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Electric Vehicles

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Started 11 years ago by rockabye
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dymonite69
Member

CPD maybe you do some accounting on these facts:

1) Top three consumers of petrochemical products in Australia - land transport, air transport, agriculture (accounts for 75% of all consumption)
2) We use four times the world average for per capita energy consumption
3) 12% of the world's population consume 40% of the energy produced (Australia ranks in the top 10 net consumers)
4) Bangladesh uses a fraction of the resources but has 8 times the population of Australia
5) Total world consumption of energy has increased exponentially since the industrial revolution (from countries with the lowest birthrates)

Posted Saturday 29 May 2010 @ 10:56:26 am from IP #
alfresco24
Member

D69. I dont argue we Ozzies are big users and wasters of energy but it's a bit much to think that we can continue supplying the worlds minerals and agriculture without a lot of that energy consumption.
Residential energy consumption (excluding transport and consumables) is a small fraction of our overall footprint, and householders should not be held responsible for 70% of our country's emissions that we cant do much about reducing. (Incremental efficiency improvement aside).
As for transport and consumables - Yes we're very bad with that, lazy car users, food imports from all around the nation and half way around the world, travelers jetting all over the place at cut rate prices, etc...
A switch to accounting the true cost of things is the best way of ensuring we apply a premium to create true parity between the cost and consequences.
But we dont want to turn Oz in Bandgladesh do we, do you?
The rate of growth of energy consumption here has declined hugely over the last couple years in particular and as a society we're starting to get more serious about conservation so I'm sort of happy that things are improving, if only slowly. Perhaps the conservation thing is starting to work, but dont hold out false hope that everyone will see it your way.
I know plenty of people who, because they can afford it, still use energy with a purpose to enjoy themselves or flaunt their position, and that's where the real challenge is - getting through to them.

Posted Sunday 30 May 2010 @ 2:04:05 am from IP #
dymonite69
Member

"supplying the worlds minerals and agriculture without a lot of that energy consumption."

During WWII, the British were encouraged to grow their own vegetables to reduce the burden on farms.

So where do most of our natural resources go towards? Transport and transport infrastructure? Electronic gizmos? Mobile telecommunications?

Posted Sunday 30 May 2010 @ 4:15:21 am from IP #
alfresco24
Member

Not anyone can grow a nice complement of food at home, certainly not enough variety to provide a healthy reliable consistent feed. But there are dozens of small things every home can do with growing useful small things with very little effort.
Then again D69 I'm shocked that many people don't even know there's a difference between real and processed food, etc, etc. The WW2 thing is moot, it had token results and includes a whole lot of redundant circumstances that dont even apply in Oz.
Our natural resources go to feed, clothe, power, build and house the world - our wealth goes to waste on poor lifestyle health issues (unfit, poorly fed, self-obsessed, instantly gratified, or fat people with glaucoma and diabetes, who make poor choices every day. Then there's the energy and pollution thing.
I dont know which is worse, but I know that just so many people cant even be expected to do the right thing for themselves let alone be genuinely green or conservation inclined.

Posted Sunday 30 May 2010 @ 5:11:40 am from IP #
continuous
Member

Great discussion.

The reason oil, coal and gas is unsustainable is that they are not energy sources, they are energy storage systems that were "charged" millions of years ago. They are not sources of energy!

The sun is the only real source of energy (or if we choose to pursue nuclear power as another real source of energy)

We, thinking of oil, coal and gas as energy sources, burn them and throw the remnants away - into our air, water and land. But really they are no different than had we found googols of 1.5v fully charged batteries underground, put them in our cars, factories etc. used their energy and then thrown them away.

Whatever we do, energy generation for the long term has to be sourced directly from the sun or a low mass energy generation like fission or fusion.

So the discussion for using hydrogen, bio fuel, batteries is really a discussion about the mechanism used to store and transport the energy, not about creating energy to power our civilisation.

The real question is where does the energy come from (and when) that is used to 'charge up' these energy storage devices.

I could conceive (Although I have no idea how to make it) of a machine that sucks carbon and hydrogen from the atmosphere and creates the long chain molecules we call petrol. To do this, it will need energy, to break the carbon oxygen bonds in C02 and the hydrogen oxygen bonds in H2O that are then used to create petrol molecules + energy to make up for losses of the process.

