Essentially like if every car was a ICE BEV hybrid, but the ICE in some power plant somewhere.
The reving and idling or low power output of the ICE can be avoided if it is in some power plant somewhere.
The reving and idling or low power output of the ICE can be avoided if it is in some power plant somewhere.
1 gallon of gas contains 33.7 kWh of energy. [1]
The average ICE car goes 24 miles on 1 gallon of gas. That's 0.7 miles per kWh (24/33.7 ≅ 0.7).
The Tesla Model 3 goes about 4.1 miles per kWh. That's 5.8x further per kWh, or 5.8x more efficient!
Most of the difference is because ICE engines are inefficient. They waste energy. Just like the article says. :)
The point made by the article about the source of electricity from power plants was simply that EVs are more efficient even when charged from coal fired power plants! Your point about the "ICE in some power plant somewhere" is temporarily true... as the grid de-carbonizes there will be fewer and fewer emissions from grid-scale generation. (Nuclear + renewables is my personal guess for where we're headed.)
It's kind of sad that several threads here are playing devil's advocate. Unless some dramatically better tech takes the world by storm in the next 2-3 years, EVs are going to completely take over the market. Economies of scale should dramatically drive down costs over the next 5-10 years, and then all new cars will be EVs. No one will want the old, expensive, dirty, loud ICE cars. And this is really good news for everybody!
[1] https://www3.epa.gov/otaq/gvg/learn-more-fuels.htm
[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310
[3] https://ecocostsavings.com/electric-car-kwh-per-mile-list/Obviously the same is true for the electricity in the EV, but that’s dependent on the energy mix in your area. If it’s primarily renewables, this is another efficiency increase in favor of the EV.
Doesn’t this ignore how the fuel was produced, and delivered (refineries, fuel trucks, power plants, charger losses)? Are those losses negligible compared to the 1kWh once inside the battery or fuel tank? If so, then the comparison is fair
The articles point is also that BEVs are more efficient even if a fossile plant is used, since the plant can operate at better efficiency than a small ICE that also need to idle and rev to bad rpm ranges. Which was what I was trying to convey.
The same could be achieved on a small scale if someone would simply make it
Personally I'd be interested in a pure electric drive HEV with a high efficiency diesel generator. Give me just enough battery for around town (100 miles maybe?) and just enough generator to extend my trip to ~300 miles. The generator doesn't need to be large (and expensive) enough to be capable to drive from directly at highway speeds, but just enough to extend the range when needed.
Heck make the power units "modular" in 3 ft x 4 ft boxes and let me mix and match power sources. I'll start out with a 1 battery and 1 diesel setup, but could upgrade to 2 battery power packs later if I drive around town a lot. (^_^)
I was joking but actually modular "power packs" would be cool.. You could replace one at a time vs a full $20k battery. Or take one out and plug it into your home. Maybe even rent a extra diesel pack for that coast-to-coast trip. Hmmm, wish I had the energy to start random companies. ;)
So you would need to park and let the generator slowly charge your car? Why not just charge the car at a charger at that point?
Make the generator large enough so that it can generate enough power to directly run the electric motor for highway driving.
The main reason would be cost and weight. Full EV card are still too expensive for many. I'm guessing there's a sweet spot that'd be much cheaper than either but would provide more range when needed. But as the other commenter points out the ICE + 20 mile pack might win out on efficiency of scale.
You only need the generator to be able to extend the driving time to around 8 hours to cover 99% of use cases, so if your battery can do 2 hours then the generator only needs to produce 3/4 of the energy in the minimal case.
What you are proposing would require the generator to be 3-20x as large as the alternative.
A car that uses 10kW average and has a 50km range is usable with a 7.5kW generator and stopping to charge every 200km. Knowing you have the ability to stop and charge or limp at 3/4ths speed to the next charger would allow more confidence pushing the boundaries.
A small battery means a 15 minute break to charge every 2 hours is viable and not a deal breaker for someone who only needs range infrequently.
A nice thing about current PHEVs is that they have smaller batteries than full EVs, which could matter in a battery-constrained market.
I wonder how reliable the portable diesel generators are. The huge ones in datacenters are known to have trouble starting up sometimes, so they're tested frequently.
Diesels require higher compression than gasoline and must be built stronger as a result. Which explains the higher cost of diesel engines in general.
No actual diesel engines can muster up much higher than 60%.
That's 85% of the crankshaft energy moving the wheels. Once you multiply in your ICE efficiency which will be around 30% for anything that fits in a car or truck you're looking at 25%
Burn the same deisel in a big turbine and chemical->wheel efficiency going via power lines and a battery will be in the 30-40% range, but with the advantage of being able to mix in solar.
Moving a giant metal and plastic box for each individual human is still a gross waste of resources though and we should subsidize mass transit and active transport infrastructure rather than spending vast amounts of common money on roads and parking lots.
But heat recovery is also paired with diesel, depending on the usage, with nearly complete conversion efficiency.
