THE Electric Vehicle (EV) Thread pt 1 (merged) Archived

[nicklockard]

technology which will give us 10X or more practical energy & power density over existing Li-ion polymer type.

It's coming.

[trespam]

The point I'm making is that, by the time you have generated and transmitted the electricity to charge your batteries, discharged them through a motor and transmitted the mechanical motion to your wheels, your overall energy usage to travel n kilometres in a given type of car is so great, you would have obtained better results filling a tank with liquid fuel.

To better complete the analogy, let's, for the sake of argument, imagine the power station burns oil. Then calculate how much oil you will need. Believe me, the overall efficiency will not be greater than if you were driving a Ford Model T. Then add the cost of the necessary infrastructure, and the cost will go sky high, as well.

You cannot isolate the parts of a process that suits an argument. You must take the holistic view (I haven't, entirely, because I'm assuming the wellhead to power station and the wellhead to fuel pump costs will be substantially the same).

Agree. One needs to work out a fairly comprehensive, industrial level solution to determine whether this makes. Oil=>ElectricityLoss=>Transmission=>Loss=>BatteryStorageLoss=>MechnicalEnergyLoss. Then consider whether the current transmission system can even handle the additional load that would be required when all these cars are plugged in at night.

[Terran]

I think the batteries will be the problem. I believe most car batteries in use today are lead/acid batteries.
We would need to produce car batteries in mass quanties, and those batteries post a toxic risk.
Batteries composed mainly of lead, it causes brain damage, etc.... We better have a good system to recycle the batteries, rather than dispose of them, and contaminate our water supplies. Mass mining of lead must take place.
Batteries also contain sulfuric acid, this is also highly toxic, and corrosive. Sulfuric acid ranks number one in terms of industrial chemicals produced, we would need to produce alot more. It's mainly made from sulfur, so we must put a mass increase in mining sulfur.

As far as charging, people should be encouraged to charge during the night, most of the energy used is used during the day. So at night there's alot of spare capacity.

[MarkR]

Car batteries in current use are lead-acid, and are totally useless for providing traction power for a car. They are far too bulky and heavy to be useful - a lead acid battery to make a corolla go 100 miles would weigh over 1t. Of course, doubling the weight of a car will impair performance and handling and range quite considerably, probably to the point where it is not practical.

Batteries in current use are Nickel-metal-hydride. These avoid the toxic lead and corrosive acids of LA batteries, but do need large quantities of 'rare earth' metals like lanthanum. NiMH technology is well established, with very long battery life, rapid charging and discharge capacity and reasonable efficiency. They are cheap and readily available from dozens of countries. NiMH forms the basis of hybrid power packs in Honda and Toyota vehicles.

Even NiMH aren't satisfactory for EVs that expect to replace liquid powered vehicles. Li-ion is the next technology available. It is already in wide usage in portable electronic equipment like computers and phones. It has a capacity of 2-3x the energy per kg of NiMH, but is considerably more expensive at present. This could potentially be reduced significantly, there is nothing specific that is difficult about the technology, but there are few factories which are tooled up to producing EV size batteries (most produce phone sized batteries). Lithium and carbon (the 2 main materials) are abundant and cheap. Electrolytes are a ultra thin film of special plastic polymer (in the more advanced batteries).

Apart from cost, Li-ion has a few disadvantages; it is difficult to make very long life batteries (1000 charge/discharge cycles seems to be about the max). Although, this is for complete discharges. A normal EV in domestic use would rarely discharge its batterycompletely in the course of a day. If average discharge level is only 30%, then battery life is dramatically extended (5-10k cycles). Lithium metal is flammable and highly reactive (you may remember a demonstration at school where a lump of lithium is dropped into water where it fizzes vigorously, and if you were lucky would burst into flames). Li-ion batteries have a recognised tendency to explode or catch fire if overcharged or damaged - high-performance fail-safe protection systems are required.

There have been a number of reports of mobile phones bursting into flames, or spontaneously combusting laptop PCs. The problems were traced to the Li-ion batteries - in particular the use of unbranded 'clone' packs which did not contain fail-safe protection devices to reduce costs.

