[leal]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dooberheim', 'I') though people in the US used more energy per capita. In terms of carbon footprint, the worst offenders are little oil kingdoms like UAE and Dubai.

DK

[gampy]

Well...you may be right...I may be crazy.

But that is neither here nor there, really.

I think the original poster had a good point, that all these hi-tech solutions to our energy woes create problems as well.

It looks good on paper, but it's not really addressing the core problem.
We are still looking at the trees...not the forest.

We are trying to have our cake and eat it too. All of the "solutions" offered to us still involve preserving the car culture.

I don't think that paradigm will shift until it's forced to by external forces.

[NTBKtrader]

DETROIT (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp. (7203.T) is working on developing a plug-in hybrid vehicle and is open to joining with other automakers in battery development, the president of its North American operations said on Friday.

Toyota, which leads the market in hybdrid sales, has not detailed plans to build a plug-in, although some environmental groups have modified its top-selling Prius hybrid so that it can be recharged with an electrical outlet.

"We are doing consumer research right now as well as product development," Toyota North America President Jim Press told Reuters in an interview, when asked about plug-in hybrid development.

Press added the biggest challenge would be developing the next-generation battery, which Toyota is now working on internally. "We would be quite open to any kind of sharing," Press said of a possible alliance on battery development with other automakers.

Press also said Toyota would not be opposed to buying existing plants from other automakers as it expands its capacity in North America.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070302/bs_ ... a_press_dc

[I_Like_Plants]

All they have to do is look at what CalCars is doing with the Prius. Mainly, adding more batteries and running on electric alone more.

The only thing is, the Prius' carrying capacity is 850 lbs, or as I put it, 4 Japanese and their luggage or 2 (since they're so fat) Americans and their luggage.

[Twilight]

The power companies are going to love that!

I couldn't resist whipping out Google and the calculator and doing a rough feasibility study.

Looking at electric car stories, the first thing journalists and reviewers look at is the speed and range in miles per charge (mpc) of a vehicle, but the total energy of charge (kWh) is at least as important as it gives you an indication of how much juice it's going to be pulling out of the grid for how long.

I decided to grab 80 km (50 miles) as my benchmark for the daily use made of a car in our societies.

Some examples...

Bubble cars - the Zap range of bubble cars and mini trucks which do 40 km on 4.75 kWh, which we could say would be 80 km on 9.5 kWh if they had bigger batteries.

Sedans - there's a DIY-job electric car on How Stuff Works, the claim is it needs 12 kWh for 80 km.

Trucks - Ford Ranger EV (pick-up) works out as 17.7 kWh for 80 km.

Future stuff - GM's Volt concept car needs 12 kWh for 80km, though its range is shorter and capacity lower. Recharge time is given as 6 - 6.5 hours.

For the sake of convenience, let's say the current generation of cars needs 6 hours to fully recharge and needs a 12 kWh charge every day, with light trucks needing 18 kWh. A car or a truck therefore places a 2 kW or 3 kW electrical load respectively, for 6 hours, which is akin to keeping a kettle on the boil for that long.

There are 32m cars in the UK and not all see daily use, so assuming only 10m were plugged into the grid at the end of rush hour, the additional load would be 20-30 GW. Here is a demand profile, 60 GW winter peak and installed generating capacity is 79 GW. As you can imagine, the demand surge at the end of a working day is going to look like a break during/after a major televised sporting event. That's difficult enough to manage, they are considered exceptional events on the system and the response is choreographed weeks in advance, every gas turbine and every bit of pumped storage is on standby and waiting for the signal when they take place. Making it the norm? Increasing the swing from < 3 GW to up to 30 GW? And extending the moment for hours? Ouch.

Even assuming some sort of timer device ensures the cars only recharge at a random spread of hours between 22:00 and 06:00, when demand falls off to baseload (plus that would be incompatible with some people's schedules), it would still require an expansion of availability of quick-response generating capacity (ie CCGTs) and scheduling coal-fired plants to run longer.

So how much of your country's coal and natural gas do you want to waste on personal motoring?

Aside from longer uptimes and increased coal / natural gas usage, the other major change would simply be more of everything, expanding installed generating capacity by a third and making corresponding changes to existing transmission and distribution infrastructure. Do not underestimate how far-reaching the impact on the existing asset base would be. The value of power system assets in the UK alone is around £80 bn. Upgrades would cost each car owner £2500 just for the network hardware; if you include construction costs, that figure swells. Need I add which way the estimates will go if you factor in rising commodity prices as energy gets more expensive?

