Posted on 03/17/2012 9:02:15 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Electric car drivers hit the road Friday to inaugurate the first major section of a West Coast "Electric Highway" dotted with stations where they can charge up in 20 minutes.
The stretch of 160 miles of Interstate 5 served by eight stations marks the next big step in developing an infrastructure that until now has been limited primarily to chargers in homes and workplaces.
The stations go from the California border north to the Oregon city of Cottage Grove and are located at gas stations, restaurants and motels just off the nation's second-busiest interstate. One is at an inn that was once a stage coach stop.
Spaced about every 25 miles, the stations allow a Nissan Leaf with a range of about 70 miles to miss one and still make it to the next. Electric car drivers will be able to recharge in about 20 minutes on the fast-chargers. The charge is free for now.
"I would say range-anxiety with these fast chargers will be nearly a non-issue for me," said Justin Denley, who owns a Nissan Leaf and joined the caravan. Inspired by the stations, his family is planning a trip from Medford to Portland, a distance of about 280 miles. Last summer, he took the family on a 120-mile trip to the coast and had to include an overnight stop at an RV park to charge up.
He expects the trip to Portland to take perhaps three hours longer than in a gas car, because the only chargers available for the last 100 miles are slower, level 2 chargers.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Beautiful car but how much does it cost?
I have asked this question over and over and haven’t gotten an answer maybe I will now. How much will it cost for the 20 minute charge?
Re efficiency, you are ignoring total system efficiency. If you have a Rankine or Brayton cycle generating your electricity, you are in the range of 33% to 65% HHV. You are counting the heat engine efficiency of the ICE under the hood, but ignoring the heat engine efficiency at the end of the power line.
Battery R&D has stalled over the past 30 years and I don’t think you’ll ever see the improvements needed to make them competitive. Besides, better batteries and motors require rare earth minerals, 97% of which are in China. It seems the earth’s crust doesn’t that much of the essential rare earths.
The overall toxic waste problem is hugely against batteries, too. Not only do you have up-front toxic messes to extract and refine rare earths, but you have the downstream disposal problem as well. With gaseous or liquid fuels, you also have up-front messes, but they aren’t as toxic as with rare earths. You have waste streams as the fuels are burned in ICEs, but those emissions are very clean now and are temporally and geographically disbursed. What in the world is going to happen to the mountains of used batteries if EVs take off? How will these be recycled?
You only need to drive your electric car as far as the train station. From there you travel by high speed passenger rail while enjoying free wi-fi or perhaps a delicious meal from the food car.
Some days I really miss Willie Green ;-)
No wonder you’re not a liberal — you’re thinking with your “left-brain” here. If you were a leftist, you wouldn’t let such cold hard facts interrupt your utopian dreams.
Of course, not all trips are long-haul and you can charge your EV in at night while you sleep, so the numbers don’t work for average annual driving of 15k miles. But for a long drive of, say, >500 miles, you’re spot-on.
An easily removable $20,000 battery — the yutes in the hood will love it. And lots of unscrupulous stations and pawn shops won’t ask many questions when they are brought in — just like all the scum today that will buy bronze urns from graves, historical markers, and miles of twisted copper pipe without asking a single question.
Simple...Post #53 has the answer.
Fine, keep your EV in hour neighborhood. But don't venture out on the Interstate highway system and expect to find taxpayer financed chargers every 25 miles. What galls us is the STATE installing these things where they are totally impractical -- it's a perfect example of STATE thinking. Extremely expensive, will used by very few "elite" people, an totally impractical (just as you point out). That's why the "wisdom of markets" beats central planning every time and every place they've been tried.
Some days I really miss Willie Green ;-)
I like to think that Boxcar Willie is out there riding the rods. But anyway, here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P0wgjpoQDw
There’s a nice mix of transport alternatives at the start. ;^)
That is because you don't understand, or even acknowledge, the costs of pollution. Including the cost to the state.
I don't mean to discourage you, but let me tell you how it always brakes out.
In this particular issue, the cost of pollution, the group divides into 2 groups with one group saying there is no cost to pollution and a second group saying there is a cost to pollution.
Now while the second group all agree there is a cost, there is wide disagreement within the group as to how much the cost is.
But they are all rational men and they will all sit down at the table to discuss and negotiate and eventually reach a consensus, then develop policy.
But, when they sat down at the table to reach consensus and develop policy, they didn't give a seat to anyone from that group who said there was no cost to pollution.
Ben, I don’t know where you get the idea I said there is no cost to emissions. Of course there is. I honestly don’t think you’ll find many people who think there is no cost to pollution.
All of us have been paying for these “external” costs of automotive pollution since the first PCV valves went into cars in 1962. By 1976, we were paying $200 - $300 per car for emission controls (remember, in 1976 dollars when cars cost maybe $5,000). Since then, the number of emission controls and their sophistication has grown tremendously. Although I can’t find current numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost of emissions controls exceeded 10% of the cost of today’s car.
Do we get benefits for this investment? Of course we do. Here in the Bay Area where I live the is much cleaner than it used to be.
If there were any honesty in the argument for EVs, we’d ask the questions “Why do we need them given the improvements in ICE efficiency and emission controls?” We’d step back and take a “zero-based” assessment of the alternatives.
I think you’d find that the justifications for EVs just aren’t there as they were 30 years ago. Both fuels and ICE have improved steadily, making the EV an impractical solution for anywhere but the golf course and a quick trip to the supermarket or your job ten miles away.
But you cannot change the mind of the STATE juggernaut — it is immune to rational thinking. Because governments don’t worry about market forces, they have the “luxury” of continuing to pursue an idea long after the justifications for that idea have evaporated. Exhibit #1: global warming. Exhibit #2: EVs.
