Posted on 07/26/2015 3:38:55 PM PDT by Hojczyk
but at the end of last year this had only reached about 290,000...
290,000 total stupid idiots who don’t know that their vehicles will be worthless when they try to sell them due to the sheer cost of a new battery.
What idiots!
What an absolutely STUPID graph! I guess that is from the “new math” they teach kids today.
You must admit though that EVs are awesome for rewarding crony capitalists (Elon Musk, etc) AND using tax dollars to help wealthy “green” consumers feel good about their EV purchase.
Perhaps you’d enlighten us with your superior data?
Electric? No thanks! Particularly now that I've driven one made by one of world's top car makers.
That graph makes no sense and I am an Electrical Engineer.
That graph is stupid.
As I said, I’m willing to consider “better” data if someone will provide it.
I heard a talk many years ago along these lines. The speaker said, “There are three kinds of liars. Liars, damned liars and battery engineers.”
Hey, it’s an official US Federal Government source so it must be right :-).
Here’s the 2014 version with footnotes, FWIW:
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/electricity.pdf
I suspect the diagram shows percents relative to _all_ energy inputs/outputs, not just electricity, with 40% going to electricity generation/use (versus other uses like going into your gas tank). So the percents are relative to that.
I too am an electrical engineer, and it makes total sense to me.
“Energy consumed to generate electricity”. I guess they mean losses in power generation. So converting coal whatever to line current is 60% efficient. There are better ways to show that.
I think that you don't know what you are talking about.
The electric vehicle and it's charging device use pretty much the same voltage (likely 12 volts.) The charger is biased a little higher to give positive Amp flow to the battery. Slower deep charging uses low Amps, where as a quick charge would use higher Amps. The downside of high Amp quick charge is that the equipment is going to get damn hot from the parasitic resistance of the wire cable.
With advanced technology batteries the charge time can be greatly decreased, but you still have the waste heat to deal with.
Low temperature superconductive materials can help with minimizing the waste heat inducing resistance, but that's still in the labs.
That would probably work for a grocery getter. However, I live in Dallas area and frequently drive to Tempe, El Paso, other cities around Texas. But, let’s see, let’s say the new and improved batteries will have a range of 100 miles, probably half that driving across West Texas at 80mph with the ac blowing and Willie and Waylan cranked up full blast. So, I would have to stop and recharge twelve times, assuming recharge stations are staged to accomodate this scenario which there ain’t no way in hell they will be. But anyway, that’s two hours of recharge time. And, my net mph would be way below 80mphprobably more like 50 or 60mph. So, what’s now about an nine or ten hour drive would turn into a two day drive. Well, alright, let’s calculate how long it woul take by using an extension chord. Naw, don’t think so, lol! Think I just keep on keeping on in my F-250 :)
To do a quick recharge you would need to have a lot of current. You could have really big diameter wire (which is ridiculous) or step down high voltage to the current you need. It is basic EE.
One of our vehicles is a Ford Fusion Energi- a plug-in hybrid. The car is now two months old and the dash display indicates our average mpg is 68.1 mpg. We get to burn very little gasoline because so many of our trips are less than 22 miles round trip.
Were we to take a long interstate trip on flat roads - like Atlanta to Hilton Head I get it that the trip mileage would drop to about 36 mpg.
I have to tell you it’s kinda fun to fill up your ‘empty’ gas tank with 9 gallons and have display tell you the range to empty is 670 miles.
My other vehicle is my workhorse Ford 4x4 2004 expedition that gets 15 mpg. But it’ll tow the boats anywhere and the Fusion is just for people and luggage.
Enjoy the debate. I straddle both sides.
If you look closely, you will see the heading "T&D losses," where "T&D" stands for "Transmission and Distribution." You can see that these losses are 1.04/14.82 = 7%, not 25%. That 7% is the percentage of total electricity lost. When expressed as a percentage of the total of all energy used to make electricity, the T&D losses drop to 1.04/40.04 = 2.6%.
The "Conversion Losses" stream represents losses incurred in converting the total energy released by the various prime-movers into electricity. You can see that the these losses are 14.82/40.04 = 63%. This figure is so high because most electricity is generated by thermodynamic processes, which convert heat into shaft power.
Current technology for accomplishing this throws away most of the heat energy used to make electricity, although the percentage loss due to thermodynamics is getting better all the time. There are some combined-cycle "cogen" plants that turn more than 60% of the thermal energy of their fuel stream into usable electricity, but these are expensive and quite new. There is a lot of old capacity out there that's not nearly this good.
Pretty much the only electricity supplies that are not based on thermodynamic processes are hydro and wind turbine. These convert the prime mover directly into mechanical power, and thence into electricity.
Of course, even these are ultimately thermodynamic in origin, with the heat source being the Sun.
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