They could make the batteries twice as efficient and we're still talking tens of GW of additional electrical load in large industrialised countries, and reworking of existing infrastructure.

I will assume the issue of switched-mode power supplies and feeding harmonics into the system has been solved on-board. Otherwise that's another nail in the coffin.

I also considered the personal financial costs. My 40 mpg car does 660 km on a single £44 tank of fuel. From my domestic electricity bill, running a plug-in electric car the same distance would cost only £10. But the former figure includes the cost of appropriate supply infrastructure - the filling stations are already there for everyone. It makes economic sense to go electric so long as the parasites leeching off the network are few in number, but if everyone does it, I would have to pay the £2500 for network expansion / replacement as detailed above, plus the same again in manpower costs, through rising electricity bills. Over a 100,000 km lifetime of the car, that would come to an additional charge of £33 for the same 660 km in journeys, a total of £43. Compare that to my £44 tank of fuel. If everyone switched at today's oil prices, I would be financially no better off than if I stuck to petroleum.

That's no coincidence. The electricity networks aren't built with plug-in electric cars in mind, so if you want all the functionality of the petroleum distribution system in electric form, you are going to have to fork out the same cash. Your share of the cost of total asset replacement is as reasonable a rule of thumb as any.

To summarise, electric cars only work if a minority has them, and that minority is so small as to have a negligible impact on electricity networks, thus not necessitating any changes or expansion. Otherwise, you are in exactly the same boat, only you are burning coal and gas in vastly increased quantities.

Personal motoring is going to die post-peak, a wholesale conversion from petroleum to plug-in whatever is not possible unless the electricity is generated renewably off-grid, and the car manufacturers are only talking up mass ownership because no-one is going to buy them otherwise, for fear of limited product support.

The real technological bottleneck is not what's in the car. The true cost of ownership actually rises with more widespread use.

[TommyJefferson]

Interesting post Twilight.

[mistel]

Twilight

I am not going to dispute your numbers, I think plug-in hybids are a step in the right direction, especially in gas guzzling America, because they are so much more efficient than an Expedition or an Escalade.
What they really need to build is something like the Chevy Volt, but with a small diesel engine.

Peter

[kokoda]

Plug-in Hybrids are all well and good but ... as twilight pointed out ... all that power has got to come from somewhere. Power companies will of course ramp up production ... but it will cost. Electricity would soon cost as much, if not more, than petrol. Plus of course natural gas is likely to peak sooner than oil anyway.

[Twilight]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mistel', 'I') am not going to dispute your numbers, I think plug-in hybids are a step in the right direction, especially in gas guzzling America, because they are so much more efficient than an Expedition or an Escalade. What they really need to build is something like the Chevy Volt, but with a small diesel engine.

[Twilight]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'C')urrent average post-midnight 20gw + additional 20-30gw = 40-50 gw. This still leaves and extra 10-20 gw capacity for emergencies.

I don't see the need for additional infrastructure?

[sicophiliac]

I think its only a matter of time before the plug it hybrids are the norm. Cost wise, efficiency wise and the fact that you have a vast array of energy source options when it comes to generating electricity all make the plug in hybrid concept a viable option. Dont forget the trade deficit/national security issues when it comes to importing and being dependant upon foreign oil.

Only thing thats holding them back is the battery technology apparently, well see if and how far lithium ion batteries go. I have also heard ideas of some sort of ( I may be way off on this) carbon nanotube or nanotech based batteries that hold alot of potential. Something along those lines anyways...

Question is.. will enough of them be on the market soon enough to actually make a dent in oil demand ? Earliest estimates of PHEVs hitting the market is around 2010-2012. One could imagine it would be 5-10 years later down the line before a large enough number of these vehicles were on the road to actually make a difference. So were still looking at around 10 years or so before real progress is made.

Assuming were around peak oil right now, or hell lets just say it peaks around 2010 to be alittle more optomistic. Demand growth of 1-2 mbd would mean a 5-10 million barrel shortage by the time PHEVs could really start to make a dent in things.. this assumes production platueas out and holds till around 2015. If it starts to drop off we could be looking at another 5-10 mbd shortage so then a 10-20 mbd total production demand gap. So unless for some reason oil production can continue to ramp up for another 10 + years Id say we still have a big problem.

