I've been looking for a "Pave the ANWR" bumper sticker for the wife's Escalade . . .
Posted on 08/14/2005 2:26:28 PM PDT by BurbankKarl
CORTE MADERA, Calif. - Politicians and automakers say a car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage.
It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80 miles-per-gallon secret a stack of 18 brick-size batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel.
Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car.
Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing small amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. The extra batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco suburb all for about a quarter.
He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models have gotten up to 250 mpg.
They have support not only from environmentalists but also from conservative foreign-policy hawks who insist Americans fuel terrorism through their gas guzzling.
And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers are beginning to take notice, too.
So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed to building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to 40 vans for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who initially frowned on people altering their cars now say they may be able to learn from them.
"They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to soup up their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, lots of chrome and accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot rodders of tomorrow are the people who want to get in there and see what they can do about increasing fuel economy."
The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the batteries and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the typical Prius fuel efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban doesn't drive too far in a day, he says, he gets 80 mpg.
"The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce gasoline usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. "The average for people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to 40 miles per day. During that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid can make a dramatic difference."
Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to boost their cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases, but they say that process still produces far less pollution than oil. They also note that electricity could be generated cleanly from solar power.
Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, a San Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues automakers could mass produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price.
But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the cost, convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids and note that consumers haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the inconvenience of recharging them like giant cell phones.
Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that hybrids don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the message.
Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of prominent hawks like former CIA Director James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, President Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have joined Set America Free, a group that wants the government to spend $12 billion over four years on plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels and other measures to reduce foreign oil dependence.
Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood arguments from him and others who say gasoline contributes to oil-rich Middle Eastern governments that support terrorism.
"The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that are bent on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more we are enabling those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said.
DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal for companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a central location at night. He declined to name the companies buying the vehicles and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or cost, or when they would be available.
Rapeseed sourced BioDiesel for one. It has a net energy balance of 3 to 1. And that's for the energy in the BioDiesel alone (no wacky energy accounting tricks like including byproduct energy offsets). BioDiesel from other source oil crops have even higher net energy balances, but not all of them grow well in the U.S. (and I only remember the number for Rapeseed). Even ethanol has a slightly positive net energy balance.
Of course no fuel is perfect. The two main problems with BioDiesel are the corporate farm subsidies that keep the price of the source oil artificially high and the plain fact that we probably don't have enough available farm land capacity to meet our current (not to mention future) fuel demands. The second problem might be resolved if someone invests a bit of cash into developing oil algae farming techniques. The first will probably never be solved so long as there are Democrats in congress.
Hydrogen fuel still relies on coal and petroleum due to their high concentration of hydrogen.
The so called "hydrogen economy" is at best a pipe dream, and at worst a joke. Because it has such a high mass energy density, hydrogen makes an excellent rocket fuel. But because it has such a low volumetric energy density, it makes a lousy vehicle fuel.
Like you said, commercial hydrogen comes from fossil fuels (natural gas mostly). As such, it makes more sense to just burn the natural gas. For hydrogen to be a renewable fuel, it needs to be produced through electrolysis. That consumes a lot of electricity and that electricity has to come from somewhere. And it's none too efficient either. Again, it makes more sense just to use the electricity. The actual hydrogen combustion itself may be "zero emissions", but that just about the only thing hydrogen has going for it as a fuel.
Personal nuke stations have tickled my fancy from time to time.
Probably a Very Bad IdeaTM. Consider the absolutely pathetic maintenance the average person (liberals especially) does on their car. Now think about what would happen to a nuke in their care.
It is for me. I get about 24 mpg from my Nissan pickup. Insurance runs me about $350 a year. Repairs are perhaps $250/year. Gas however costs me about $800/year. More than everything else combined.
read later bump
All vehicles are toys. That's why most people enjoy driving the vehicles that they drive.
"Electricity isn't a "heck of a lot cheaper". It isn't cheaper at all."
The article said it cost a quarter to plug in the car. That's a lot less than it would cost to go to the gas station.
A day maybe, otherwise it is simply a lie.
A quarter will buy you about 2kW/h of electricity in California - at best.
That amount of energy is enough to charge two standard car batteries (75 Amp/hours each) without losses.
2kW/h of electricity is about 2.68 horsepower for an hour. Again without losses.
So if he drives 15 minutes a day he'd be picking up about 10.7 horsepower from the batteries total over the duration of the trip without losses. There are losses.
If he travels 10 miles a day (he lives in San Francisco so that is easily possible) and his Prius gets 45 mpg normally he’ll use about 0.222 gallons of gas a day (or $0.62 @ $2.80 a gallon) without adding his batteries. If he now gets “80 mpg” then he’ll use about 0.125 gallons of gas a day instead (or $0.35 @ $2.80 a gallon). That translates into a net gas cost savings of about $0.27 a day. So electricity costs of “a quarter” a day would be close.
