230 MPG Volt reality....

[pullin-gs]

230mpg in gas
.....and about 4 Miles Per Lump-of-coal (MPL) to produce the electricity. :wink:
Yep, that's clean energy alright!
The enviro-icians really hanvnt a clue.
The consumers have no clue either.
**************************************************
I suppose you could get 40 100watt solar panels needed to "fill-up" your new 4MPL/230MPG car within a 4 hour max-sun timeframe:
You would need to keep a 2nd car battery so it can charge while you are driving the car on the other battery.
These numbers are real for a 60-mile range regenerative car at highway speeds:
Assume to drive car at 60 for one hour.
It takes 12HP to drive car at that speed.
That figures out to 750wattsx12 over a 60 minute period.....9000watts/hour.
Said solar panel makes about 100watts on average at 12V at 8amps.
Distribute that across about 4 hours of charging time during optimal conditions.
That will get you "clean, free" electricity (0-MPL).
Now if you have a cloudy day, your kind of hosed though.
But this seems like a huge dump of manufacturing chemicals and bi-product energy, not to mention up-front cost (about 25. grand). And another 25-grand for the NIMH battery. Not to mention realestate to plant your new solar farm for your car.

 

[TylerDurden]

The enviro-icians really hanvnt a clue.
The consumers have no clue either.

A commercial wind turbine outputs ~1.5MW.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/03/vestas-breaks-ground-in-colorado-sells-tower-facility-in-scotland?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-April1-2009

 

[swbluto]

So it's not a perfect trade off for the environment. But is it environmentally better?

I don't think any of the critics have answered that but I believe Toshi had analyzed it once.

 

[pullin-gs]

The enviro-icians really hanvnt a clue.
The consumers have no clue either.

A commercial wind turbine outputs ~1.5MW.

***
And that figures about 49,500 turbines dedicated to powering a US-based electric car world.
Figure about 50% at best wind, and we are looking at 100,000.
Or, about 100 billion dollar up-front investment.
Assuming it would be another E-bama initiative, that figures out to about 1,000 dollars per tax-paying US household.
That will buy a lot of gas/coal!

Cheers!

 

[spinningmagnets]

Producing electricity...(sigh) OK, Already smaller cities are building geothermal ORC generators. Organic Rankine Cycle is a steam engine that uses freon. Two benefits, freon boils at a much lower temp than water-steam, and freon can be condensed back into a liquid with an air-fan. Whether coal or nuclear, most water-steam plants have a cooling tower (remember 3-mile Island, Pennsylvania?) that evaporate a lot of water to cool the outsides of the radiators. Water supplies have already become an infrastructure restriction.

Not every place has the appropriate geology to extract geothermal heat. You drill a well and install a loop of pipe to circulate a heat-transfer fluid. Geothermal can produce 24-hrs a day. There is an increasing use of solar-concentrated ORC, but of course, they only produced during the day when it wasn't cloudy. The newest plants have underground tanks of salt-syrup to store and provide stable heat to the ORC plant, plus time shifting the sun heat from 9AM-6PM to highest demand from Noon-9PM.

Adding the solar concentration and heat-storage makes these newer solar plants more complex and expensive than Geothermal-ORC.

Germany and the US are the Saudi Arabias of coal, so they are doing the most work on developing clean coal. Clean coal is possible, but it is much more expensive than the old ways. The Polk County pilot plant in Florida has led the US development. The coal is ground fine and has enough water added to make it pumpable. The slurry is heated to off-gas a lot of methane thats burned in gas-turbines. The GT waste-heat is used heat the slurry and then dry the effluent. The sulfur is separated and sold as a product before burning the coal.

If you separate oxygen from the air on-site, you can burn the left-over coal in a pure oxygen atmosphere, so there is zero NoX produced. Strictly controlling the burn process virtually eliminates CO/CO2 production. Still not "perfect" but improving ( though again...very expensive). Still working on the Radon problem...

