The Electric Car Thread- Merged

[Long Sword]

I found this article awhile ago talking about the production of the "environmentally friendly" vehicles, it is from a University.
http://clubs.ccsu.edu/Recorder/editorial/print_item.asp?NewsID=188

That's a good article, but it deals with hybrid cars which use a nickel battery. Teslas use a lithium ion battery.

 

[BradCon]

Finally some what I guess is un common sense on the subject of electric cars.  As the technology advances we will see things we never could dream of.
Hyper efficient wind turbines, the miniaturization of solar panels, an increase in safety and use of nuclear power and advances in hydro electric power as well. 

More people must reach the conclusion that the current system is breaking quicker than it can be repaired.  Green causes need to be championed, my daughter thanks you, as do I.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Found this article in one of those 'Artsy' type newspapers in a hotel lobby in Buffalo. I wasn't expecting the article to be anti-electric car but......

http://artvoice.com/issues/v8n14/electric_car_kool_aid

 

[c_canuk]

Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College

The lack of numbers, embracing biomass and the above tells you all you need to know about him.

Yet another greenie preaching gosple instead of looking at the numbers.

I'd believe it if it was an electrical/mechanical engineer saying this but I've never met one who thought the electric car model was flawed in any way but power density of existing batteries.

The problem with electric cars is we'll need to beef up the electrical grid and disposing of spent battery packs.

that said, we're going into an economical down turn that's hitting the auto industry rather hard... building our home grown electric might be a way to keep them employed and beefing up the grid would be a good way to spend some federal capital work project money. The recycling of battery packs could be a new industry that would expand should electric cars be embraced.

 

[Good2Golf]

power plants are at around 80% efficient, meaning about 80% of the fossil fuel they burn becomes power,

electric cars are about 80% efficient, meaning 85% of the power that goes into them becomes kinetic energy pushing you down the road


internal combustion engine cars are at best 25% efficient, ie 25% of the fossil fuel they burn becomes kinetic energy pushing you down the road.

this is being charitable because electric motors produce a lot more torque at low RPM than a gas engine...

so if 1 liter of gasoline makes 1KW

if you burn it in a power plant, you get 800 watts out, and if you take the 800 watts and transmit it to your house you get an average of 90% efficiency so 720 watts gets to your car

your car takes the 720 watts and turns 80% of it into kinetic forward motion which is 576watts



take that same 1000 watts of gasoline and burn it in your car and you only get 250 watts of forward motion.

I think a greater than twofold difference in efficiency is worthy of respect, as it results in a reduction in green house gasses by over 50%.

-------------

in cold weather batteries only have a problem if they are stored cold... the a large part of the 20% inefficiency is heat lost due to the batteries heating up while drawing current.

electric cars work fine if you have something as simple as an electric blanket in an insulated battery box to keep them above freezing until you start driving and the batteries can keep themselves warm.

c_canuk, your analysis is a bit off. 

Conventional fossil fuel power plants have efficiencies in the high 30's to low 40's of %, and newer supercritical designs (like combined gas turbine/steam plants) can reach mid-to-high 50's of % efficiency.  Gasoline engines running the Otto cycle (primarily adiabatic compression/expansion) are generally 25-30% thermally efficient and diesel engines (isentropic compression/expansion) are 35-40% thermally efficient.

If you run the power generation thermal efficiency as 50%, transmission efficiency as your assumed 90% (this is a bit low for average distances) and take your 85% efficiency of an electric motor, the result is a generation to electric vehicle overall effectiveness of 38.25% (.5 x .9 x .85 = .3825).  Not to burst your bubble, but a clean diesel Jetta TDI will exceed this efficiency level as there is only the .4 efficiency factor of the use of the fossil fuel.

An electric car just pushed the polution problem back to the power source...you didn't get a "two-fold" increase in efficiency.

so if 1 liter of gasoline makes 1KW

As a point of "power" order, I'm not sure where you figure this. 

A Kilowatt is a unit of power -- the rate at which work can be done: work / unit time (1 Watt = 1 Newton-meter per second). 

A quantity of a fuel on the other hand (your litre of gasoline) represents "Energy", not "power". Energy is the ability to produce a certain level of power for a given duration of time (power x time) and is expressed in a unit like Joules or, if you're going to use kW in the term, a kWh (kilowatt-hour...like how Hydro bills you for your house's 'energy' consumption).

There is no direct linkage between a litre of fuel and the kW.  Burn it in a moped, it'll take you quite a while.  Burn it in a dragster, it'll last a fraction of a second.

As for power, I'd like to see some folks investigate advanced capacitor storage instead of batteries because as you don't have to worry about lithium or lead or cadmium or other chemicals related to batteries...food for thought.