What's next? Well, Lithium is the metal with most energy per unit mass, so it has to be lithium based. A couple of companies are working on variants of the Lithium-ion battery called Li-sulphur. This technology can boost capacity by a factor a 3-4 over Li-ion. Construction and manufacture is virtually identical to Li-ion, so should be easy to commercialise, and reach a similar price point to Li-ion. Developement is at an early stage as yet, but protoype batteries have been shown powering a laptop for an entire day - so they do work.

[JayHMorrison]

A pure Electric Vehicle is not going to work for anyone. The resistance is too huge from automakers and there is no demand from consumers.

What do we see in the market? We see automakers rushing to Hybrids and consumers willing to pay above sticker price to get a Toyota Prius.

What is the next logical step from the current generation of Hybrids?
Put a stronger battery in there, make it rechargable with a plug.

http://www.iags.org/pih.htm

Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are hybrid cars with an added battery. As the term suggests, plug-in hybrids - which look and perform much like "regular" cars - can be plugged in to a 120-volt outlet (for instance each night at home, or during the workday at a parking garage) and charged. Plug-ins run on the stored energy for much of a typical day's driving - depending on the size of the battery up to 60 miles per charge, far beyond the commute of an average American - and when the charge is used up, automatically keep running on the fuel in the fuel tank. A person who drives every day a distance shorter than the car's electric range would never have to dip into the fuel tank.

Electricity instead of gasoline
Most of the energy used by plug-ins comes from electricity and not from gasoline. That electricity can be generated efficiently and cleanly from America's abundant domestic energy resources, thus greatly reducing our dependence on imported oil.

Performance
The plug-in hybrid drive system is compatible with all vehicle models and does not entail any sacrifice of vehicle performance or driver amenities. A mid size plug-in can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour at less than 9 seconds, sustain a top speed of 97 mph and maintain 120 mph for about two minutes even with a low battery.

Cost
Plug-ins estimated retail price is higher than that of corresponding conventional vehicles. The difference in price depends on the size of the battery. Every additional 10 miles of vehicle range in electric mode adds about $1,000 to the cost. Battery costs are the primary reason for this incremental cost, and battery prices are likely to fall with increased production. The price difference is partly offset by lower operating costs of plug-ins. Fuel costs for conventional vehicles stand on 6 cents per mile while for plug-ins the cost is only 3 cents per mile including the cost of electricity.

[MarkR]

The point I'm making is that, by the time you have generated and transmitted the electricity to charge your batteries, discharged them through a motor and transmitted the mechanical motion to your wheels, your overall energy usage to travel n kilometres in a given type of car is so great, you would have obtained better results filling a tank with liquid fuel.

I see your point, but what if liquid fuel isn't available, or is available only at very high cost? If we have an alterantive supply of cheap energy, would it be wrong to use it, even if there was no efficiency benefit (or even a slight disadvantage?)

Just some example figures:
Modern coal plants get about 42% efficiency
Modern transmission grids get about 90%
Modern batteries/chargers get about 80%
Modern electric motors and electronic controllers about 85%
Total efficiency: approx 25%

That's not so much worse than a conventional car, and may be a bit better. Much of the electrical infrastructure is already there, so that isn't much of a problem - there is plenty of spare capacity in the grid during 'off-peak' times, far more than would be required for suburbs full of EVs.

Indeed, using off peak electricity would be an incentive for the power compnaies to get rid of low-efficiency single cycle gas turbine plants (used only during peak time) and replace them with high-effiency coal, or nuclear which are most cost effective when used 24/7.

The point is that if oil becomes short, and prices rise - then EV is an alternative, albeit an expensive, and an ugly alternative. But, it one day will compete economically with oil. It will be more expensive than today, so there will need to be changes in usage patterns; people will no longer be able to afford 3 SUVs per household. Despite this, EV remains a potentially viable alternative.

[JayHMorrison]

As for recharging against the electric grid, most of it would be done at night when the power grid is much less utilized.

That will of course require that base load power be expanded because nightly base load will be higher. But it will also mean that "Peaking" afternoon power generation, that is normally "natural gas", will not be needed as much.

