Posted on 09/04/2022 6:53:11 AM PDT by lowbridge
An electric vehicle needed some coal miners to get where it needed to go last week.
The vehicle broke down Friday near Mettiki Coal access road on US 48, in Tucker County, West Virginia, according to WBOY-TV.
A Facebook post from Randy Smith described the incident.
Smith is a Republican state senator who represents the region where the incident took place, according to the West Virginia state Legislature website. He’s also the safety coordinator at Mettiki Coal, his Facebook page states.
“Some days are just better than others,” Smith wrote before launching into the tale.
“Today at our mine off Corridor H an electric car from DC ran out of battery at the road entrance to the mine. Someone called one of our foreman and told him a car was broke down in the middle of our haul road,” he wrote.
The foreman learned the car’s passengers were en route from Washington, D.C., to the Tucker County town of Davis, Smith wrote. Davis is about 170 miles west of D.C.
“He then went back to the mine and got guys to push the car to the guard shack so they could plug in to charge,” he wrote.
Giving the vehicle a tow was out of the question, he wrote, because “it was all plastic underneath and nothing to hook up to.”
“So here are 5 coal miners pushing a battery car to the coal mine to charge“up. If you look closely you can see our coal stockpile and load out in the background,” he wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at westernjournal.com ...
And just how advanced is that technology, how much energy does it take, what pollutants are released, what do you do with the cobalt and all the other stuff in the battery, what does the process cost and how much is the recovered lithium worth?
Inquiring minds just want to know.
Unless you enjoy arguing don’t waste your time trying to convince the gator guy. I think he is the same one that has money to burn, a bank of solar cells, batteries in his house out the wazoo and goes everywhere in his Tesla sports car and thinks the rest of us lower life forms. I also don’t think he give a whit about cost effectiveness.
You can never persuade someone by logic, reason and fact a position they did not arrive at by the same means.
Didn’t you know that Tesla has a new 100 year / 4 million mile battery they have been testing for three years? It has been in all the press releases from them. Didn’t you see how much their stock went up because of that announcement?
Oh, you didn’t? Neither did I.
What I did see from Tesla via Musk is that civilization as we know it can’t continue without fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Strange words coming from someone and a company that has a new breakthrough battery. Isn’t it?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Also they left out of the story that at the guard shack there was probably only a 15amp 120v circuit to charge from. I believe i've seen a Tesla would require more than a day to charge on that type of circuit. I doubt a guard shack would have a Tesla high capacity charging station. Even my little old first generation Chevy Volt charges 10hrs overnite on a 110v circuit.
Seems to be a completely environmentally responsible thing to do. Just replace one problem with another or even bigger one. Perfect. Qualifies for new age thinking worthy of the great reset.
I see.
You haven’t studied the matter extensively, either, and you’re just puking up knee-jerk negativism.
Have a nice day.
Actually, I am not interested in the subject at all since I have a perfectly good solution that serves me well. It is called an internal combustion car and a truck.
I have no need to study the problem of recycling EV batteries since I have no need for an EV nor do I perceive any reason to have one other than some cockeyed, manipulative and liberty robbing action on the part of ill informed bed wetting, hand wringing people and their controlling gooberment over lords.
I just have better things to do than look for problems to solve where I don’t think there is one.
You brought it all up and since you did I asked you what your solution to the identified problems is. I asked you first but was gracious enough to entertain you by offering a solution and comment instead of insisting you answer since I asked first.
Do you have anything constructive to add or are you just going to charge into the night blindly in the name of saving the planet from... what? and then leave another trail of wreck in ruin in your wake of a new set of problems for someone else to deal with?
You too have a happy day.
Since BEVs all have electric motors (and an energy recovery braking system) directly connected to the wheels, I caution to think what would happen if you towed one.
But with nothing to hook to, how do you load it on a roll-back?
I finally found a previous post on EVs and efficiency, just one of the items considered about EVs. I have even considered buying one but not now since I need something more than a glorified golf cart and can’t justify something with better range for their price. It is from a thread in June of this year:
IS IT IMMORAL TO DRIVE AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE?
6/11/2022, 4:56:57 PM · 73 of 91
Sequoyah101 to Hojczyk
Hardly anyone looks at full-cycle efficiency of anything. All they see is from filling the tank or battery forward in a snapshot of time.
