overburdened already, and has partial excess capacity only at night. Still, it provides a starting point, and should serve once we add about 50% more power generating capacity. But we still have to transition the mechanics, vehicle dealerships, vehicle manufacturing, etc. to EVs. Not to mention, building about 200 million charge points, since a fast recharge in an EV takes about 10X as long as refilling a liquid fuel tank. Most of those charge points need to be trickle chargers, it's better for the EV battery and the power grid.

So let us make the rosy assumption that we can replace all 260M ICE vehicles with EVs in say 50 years - and that we can expand the power grid capacity by 50%, and that we can successfully transition the repair techs and dealerships. 50 years is an extremely aggressive goal, frankly one with but a faint chance of success.

But as long as we got a good start back in 2005 when oil peaked here in the USA, no problem. To be on goal, we need to have 47M EVs on the road, with proportional progress in infrastructure items above.

Oops, there are only 215,000 EVs on the road in 2014. We seem to be under-performing the goal.
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby Pops » Wed 02 Jul 2014, 07:52:14

PeterEV wrote:In some ways, this is a “no-brainer”. For instance, the purported cost of the Iraqi War so far has been $1.7 trillion

This is a very simplistic scenario where a lot of details and other costs that have to be worked out.

A couple of problems you didn't mention
Half the population believes the only thing governments are for is fighting wars and shouldn't be "picking winners" in the sacred realm of business
Probably 90% think FF are unlimited and being hidden by BigOil.Gov to keep the price up and well over half polled never think about energy availability.
And of course half think climate change is a scam thought up by Al Gore.

That is after 12 years of oil war (and counting),
9 years of flat oil production
3 or 4 years of "fracking will make US the largest exporter" propaganda and
3 years of the highest average oil prices in history

So, having said that and barring a heralding of trumpets from on high and Jesus himself (with proper photo ID of course) appearing to admonish the faithful, I'm pretty sure it is all about cost because the US gov is not going down the subsidy road again for a while.

On the other end of the spectrum, the big drop in PV prices has been due to an oversupply of polysilicone (you see, in a real glut prices fall; as opposed to a PR glut, where they do not). Since much polysilicone is made in China, the government will help them weather the losses somewhat so the glut continues with PV selling at a loss (financed by selling cheap fracked-plastic chachkas to round-eyes).

Poly is about half the cost of PV, manufacturing being the other half and it (manuf cost) has already dropped significantly so I don't know how much more improvement to expect there. If there were a large uptick in demand, then of course the glut would disappear and a shortage would follow and so would the price rise in relation to demand.

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I like electricity and I think PV is cool, Unfortunately the world can't be modeled on the back of the envelope
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby efarmer » Wed 02 Jul 2014, 11:16:39

Like Pops I like solar and PV technology and welcome the trend of it blossoming into everywhere it fits and thrives. I have worked on crystal pullers for silicon and the embedded energy is immense in the process. You need to see a 1000 pounds of silicon nodules placed in a crucible and have 900KW of electricity applied to melt it to incandescence and keep it there for 36 hours while a rod is pulled out like a bologna sausage to later be diamond sawed into slices (wafers). China is making a bunch of silicon as Pops stated and essentially they are burning coal to make silicon wafers for solar PV and other semiconductor uses.

Silicon Valley is a huge American treasure of talent and minds and creativity
that rides on the back and is transported by a juggernaut of Asian manufacturing and embedded energy input. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby hvacman » Wed 02 Jul 2014, 12:40:40

Parking garages, streets, office buildings, shopping centers, apartments, most homes would need to be stripped to the bone and rewired to make this dream possible. It won't happen.


Well, right, "it" (stripped to the bone and rewired) won't happen, and doesn't need to happen to make this dream possible.

Those who think this is what needs to happen have not yet lived with an EV. I have, for almost two years. I have to travel all over rural Nor Cal for work. I have at least one 300 mile trip each month, plus tons of more local trips. My Volt only has 40 miles electric range and I charge it only at home on a regular 115 volt 20 amp outlet, but it takes me everywhere. The electric side of it cover about 60% of my driving. If I had an EV with 150 miles range and there were maybe 30 fast chargers at key highway intersections in CA north of Sacramento, I could do 100%. Even with all the gas-generator usage I have to engage to visit remote rural sites, I'm still averaging 90 miles/gallon.

