[Cog]

How are those driver-less mini-vans going to deliver to the customer? Going to drop the package off into the street? The final step of the delivery process is to have a human get it out of the truck and bring it up to the porch or into a business.

[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'H')ow are those driver-less mini-vans going to deliver to the customer? Going to drop the package off into the street? The final step of the delivery process is to have a human get it out of the truck and bring it up to the porch or into a business.

[evilgenius]

I posted previously about Don Sadoway's battery. He, and his team, have invented what he calls a liquid metal battery. It's a big thing. The size they envision, for grid use, is the size of a 40 foot shipping container. It would produce power enough for 200 homes. The more I think about this, the more I wonder if it could work to provide power for an electric tractor trailer. If we break from what tractor trailers conventionally have to look like and picture a huge battery either right behind the cab or on a trailer between the cargo and the cab, then the only question is really how long can the battery power the motor the truck would need to haul it and the cargo for some reasonable distance? If the battery lasts long enough, since this doesn't have to be pretty or petite, it could work. It wouldn't be a solution to ordinary drivers, but it might do this.

Check out this Ted Talk, https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy. In this talk Sadoway suggests his battery for grid balancing purposes, especially in how it could supply power gaps inherent to alternative energy. I looked at this after I started thinking about him again and wondered if a 15 or 20 foot battery with sufficient controllers working it, and using braking to recharge like is already being done on hybrid cars, would work. Obviously, I don't know enough about it. Even if it's really heavy, it would have to be extremely heavy for weight alone to preclude it, since it would be on wheels. The trick is, how long would it stay charged? If it would go far enough all you would need would be a network of truck stops. At those places the entire battery could be either lifted out as a package and replaced with another under a hoist, for behind the cab, the trailer swapped out or, if it charged quickly enough, simply recharged. You wouldn't need the same kind of fuel station style everywhere infrastructure for tractor trailers only.

[efarmer]

A gallon of gasoline is about 36 Kilowatt Hours of power and a gallon of diesel about 40kwh.
Multiply this by the size of a car or truck tank. The biggest Tesla available has 53kwh of battery,
or about as much as two gallons of gasoline. The fossil fuel energy is inherent, the battery energy is stored from a real energy source, and at under unity of course. 18 wheelers hold 125 to 300 gallons
of fuel. On the optimistic side you only need a battery that can hold 5000 to 12000 Kwh to do this
task.

[GHung]

efarmer said; "The biggest Tesla available has 53kwh of battery,..."

Tesla's car batteries have claimed capacities up to 100kWh. Just sayin'....
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/23/12611 ... -ludicrous

[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('efarmer', 'A') gallon of gasoline is about 36 Kilowatt Hours of power and a gallon of diesel about 40kwh.
Multiply this by the size of a car or truck tank. The biggest Tesla available has 53kwh of battery,
or about as much as two gallons of gasoline. The fossil fuel energy is inherent, the battery energy is stored from a real energy source, and at under unity of course. 18 wheelers hold 125 to 300 gallons
of fuel. On the optimistic side you only need a battery that can hold 5000 to 12000 Kwh to do this
task.

[efarmer]

Stated differently, 5 to 12 Megawatt Hours then. And the 40 foot battery hold 2?

[Newfie]

Take a look at Tanda barge canal thread for a comparison of efficiencies in translort modes. Water is much more efficient than rail and rail is far more efficient than trucks, and that doesn't include the cost of the human operator.

If you want effiency gains get rid of the pesky human operator that need constant care and feeding.

But also look at eFarmers logic. It's all about the energy DENSITY.

And a quibble, no battery can or ever will "power 200 homes." It may STORE sufficient power for 200 homes, but that power is generated elsewhere by other means.

But really, the true answer you seek is not in making millions of semis run on batteries. The REAL LOW HANGING FRUIT is to change our life style so that we did ourselves of millions of semis totally.

Rant off, sorry.

[kublikhan]

TransPower makes heavy duty electric trucks. They only go 100-120 miles so that's too short for long haul. But it's enough for short routes like between ports and rail yards.

Video: Battery Electric Class 8 Semi-Trailer Truck

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his truck, and the first two of the seven pre-commercial trucks being deployed, have demonstrated performance equal to or superior to diesel trucks in many respects, including faster acceleration, the capacity to pull loads of up to 80,000 lb., and top operating speeds of greater than 65 miles per hour. Equipped with extra-large battery subsystems weighing nearly 6,000 lb., these trucks can haul heavy loads for up to 100 miles on a single battery charge with unprecedented energy efficiency for vehicles of this class.

The five battery enclosures in the Class 8 ElecTruck design provide a total of approximately 215 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of total energy storage.

[kublikhan]

Mercedes-Benz electric truck:

Video: New 2017 Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')aimler Trucks is presenting the Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck in Stuttgart, as the first fully electric truck with an admissible total weight of up to 26 tonnes. The power is supplied by a battery pack consisting of three lithium-ion battery modules. This results in a range of up to 200 km.

[KaiserJeep]

Can we keep things simple? For the purposes of this discussion, a "battery" is something that one charges from grid electricity, then discharges to achieve another purpose such as running a vehicle or a house off the grid.