[I_Like_Plants]

Twilight, the thing you'll constantly run into on this and other Peak Oil boards is that Americans simply can't imagine a life that doesn't involve driving everywhere. They will kill, bomb, strangle their neighbor's 11 year old daughter, eat worms, whatever it takes, or they think it takes, to keep driving. I was originally going to say Americans will just sit down and die before they have to accept not driving everywhere, but who are we fooling? They're Americans - they'll make a huge mess.

The one way to become a pariah on the peak oil discussion boards is to suggest WALKING for fucking crying out loud.

The only silver lining on the cloud is, most Americans are so obese that they really will sit down and die when the flow of fizzy sugar water stops.

[TonyPrep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sicophiliac', 'O')nly thing thats holding them back is the battery technology

[Uninspired123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'T')wilight, the thing you'll constantly run into on this and other Peak Oil boards is that Americans simply can't imagine a life that doesn't involve driving everywhere. They will kill, bomb, strangle their neighbor's 11 year old daughter, eat worms, whatever it takes, or they think it takes, to keep driving. I was originally going to say Americans will just sit down and die before they have to accept not driving everywhere, but who are we fooling? They're Americans - they'll make a huge mess.

The one way to become a pariah on the peak oil discussion boards is to suggest WALKING for fucking crying out loud.

The only silver lining on the cloud is, most Americans are so obese that they really will sit down and die when the flow of fizzy sugar water stops.

[Twilight]

I don't think anyone in a nation with half as many cars as people feels comfortable contemplating a world without personal motoring. Even among environmentalists, the mainstream view is that every household can have its own hybrid / hydrogen / electric car and that's OK, we can manage that.

Think about how deeply this has penetrated our culture, we have people who believe in climate change, or peak oil, people who believe the world faces upheaval in the form of environmental degradation, resource wars and economic collapse, still sticking their own personal motor car into their vision through some back door. It's like "Oh yeah, yadda yadda apocalypse but we'll still be driving." At some level they know it's incompatible with the rest of their vision, but they can't let go.

It's an unpopular view, but someone has to have the guts to say that electric cars are a gimmick. While it's charging, it's drawing as much power as the rest of your house. Unless you've got a PV installation that charges a modular battery system during the day, which you swap in at night, it's not the car manufacturers you have to convince, because that's not where the engineering will be.

It's not battery technology that's the problem, the issues there are a trivial distraction, more to do with short lifespan and energy density / range. You don't want to be throwing away two or three batteries during the lifetime of the car, and you want it to run 500 km not 80 km on one charge for no additional mass, so electric cars can leave a city and go cross-country. That's it! This so-called technological hurdle is about functionality, the energy equation has not been addressed at all. I'm saying, the above mini feasibility study is what the energy equation entails. That's where you have your real problem.

I really think people need to let go of personal motoring, stop accommodating it in their view of the future, or else expand their assumptions to include a whole bunch of other stuff. Electric cars bring a lot of baggage with them, which most people have not yet properly considered.

[lawnchair]

There's another major factor at play in the cost difference between petrol and electric.

At least in North America, petrol is taxed at a high rate to support the building of roads. It's a pretty fair way to pay for them... neatly correlated to the number of miles driven, and reasonably related to the damage done (heavier vehicles damaging the road more). Mind you, gas taxes don't fully cover the cost of roads and streets in most of the US... even with the con game where general revenue helps pay for roads and gas taxes pay for transit and pedestrian improvements.

Freeways aren't cheap. Decently maintained gravel roads aren't cheap for that matter.

If plug-in hybrids gain traction, expect governments to seek a taxation meter on cars plugged into the grid. This will sharply bite into the cost advantages of plug-in cars.

[frankthetank]

You still have to figure in the batteries. Be it lead or Ni or Li... The cost of these are going to skyrocket if any of this is ever implememented. You also still have millions of gasoline cars on the road. What the hell is going to happen to these? Recycle? Left on the streets to rot? I don't ever see it happening. Maybe small scale. The crash will come too fast/too hard to make it happen (atleast here in the states). When Joe has no money (no job), the bank takes away his house (mortgage) and he's living in a cardboard box, i doubt he'll be worrying about plug in hybrids

This is fantasy stuff in my book/ too little/ too late.

[retiredguy]

Lawnchair,

Excellent observation. There was a move afoot a while back to apply an excise tax to people like me who own hybrids. Seems that our fuel use means that we don't pay our fair share of road taxes.

Guess that means we should be paying subsidies to Hummer owners.