[JayHMorrison]

Somehow, I dont really think that this will be much of a strain on the electric power grid.

http://world.honda.com/news/2004/2040824_02.html

[Devil]

I'm sorry, guys, the infrastructure just ain't there.

Assuming total conversion to electric cars, various estimates I've seen have talked about the need to triple or even quintuple generating capacity to provide the required number of kWh, based on daily averages of about 40 km (European figure).

Let's hypothesise that a given town has a peak average daily demand of 1 GW, dropping to 200 MW at night. If we assume all its cars are charged at night, that leaves 700 MW capacity (you need a reserve of, say, 100 MW available). If we take the most conservative estimate of 3 x peak, we still have a shortfall of 2.3 GW. We can perhaps reduce this by 10% because not all cars will have flat batteries on the same days (e.g., family cars will be more used at weekends). So, in round figures, the infrastructure will still need to be doubled and this presupposes charging only at night.

What is even more disturbing is that the efficiency of converting electrical energy to chemical energy and back again falls quite rapidly with time, for a given battery. Your laptop may have averaged 3 hours when new but it doesn't stay that way: I've had Li-ion batteries fall from 3 hours to 15 minutes in less than 1 year (and this is when they overheat!).

Quite frankly, I have no faith in the future of large-scale EVs or even plug-in HEVs. At our current state of the art, I believe that vehicles like the Prius are the only short-term (2004 - 2020) solution for the private car as a means to cut down fuel consumption. We may have other solutions in the medium term, but I don't know what, yet, but I don't think it will be EVs or fuel cell cars.

However, if EV, plug-in hybrid or fuel cell cars do invade the market, there is one given: the electricity generated for this extra load must NOT be generated from fossil fuels, especially coal: we are already pumping too much CO2 and other pollutants into the air. We have to reduce man's contribution to the carbon cycle and certainly not increase it.

[MarkR]

I've redone my calculations, and I'm afraid I made a silly schoolboy error when collecting data.

In the UK, there are 25m cars - if we assume 40 km/day/vehicle with an energy comsumption of 5km/kWh. This means a daily burden of 200 GWh.

This could be dispersed over an 10 hour off-peak charging period (actual charging could take less than that, but the off-peak periods could be staggered from region to region). This leads to a required surplus generating capacity of 20 GW.

In the UK, there are 60 GW of generation capacity. Demand on a typical Summer night is approx 20-25 GW.

What I had failed to account for was the increased Winter demand: typically this is about 35-40 GW overnight. This would certainly be far too small a margin for reliable operation.

The other issue is where the vehicles would be charged. I would expect most charging to be done at home. As each vehicle would only need approx 1 kW during charging, I would expect there to be sufficient capacity in the residential distribution grids, although I cannot be sure of this. Peak residential demand is in the region of 15-20 GW, with 'baseload' in the region of 5-10 GW. Would residential grids be able to cope with 30 GW, maybe not?

[davidyson]

Someone already mentioned the concept, but I thought I would like to emphasize:

We will not have to stop for hours to recharge with battery-electric vehicles. There would be Plug-In batteries so you can change them within a minute or so just as messengers changed horses quickly at post stations in the "good old times".

Of course, one would not really "own" the battery, butjust a battery!

Davidyson

[backstop]

The proponents of electric motoring on a significant scale seem to be ignoring a number of critical factors discussed in other threads.

1/. Greatly expanding power generation and distribution capacity.

a) The core problem of peak oil is that it impacts the economic growth world wide, by which major infrastructure projects, that take as much as 10 years to come on line, would have been funded.