Rather than evaporate water to cool the water-steam radiators, a bottoming cycle of ORC is used to generate some additional electricity and draw off heat to restart the water-steam cycle.

Nuclear is still a political hot-potato, but other nations have continued to improve them. Thorium can be used as a fuel instead of Uranium (no plutonium possible) used fuel can be re-charged on-site (like warheads) rather than buried. Using low-pressure helium as a heat-transfer medium instead of pressurised (non-boiling) water prevents radioactive steam leaks like Chernobyl and 3MI. (water/steam holds radiation, helium doesnt). Working pebble-bed reactors have "walk-away" inherent safety. The prototype GT-MHR's are even better than this...but, again, probably won't happen in the US.

Giant wind-gens only generate when the wind is blowing, but the more they generate, the less coal we have to burn. Love coal or hate it, the US has a LOT of it. The big problem facing the giant windfarms is it doesn't appear the Govt will be building additional (expensive) grid to carry electricity from the high-wind areas to the cities. Many areas are allowing cheaper EV charging at night to utilize currently unused capacity.

I still haven't seen the figures on how much pollution the current coal plants make per mega-watt produced. From that we can determine how much coal pollution is produced per watt-hour of battery charging for plug-in-hybrids and EV's, such as the Volt and others...I'm guessing even using coal electricity, its less pollution than burning only gasoline directly in a car.

 

[dnmun]

i feel it important to clarify a few things just stated.

burning coal in any atmosphere always produces CO2. integrated coal gasification with CO2 capture involves using an almost pure oxygen atmosphere for the combustion process so that there is no nitogen oxides formed in the burning of the coal beyond the trace amounts of nitrogen and sulfur in the coal. this is critical for the next step of using the CO2 produced.

the CO2 is pumped through pipelines to older oil producing formations which have lost all their natural pressure and need secondary and tertiary recovey techniques to 'sweep' the remaining oil to a central recovery well where it is pumped out and delivered to the refinery.

the weyburn field in canada is the current prototype of how this works and there are several other projects under consideration. as with secondary recovery techniques where water is used to flood the field and then separated at the recovery well, the CO2 can be separated from the oil and then reinjected back into the field or another field to continue to boost the pressure and cause more oil to flow. it is not clear how this works, some speculate that the CO2 turns into a liquid at the high pressures needed to force it through the rock formations and this allows the oil to become 'wetted' by the CO2 liquid and then flow more easily than when flooded with water, and the success of denbury in using CO2 as a secondary recovery technique rather than water flood in the mississippi salt basin and heidelberg field indicates that CO2 flood is superior to waterflood for secondary recovery.

a few other notes about nuclear reactor failures. the russian engineers who created the criticality event at chernobyl were operating the reactor at the extremes of its operating performance in order to test the ability of the safety systems to respond to possible coolant failures and shutdown mechanisms of that particular type of reactor. no normal engineer in their right minds would have ever attempted to play with a fully loaded reactor, and in every other country besides russia, they would never have been allowed to even consider playing with the reactor.

the failure of the three mile island nuclear reactor was not a criticality event. it was a loss of coolant failure which caused the reactor to overheat and melt part of the reactor bed and caused primary loop coolant to leak into the containment building. this accident was caused by failure of proper procedure and supervision during normal coolant pump maintenance. the pump was left isolated behind a valve after the maintenance was completed and so no coolant could flow when the pump was enabled to deal with the initial primary coolant overtemp event later.

it is clear that the most effective solution to the transport problem is the use of compressed natural gas CNG to provide the high energy density fuels for moving larger vehicles, and plugin hybrids for local use. it is obvious we will continue to consume oil at these extreme rates right up until the very end. i expect oil to be back over $200/bbl in a few years as china and india continue to increase their consumption.

we are condemned to be controlled by those who have their whole lives invested in big fat cars. people who cannot imagine a world without fat cars and trucks, yet most of the vehicles on the road today will be obsolete before they have exhausted their normal lifespan. i drive a 25 year old honda wagon, 25 years from now, no one will be driving any of these fat trucks they bot under the clunkers deals. yet we will still be paying for them to buy them today. jmho

 

[pullin-gs]

Interesting and applicable posts from all so far.
The point of my thread created the exact discussion I had hoped for.
Hopefully others in the industry/press who have much more accurate data will start discussions/publications which bring to light the flawed EPA rating system which was applied to the Volt. In addition, I expect that clean sources for e-fuel will be studied in more detail in order to better justify the idea of plug-in bikes/cars/etc as it applies to the environment.

