Plug In Hybrid Cars

notanon · August 2018

Haych said:

Diesel is evil though - or at least that's the current message from European governments, which is why petrol/electric hybrid is in fashion.

The advances in diesel engines (that match petrol) are producing tiny particles that can cross lung membranes so yes a new evil would be a reasonable description:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/179526/researchers-show-diesel-fumes-could-cause/

m_c · August 2018

Sporky said:

So why are Japan making it at night?

Because Japan has an abundance of nuclear power.

If the boffins actually get nuclear fusion working, and commercialised, then pretty much every current power generation source is going to be obsolete. Power when you need it, and minimal pollution/waste. It would make even more sense to use the extra capacity overnight to produce hydrogen. It's not that efficient using current tech, but it eliminates the environmental issue of lithium, allows fast refuelling, and reduces the weight.

When you look at the end to end environmental cost of renewables, they're pretty poor. Wind turbines have to run for a lot of
years to balance the energy taken to create their concrete bases (IIRC it's many decades), and it's debateable if solar panels ever repay their impact given the amount of energy required to create them.

And that's before you consider that you still have to have enough power stations to allow for when renewables aren't producing anything. It's far more efficient to run power stations at capacity, rather have them just ticking over for when renewable inevitably can't cope. Battery storage can help alleviate the intermittent nature of renewables, but then you're back at either low density/efficiency lead-acid, or highly polluting lithium. Hardly environmentally friendly.

There's not any one ideal solution, especially once you look at details, and not just the bits selected groups want to highlight while ignoring other bits.

ICBM · August 2018

m_c said:

If the boffins actually get nuclear fusion working, and commercialised, then pretty much every current power generation source is going to be obsolete.

They’ve been saying that for over fifty years. “Electricity too cheap to meter”... lol. I’ll take a bet that it never happens in the next fifty years either.

The only fusion power station that works is operated and contained by gravity, and is 93 million miles away.

The best thing to do is stop wasting money trying to make it work on Earth and use it to improve the capture of that free energy.

The calculations for payback on energy investment in renewables are quite a lot different now too, as the technology moves beyond the early development phase.

crunchman · August 2018

There is scope for cheaper nuclear with less obnoxious leftovers using Thorium fission.

China seems to be putting a lot of effort into developing it:

https://www.environmentalleader.com/2016/08/chinas-research-into-thorium-will-have-implications-for-nuclear-energy-in-the-united-states/

Haych · August 2018

The problem as I see it is greed. Whenever it comes to solving the energy crisis, whether it's a fuel source for transport to replace oil, or powering the grid, the brief is always the same; the first agenda item is, how do we sell it and how much can we sell it for.

If as a species we stopped trying to profit from it for a couple of decades and just accepted that we needed to do something pretty sharpish for the good of the planet and the good of our own, and all, species then I reckon we could have easily solved the energy crisis by now. The technology is out there but instead of sharing knowledge and pooling effort and advancement it's all hush-hush secret squirrel type stuff in case it gives one corporate conglomerate the competitive edge over another.

Either that or there's a huge amount of red tape and/or cost implications which means it's not economical to use certain technology or it's not had the rubber stamp of approval from some minister in the department for procrastination to say it's ok to use.

rlw · August 2018

Haych said:

crunchman said:
The big problem with battery powered cars of any kind is charging them. I've said in several other threads that hydrogen fuel cells are likely to be the better long term option than battery power.

Where is all that Hydrogen going to come from? The major sources are fossil fuel based and as a result a by product is a number of different greenhouse gasses.

Spare capacity from wind and solar. Much discussed on here before.

gubble · August 2018

Just done a 135 mile trip to my other office.
65MPG - quite happy with that

Haych · August 2018

gubble said:

Just done a 135 mile trip to my other office.
65MPG - quite happy with that

Sheesh well done fella - I'd be happy if I could get 29 mpg on that kind of journey

Sporky · August 2018

m_c said:

There's not any one ideal solution, especially once you look at details, and not just the bits selected groups want to highlight while ignoring other bits.

Exactly.

Hydrogen only seems to solve three issues - you can fill up quickly, it doesn't need anything particularly weird materials-wise inside the car, and there's nothing worse than water that comes out of the engine. Probably.

But it needs huge amounts of energy to produce, and there just isn't the solar and wind "surplus" that the hydrogen fans claim is going to provide that energy, so you're back to burning fossil fuels or using nuclear power.

Sporky said:

So why are Japan making it at night?

Because Japan has an abundance of nuclear power.

Japan has an abundance of nuclear power stations, but very few of them are running, and (I think) only one at full capacity since 2011.

57Deluxe · August 2018

Image: http://www.warehousemold.com/upload/2018/02/20/rustic-vintage-mini-car-table-lamp-child-dimming-kids-car-lamp-l-b0a8872a8cae8e46.jpg

crunchman · August 2018

Sporky said:

But it needs huge amounts of energy to produce, and there just isn't the solar and wind "surplus" that the hydrogen fans claim is going to provide that energy, so you're back to burning fossil fuels or using nuclear power.