b) Expanding nuclear power in western nations has many, jointly insuperable, problems. A shortlist of these include

the classic untenable immorality of this generation getting the power and all coming generations getting the wastes, its risks and costs, and its necessary secret police forces;

the massive CO2 emissions during stations' construction that are not recovered by operation displacing fossil fuels for a number of years, meaning that building a series of stations, say 20 at one per year, will put extra CO2 into the atmosphere for well over 30 years. This has an intensifying destabilizing impact on the global economy, (viz hurricane Ivan) exacerbating 1/a) above, and causing potentially catastrophic impacts on food production;

if western countries were to opt for heavy nuclear expansion, they would not only be investing that much less in the sustainables, they would also, undoubtedly, be pushing nuclear across developing countries, multiplying the probability of general nuclear proliferation;

c) The costs of clean coal with carbon sequestration appear still worse than those of nuclear power, thus further exacerbating 1/a) above;

if western countries were to opt for heavy conventional coal power expansion, they would not only be investing that much less in the sustainables, they would also, undoubtedly, be pushing coal power across developing countries, multiplying the probability of general climatic destabilization with catastrophic impacts on global food security.

2/. The alternative option of Sustainable Forest Methanol

a) This option provides a high grade liquid fuel suitable for ICE engines, turbines and fuel cells.

b) Woodland yielding 5 tonnes dry wood per hectare per year can yield over 2.75 tonnes methanol /ha/yr via a local processing plant.

This amount of the fuel, if used in fuel cell vehicles, is roughly equivalent to 1,000 gls of petrol used in an ICE vehicle.

c) Its CO2 emissions are recovered by the regrowth of the woodland's (deciduous) trees in a 'Coppice' silviculture, harvesting on a cycle of from say 7 to 28 years according to local conditions. (i.e. fell say one-seventh of woodland per year)

CO2 is banked in new coppice woodlands' growth effectively for half the harvesting cycle, and continuously in the growth of roots and new soil.

d) By utilizing/replanting existing productive woodland plus additional low-value hill lands, this option minimizes the competition for arable land that mitigates strongly against agribusiness biomass crop production for ethanol, biodiesel, etc.

Coppice woodland (in Europe) accommodates the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem, thus raising non-wood yields such as game, fruit etc.

Coppice woodland stabilizes hill soils cutting erosion, and mitigates lowland flooding by slowing the runoff of intense rainfall.

e) Sustainable Forest Methanol is applicable across developed countries, where a new financial motive for afforestation may be largely welcomed, and particularly across developing countries where low labour costs will predictably accelerate investment with a view to escaping the need to spend hard-earned dollars on fossil fuel imports.

Therefore I suggest that this option is not only desirable for its exceptional sustainability, it is also far mor practical as a viable option than trying to raise power-generation capacity to drive electric or hybrid vehicles.

regards,

Backstop

[davidyson]

backstop,

some questions:

- How long would it take to build the Sustainable Forest Methanol conversion plants?

- Have you got a link showing the feasibility of the conversion process?

- What is the conversion efficiency?

- Did you do an area calculation for how much land we would need to grow 1% of the world's current fuel demand?

Davidyson

[Devil]

Backstop

Please substantiate, with serious references, every one of the statements you have made. Most of them are controversial and it would be easy to find references which go in the opposite sense. I would not consider the sayings of either green or anti-green NGOs or other extremists as serious references. Whereas some of what you say appears correct, some of it is also twaddle. The problem is that some readers here may not have the knowledge to sift the good from the bad and, under a guise of an informed post, they may take it all as being correct or none at all. I therefore suggest this substantiation, so that they can judge better for themselves.

[Whitecrab]

More details on the methanol economy idea: http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic743.html

You can also make methanol from natural gas or coal: this can help supplement the supply until the sustainable tree farming is worked out and scaled up.


I would be interested in seeing if you have more details, too. Methanol, cellulose ethanol, or EVs: it's still unclear which is the best bet.

[Devil]

You can also make methanol from natural gas or coal: this can help supplement the supply until the sustainable tree farming is worked out and scaled up.

Of course you can, and that makes the methanol a fossil fuel and will increase the the greenhouse gas emissions. Not a good idea, is it? You will get just as many joules (if not more) by simply burning the original fuel without any energy-consuming chemical processes, and the number of additional carbon atoms ending up in the atmosphere will be the same.

[backstop]

Davidyson - my apologies for the delay in replying to your questions. Until recently I'd resisted using e-mail and the internet, so info gathered over the years is on paper. I've had an interesting time seeing what's available on the web so that you can review it if you wish.