Cheers!

 

[dogman dan]

The fact of it is, if it's there, we are gonna burn it. Yup, it will ruin the earth, but it will be done. We'll be doing some wind and solar, but as long as you can efficiently dig up that coal, or tar sand, or whatever, somebody who could give a shit is going to buy it and burn it. Stuff like sequestering the co2 is great, but really, the guys burning the coal are just going to prefer to pay whatever tax they have to pay to just put the co2 in the atmosphere. Hopefully the carbon credits or whatever you call the tax will pay for some cleaner energy to help out, or some kind of tree planting, algea growing, scheme like that.

So all we can really do is what we allready are doing, those of us on this forum. We adopt something less wastefull than a normal car for as much of our needs as possible. I hope to someday be able to afford a 60 mile range electric car, but realisticly, just driving as little as I can is the best bet. So I ride the bike when I can, the scooter if I need to go farther, the subaru if I need to carry something under 500 pounds, and the one ton truck if I need to carry a ton of cement or something huge. I have cut my gasoline use by at least 60% in the last year.

On another thread some discussion of living closer to work was done. Great for those who rent, but where I live, 15 miles from work is as close as I could afford to buy. By some standards that still real close! At least I didn't have to buy a house in a far away town, and rent a crib in the city for weekdays like the folks in San Francisco have to.

 

[dnmun]

i do the same thing, use my truck for hauling really heavy loads such as a yard of crushed gravel was my last load, 3500lbs, back in march. use the honda wagon for almost all my other hauling, i can carry 20' lengths of rebar tied underneath, and i can carry full sheets of OSB or plywood on top, even carried large 6' wide sliding glass door on top 30 miles down the freeway, and a 6'x6' thermopane window. the honda wagon will carry almost 1500lbs loaded inside so i can stack up 10 bags of readymix and all the tools and use it rather than have to haul the extra 4klbs of truck with it.

but my truck is not even as bad as these fat SUVs people drive everywhere. i can get 13mpg with it, 35 with my honda, so i feel that is sufficient to be on the right side of the solution. i am not even totally rad like a lotta people. i know a buncha younger folks who don't even wanna car and instead do everything with their bike, and then borrow a car or truck when needed. very efficient lifestyle because otherwise they have to pay $1200-1800/year for insurance too.

my message on the other thread is that carpooling and ridesharing is a very realistic option for almost everyone, but it is just considered too much hassle because fuel is so cheap that it is easiest to just jump in the fat truck to go 20 blocks to the store for cigarettes and beer.

 

[pullin-gs]

Most of the people on these boards are not only talking-the-talk, but walking-the-walk when it comes to environmental responsibilities.
I don't have an ebike yet...I'm still piecing it together. But I do have a regular bicycle which I use.
My primary mode of transportation for the past 5 years has been a 250cc dirt-bike.
65MPH all day, flogging the snot out of it between stop lights, yet I still get 75MPG.
Parking is free also in downtown DC for motorcycles for the well-informed.
The savings I experience by going green with my commute is real-dollars. And I find it personally rewarding as well.
Now my 2nd car is a 283 cubic-inch V8 car (I've put 9,000 miles on it in 15 years)....so I am a poor example I suppose.

Cheers

 

[dnmun]

i can outdo that, one of my F250s back in colorado is 390ci and 4bbl holley. still gets 15mpg at 65 on the freeway. i once put 2 yards of gravel in the back of it. now that was too much. 7000 lbs, ow.