As the EV community and the commercial charging market are learning, at-home charging using conventional existing home power circuitry is the perfectly fine for the average day's trips 80% of the time and will meet more needs in the future with larger batteries with 150 miles of range. Tesla's "supercharger" model of Level 3 fast-chargers at 75-mile intervals along the major highways will be the future high-usage charging infrastructure for future generation EVs. More like the truck stop model than the neighborhood gas station model. All these Level 2 chargers being installed at malls, office buildings, public parking lots, etc. are slowly dying on the vine, as they are too expensive to install, too expensive to use, and too slow.

Apartment dwellers and urban dwellers those who have to park out on the street- that will take a bit more time to work out their charging opportunities, but almost half of America already has the basic at-home capability to charge an EV without any major modifications. EV's and plug-in hybrid growth will continue ramp up as car buyers become more educated about how truly easy they are to own and as production costs continue to drop.
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby Surf » Wed 02 Jul 2014, 14:39:15

Image

The factory battery won't last 100,000 miles, and a new one will cost $15-$30,000. Yikes.


thats the Tesla model S battery. Listed replacement cost is #12,000 and in terms of KWh it is the largest EV battery currently in production. It also has a 8 year unlimited milage warenty. The Nissan Leaf replacement battery cost $5,500 and has a 8 year 100,000 mile warranty. Both batteries will probalby last longer than 8 years and cost are still falling.

http://www.teslamotors.com/it_IT/forum/forums/real-long-term-cost-vs-battery-life
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1092983_nissan-leaf-battery-cost-5500-for-replacement-with-heat-resistant-chemistry

I have to say that Shai Agassi had the right idea. Unfortunately that blowhard Musk put the kibosh on it all. The car companies should have come together to support the Better Place paradigm.


Bad management put the kibosh in Project Better Place replaceable battery, not Musk. Shani Agassi spent a lot of money lobbying and building battery replacement centers before any of the cars hit the road. And since most of the time the cars were charged at home, there wasn't enough long range driving or Agassi cars to justify the cost of battery replacement centers. Furthermore the low performance electric cars they had were not selling. As a result they filed for Bankruptcy.

The Tesla Model S has automatic battery replacement capability built in and it is a hi performance car which is selling well. The battery swap capability has been demonstrated and only takes 1min 30sec. When there are enough Teslas on the road Tesla will start deploying the stations. In the mean time you can use the 20 minute free recharge centers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

Parking garages, streets, office buildings, shopping centers, apartments, most homes would need to be stripped to the bone and rewired to make this dream possible. It won't happen.


If you need to charge your car in less than an hour, Yes you will need to do a rewiring job. However most people don't drive a lot of miles every day. For most people 120V or 220V outlets are all they will ever need on a daily basis. Even shopping centers will only have 120V to 220 V rechargers. If you need a fast charge or a battery swap you go the nearest place offering the service. for me the nearest Tesla charging center is 8 miles away from home and 2 miles away from work. when gas it too expensive your local gas station might be replaced by a recharging center or battery swap facility.
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby hvacman » Wed 02 Jul 2014, 17:07:11

220 outdoor outlets are rare. I've never seen one? Even so that's a 4 hour complete charge.


Every RV park is full of them. 40 amp standard 240 volt outlet. Many parks charge a nominal fee for a charge. Tons of Leaf owners are using them for doing long-distance drives outside the more conventional public charge station infrastructure available in urban areas. The following link shows where EV owners have found public chargers, RV parks, or business/hotels with 115/230 volt outlets available for re-charging.

http://www.plugshare.com/
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Re: Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2

Unread postby Beery1 » Wed 02 Jul 2014, 17:11:38

Graeme wrote:Fossil fuels, utilities, petrol cars to be obsolete by 2030


More cut-n-paste BS from the forum's resident pie-in-the-sky merchant.

There used to be this show on TV when I was a kid growing up in England - it was called "Tomorrow's World". According to the show's presenters, the future was to be a utopia of fold-up cars that fit into suitcases, collapsible knives and forks, paper pants and floating bicycles. Sadly, they got a lot more wrong than they got right, and the world is a lot less utopian than the show seemed to promise. The same is almost certainly true of every post that Graeme has ever made here.
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