If this machines source of energy is coal, gas or oil we are not changing anything - we will continue to overload the atmosphere with CO2 etc., but if the source is solar or wind, then we have created a sustainable system. With energy from the sun powering this machine, we are not unbalancing carbon or anything else on the planet.

Imagine that, we could make billions of barrels of petrol this way using solar power plants as the energy source. Wonderful - excellent energy storage mechanism this petrol!! (ofcouse we could be making hydrogen (separating hydrogen from water) or charging batteries instead). And we already have the infrastructure to distribute this form of energy storage (petrol). And this particular system is closed loop - there is no more or less carbon or any other material going into our atmosphere, water or land.

Cheers,

Oh, and by the way, our future as a civilisation will be in more energy use, not less.

Going low energy = killing billions of people, so stop talking such nonsense! We have plenty of energy continuously coming from the sun, we just don't know (or want to know) how to tap into it!

Posted Sunday 30 May 2010 @ 3:29:35 pm from IP #
Benny
Member

Hmmm - something thats solar powered, takes in Co2 and H20 and converts it in to long chain hydrocarbons that can be used as fuel .....

a tree ! (-;

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 12:19:42 am from IP #
continuous
Member

A tree indeed, and if we bury it and subject it to huge pressures and temperatures we get oil, coal or gas....but it takes millions of years this process - growing just the tree will take years, so not so practical plus the land forests will consume - after all the efforts we have put into denuding the planet of forests.

What we need is an iron & bearings type machine (preferably one that makes lots of noises) that can generate the petrol in seconds....hang on, I'll just go have a look and see if Bunnings has one....

The point was not about the machine, but that we need to be clear about what an energy source is and what an energy store is, and not be conned by the coal/oil industry into thinking they are generating energy - they are just digging up energy stored in coal or oil that nature gathered from the sun millions of years ago.

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 2:54:09 am from IP #
dymonite69
Member

Not enough trees to run the world. Not enough coal, gas or oil to run the world. What about solar?

Most Aussie installations have 1-2 kW on their roofs. This maybe just enough to cover the actual energy needed to run the house. Most will also need to burn an equivalent amount of energy in trees to keep it warm.

We actually need about 27 kW panels (180m2 worth) per person to maintain the mining, constructing, agriculture and transport sectors so that we could continue our standard of living.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 3:19:55 am from IP #
rockabye
Member

A solar powered machine capable of recovering CO2 from the atmosphere has been developed. They are just waiting until the oil runs out, or perhaps causes a massive ecological disaster like the Gulf of Mexico, I'd say to bring them online.

"The device, technically called the Counter-Rotating-Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5), uses concentrated solar heat to provoke a "reverse combustion" reaction that turns waste CO2 in carbon monoxide."

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/sandias-sunshine-petrol-machine-turns-co2-fuel

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 7:07:10 am from IP #
rockabye
Member

Following on from the oil, coal issues raised in this topic perhaps this view makes it very clear where we are in the global context.

Quote: "The world faces a virulent and spreading socio-economic epidemic: abject poverty." but "There is still room for optimism, though. Thoughtful conservation, ethical consumption, and voluntary social reorganization offer the possibility of a better tomorrow..."

http://theseventhfold.com/about/

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 8:05:28 am from IP #
continuous
Member

Thanks dymonite69 for the links and figures. So using these figures from wikipedia and assuming 150W/sqm, Australia needs to dedicate about 5% of it's total land area to solar panels to power our selves. (hope my arithmetic is ok - I'm a little confused how you got 27kwh per person dymonite69??)

This is the fundamental reality we face as a planet. Australia is blessed, low population vast expanses of land - but what about say the UK? They possibly will need more land mass dedicated to solar collection than they have - let alone growing food, sustaining environments etc. and so rackabye's comments and quote is so appropriate.

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 12:57:22 pm from IP #
dymonite69
Member

Oz per capita energy usage: 240 GJ/person/year = 66666 kWh/person/year

27 kW PV system generates this much each year. **

** 0.15 kW (1m2 panel) generates 365 kWh/year.

Can you imagine 180m2 per person of PV panels? There is not even that much roof space in the country!