The electric drive Nikola 1 in my first post in this thread uses hydrogen fuel cells. They are NOT batteries, they are primary energy sources that consume hydrogen fuel and make electricity. The huge batteries that use liquid metals, liquid sulfur, or other high temperature electrolytes are also primary energy sources, not energy storage media.

An electric heavy truck with an overhead catenary and a ground connection would be possible, and need only have enough real battery storage to maneuver to and from the Interstate Highway. The Nikola 1 above does in fact have a 320 KWh battery as an efficiency booster - you would climb a grade using the hydrogen fuel, and as you coast down the other side, you run the motors as generators and recapture most of that energy expended going uphill, i.e. "regenerative braking".

I would appreciate it if you would please distinguish between true storage batteries and flow batteries, fuel cells, and other energy sources for the purposes of this thread.

Edit: The Mercedes truck chassis shown is NOT a tractor/trailer heavy truck, it is a "medium truck" used for local deliveries in an urban setting, when fitted with a large "delivery van" body on the rear. YES it is an interesting EV, but it will play no part in our discussion of heavy long range freight alternatives. The 200 Km range of the bare chassis will probably be halved when loaded to capacity - but 100 Km is still a useful range for urban delivery.

baha: My name is on a few patents, but as with you they "belong" to my former employer. Now that I'm retired, I find that all those 10+ year old computer circuitry patents plus $2.10 will buy me a cup of coffee. I have those patents enumerated in certificates and engraved plaques that I used to hang in my office at work (we called it an "I love me wall"), but those have now been in storage for 8 years, and I will probably recycle the frames and glass to display pictures of my grandkids.

[Zarquon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')I'm not kidding about this. Trump needs to add $1 per gallon tax to each gallon sold, and bump that $1 for each year he is in office, and keep the current EV incentives in place while doing so. We HAVE the technology we need to replace 95% of the consumer vehicles, and we need to build the charging infrastructure.

If he has real cajones, he should ban new ICE vehicles in say 10 years. If he wants to make an exception such as say a $25,000 "gas guzzler" tax for a new ICE vehicle, I'll listen to the argument, at least. Nor would I add the gas guzzler tax to a vehicle that burns alcohols, LPG, CNG, biodiesel, etc - anything but petroleum derived gasoline and diesel fuels.

[efarmer]

When applying lithium ion cells to megawatt power needs like this can be better understood by some simple notions. The current electric car / hybrid standard is the 18650 lithium ion cell and it provides about 12 watt hours as it give current over time (3.6V to 2.7V usage span assumed). The new Tesla Gigafactory 2170 cells come in at about 18 watt hours. So you see how 5 megawatt hours wants there to be about 278,000 Gigafactory or 417,000 present standard 18650 cells plus some spares in a battery pack arrangement. That is a show stopper. But the people scaling up to tractor trailer EV are actually using LiFePo4 batteries with much larger cells, right now 400aH cells capable of 1.26kwh are used, and Winston (one manufacturer) offers 1000aH cells providing 3.15kwh are available and weigh 41 kilograms each (circa 90 pounds) and we get to 5 megawatt hours with just 1587 cells,or 143,000 pounds of batteries.

Now the kwh hours in a gallon of diesel get wasted getting to wheels in many ways that a battery powered truck with electric motors right at each wheel does not. But I am attempting to paint an easy to see picture of what a steep climb it is to match the current diesel tractor trailer fleet with battery power using present technology, of course especially with truck range per refill / recharge.

But let's say for the sake of argument, we just do this right now and scrap the diesel tractor fleets, millions of 18 wheelers suddenly needing daily chargings of some megawatt hours each has to come from the grid and not out of the petroleum infrastructure, and you have to deliver those megawatts in many of the places where you see truck stops now.

Ths is not trivial, and I am not against the idea, it is just when I do the simplest equate between what the battery has to be to swap for diesel I am humbled. At 6 to 7 (10-11 in isolated best cases) miles per gallon presently the diesel tank capacities of 125 to 300 gallons represents a range that is roughly 650 min to 1800 max when the tanks run dry. Diesel weighs roughly 7 pounds per gallon so the truck when fueled fully has a fuel load of 875 to 3000 pounds again based on 125 to 300 gallons capacity.

[Newfie]

Better than 18 wheelers just electrify the freight railroads.

Existing technology, immediate effeciency improvement just by going from truck to train.

I mean really, what are you trying to accomplish with all this hoop jumping that could be accomplished far more simply?

Not to mention just not using so much stuff, like 18 bazillion creaking batteries and all the pollution that comes from that. Like the ones that keep failing on new airplanes? How reliable!

You are going to have to learn to live happily with less. Everyone else in the world does. Get over it.

[efarmer]

Yes indeed baha, BAU is ridicuolously wasteful, and F=ma goes out the window when you have relatively cheap and plentiful petroleum, because "F" becomes cheap and easy and "a" becomes thrilling and fun, while "m" is allowed to fatten up for style and comfort. I do enjoy these forums for the same reason, there is real and dynamic content, as well as all of the sniping and thundermug rides on the pitty pot of doom. The internet is an instant gratification medium, and it tends to inspire people to think that the right idea and technology can be implemented similar to taking down the servers for a few hours and loading new code. And as always there are rumors of almost free energy for just a couple of j$ to a besieged individual who has been hounded by the energy industry and government to silence him, but who conjures the stones to persist and ply his wares online.