I doubt he knows exactly how much power he’s using to charge his batteries every night. Nothing else in the article is specific.
If your truck cost you $15,000 and you drive it for 15 years then it is costing you $1,000 a year not including all the other expenses. If you borrowed money to buy the truck is significantly worse.
So your actual costs excluding gas are $1,000 + $350 + $250 or $1600 a year. Your gas is half that.
I don't want government to spend a dime on such things. I just want it to get out of the way.
Actually, lithium is the lightest metal of all, and most acids used in batteries contain no metal at all.
The point is that you're not using electricity constantly. The car sometimes uses electricity and sometimes uses gas. In any event, I just have a hard time understanding the knee-jerk cynicism about this. I don't think the government should do anything to interfere in the market, but if demand exists for cleaner cars and the manufacturers are responsive to that demand, that's fine by me.
I wear 12 inch shoe inserts and red white and blue striped and starred pants and I laugh at your toys! ;)
But there is another factor ... For those of us who live in hot climes, or even just have hot summers (Phoenix, AZ), such as myself, and need to use the A/C about 6 or 7 months of the year, the hybrids are really a bust. The reason? When you are running the air conditioning, the hybrid system cannot shut down the gas motor at traffic lights or at low speeds to save fuel like it wants to. So your gas mileage is just marginally better than a 'standard' model when running your air conditioning.
Then there is the whole issue of replacing those batteries after 5 to 8 years, at an estimated $5000 to 8000. That will buy you a lot of gasoline, even at $3 or more a gallon.
Ping
"So your actual costs excluding gas are $1,000 + $350 + $250 or $1600 a year. Your gas is half that.
But my truck didn't cost me $15,000. I bought it about 3 years ago for $4500 and I payed cash. Right now it's got about 95,000 miles on it. I drive about 10,000 miles/year and I expect to put another 70,000 or so on it before I find a replacement. At that time I'll probably get about $800 or so when I sell it, so my annual purchase cost will work out to something like $370.
I'm probably atypical in that I buy very boring, practical vehicles and then work on them myself, but I'd guess that around 10% of the population does the same thing. I didn't always do this, but once I started regarding my truck as nothing more than transportation for me and my gear it was amazing how much money I had available for guns, boats, scuba equipment and other toys.
Messed up with the italics. Sorry.
So is every fuel. Even the heavy unstable elements used in nuclear reactors formed at the heart of a star. Petroleum fuel is just converting solar energy from millions of years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if current solar cells are more efficient, as bad as they are, overall.
I would. Even the best modern solar cells are only about 20% efficient, and the ones you can actually buy are only 15% efficient.
They can be used all year.
Not hardly. Maybe in Arizona and other sunshine states, but not everywhere. Ever been to the Pacific Northwest?
don't require large amounts of water and other resources to make them continue to produce.
But they do require tremendous energy and resources to manufacture. Even the 15% efficient industrial solar panels are very expensive; expect for them to take 20 years or more to pay for themselves.
Plants are much more efficient at gathering and converting solar energy, especially in less than optimal lighting conditions. To maximize its energy output, a solar panel needs to be connected to an expensive actuator called a "solar tracker" to keep the panel pointed at the sun. Plants do this automatically. Solar panels also lose efficiency as they heat up, but plants have no such restrictions and are self cooling through transpiration. Granted, only a portion of the energy plants collect goes into stored energy in sugars, starches, and oils. However, the rest is used for constructing the plant itself, giving them a much lower cost to produce than expensive solar cells. And some plants still store a large amount of energy indeed. Certain algae are more than half oil by mass.
So plants are much better than solar cells at capturing and storing usable solar energy. This shouldn't be surprising. Solar cells have only been around for 50 years. We've been able to quadruple their efficiency in that short time. However, plants have been around for billions of years, constantly improving through competition and natural selection. Or, if you're of a more religious persuasion, they were handmade by God himself. Either way, we cannot expect to do better with a man made device after only a few decades.
Even if we manage to make 100% efficient solar panels, there's still the problem of storing and transporting the electricity produced. Solar panels need large, expensive, toxic, and inefficient batteries to store the power they generate. You can store vegetable oil in a bucket.
Right now oil is cheaper than all those other means. Until that changes, oil will remain our primary energy source.
But oil has many many hidden costs, not the least of which is having to bow and scrape before a bunch of religious nutjobs. The petroleum industry is also heavily subsidized to keep prices down. What you don't pay at the pump, you pay every April 15th. At the same time, the agricultural industry is also heavily subsidized, but to keep prices up. Vegetable oil is only $5 a gallon because of corporate farm subsidies to limit vegetable oil production. Without the subsidies on each, vegetable oil is quite competitive with fossil oil.
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