We all pay for the folly of government. That is why people on this thread are so angry about government taking OUR money and wasting it for charging stations on long stretches of Interstate highways where it is obviously impractical to use EVs. But logic and honesty are almost always missing in government — they are happy to spend the money because it isn’t theirs, “It’s just taxpayer money.”
I agree. Wake me when that ever happens. I don't understand much physics but I understand economics pretty well. Meanwhile I'm looking for free lunches somewhere else.
You mean after obama has his way and electricity costs "skyrocket?" Not to mention overhead and "reasonable profit" for his lackeys from GE who get the monopoly on roadside recharging units? My guess is, it will be a rude awakening.
Absolutely true. It's just current EVs are not competitive. Pretty much all opposition to EVs is caused by the government giving people's taxes to EV manufacturers. If an EV manufacturer stands on his own and sells whatever, why would anyone care? There are many EV vehicles currently in use - such as indoor forklifts and golf carts. Nobody villifies them because they do their job and they are not consuming taxpayer's money.
The Tesla S model can travel at 55 mph for 300 miles, so those batteries do exist. However, the current energy density levels means you need a lot of them to go 300 miles.
Yes - and then you are facing a kind of a rocket equation. You need a 10,000 lb of batteries to move a 200 lb payload (the driver.) While mathematically possible, it's unreasonably expensive.
On most days, people would trickle charge overnight.
This is OK as long as the battery has enough charge to cover all the daily trips. This also presumes that the car returns to the home base every night. Trips anywhere else, with stays in random hotels, are not supported (the charging port may or may not be available.) Which again says that the EV, as it exists today and in the nearest future, is a car for local use during the day, under controlled conditions. If you live on a ranch and on a windy day a telephone pole falls and injures your spouse you can't just take an EV and drive her 100 miles to the hospital. You need to let the EV charge first. This is obviously not what people like to hear.
To say that a battery would have to cost the same as an empty gas tank to be competitive is absurd.
You need to give some incentive to the car buyer. If an EV has the same TCO as a gas car then there is no reason to buy an EV. An EV must be cheaper. In any case, today's batteries represent about 80% of the EV's cost, so there is a long way to go until we can debate this fine point.
And don’t forget, that these cars can be programmed to hear / cool the battery and passenger car, using the plugged in power source before the owner gets in the car, so that the car’s battery is not wasted for that purpose.
Yes, the car can be preheated or precooled, but that doesn't last more than 5 minutes. I know that very well, I lived in cold climate for decades. Thermal insulation of a car is poor due to many glass windows. I don't know how the measurements that you refer to were made; perhaps the driver was using fur clothes, gloves, and was breathing through a water vapor absorbent. In real life, though, defrosting requires a lot of energy - and the only source of that energy is the battery.
The reason heating a gas car seems free, is that you are just tapping to the tremendous amount of waste heat that the gasoline engine puts out. Of course, all of that heat is generated by gasoline whose energy is not being used to turn the wheels, and you are still paying for that gasoline. Another way to look at it would be that with an electric car, you only use energy to heat or cool when you tell the car to do so, in a gasoline engine, you are burning gas to generate heat, whether you direct it into the passenger compartment or not.
1. If you can point to the car now in production with a 35-65 percent efficiency, I would like to see it. Such a vehicle is not in production. I am not ignoring the heat efficiency at the source, but you have tremendous energy expenditure to extract, refine and transport oil, with electricity generation the energy lost in production isn’t any greater than that used to produce refined gasoline. However, the transmission over the power line and the use in the vehicle itself is dramatically more efficient that the gasoline counterpart.
If you think batteries haven’t advanced in 30 years in terms of energy density, then you just haven’t been paying attention.
Lithium is non-toxic and can safely be disposed of in landfills, although it would likely be recycled for economic reasons.
And there is no shortage of lithium in places like Bolivia, or even seawater.
50-80K depending on how much range you want
If you drive a Tesla S with a 300 mile range, you are probably not going to pull into your driveway with zero miles left in the battery. However, charging gives you a mile after every couple of minutes, so even if you pulled in on absolute zero and were on charge for 30 minutes, when your wife injured herself, you would probably have plenty of juice to make it the few miles that most people live from an ER.
EV’s don’t have to be cheaper, they just can’t be more expensive, but you can’t just consider the battery cost, you have to consider the per mile cost to operate the vehicle, including the greatly reduced maintenance cost of EV’s.
Initial defrosting would normally happen while the vehicle was still plugged in was my point. Yes, you would have to heat the car on long trips, but a 300 mile battery will still take you 250 miles even with the heat on.
I know. But the way you wrote it makes it sound as if this tremendous amount of energy is over and above what is usually used in mild weather.
Of course gas engines throw away a lot of energy, but for now they are the best bet.
There is no way way a present day all-electric vehicle is going to keep me warm in a cold winter (or cool in a hot summer) and be able to have any usable range. Any heat provided by the plug-in will be gone in 5 minutes in cold weather.
I don’t think we are going to convince each other, so I’ll stop here. You can have the last word it you’d like.
I have an idea, one that can work, you install a regular trailer hitch to your electric car, when the need arises that you have to travel a long distance you hitch up the “Electra-Mule” which is a small gas engine on a trailer axle connected by a drive belt and a clutch.
From inside the car by remote control once you have reached a cruising speed you engage the pusher motor and let it take the strain off the batteries.
Wit other options available is a quick charge feature alternator that can re-charge your electric vehicle when other options are not available.
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