The scale and degree of modularity of construction will define the time taken "to build methanol conversion plants." Scale is a function of the costs of fuelwood transport, which appears to be best below about 3 miles. This gives a theoretical maximum area of about 28 sq mls which equals about 7,000 hectares. (For anyone who needs to know it, a hectare = 2.47 acres).

I've seen yields of >10 Tonnes Dry Wood/ha/yr in Venezuela, 5TDWd/ha/yr in UK, and 1TDWd/ha/yr in Norway. Taking 5TDWd/ha/yr as the yield, 7,000 ha.s would provide 35,000 TDWd/yr or around 100 Ts/day. For a plant this size, given a large degree of factory production of plant modules, I'd expect an on-site assembly period of less than six months.

It should be noted both that far larger unsustainable plants have been operating to provide methanol as a chemical feedstock, (for instance at Goole, UK, importing 70,000Ts /yr of Baltic conifer forest) and that smaller plants drawing on less than 7,000 ha.s will have lower transport costs. Also, in the interests of decentralization the smaller the operation can be (without untenable capital costs/ tonne output) the better.

The material conversion efficiency in the '80 was 1.0T methanol from 2.3TsDWd, or about 44%. It has since risen to about 55% and, following EU-funded research into reforming the tars & condensates produced during the wood's gasification is set to rise considerably further.

In terms of the energy efficiency of this conversion, dry deciduous wood is generally taken to have a potential of around 4,850 KWHrs/tonne. (For those who need to know, a tonne = 2,205lbs). Both the wood's gasification and the woodgas's conversion to methanol emit heat, a proportion of which is used in processing, with the remainder either being vented or put to use for a steam-turbine genny or possibly community heating. It is not accounted below.

On the present material conversion efficiency of 55%, a tonne of wood yields 550 kg Methanol = 2,994 KWHrs (methanol = 19.6MJ/kg). This gives an energy conversion efficiency of 61.7%. (The bonding in of an atom of Oxygen in the woodgas to make methanol CH3OH is part of the reason for the rise from mce:55%).

I'm loth to attempt your last question without a clear idea of what you mean by 'the world's current fuel demand' but would calculate the following.

Petrol= 44.5MJ/kg x 20% effic IC engine vehicle = 8.9MJ delivered

Methanol= 19.6MJ/kg x 44% effic FC vehicle = 8.62MJ delivered.

On these numbers we need 1.03Ts methanol to replace 1.0T petrol.

Therefore, per million tonnes of petrol replaced we'd need 1.03MT methanol which, at good UK growth rates, needs about 375,000 ha.s of land.

It is perhaps worth noting that even the tiny UK has over 10 million ha.s of deforested moorland and marginal hill pasture, much of which is producing less than 25 servings of lamb per year, largely at the taxpayer's expense. Given reasonable incentives, there are many areas where hill-farmers could be willing to reforest parts of their land with native deciduous species to supply feedstock to a local processing plant.

Below are some of the better web sites on the issue. None I'm afraid give a clear overall picture of the option from forestry to vehicle but each has relevant items that are worth hunting out.

http://payson.tulane.edu:8085/cgi/bin/gw

www.mhi.co.ip/power/e_power/techno/biomass/index.html

www.methanol.org

www.gasnet.uk .

Hoping I've written the addresses properly,

regards,

Backstop

[backstop]

Devil - If you'd a/. care to withdraw the word twaddle, and b/. explain which parts of my previous post you find incredible, I'd be happy to try to explain the option further.

Can we agree that discussion demands courtesy ?

Backstop

[backstop]

Davidyson - sorry about the addresses above which seem to need to be nothing like what showed up in my links column. Here are the three that didn't work.

www.payson.tulane.edu

www.mhi.co

www.gasnet.uk.net/

Hoping these do work,

Backstop

[backstop]

Davidyson - Herewith, God willing, the right address of a current Japanese processor manufacturer. (Misreading a j for an i was I hope the problem).

http://www.mhi.co.jp/power/e_power/tech ... index.html

Backstop