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 2:57:22 pm from IP #
continuous
Member

Thanks for the clarification dymonite69. In a way I have hijacked this thread - though the detour asks the question where will we get the electricity for electric cars.

I don't see any massive swing to Solar/Wind/Geothermal power happening soon, so we will be getting the power for electric cars largely from our brown coal "generators".

There is an upside - the effluent (gas, liquids and solids) are concentrated in the power plants, which should give us an edge in doing something about the carbon problem, with the only push back coming from the power stations themselves. I guess we need a strong government to force the generators to account for the effluent and stop externalising this cost.

I've got a little personal dream, to create a motorhome using a front wheel drive van like the FIAT ducato. I want it to be relatively independent, so we can camp away from 'civilisation' for days and weeks, so apart from the diesel for motive power, I will have a smallish (I think perhaps 20kw) electric motor driving the rear wheels and solar panels on the roof** and of course good battery capacity suitable for driving the electric motor for 10 - 20 minutes at full power.
The electric motor driving the back wheels wwill provide several things:
1/ Additional power when required (e.g. hills)
2/ Regenerative braking to improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of running the vehicle
3/ 4WD capability for getting out of difficult situations.

So the imminent sale of electric vehicles in OZ will help deliver lower cost batteries, motors and perhaps even controllers. Additionally I hope we will get more efficient batteries, lighter weight motors and improved efficiency controllers. It will be a while though before all this happens....

**solar panels for providing enough power to see, refrigerate etc. while we are camped.

Posted Monday 31 May 2010 @ 11:57:21 pm from IP #
dymonite69
Member

PV set up to charge a Tesla Roadster. Battery energy storage 53 kWhr. Nominal range 393 km.

If you travelled about 50km day (national average is 15000km/year) you would deplete the battery 6.7 kWhr.

You would need at least a 1kW panel to restore the charge within 24 hours. You may need double this for winter insolation.

For a long haul trip where you exhausted the charge you would at least a 8 kW panel (7m2) to recharge it for next day use. If want it back on the road in half that time, double the panel size.

Posted Tuesday 1 Jun 2010 @ 1:33:22 am from IP #
Anonymous
Unregistered

Fuel cost savings for consumers, less reliance on imported fossil fuels and reduction in transport-related greenhouse gases are among the benefits of adopting electric vehicles and fuelling cars and largely renewable electricity. Thanks

Posted Tuesday 1 Jun 2010 @ 4:19:19 am from IP #
dymonite69
Member

A 8 kW panel to fully charge an electric vehicle to transport 2 people!

Moving one person around with in a 1000 kg vehicle (electrical or otherwise) for purely commuting purposes is unsustainable and wasteful.

Private transport (particularly for long distances) will be a luxury in the future. Recreational travel will not be a common place event. Most of us will have to move around in light-weight vehicles e.g. electric mopeds and bikes for short distances or catch electric buses and trains.

We would need to multiply the current number of solar installations by 150 just to account for residential energy consumption. Multiply by 200 if we wish to provide for both residential consumption and one private electrical vehicle per household.

Multiply by 1500 to provide for the commercial sector consumption (which includes the factories that will produce your electrical car).

Posted Tuesday 1 Jun 2010 @ 5:11:22 am from IP #
alfresco24
Member

D69
The "Oz per capita energy usage: 240 GJ/person/year = 66666 kWh/person/year" number, is that the country's energy use divided by population?

Posted Tuesday 1 Jun 2010 @ 5:37:57 am from IP #
dymonite69
Member

Yes.

Posted Tuesday 1 Jun 2010 @ 6:10:44 am from IP #
alfresco24
Member

Yeh, well I cant argue that's what the national footprint is, but I dont like attributing all of it into each individuals hands as if we can do anything about the component of that which comes from those activities I mentioned earlier.
Point is, I spend all my time developing energy efficiency technology and behavioural tools that can be used by SME and residential energy users to conserve or replace it with (true) green alternatives, and most everyone I speak with doesnt believe in stopping Olympic Dam, the Pilbara, or Murray Darling food production until we find a way of replacing diesel, petrol, Avgas, gas, etc that everyone else around the planet agrees to do at the same time we do.
Likewise, if some country is buying our primary and secondary industry products then they are also buying all the footprint that goes with it. Our responsibility for it leaves with the shipment and through the customers desires/needs/wants, he acquires the footprint.
We need a fair system of applying a uniform price on carbon and pollution globally.