Given how cheap solar is getting, there could easily be a surplus within a few years if the will is there from government.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/solar-power-cost-decrease-2018-5

As the costs go down, and panels get more efficient, people will still be putting solar panels on their roofs, albeit not in the quantities that they were in the past when there were bigger incentives.

There is a lot of scope for solar on non-residential buildings as well. I'm looking out of my office window at a school with a huge roof space. Given that the system on my brother's old house could generate over 2kW on a sunny day, with a roof that size they could probably generate several hundred kW (especially with newer panels which are more efficient).

It might cost a lot to retrofit older buildings, but if you changed building standards to so that new builds had to have solar on the roof, solar would have loads of capacity in 15 years time.

I think the reason the government has stopped pushing solar is because of the intermittent nature, and the inability to store it with current technology. Using it to liberate hydrogen from water gives you a way of storing it.

A bit of subsidy for new solar will be a lot cheaper than all the grid upgrades required for battery powered cars to become mainstream.

Sporky · August 2018

crunchman said:
I think the reason the government has stopped pushing solar is because of the intermittent nature, and the inability to store it with current technology. Using it to liberate hydrogen from water gives you a way of storing it.

That's an entirely fair point. I do think hydrogen will/ought to form part of a balanced energy wossname.

What we need is a way to exploit zero point energy.

m_c · August 2018

ICBM said:

m_c said:

If the boffins actually get nuclear fusion working, and commercialised, then pretty much every current power generation source is going to be obsolete.

They’ve been saying that for over fifty years. “Electricity too cheap to meter”... lol. I’ll take a bet that it never happens in the next fifty years either.

The only fusion power station that works is operated and contained by gravity, and is 93 million miles away.

The best thing to do is stop wasting money trying to make it work on Earth and use it to improve the capture of that free energy.

The calculations for payback on energy investment in renewables are quite a lot different now too, as the technology moves beyond the early development phase.

The technology for Fusion hasn't existed until now, and there's been some interesting developments recently. Both the US and France have managed to produce excess energy from their experimental reactors in the past year, and there's a UK startup company (https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/) developing reactors, which are showing promise.

Plus solar energy doesn't give you that much energy. To put it in context, my neighbour runs three electric vans for local deliveries. He's just built a quite substantial new shed. Even if he covers the entire roof in solar panels, it would only produce enough power to keep two of the vans charged on a good day, and that would only be if he didn't use them during the day.

He's just paid 15k to get a suitable power supply installed, and even at that, it's only going to be enough for three standard 7KW chargers. He might add solar, but from a commercial point, it's not cost effective, unless he gets it heavily subsidised.

ICBM · August 2018

m_c said:

The technology for Fusion hasn't existed until now, and there's been some interesting developments recently. Both the US and France have managed to produce excess energy from their experimental reactors in the past year, and there's a UK startup company (https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/) developing reactors, which are showing promise.

I'll believe it when it becomes a reality. Getting excess energy from a microscopic experimental reaction is one thing, making it operate on a stable large scale to actually generate power is quite another. It's now far longer from the start of the development of fusion power than it took from the first experimental fission reactions to full-scale power stations, and we're barely any closer - even given all the advances that have been made in the understanding of nuclear physics since then. It remains the case, as it has been since the 1950s, that the only way to make a large-scale fusion reaction on Earth is inside an H-bomb.

m_c said:

Plus solar energy doesn't give you that much energy. To put it in context, my neighbour runs three electric vans for local deliveries. He's just built a quite substantial new shed. Even if he covers the entire roof in solar panels, it would only produce enough power to keep two of the vans charged on a good day, and that would only be if he didn't use them during the day.

I don't just mean direct photovoltaic. All forms of renewable energy other than tidal and geothermal are actually indirect solar power - we just need to find better ways of capturing it. The amount of solar energy falling on the Earth is vastly greater than anything mankind can use.

crunchman · August 2018

m_c said:

ICBM said:

m_c said:

If the boffins actually get nuclear fusion working, and commercialised, then pretty much every current power generation source is going to be obsolete.

They’ve been saying that for over fifty years. “Electricity too cheap to meter”... lol. I’ll take a bet that it never happens in the next fifty years either.

The only fusion power station that works is operated and contained by gravity, and is 93 million miles away.

The best thing to do is stop wasting money trying to make it work on Earth and use it to improve the capture of that free energy.

The calculations for payback on energy investment in renewables are quite a lot different now too, as the technology moves beyond the early development phase.

The technology for Fusion hasn't existed until now, and there's been some interesting developments recently. Both the US and France have managed to produce excess energy from their experimental reactors in the past year, and there's a UK startup company (https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/) developing reactors, which are showing promise.

