electric vehicles

[krack_the_sky]

new tech advances, reveal a new mode of transport. They'll get it right with vehicles eventually. Do they have usable motrcycles yet ? Are they safe ?-0- petroleum fuel expense is looking nice!Plus no additional harmful effects on ozone? Are these available ?

 

[itsbob]

Plus no additional harmful effects on ozone?

Are you sure about that?

How are all these batteries made? How is this electricity to charge the batteries being generated? They'll still burn fuel, it's just being converted to electricity before it goes in the car.

AND since the current administration doesn't want us using coal, doesn't like Nuclear, and the enviro whackjobs don't want Hydro.. how are we going to generate all of this electricity for these cars?

ALSO, like corn ethanol, they quote the price of a "charge" at current electric prices. IF the idea of electric cars catch on, and say 10% of all cars on the road are electric and getting recharged at night, how much do you think electricity will go up??

 

[aps45819]

how much do you think electricity will go up??

 

[Crewdawg141]

new tech advances, reveal a new mode of transport. They'll get it right with vehicles eventually. Do they have usable motrcycles yet ? Are they safe ?-0- petroleum fuel expense is looking nice!Plus no additional harmful effects on ozone? Are these available ?

Build one! If you have any tools its not that hard, it can cost some time and energy but it can be done. I don't have the right ride to convert right now and I have other toys that take precedence. I hope to monkey with such an idea in the next year or so.

Check this out for ideas.

A $672 electric car, built by two DIYers | Hypermiling, Fuel Economy, and EcoModding News - EcoModder.com

 

[ylexot]

The are Zero motorcycles:
ZERO MOTORCYCLES – The Electric Motorcycle Company - Official Site
and Brammo motorcycles:
100% Electric Motorcycle : Brammo Empulse and Enertia Home

 

[Larry Gude]

Are you sure about that?

How are all these batteries made? How is this electricity to charge the batteries being generated? They'll still burn fuel, it's just being converted to electricity before it goes in the car.

AND since the current administration doesn't want us using coal, doesn't like Nuclear, and the enviro whackjobs don't want Hydro.. how are we going to generate all of this electricity for these cars?

ALSO, like corn ethanol, they quote the price of a "charge" at current electric prices. IF the idea of electric cars catch on, and say 10% of all cars on the road are electric and getting recharged at night, how much do you think electricity will go up??

Don't you just open up the gas cap and pour the sunshine in there?

 

[SamSpade]

It seems to me that, if we EVER find the means to make lots of electricity cheaply, the use of fossil fuels will diminish on its own.

And I mean that.

Let's say, for example, we finally learn how to mass produce electricity through say, fusion technology and can make electricity for a tenth of what we have today. Is there any reason to believe that electric vehicles WOULDN'T sell well?

I get the impression that government, with the hope of promoting green habits, is doing what it normally does - pay for incremental progress. Maybe if we just make it a LITTLE better, they'll start to adopt it.

That's not what drives consumers. Make it a LOT better. People don't want an electric car that goes 100 miles on a charge. They want one that goes 1000 miles on a charge.

This is like those retailers who say "bring in any competitor's price and we'll match it". Why would I do that? Why would I drive to your place of business so you can give me the same price?

If they want people to get electric cars, they have to be a LOT better and offer better choices. And if they want people to charge them with electricity, they're going to have to make electricity a LOT cheaper.

 

[itsbob]

Don't you just open up the gas cap and pour the sunshine in there?

I was just thinking about that..

If you owned an electric car around here, could you put a radiation hazard sticker on the back of it, because wouldn't it REALLY be a Nuclear Powered vehicle?

I'd be bragging about having a Leaf(N), screw the mamby pamby hybrid moniker.

 

[itsbob]

It seems to me that, if we EVER find the means to make lots of electricity cheaply, the use of fossil fuels will diminish on its own.

And I mean that.

Let's say, for example, we finally learn how to mass produce electricity through say, fusion technology and can make electricity for a tenth of what we have today. Is there any reason to believe that electric vehicles WOULDN'T sell well?

I get the impression that government, with the hope of promoting green habits, is doing what it normally does - pay for incremental progress. Maybe if we just make it a LITTLE better, they'll start to adopt it.

That's not what drives consumers. Make it a LOT better. People don't want an electric car that goes 100 miles on a charge. They want one that goes 1000 miles on a charge.

