Runs on electricity, which comes from.....a plug in the wall. Wrong!
It comes from burning coal, dams, or nuclear power. Electric cars mean more of these three. How many lefties would be so thrilled about electric cars if they realized it means burning more coal or building more dams and nuclear power plants?
It can also come from micro turbines running off of natural gas, mathene, sewer gas, etc...which Capstone makes too(they have a great product if you look into it)
many cities are now collecting sewer/landfill gas to turn into electricity....
These turbines can also use the waste heat for heating or a chiller for air conditioning
I am tickled pink over the idea of powering my car with domestic coal and nuclear power rather than imported oil.
>> Runs on electricity, which comes from.....a plug in the wall. Wrong!
It comes from burning coal, dams, or nuclear power. Electric cars mean more of these three. How many lefties would be so thrilled about electric cars if they realized it means burning more coal or building more dams and nuclear power plants? <<
I am all for Hybrids if it means building more Nuclear Plants, unfortunately the left hates Nuclear Power unless Iran and North Korea are the ones building the Nuclear Power plants....
They would have us ship dead batteries to Iran so Achmed-a-nut-job can charge us money to recharge them with his new “peaceful” nuclear plants....
Way to make us energy independant you left wingnuts!!
>> These Capstone microturbine also have only 1 moving part so down time is very low as is repair cost..they also use no lubrication(oil) to run either <<
Yes they are pretty neat, plus swapping out a Micro-turbine unit would be a lot easier than swapping out a direct drive unit. You would only have an exhaust port, a fuel port, air intake, mounting bolts and a wiring harness to unhook and re-hook up.
In essence it is almost the same tech as a Diesel Locomotive, only you add a battery pack as a Buffer between the generator and the electric motors. The plus side if you increase the efficiency of the conversion of chemical power in the petroleum product to physical work. Regular 4 cycle direct drive systems in regular cars are somewhat inefficient in that they produce a lot of waste heat that goes out your tailpipe.
I say they should make the mini-turbine be a modular, stack-able mass produced unit so for a small pious-mobile you only have one of them in them, but for a Hummer sized SUV you may have three or four of them and when driving around the neighbor hood you would run off the batteries, then more kick on automatically as you step on the accelerator or the batter runs lower.
With these since you can make the turbine and generator as one piece you remove a lot of the dead weight that you would normally have for the transmission and gear sets and use that weight for the buffer being the battery packs. Put a direct drive electric motor with a planetary gear set on each wheel and you can make any vehicle a 4-Wheel drive vehicle! It also simplifies front wheel drive cars as well, because you no longer need CV-shafts as well, more weight savings you can re-claim by adding batter buffer weight.
Accessories that normally run off the front of a gas engine also sap power from the engine, the power steering pump takes a bit of energy even when you are driving down a perfectly straight road. Or the alternator when you are driving down the road, even when there is no load on it, the pulley friction saps away a little energy that could be used to move you forward. So too with the AC unit when it is not needed. Making all these functions be electric would only make them draw power when needed and increase overall efficiency. The only thing you would want to not be electric would be your heater which would re-direct waste heat from the turbines in this case to the heater fans via airflow.
What electric cars really need is a standard “Power Bus” similar to what a computer has in terms of USB. Both power line and Data lines included in the electrical connector. A standard that would allow manufactures to buy different components from different companies to lower cost of manufacturing. So you could have three different companies make the same component and introduce some much needed competition back into the auto parts supply industry. Plus you wouldn’t be changing your motor designs from year to year
I am all for increasing efficiency of vehicles and performance at the same time. Well as long as the market supports it of course!
Agree the left is not known for thinking.