Pioneer Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 It would be funny and sad if oil companies funded nuclear power plant projects.... It won't matter who funds them. Unless we can find a way to generate electricity with fairy dust, California will never allow an electric plant to be built. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmc523 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 This reminds me of Bill Ford Jr's Hybrid promise and the Think! Electric a few years back. I don't mean to sound cynical, it just came to mind. I was thinking the same thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jpd80 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 Unless we can find a way to generate electricity with fairy dust, California will never allow an electric plant to be built. Hook up a politician and get all the free hot air you want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmc523 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 Hook up a politician and get all the free hot air you want. I can think of a few right now..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jafo Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 The electrification of the car has begun. I dont know if we will see many pure electric cars by end of the next decade, but drive trains will more resemble the prius than anything else today. Belts will be gone, everything will be electric and start/stop capability will all be standard features on a significant number of cars. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noah Harbinger Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 I think the big change comes when electric cars are purchased on plans like mobile phones. If only there were some sort of installment plan we could use on cars... some way to split the cost of an auto purchase over a number of months or years... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noah Harbinger Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 Hook up a politician and get all the free hot air you want. Stick a turbine in front of Rush Limbaugh... he never shuts the f*** up... he's got the combined hot-air production as all of congress combined. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jpd80 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 If only there were some sort of installment plan we could use on cars... some way to split the cost of an auto purchase over a number of months or years... I'll try that again, you know how you get a fixed monthly plan and free calls with mobile phones, how about free fast recharges or quick change battery packs in the city or if you do long distance runs? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joihan777 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 I'm glad Mulally is actually leading. I'd love an electric Mustang... or an electric T-Bird. As long as the rush is there! Here in sunny California architectualized solar roofs will be the norm, so the sun gives me energy for my home AND my cars. And forget Opec and Hugo-boy! (It feels good just typing that!) And for all of you in less sunny states, Nuclear will become a better and better option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mustang_sallad Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 not to mention the MONUMENTAL cost of having to extensively revamp the entire grid to appease the dramatic upswing in electrical consumption....be funny having blackouts 5 times a week when everyone plugged their wheels in....oh and here comes electric tax or electric rationing....so please applaud the guy down the road plugging his Volt in for you having two hours of downtime a day and getting pissed at burying your prized tropical fish once a week.... but there won't be a dramatic upswing in electrical consumption cause there won't be a dramatic upswing in EV purchases. They'll catch on gradually, and the grid will have the chance to gradually beef up. Already the government's tossing a bunch of cash at new renewable energy projects, and really the biggest gains probably stand to come from increased efficiency of existing consumers. Efficient lighting, improved insulation, programmable thermostats and energy efficient appliances can easily cut electricity bills in half, we've done it at my apartment. I'm also curious to know how much energy we throw away with street lighting. There's gotta be a smarter way to keep things safe than just leaving all the street lights on all the time. Plus light pollution messes with wildlife, and its ugly! Besides, power plants have a hard time revving up and down, they just run at a constant rate, so there's a solid reason some companies make electricity cheaper at night, since they end up throwing that power away a lot of the time anyways. All it would take would be a 15$ timer to set your car to start charging at midnight, and you're charging for cheap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmc523 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 And for all of you in less sunny states, Nuclear will become a better and better option. Nuclear powered cars will be the next thing.... (I know what you meant). I'm also curious to know how much energy we throw away with street lighting. There's gotta be a smarter way to keep things safe than just leaving all the street lights on all the time. Plus light pollution messes with wildlife, and its ugly! That's a good question....it's even worse when the street lights are left on during the day (it happens sometimes here). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noah Harbinger Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 (edited) I'll try that again, you know how you get a fixed monthly plan and free calls with mobile phones, how about free fast recharges or quick change battery packs in the city or if you do long distance runs? Or for the long distance factor, how about 1 free weekend car rental a month (or 50% off as many as you want)? The Quick Change Battery Pack thing would be nice but to be useful you'd need a lot of distribution points, which would be expensive until you start to build a critical mass of users. Fast Recharges are probably limited by the battery technology. Edited March 6, 2009 by Noah Harbinger Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matthewq4b Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 You know the first few generations will be novelties like the Prius was but then it will take hold.It would be funny and sad if oil companies funded nuclear power plant projects.... Uh they already are. And they are the largest producers of hydrogen. If anyone thinks they are going to get out from under big oil with electric cars has a surprise coming. Electric cars will never be mainstream until storage technology makes some massive leaps forward. In the last hundred years, per pound of battery we have "maybe" doubled the storage capacity. Where the gains have been made is with the amount of work done with each watt. Battery tech has advanced at a snails pace. Until they can figure out a way to affordably store the energy in a form other than chemical energy in a battery I do not think that great leaps forward will be made with electric vehicles. The future for electrical storage lays in fuel cells Pairing a regenerative fuel Cell and a conventional fuel cell has the best shot of increasing electrical storage capacity. Basically you have a hydrogen proton exchange fuel cell that would consume hydrogen and oxygen and produces water and electricity. The water would be stored and the Electricity is used to power the vehicle The regenerative fuel cell uses water and Electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The regenerative fuel cell would