Plus solar energy doesn't give you that much energy. To put it in context, my neighbour runs three electric vans for local deliveries. He's just built a quite substantial new shed. Even if he covers the entire roof in solar panels, it would only produce enough power to keep two of the vans charged on a good day, and that would only be if he didn't use them during the day.

He's just paid 15k to get a suitable power supply installed, and even at that, it's only going to be enough for three standard 7KW chargers. He might add solar, but from a commercial point, it's not cost effective, unless he gets it heavily subsidised.

He doesn't have to generate it all himself. You can generate more than 2kW from a domestic installation. There must be millions of houses that are empty during the day, when the inhabitants are out at work. There would be a lot of surplus there if they all had solar panels.

On the subject of fusion/fission, thorium fission is probably more promising at the moment than fusion. The big advantage of Thorium is that you don't have the risk of a runaway chain reaction like you can with Uranium - so you don't get a Chernobyl/Fukashima type of situation. It's no use for making nuclear bombs, so you can let countries like Iran have it. It also has less radioactive leftovers than Uranium fission.

Here's a link to a New Scientist article on it:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2145535-thorium-could-power-the-next-generation-of-nuclear-reactors/

I know China is working on Thorium as well. I posted a link above on that.

stickyfiddle · August 2018

On fusion, I don't believe it will ever happen. We might get the tech there one day but by that point we'll be so far down the solar road there'll be no need for it except in deep space (and really dark caves).

On solar, I am a confirmed believer that we will relatively soon (~10years, not 100) move to a decentralised grid, where almost every property has some form of solar generation capability, feeding back into the grid when you have a surplus and taking from it when you have a deficit, and paying someone somewhere some money if your net amount is use, not generation. Add Tesla's home battery concept into the equation and the whole thing becomes a very neat system where there is potentially very little need for power stations at all

This would actually shift the traditional concept of "peak hours" towards evenings as local solar generation shuts down and people are home for cooking, entertainment etc, meaning your hydrogen generation would be around lunchtime (if hydrogen cars are a thing, and it is potentially better for cars than lithium batteries, were the above to all happen)

What is interesting is that the Middle Eastern countries everyone loves to hate may still end up as major suppliers for the world's energy needs, but in the form of electricity itself rather than oil and gas used for electricity generation. There are vast amounts of unused desert with shitloads of sunshine which are perfect for solar farms. Get these (and battery and/or transmission tech) to a high enough efficiency and it may be beneficial to export the power on a huge scale

Snap · August 2018

My next car, sometime next year, will be a hybrid. The one I'm looking at does all that hijninxery flipping between electric, petrol and charging automatically depending on how you are driving. If it does more than 35mpg, that will be fine for me. I don't do enough mileage for it to be a significant thing (mpg) really.

Diesel will get hammered more and more in the future, the cars cost more to by, and the fuel costs more to buy, so for me, the mpg again isn't a factor.

Tbh, if your carbon footprint is something you worry about, one of the best things you could do is to stop eating meat. Meat production world wide is more of an issue in terms of CO2 production than whether we drive a diesel car or not.

ICBM · August 2018

stickyfiddle said:

What is interesting is that the Middle Eastern countries everyone loves to hate may still end up as major suppliers for the world's energy needs, but in the form of electricity itself rather than oil and gas used for electricity generation. There are vast amounts of unused desert with shitloads of sunshine which are perfect for solar farms. Get these (and battery and/or transmission tech) to a high enough efficiency and it may be beneficial to export the power on a huge scale

Yes, and unless they're very stupid and shortsighted, their governments know it and are probably already planning their approach to it. It is actually looking like technology is evolving fast enough that the long-term limit on oil production will be demand, not supply - something that would have been unthinkable probably only ten years ago - and sitting on the world's largest reserves won't keep them rich if no-one is buying it.

It's not climate change or environmentalism that will turn us away from oil, it's economics. Once competing technologies become cheaper and more efficient - which will obviously happen sooner in some areas than others - then oil will be yesterday's news in the same way that steam railways and horse-drawn carriages are. We may need a few incentives to push progress along, but once started it will become unstoppable.

Snap · August 2018

@ICBM totally agree, economics drives everything. Otherwise, we'd have moved away from fossil fuels much more quickly.

crunchman · August 2018

It's not helped by subsidies for fossil fuels:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/aug/07/fossil-fuel-subsidies-are-a-staggering-5-tn-per-year

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/23/green-energy-subsidies-community-projects-fossil-fuels

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/6/16428458/us-energy-coal-oil-subsidies

If they removed the subsidies for fossil fuels then it would all change very quickly.

The problem is that governments are in the pockets of big coal and big oil. There is a more legitimate concern over hundreds of thousands of people in those industries suddenly being out of work. Maybe they need a programme to reduce the subsidies to zero over a 10 year period.

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