Unless the energy is free and there is no damage to mother erf, EVs are a lie of efficiency and ecology.
WITHOUT the mining, the drillig or the extraction the EV vs the IC efficiency is almost the same even though the EV is more efficient in burning power within the vehicle proper.
Gasoline is 33.7 Kwh per gallon and diesel is 40 Kwh per gallon. How much energy does it take to get a gallon of each one of these?
Coal fired steam plants are about 40% efficient and the transmission losses are about 20% and so out of the original 100 units of coal we get 100x.4x.8=32%.
When we put that electricity to work in an EV with a power train including electric motor we get about 77% of the energy stored in the battery back in the form of tractive effort, not including losses owing to the conversion from the plug to the battery. SO, from the original coal, not including mining and transportation energy, we get:
100 x 0.4 x 0.8 x 0.77 = 24.6% of the original energy in a lump of coal going to moving our EV and NOT including the energy it takes to mine the coal or make the battery or build the motor etc.
I wonder what the same number is for an internal combustion engine?
Refineries are about 88% efficient, the IC is between 17% and 30% thermally efficient with some race cars with regenerative features being up to 50% efficient. A similar number for the IC engine compared to the EV would be:
100 x 0.88 x 0.25 = 22% NOT including the energy and cost to drill for and produce the oil or to transport the fuel from the refinery. The number would be about 24% for the most efficient production engines of the day, equal to EV efficiency in full cycle.
Essentially, it looks like a wash in full cycle efficiency for coal to electricity to car vs. oil to fuel to car.
It is folly to think that energy from the sun via turbines or solar cells is “Free”. It is not but that is yet another set of calculations nobody looks at or cares about.
Seems like if you want to save the planet you would first want to make what you have better instead of launching off on some half-cocked new folly. The 68% energy loss in getting electricity to me is very similar to the 65% of oil left in the reservoir. The wasted prize is awfully big for shooting fish in a barrel when you already have the fish and the barrel. Distributed power alone, such as mini-nuclear units, could make a big contribution to reducing waste in power transmission. I’d even go so far as to suspect that photovoltaics could make a useful contribution to combating waste in power transmission but that remains to be supported by facts and engineering.
First Law of Thermodynamics, You can’t win. (Energy can neither be created nor destroyed)
Second Law, You can’t even break even. (In every energy conversion or transfer process the sum of the resulting energies will always be less than that of the original sources of energy)
Actually, I have studied the matter. If you do have anything remarkable to contribute I may find time to consider it.
I have to go change the cat box now so I have other more important things to do than chat with you.
I’m not sure that’s correct. Does spinning an electric motor generate electricity? That would make it an alternator. I has me doubts.
Upon further reflection, maybe the motors DO function as an alternator if spun externally. That’s how charging the battery by regenerative braking works.
Much as I hate to admit it, I have lately begun thinking the windmill and solar panel dreams of the greenies will eventually become reality. The new bladeless windmills, and more efficient solar panels could make each house self-sufficient. At 83 yrs old, I prolly won’t be around to see it, but it will almost certainly be accomplished.
Citations
If somehow you've mistaken me for a battery-car proponent, well ... you're mistaken.
Great photos, but they left out the child slaves laboring in the lithium mines.
“I’m not sure that’s correct. Does spinning an electric motor generate electricity? That would make it an alternator. I has me doubts.”
Then do your homework before expressing ypur ignorance.
It is correct. An article was posted a few days ago where a guy tested his battery by diving uphill till it was depleted. He turned around and coasted downhill. At the bottom he had 422% charge.
“Coal fired steam plants are about 40% efficient and the transmission losses are about 20% “
Transmission losses are nowhere near 20%. More like 5%. And cars don’t run on coal, nuclear, hydro or NG. They run on oil.
Combined cycle NG generating stations are running 60% which nets the EV 2-3x the efficiency of an ICE car.
Never heard of a backup motor-generator set? Durning normal operation The AC side is a motor turning a DC generator to charge the batteries.
If AC power is lost,
The DC generator becomes a DC motor and the AC motor becomes an AC generator proving the backup AC electricity.
“Great photos, but they left out the child slaves laboring in the lithium mines.”
I see you get your news from Mother Earth magazine.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.