Ways to solve global warming
POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Sunday, June 16, 2024 03:19
VIEWED: 6297
PAGE 6 of 13
Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Electric vehicles are actually capable of doing everything your dinosaur burner can do.
Some things, yes. Everything, no.
Until energy storage gets a couple of orders of magnitude better, you can't cover long distances quickly in an electric car. Tesla's Roadster can cover about 225-250 miles on a full charge and then needs 3.5-4 hours to recharge, IF you have the dedicated 240v 70amp recharging station. Leaving Washington D.C. with a full charge, you'd have to spend 8 hours just recharging on a trip to Atlanta, and recharge immediately once you got there. This makes a 10 hour trip in a gas fueled car into at least 18 hours and probably an overnight stop on the way. Now imaging trying to drive a Tesla to Montana from D.C.
The other problem with highway travel and the long recharge time is - where do you put all those cars for 4 hours while they're recharging? Filling stations can get away with having just a few pumps because each car only uses a pump for a few minutes. Imagine 100 cars an hour trying to use a recharge station. At any one time you'd have 300-400 cars you had to park and connect to rechargers. Also, what do the several hundred folks in those cars do while they're recharging?
This just ain't gonna work until you have a way to recharge as quickly as you can currently pump a tank of gas. At this time, gasoline is just a much better way to store and transfer energy quickly, compactly, and with little weight penalty.
This is not to say that current or near-term electrics couldn't replace internal combustion in a lot of roles, particularly in the commuter or urban-use-only areas. Folk could recharge at home or in garages where the cars are gonna be parked anyway. Commercial vehicles that run urban routes - UPS trucks, say, or garbage trucks - could recharge at their lots overnight. I figure that there will be a mix of conventional internal combustion, hybrid, and full electric for quite some time to come.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Hello,
Sadly, Kwicko, because the Tesla still has kinks, AuRaptor does not consider electric cars a viable technology for the remainder of this century.
A judgment we may all be glad was not made of petrol cars in 1909.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Rap, an electric car, like the Tesla, opens all sorts of possibilities.
Imagine, never having to pay for gas again, for one. Also, combined with solar power cells, you would never have to pay for electricity.
Look at it this way, if they really focus on these batteries, you might have a home fully off-grid within the next 10 years.
Then, its only a hop-skip-and-jump away from having a Serenity-type ship.
Which I think we can all look forward too.
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Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,
Sadly, Kwicko, because the Tesla still has kinks, AuRaptor does not consider electric cars a viable technology for the remainder of this century.
A judgment we may all be glad was not made of petrol cars in 1909.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
Well, there IS *some* validity to what he said - for now, for automotive applications, petrochemicals DO seem to have the energy-storage edge. That's not to say that rapid advances aren't being made and shouldn't be pursued, but we aren't quite there yet.
The Tesla Roadster is a marvelous example of how far we've come - but also of how far we have yet to go. Yes, it beat the Lotus Elise (itself one of the very best-handling road cars on Earth) on a short, twisty road course - and for fun, look up the Elise-versus-Corvette tests on the same course, where the Elise hands the Z06 Corvette its ass). But - and here's the important part - it also ran out of juice after less than an hour of being flogged on high-performance (read "battery draining") runs.
So it's fast, WHEN it's charged up. If you drive it fast, its range is not even anywhere CLOSE to 250 miles - more like less than 50. That's where electrics are still being let down; there's too big a disparity between your mileage depending on how you drive. My CRX, for instance, if I flog the living shit out of the car for a full tank, all city driving with the A/C on, and flooring it off every stop, I can *maybe* get the mileage down to around 20mpg. If I soft-pedal it on the highway, I can push it above 46mpg. So worst case, my mileage is a little less than half what my best-case mileage would be. The Tesla as it sits is more like one-fourth to one-fifth.
But it's still a huge leap forward, and something that should absolutely be encouraged. There are faster batteries coming out that will charge MUCH quicker, and storage capacity and speed are moving ahead quite rapidly. It won't be more than a few years before pure electrics can finally stand toe-to-toe with gas-powered cars.
Mike
just lying smiling in the dark
shooting stars around your heart
dreams come bouncing in your head
pure and simple everytime
now you're crying in your sleep
i wish you'd never learnt to weep
don't sell the dreams you should be keeping
pure and simple everytime
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That's why my dream car is ethanol / reformer / fuel cell / direct electric drive.
Ethanol is a good fuel because it can be derived not just from corn or sugar cane, but also from cellulose and algae. There are several already developed ways to produce cellulosic ethanol, all they need is scale-up and production. Algae is still in the pipeline, so to speak. And being based on plant-material, ethanol doesn't add to the total surface carbon. It handles like our current fuel, so all our infrastructure is appropriate. There are two reformers for ethanol to turn it into H2, one ground-breaking in its efficiency, ruggedness and simplicity. The fuel cells are there already. And one can never say too much good about direct electric drive.
Why isn't that car available ? That's what I want to know.
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Silence is consent.
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But lately, I've been driving to West LA and back 3 days a week. You would not believe the traffic. 
While it is true we need better cars, we also need better transportation systems.
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Silence is consent.
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AND better regional planning.
Economic geography. It's one of those immensely fascinating hybrid fields of study.
But imagine planning a region like you plan ... say, a kitchen!
Some considerations are density of services. So the stuff you need every day (homes, transportation, utilities, parks, schools) are ubiquitous. The stuff you need at least weekly (grocery stores, gas stations, churches etc.) all "within reach". The stuff you need monthly- doctors, home improvement stores etc ... a little further out. The stuff that you need almost never (major university-research hospitals)... may not be accessible for miles.
The best regional planning takes synergy into account: Portland has a wonderful contiguous business-historic-university-arboretum-zoo area with great transportation.
The kink is work. Most production is dirty, and has to be done by a larger work force. There's no way to fit that into a residential community. It would be best, in fact, to concentrate production into one area. However, because production creates a big tax base with relatively few services requires, that tax base would have to be shared by surrounding communities. (We have that situation here: Santa Fe Springs has a daytime population of 25,000 and a night-time population of about 1000. Its an immensely wealthy city; but the surrounding cities are bearing the burden of maintaining the schools, houses, sewers, trash and water services for Santa Fe Spring's source of wealth)
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It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Wulfenstar:
Look at it this way, if they really focus on these batteries, you might have a home fully off-grid within the next 10 years.
Then, its only a hop-skip-and-jump away from having a Serenity-type ship.
I think the distance between an energy self-sufficient house and an interplanetary spacecraft is slightly more than a hop-skip-and-jump. Maybe a gaping chasm several miles wide.
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Quote:
we also need better transportation systems.
I am always just a bit appalled at the fact that we have no realistic high speed rail service.
And nothin I got to say about Amtrack could be printed in a family magazine...
-F
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