G2G

 

[SupersonicMax]

G2G, your analysis implies we only use Fossil Fuel power plants, which we don't, and hopefully, we'll move away from this in the future.

 

[Good2Golf]

G2G, your analysis implies we only use Fossil Fuel power plants, which we don't, and hopefully, we'll move away from this in the future.

Max, I used that as an example because c_canuk was trying to compare use of fossil fuel through power generation-transmission-consumption to direct consumption via an internal combustion engine. 

If you power a car through nuclear/wind/solar/geothermal/tidal/other power source, then no, fossil fuels would not be consumed.

G2G

 

[TimBit]

Max, I used that as an example because c_canuk was trying to compare use of fossil fuel through power generation-transmission-consumption to direct consumption via an internal combustion engine. 

If you power a car through nuclear/wind/solar/geothermal/tidal/other power source, then no, fossil fuels would not be consumed.

G2G

EVEN with fossil fue, even with coal-fired power generation:

• Most cars would be recharged at night, and so no need for additional capability, since nighttime usually has plenty of available power.
• The resulting greenhouse gases from coal-fired power generation, transferred into car battery power, is still less than that created by your average internal combustion engine, according to http://evcanada.org/evfaqs.aspx. Arguably, this is a biased site, however Technology Review, a MIT publication, seems to demonstrate the same here https://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20213/?a=f, and reproduced here http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1569/ (no registration rqrd on the last site

So, electric cars would mean less pollution, fewer greenhouse gases, cheaper running costs, no required increase in production, and in some provinces (i.e. Quebec and Nfld, I believe), almost entirely emission-free car-park thanks to hydroelectrical production. What's not to like?

 

[Good2Golf]

Timbit, hydroelec is definitely a win-win.  I'm not anti-electrical, but just interested in making sure folks understand all the facets of the issue. 

If you want to try and figure out positive or negative energy efficiencies try researching E85 and do the energy-cycle math when you include power used in crop production pre-processing!

 

[Antoine]

Sorry for the necroposting but I think the following could be of interest:

Measuring The Electric Vehicle's Environmental Footprint, Chemical & Engineering News, August 13, 2010

By Naomi Lubick

www.pubs.acs.org/cen/news/88/i33/8833news6.html

Transportation: Life-cycle analysis shows that lithium-ion batteries are not the environmental concern experts once imagined.

Electric vehicles have more than technical hurdles to overcome: Some experts fear that the vehicles' environmental impact is no lighter than that of gas-powered vehicles. And the biggest concerns center on the vehicles' all-important batteries.
Now researchers have published the first in-depth environmental analysis of electric cars using lithium-ion batteries, and have found that they beat their gas-fueled counterparts (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es903729a).
When experts consider batteries' environmental footprint, they worry about a range of issues, including the impacts of mining the necessary metals, the chemical manufacturing process, and whether the batteries end up in landfills or get recycled.
To break down all the possible environmental impacts, Dominic Notter of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and colleagues performed a detailed life-cycle analysis of lithium-ion batteries—a fast-growing battery class—and included it in an assessment of electric vehicles' environmental impact. In their battery calculations, they accounted for the consequences of each stage of a battery's life from the impacts of lithium mining to the global warming potential of emissions from electricity production.
According to the researchers' analysis, about 15% of an electric vehicles' total environmental burden comes from manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing of the lithium-ion battery. Most of those costs, about 50%, stem from mining and manufacturing the copper and aluminum used in the battery and its connecting cables. Extracting the necessary lithium produces only 2.3% of the battery's total environmental footprint.
And while they did not calculate the impacts of end-of-life issues for lithium batteries directly, prior work suggests that recycling can cut down on such costs. "The lithium-ion battery is not as bad as it is assumed to be," Notter says.
Still, the largest contributor to electric vehicles' total environmental burden comes from recharging the battery. These operational costs were three times greater than the battery alone, but they fluctuated when the researchers looked at other electricity sources besides the typical European power mixture that includes nuclear power, hydropower, and fossil fuels. When the vehicles charged up on electricity from coal-fired plants alone, their total environmental impact increased by 13%, but it dropped by 40% when the electricity came solely from hydropower.
Overall, when the researchers compared battery-powered vehicles to their gas-fueled counterparts, they calculated that a car with an internal combustion engine would need a fuel economy of about 60 to 80 mpg to achieve a lower environmental impact than a battery-powered electric vehicle that recharged using European power sources.
The study confirms that lithium-ion batteries themselves are "a small part of the environmental impact of a plug-in electric vehicle, whether battery or hybrid," says Eladio Knipping, a researcher at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry research group in Palo Alto, Calif. And Constantine Samaras of the RAND Corporation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hopes that the researchers' detailed accounting of the environmental impacts of each lithium-ion battery component will help engineers identify parts that could be more environmentally friendly.

Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
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