In Oz there's something like 5 to 20 tonnes per person that can be targetted for 'change' but most of the other 61 to 46 tonnes you suggest we "owe" cant simply be fixed with any amount of PV or wind (with all its embedded and embodied energy & resources). Simply generating electricity is not the same as solving energy problems. There are too many situations in both stationary and motive energy applications that need large amounts of storable energy.

EV's may be more trouble (for the electricity grid) than they're worth in these early years. As the penetration of EV's grows past 5% we will experience distribution, transmission and generation issues that we're just not set up to deal with. That could happen as soon as 2013-15 in some places.

Posted Wednesday 2 Jun 2010 @ 2:58:17 am from IP #
dymonite69
Member

Alfresco,

I agree with you. It is an issue of an energy policy rather than just addressing technological issues. Honestly, I don't know how what the future will look like. We might be burning energy to produce goods that go overseas but the money we get in return also helps prop up other bits of our economy.

However, I am very sceptical that we will be able to match our energy consumption and production with renewables in the future. Demand has to fall and so will our living standards. We might mitigate that with technology so that we don't revert back to the stone age but we won't be able to continue using it the way we currently do.

Fossil fuels were dense energy nuggets created over millions of years and gone in a few hundred.

Whether we harness the 'free power' of nuclear energy in our ground or from the sun, there are remains huge infrastructural costs to run and maintain a system to collect the energy.

Posted Wednesday 2 Jun 2010 @ 3:53:11 am from IP #
LanceTurner
Key Master

Efficiency improvements are enormously important and are usually the one thing overlooked when people talk about renewable generation. We have grossly inefficient processes and systems currently simply because of the very cheap energy available from fossil fuels. Look at it this way:

On a personal domestic level, what's the point of spending, say $15,000 on a PV system to power your inefficient home when you could spend $5000 on efficiency measures and get away with a $5000 PV system? That's a simplistic argument, but a valid one.

There's no point spending vast sums of money and enormous resources on building massive renewable energy plants when most of the energy generated by those plants is wasted by inefficient homes, businesses and transport. It's just plain stupid, to be honest, and goes against all common sense.

Posted Wednesday 2 Jun 2010 @ 4:30:41 am from IP #
rockabye
Member

Which is why my solar charged ebike is even better. No distribution losses as all energy is produced on site. Edison always pushed hard for decentralised generation way back last century and this is what makes solar so effective. Use it close to where you make it and cut out the middle man.

Posted Wednesday 2 Jun 2010 @ 5:05:28 am from IP #
alfresco24
Member

Yeah, expanding and building distributed grids is the next big thing for electricity, because expanding the existing one just doesnt pay off like it used to.
Think of it this way, whenever someone adds another 1kW of load to the grid another $1500 to $6000 has to be spent on the grid infrastructure to support it now and for 10-25 years, plus energy use.
That's why energy efficiency and high star ratings on everything including homes is important.
Reduce our 8.2m homes electricity consumption by 1kWh average and you'd save Australia $12b in stranded infrastructure and $24m/day in energy cost, I think.
That's how many hospitals, schools etc?

Posted Wednesday 2 Jun 2010 @ 5:27:29 am from IP #
Buzzman
Member

Most of us will have to move around in light-weight vehicles e.g. electric mopeds and bikes for short distances or catch electric buses......

......we could call them ... "trams"!!!!

Pity the moronically backward NSW govt of the early sixties did away with all ours! Still, could always move to Melbourne. Or San Fransisco. Though the Glebe Light Rail is good, it's too slow and doesn't go far enough...

What we need is a Great Big New Tax on cars and trucks/km for the purpose of building replacement people and goods moving transport sytems.

It would be roughly the same as the cost per kilometre of new freeways.....

Hey, here's an idea for the cash-strapped NSW govt. Why don't they sell off the railways? Under "market competitive" models they'd then be looking at ways to increase traffic in order to make a profit. New lines, more carriages, better efficiencies...