This is like those retailers who say "bring in any competitor's price and we'll match it". Why would I do that? Why would I drive to your place of business so you can give me the same price?

If they want people to get electric cars, they have to be a LOT better and offer better choices. And if they want people to charge them with electricity, they're going to have to make electricity a LOT cheaper.

You're missing one key piece. TAXES, and tax revenue.

There is a lot more tax to a gallon of gas than just the >$.40 cents we pay at the pump.

WE do away with the drilling, the exploration, the refining, the transportation the government will have to recoup the lost revenue somewhere, and guess who's pocket it will come out of??

So say you currently pay $.14 a mile in operating costs, and they find a way to generate electricity so it's $.07 a mile.. That's what the generating costs would be, NOT the consumer retail price.

I doubt we'll ever see less than $.10 a mile costs no matter how cheap the fuel source is as the government will look at as "We can charge them more in taxes, and they'll still be payine less!!"

I would assume for every nickel in cost saved an increase in taxes of 3 to 4cents.

 

[Larry Gude]

It seems to me that, if we EVER find the means to make lots of electricity cheaply, .

Oh, you mean like....nuke?

Nuke could have long ago ended the use of coal in the US but, our good friends in the enviro lobby, funded, I suspect, by coal interests, focused on the problems instead of the solutions. Just imagine how much less dread C02 would have been emitted the last 40 years had we gone BIG GLO instead of BIG COAL.

And, imagine how much the science would have advanced in terms of productive use of the waste.

You said this some time ago; the issue will be the storage, a new generation of 'battery'. That that is the Holy Grail. We can produce the juice. We can make the motors and apply the power. The issue is mobile supply, reserve, storage.

 

[Tilted]

Though there's plenty of wiggle room to argue the numbers, the comparative MPG numbers for CO2 emissions neutrality for the Volt are something like 45 for gas and 50 for diesel. In other words, if you compare driving them (on their electric charge and in the aggregate) to driving vehicles that get significantly less than 45 MPG, they probably represent a net reduction in CO2 emissions. (We can explore the underlying math if anyone wants to.) So, if you drove the Volt rather than an SUV, you might be able to claim that you are helping to save the world. Then again, if you drove a Prius (or various other vehicles) rather than an SUV, you might be able to make much the same claim.

When it comes to mileage costs for owners, at current Smeco rates and current gas prices, the break even point is something like 80 MPG. Compared to gas-powered vehicles that get significantly poorer mileage, they probably represent a cost per mile savings (i.e. the cost of the electricity is less than the comparable cost of fuel).

Lastly, to itsbob's question based on 10% of all cars being electric: If electric cars (operating on their charge) accounted for 10% of the passenger car miles driven in the U.S., that would represent about a 2% increase in the total demand for electricity generation in the U.S. Considering that our net summer generating capacity is currently about twice our actual net generation level, if most of the charging occurred during non-peak load hours (i.e. at night), the impact on average rates probably wouldn't be too great.

 

[Tilted]

It seems to me that, if we EVER find the means to make lots of electricity cheaply, the use of fossil fuels will diminish on its own.

And I mean that.

Let's say, for example, we finally learn how to mass produce electricity through say, fusion technology and can make electricity for a tenth of what we have today. Is there any reason to believe that electric vehicles WOULDN'T sell well?

I get the impression that government, with the hope of promoting green habits, is doing what it normally does - pay for incremental progress. Maybe if we just make it a LITTLE better, they'll start to adopt it.

That's not what drives consumers. Make it a LOT better. People don't want an electric car that goes 100 miles on a charge. They want one that goes 1000 miles on a charge.

This is like those retailers who say "bring in any competitor's price and we'll match it". Why would I do that? Why would I drive to your place of business so you can give me the same price?

If they want people to get electric cars, they have to be a LOT better and offer better choices. And if they want people to charge them with electricity, they're going to have to make electricity a LOT cheaper.

What we've always needed, more than anything, is better battery technology. Absent issues related to getting it to where it is needed when it is needed, particularly when where it is needed is constituted by many moving targets, we can produce energy (i.e. convert it to a readily usable form) relatively cheaply.

 

[Tilted]

Oh, you mean like....nuke?