then use the water and Electricity from the grid to produce Hydrogen and Oxygen basically recharging the system. That currently is the best bet for increasing electrical storage capacity and in creasing the range of the Electric vehicle and getting closer to replace ICE vehicles. Throw some batteries on board as well. And you could get the range of most all current gasoline powered vehicles with current fuel cell tech. The other advantage here is the vehicle is not solely limited to being recharged by electricity but could be fueled with hydrogen if the need arose. As fuel cell tech advances and costs come down, and when fuel cells can be as efficient in reverse (regeneration) as they are going forward then we will see some big leaps toward eclectically powered vehicles displacing the internal combustion engined ones. Matthew Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jpd80 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 Or for the long distance factor, how about 1 free weekend car rental a month (or 50% off as many as you want)? The Quick Change Battery Pack thing would be nice but to be useful you'd need a lot of distribution points, which would be expensive until you start to build a critical mass of users. Fast Recharges are probably limited by the battery technology. The batteries load and unload from under the car via twist locks (similar to shipping containers). On arriving at a charge station, the cars wheels follow deep groves to a halt point, a laser guided battery probe rises from underneath and measures remaining charge. After a credit card swipe, the battery is undone and taken down underneath the charge station to a recharge rack by a shuttle. The same shuttle then grabs a fully charged battery from the rack and installs it in the car. Change over time is less then refueling your gasoline car and the best part of it is you buy the battery pack once like a propane cylinder and just pay for the recharges. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noah Harbinger Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 The batteries load and unload from under the car via twist locks (similar to shipping containers).On arriving at a charge station, the cars wheels follow deep groves to a halt point, a laser guided battery probe rises from underneath and measures remaining charge. After a credit card swipe, the battery is undone and taken down underneath the charge station to a recharge rack by a shuttle. The same shuttle then grabs a fully charged battery from the rack and installs it in the car. Change over time is less then refueling your gasoline car and the best part of it is you buy the battery pack once like a propane cylinder and just pay for the recharges. That's a great description of a vision of how it could work... and I'm not arguing at all that it can't be done from an engineering standpoint; it's not much more difficult than some of the new-fangled vending machines the've got these days... The only engineering challenge I can see is: How hard will it be to make these power packs and this station compatible with the wide variety of autos? But how much is one of these stations going to cost? How many changes do you need to make a day to pay the loan it cost to install it? How long will it be before there are enough electric car-miles being driven to bring the business you need? Remember that a station will have to own (i.e. perpetually have on hand) a number of power packs equal to the maximum number of power packs it expects to have to change out during a length of time equivalent to the time it takes to charge a pack. So if a pack takes 8 hours to charge, and a station wants to be able to service 200 cars during a busy 8-hour period (based on the time Ford predicted for its Plugin-Hybrid Escape), they would have to own 200 packs. If the packs cost $6,000 each (based on the price I see for an Escape Hybrid battery pack), that would be an initial investment of $1.2 million right there. Who decides when a battery pack is too warn to continue being charged and used, and who foots the bill for replacing it? Is it the unlucky customer, who might get two bad batteries in a row? Or the charging station (who can shirk their responsibility and continue passing on bad packs, in a tragedy-of-the-commons situation)? What incentive would you create to prevent a charging station from reducing the lifespan of batteries, by charging them at too-fast of rates or poor storage conditions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noah Harbinger Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 So if a pack takes 8 hours to charge, and a station wants to be able to service 200 cars during a busy 8-hour period (based on the time Ford predicted for its Plugin-Hybrid Escape), they would have to own 200 packs. If the packs cost $6,000 each (based on the price I see for an Escape Hybrid battery pack), that would be an initial investment of $1.2 million right there. Ok, so on a 30 year loan, that would only add about $1.19 to the cost of each power-pack changeover... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jpd80 Posted March 6, 2009 Share Posted March 6, 2009 (edited) That's a great description of a vision of how it could work... and I'm not arguing at all that it can't be done from an engineering standpoint; it's not much more difficult than some of the new-fangled vending machines the've got these days... The only engineering challenge I can see is: How hard will it be to make these power packs and this station compatible with the wide variety of autos? But how much is one of these stations going to cost? How many changes do you need to make a day to pay the loan it cost to install it? How long will it be before there are enough electric car-miles being driven to bring the business you need? Remember that a station will have to own (i.e. perpetually have on hand) a number of power packs equal to the maximum number of power packs it expects to have to change out during a length of time equivalent to the time it takes to charge a pack. So if a pack takes 8 hours to charge, and a station wants to be able to service 200 cars during a busy 8-hour period (based on the time Ford predicted for its Plugin-Hybrid Escape), they would have to own 200 packs. If the packs cost $6,000 each (based on the price I see for an Escape Hybrid battery pack), that would be an initial investment of $1.2 million right there. Who decides when a battery pack is too warn to continue being charged and used, and who foots the bill for replacing it? Is it the unlucky customer, who might get two bad batteries in a row? Or the charging station (who can shirk their responsibility and continue passing on bad packs, in a tragedy-of-the-commons situation)? What incentive would you create to prevent a charging station from reducing the lifespan of batteries, by charging them at too-fast of rates or poor storage conditions? All valid points, it would take: - Standardization of batteries and national retail chains - Fast charge set up to have quick 1-2 hour turnaround (Lithuim Ion) - Full analysis and repair station to change individual cells. - National standard for battery life and fees levied for electric charge (a bit like gas prices) Could you imagine a near fully automated station that only takes credit cards with only 1 or two staff on duty to monitor and do repairs to batteries and some customer service. It's wonderful thought but no matter how many problems and solutions you and I find, unless someone is willing to make a major departure on energy policy and vehicle design, it will remain a fanciful dream. Edited March 6, 2009 by jpd80 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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