Only one small hitch - there isn't one single railway company in the world that moves passengers only (as opposed to freight) that actually makes a profit. The only one that supposedly does is the Japanese VFT Shinkansen but I have it on good authority that it is only "profitable" because it owns the airspace above the rail tracks and has been selling it off in expensive areas (Tokyo real estate prices, anyone?) for years.

Even Hong Kongs MKR is marginal, and it moves millions of people daily.

But that's hearsay from industry insiders, so don't quote me...

Posted Sunday 13 Jun 2010 @ 9:17:29 am from IP #
dymonite69
Member

Once upon a time the railways did probably make money - before cars came along. They will be again when it becomes unaffordable to own or run an automobile.

Posted Monday 14 Jun 2010 @ 7:06:52 am from IP #
dymonite69
Member

An interesting article about the economic impact of the automobile.

http://www.vtpi.org/ecodev.pdf

Whilst it has given unprecedented freedom of travel and opportunties, it is becoming (or has become in many place) an economic liability on our world's resources.

Posted Tuesday 15 Jun 2010 @ 1:19:16 am from IP #
Buzzman
Member

dymo
You are 100% correctimundo! Back in the horse and buggy days of the 19th Century, steam trains, despite rarely travelling at greater than 50mph (80km/h) were still a damn sight faster than a horse-drawn wagon, and thus were the chosen route for most goods and people travelling furher than a few k's, and hence were profitable.
However, it was revealed mid-20th Cent that part of the reason they were profitable was the inflated bubble share prices (esp in USA) and the near total lack of regular maintenance by the original railway builders. Many States in US are still playing catch-up.
Nowadays maintenance is to a MUCH higher standard and is therefore much more costly. The only rail traffic in this country that makes a quid are the various RailFreight businesses, and especially those that move large amounts of primary goods - minerals, bulk wheat etc. These goods are still impractical to move by truck, although, due to the dispersed nature of their locations and smaller bulk quantities, stone and quarry products are most often moved by truck rather than rail.
But back in the 19th century there were numerous rail lines dedicated to mines and other primary industries, like sugar cane for example.
The 2'-gauge cane railways still operate in areas of QLD that have a high proportion of cane growers, but as they travel quite slowly there isn't much emphasis on regular maintenance.......so they are pretty scary to watch, rocking and rolling all over the place.
Maybe when the oil runs out, and all the regional lines are electrified, we will begin to re-discover the pleasure of train journeys.
India has a fantastic network of railways, but they have problems with signalling infrastructure - the locals steal the components - so they have a lot of crashes, but their railways move millions daily.
The Chunnel in Europe gets you from St Pancras in London to Paris in a couple of hours, at around 300km/h.
Why we don't have a VFT link between Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong amazes me. Due to congestion it would be WAY quicker during peak hour!
And the 900-odd kms Sydney-Melbourne could be travelled in less than three hours with a plus-350km/h VFT. Imagine that. Central to Southern Cross in less than three hours.
You couldn't do that by plane and taxi, almost.

Posted Thursday 17 Jun 2010 @ 7:48:31 am from IP #
LanceTurner
Key Master

Imagine hitting a roo at 350km/h, would do a lot of damage to the average high speed train. No other country has animals that can jump a 6 metre fence, so it's far easier to keep critters off the tracks in other countries. Here, they would have to run trains with a decently strong front end compared to the composite bodied trains used in other high speed rail networks.

But, that can be solved. The main reason we have no high speed rail is that there isn't enough money available to do it unless you take money from roads (shock horror, you can't do that!). Remember, we have a small population in a very large country, the opposite of most countries, so the money available per person-kilometre travelled is much lower here.

Posted Friday 18 Jun 2010 @ 2:34:44 am from IP #
rockabye
Member

We could always build the track 4-5metres above ground. Would solve a lot of train crossing road issues as well. We just have to be smarter and think outside the square.

Building sustainable infrastructure could replace a lot of pointless waste on consumer goods to keep growth theorists happy and position us to survive the economic train wreck that is possible just over the hill.

Posted Friday 18 Jun 2010 @ 4:42:51 am from IP #
LanceTurner
Key Master

True, but that's a hell of a lot of concrete, imagine the emboddied energy in 900km of track. You can't just put it on an earth mound, that means nothing to a roo which will happily bound up it...

Posted Friday 18 Jun 2010 @ 6:33:47 am from IP #

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