Nuke could have long ago ended the use of coal in the US but, our good friends in the enviro lobby, funded, I suspect, by coal interests, focused on the problems instead of the solutions. Just imagine how much less dread C02 would have been emitted the last 40 years had we gone BIG GLO instead of BIG COAL.

And, imagine how much the science would have advanced in terms of productive use of the waste.

You said this some time ago; the issue will be the storage, a new generation of 'battery'. That that is the Holy Grail. We can produce the juice. We can make the motors and apply the power. The issue is mobile supply, reserve, storage.

I think the inexpensiveness of nuclear electricity generation is probably generally overstated. In high fossil fuel price environments, nuclear seems to be a somewhat more economically attractive means of generation. However, the costs were pretty comparable (i.e. as between coal generated and nuclear electricity) as recently as 5 or 6 years ago, when coal costs were significantly lower.

 

[SamSpade]

Oh, you mean like....nuke?

Not typically cheaper. And part of the cost is the safety measures surrounding it.

Do you know who has the most nuclear power plants in the world, and who generates the most power from nuclear? It ain't France or Japan.

It's us. We have one out of every four reactors in the world. We just consume so much that it isn't as high a percentage of total electricity.

Admittedly, better batteries would be great - but it really doesn't matter if they're highly efficient and don't drain when not in use. You still have to pay a lot for the juice that goes into them.

There's at least one technology on the horizon where the battery is little more than a very cleverly designed capacitor with a controlled discharge. It has the capability of storing a LOT of charge. One of the more promising ones is called Eestor.

But I recall another one - I'll google now - which is based on carbon nanotubes that are grown. Let me see. Yeah. PAPER batteries. Doesn't waste effort with rare earths and such. The design is the key.

Sorry. Thinking out loud. The idea with these kinds of batteries is to increase surface area in tiny spaces, just like you do with plates in batteries - except the plates are so small, they are a lot more like synapses in a human brain than a battery.

No Matrix jokes, please - but not far off the mark.

 

[Larry Gude]

I think the inexpensiveness of nuclear electricity generation is probably generally overstated.

Not typically cheaper. And part of the cost is the safety measures surrounding it.

Would we all agree that a huge(?) part of the cost of nuke is waste and amounts to, for lack of a better term, atomic political correctness? In other words, dollars spent that don't effectively make a reactor any safer but, makes some people feel better?

 

[itsbob]

Lastly, to itsbob's question based on 10% of all cars being electric: If electric cars (operating on their charge) accounted for 10% of the passenger car miles driven in the U.S., that would represent about a 2% increase in the total demand for electricity generation in the U.S. Considering that our net summer generating capacity is currently about twice our actual net generation level, if most of the charging occurred during non-peak load hours (i.e. at night), the impact on average rates probably wouldn't be too great.

I honestly believe you have to take fuel savings and cost out the window.

Same 10% of cars get converted, how do you think they'll recoup the lost tax revenue? We can look to California to verify that this is/will be an issue.

Consumers will NEVER see a price break as the government HAS to get theirs.

Problem is it's either going to be a usage tax (GPS Monitoring to detemine your cost per mile per year) or they are going to do the same to electric as to gas and diesel the only difference is how can they tell the electric for you car apart from the electric to run your HVAC AND people that don't have electric cars will paying that tax on top of the fuel tax they'll still be paying.

I guess homeowners could be on the hook for two seperate meters on their house. One solely for the car recharging and one for the house, but who's going to incur that cost? The Electric Company? I doubt it.

Everyone (not just E-Car owners) will see a significant hike in their electric bills.

 

[Larry Gude]

I honestly believe you have to take fuel savings and cost out the window.

Same 10% of cars get converted, how do you think they'll recoup the lost tax revenue? We can look to California to verify that this is/will be an issue.

Consumers will NEVER see a price break as the government HAS to get theirs.

I think that is right. I think that is why nuke is nowhere as cheap as it ought to be. It was government built in to get the costs roughly the same as everything else.

 

[itsbob]

I think that is right. I think that is why nuke is nowhere as cheap as it ought to be. It was government built in to get the costs roughly the same as everything else.

Ed Zachary..

And us as consumer will NEVER see the benefit of the cheaper Nuclear energy because there is no transparency to our energy.