All the calcs for electric are bullshit. Every engineer that isn't a bleeding heart acknowledges this. They have either fudged the production cost or disregarded the recycling cost or ignored the mining expense, drive like a puritan with no climate control... on and on.
Well then how about an electric car driving full out in freezing temps? Or with the A/C max?
I can take nearly 100% of the waste heat from a diesel genset working at maximum efficiency with 42% conversion
If we are battery constrained today, we need to consider the most efficient use of our limited battery supply. Start/stop idle technology is much cheaper than 1000lbs of lithium batteries in each vehicle.
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It looks like the most efficient solution involves like 50lbs of batteries, rather than the gross 1000+lbs of batteries that BEV fans want to use per car.
Living in low or high density urban environments is far more efficient in pretty much every single way that we can measure. CO2, energy, land use, water use and so on, and not just by a little but by a huge margin.
Transport can be electrified trains, trams, trolly buses, metros. This uses very few battery materials and essentially no new technology. All technology read to deploy in large numbers.
This would also 'solve' the housing crisis as increasing density around transportation with mixed use is what leads to much cheaper living cost (housing and transportation need to be seen together).
This talk by famous City Planner Peter Calthorpe is really good and goes into detail. He and his teams were charged with making a few projection plans for California and have really good numbers on all of these things (except the nuclear I mentioned):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4
He has other great talks about his work in China as well, this is a bit more academic:
U also wish EU didnt have the silly 25 km/h limit on ebikes, I can pedal faster than that myself
Also, did you know about the EU speed pedelec category L1e-B? It gets classified as a moped with maximum speed of 45 km/h and maximum 4 kW power.
and use overhead cables
We had trolley busses like 100 years ago
For this to work however you need to change far more then just the buses, you need to change the whole development pattern. I put some great links in my other comment.
> The metals thing is a problem the markets will solve because the tech is largely solved.
The metals thing comes from Russia (nickle) and Congo (Cobalt), and Argentina/China (Lithium).
The steel thing is *already* solved, with 88% of USA's steel being composed of recycled steel. You're hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn't right now.
Lithium is mostly from Chile, Argentina and Australia but its mostly refined in China.
> You're hoping that some magic recycling process spins up over the next years to make Lithium sustainable, when it clearly isn't right now.
The amount of lithium even if 100% recycled isn't nearly enough to cover what is needed. We know how to recycle it, in fact we have far more recycling capability then we have material that we can recycle. Everybody invest in recycling but there is not much to actually recycle yet.
Seeing your comment above made everything make sense; it's pretty dang "not my style" but whatever floats (or tows) your boat
There's lots of things the markets haven't "solved".
Also, getting a lot more nasty things out of the Earth will also most probably mean more dead kids in the mines of Africa, but I'm sure the market won't advertise that. At least the Saudis don't directly kill kids in their oil-fields explorations (they kill them only indirectly in Yemen, with the guns they've purchased from the West using the money they got from the oil-fields).
But sodium batteries are very nearly in mass production so while we're continuing to insist that petrol is 100% of the problem cars cause rather than 50% I guess that will do.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Airborneplein,+6828+KP+Arn...
It's extremely efficient.
I dunno. Maybe I just haven't experienced the right ones, but my experience is that the most pedestrian friendly urban spaces have mostly (roughly) straight lines and right angles and lots of natural or man made barriers to free flow of cars to prevent them from going too fast. I don't know how you can square that circle.
Thanks for the link, a bit sad to read to following(!)
> later fell out of favor with traffic engineers there, as it was seen as prioritizing flow of pedestrians over flow of car traffic.
Unless it does that awful hybrid “turn if no one is crossing” crap that I hate as both a driver and pedestrian.
Putting roundabouts onto streets is not a binary decision: some intersections could be roundabouts, some could be lights, and others could be roundabouts with lights.
Four way stops are one of the dumbest inventions of man kind that are way over used in North America. Everyone has to stop all the time and it leads to scary situations at 2 way stops because people don't expect those anymore.
Here is a great video about life without stop signs in the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/42oQN7fy_eM
And here are some infinitely better alternatives:
Low traffic + low speed: raised intersections where right goes first.
Medium traffic + medium speed: priority road with yield signs on side streets and roundabouts
High traffic + medium speed: traffic lights
High traffic + high speed: grade separated intersections
Maybe for people coming from the west, but it'd undeniably be way way better for people coming from the south.
Small roundabouts don't have this problem.
Almost everyone were going from the highway to the parking except me.
I had to wait for a bus that was going straight so you could enter or two cars going straight in a row.
It got so bad that the workers started to give way to those coming from the starved road so it sorted itself out I guess.
Idle is like 0.15 gallons/hour. There's no way 25 mph uses that little gas, if 60mph uses 26 times as much.
What 1960s car are you driving? :) Should be getting 50-80mpg at 60mph.
Also, with solar and wind in the fray, and increasing renewable energy share, having an all electric energy consumption economy is better logistically and environmentally.