I bet if the Nuclear Power from Calvert Cliffs was kept local, and we paid for THAT energy, our bills would be much less. Kind of like the old public utilities that had the hydro electic dam downtown, or just outside of town.


As it is our Nuclear Energy (that we assume all the risks for) gets sent into a pool, and intermingled with electricity from Coal, Gas, Water, and whatever sources and are charged the hybrid rate.

You can not look at your bill and say "70% of my electric came from our local Nuke Plant at price X, and 20% came from coal fired plants and I paid Y.. and 10% came from other sources and I paid Z"

As it is today, if they did, you'd see we get practically NO electiricy (if any) from Calvert Cliffs. It's all transported out of the state to power BIG cities in the North East.

 

[Tilted]

Would we all agree that a huge(?) part of the cost of nuke is waste and amounts to, for lack of a better term, atomic political correctness? In other words, dollars spent that don't effectively make a reactor any safer but, makes some people feel better?

I wouldn't - but I suppose you'd have to more precisely describe what expenses you mean to refer to in order for me to give a more (or should it bet better?) considered answer. For one thin, dealing with waste material is something that has to be done - it's a real expense, not an imagined, unnecessary, or PR-driven one. More generally, our defense in depth principles/guidelines are important when it comes to safety. To the extent I am aware of and understand them, I'm content with the lengths we go to to make our nuclear power industry as safe as is practical. But, we shouldn't pretend it's not an inherently dangerous thing we're doing. In other words, I wouldn't want us to do significantly less - I wouldn't want us to become less rigorous. But even if we did to some small degree, there would still be real costs to operating nuclear plants (not to mention the carried capital investments costs) and even fueling them represents considerable costs (though far less than fueling fossil fuel plants).

There may be some waste in appeasing the ignorance of some of those opposed to nuclear plans (I certainly don't mean to suggest that all opposition to such plans is ignorant), but I don't think that the measures we take and the lengths we go to to make our nuclear power industry safe amount largely to atomic political correctness. I think they are quite necessary. The acceptable probability standards that our regulators work within are demanding, no doubt. But, considering the potential consequences, I think they are more or less reasonable. We aren't willing to accept a real risk of Chernobyl happening here, and as it is I don't believe we accept anything close, but we have to (and do) work very hard to make sure that we don't - and that sometimes translates into real and legitimate costs for the nuclear industry. I can feel confident that defense in depth will work - I'm not sure I could say the same about defense in well-we-make-some-effort-at-least.

 

[Tilted]

I honestly believe you have to take fuel savings and cost out the window.

Same 10% of cars get converted, how do you think they'll recoup the lost tax revenue? We can look to California to verify that this is/will be an issue.

Consumers will NEVER see a price break as the government HAS to get theirs.

Problem is it's either going to be a usage tax (GPS Monitoring to detemine your cost per mile per year) or they are going to do the same to electric as to gas and diesel the only difference is how can they tell the electric for you car apart from the electric to run your HVAC AND people that don't have electric cars will paying that tax on top of the fuel tax they'll still be paying.

I guess homeowners could be on the hook for two seperate meters on their house. One solely for the car recharging and one for the house, but who's going to incur that cost? The Electric Company? I doubt it.

Everyone (not just E-Car owners) will see a significant hike in their electric bills.

It certainly may be the case (probably would be) that lost fuel tax revenue would be made up somewhere else. But, I wasn't addressing that issue - I was addressing how much extra demand such a change would put on our electricity generation capabilities. The answer is that it wouldn't put much, and if the extra demand came mostly during off-peak hours, it wouldn't necessarily force costs significantly higher.

To the overall costs of passenger vehicle travel (considering the tax issue you are referring to), there seems to be enough average savings (i.e. in replacing the average gas powered vehicle with an electric-grid charged one) to still realize a net overall savings even after replacing the would-be fuel tax revenue losses. Then again, replacing the average passenger vehicle with something like a Prius (i.e. something that gets considerably better mileage, even though it still runs primarily off of petroleum products) would represent a significant savings as well - factoring in the tax issue, perhaps even more.

Speaking practically, I suspect the short term response to lost fuel tax revenue would just be to increase the rate of fuel taxes. In other words, make the evil, planet-hating, gas-powered car driving people take up the tax slack for the good, planet-loving, electric-powered car driving people, with the latter getting a tax benefit for their planet-saving sacrifices.