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The Electric Car Battery Battle

by: Jim Kingsdale August 08, 2008 | about stocks: HMC / NIS / TM    

Jim Kingsdale

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The next five years will clearly be a transition period from the petro-car to the electric car.  But this transition will feature an interesting horse race between two different battery technologies, a lithium-ion (Li-on)  or an upgraded Nickel Metal Hydride [NiMH] powered battery. 

Apparently Toyota (TM) and Honda (HMC), the two currently leading makers of transition hybrid cars, do not think the Li-on is ready for prime time yet.  They reportedly are going with an upgraded NiMH battery.   Carlos Ghosn, on the other hand, is taking Nissan (NIS) directly into what he thinks will be the ultimate answer, a Li-on powered electric car with a short stop in hybrid-land, but still powered with Li-on.

This report offers a preview of Ghosn’s all-electric Li-on powered dream car.  It also confirms that Ghosn is a realist who understands that the all-electric vision that he has embraced so fully along with Project Better Place needs a hybrid transition period.  To solve that problem he has purchased a power plant from Toyota.  But apparently deciding that the transition will last for quite a while, he is also now building his own hybrid, but still one with a Li-on battery.

On “the outside”, as they say in horse racing, is an untested potential game changer, the ultracapacitor powered car by EEStor/Zenn.  That has to be considered a very long shot at this point since so little is really known about it.  But this will be a long race and there is certainly time for a twist that is not currently anticipated. 

The largest stakes in this horse race are not so much which battery is best or whether the electric vehicle [EV] or hybrid electric vehicle [HEV] is ultimately proved better (it might be both).  Rather it is whether the global fleet can be taken off petroleum faster than the decline of old oil fields causes the amount of crude available to the market to become truly scarce as predicted by megaprojects analysis. 

Honing in on just the battery issue  though, this horse race bears on the fortunes of companies that produce lithium, e.g. (SQM), and Rare Earth Elements that are used in the NiMH battery.  It is entirely possible that both will be winners.  I have re-established a position in SQM now that it has fallen to my target of the mid-30’s.

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This article has 86 comments:

  •  
    Aug 08 10:23 AM
    Toyota has NOT chosen NiMH batteries for its future plug-in hybrids
    (awhich will crush the plain hybrids we have today). They will be using li ion like everone else - it's impossible to build a plug-in using NiMH batteries - Toyota has already tried and only managed an 8 mile driving range. NOBODY is using NiMH batteries for either plug-ins or battery-only electrics. I might add that they call a million plug-ins on the road by 2015 optimistic. Regardless, a million plug-ins, even if they use no gasoline whatsoever, will only reduce crude demand by less than 1/4th of 1 percent. And plug-ins use 1/10th the gasoline that plain hubrids use. A dose of reality amongst
    the cheerleading fantasies that the media is engaged in. And 1/3rd of the fleet (commercial diesel trucks) won't be going electric for a long, long time.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 08 11:11 AM
    Also Chevron, via their part ownership of Cobasys, has long blocked the use of NiMH for pure electric vehicles, using their NiMH patents they bought up to block the large-format NiMH batteries needed for that type of application, even for companies like Toyota that get their NiMH batteries elsewhere.
    Cobasys is apparently for sale though (and having $ problems), see: www.courthousenews.com....
    Gee, maybe if they supplied BEVs they would be making more money?? Even a 50-mile range in a reduced-price car would be sufficient for a whole lot of people (I know I'd strongly consider buying such a car), but they think they need the full range of a gas car before anybody will buy it for their commuting needs.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 08 11:21 AM
    The latest I've heard is that Toyota hasn't narrowed their options yet for batteries in a PHEV. bike45, how do you come up with 1/4 of 1%? Hybrids are now 3% of new car sales (more if they could make more batteries, it's supply limited). Hybrids in general are getting about 40% better mileage than fleet average (high-efficiency hybrids sell the most), so my math shows 1.2% improvement in overall consumption from all new cars sold today. As hybrid sales go up, so does this number.
    Yes, it's a small start. But we simply cannot continue the status quo - we absolutely need to switch to hybrids and BEVs and public transportation or we'll be faced with only being able to afford bikes.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 08 11:23 AM
    Yesterday in the earnings call Tom Granville of Axion Power International (AXPW) described a first generation EV conversion using advanced lead acid batteries that cost under $10,000 and has a 50 mile range. Their short term goal is to get the range up into the 75 mile range. Axion has already shown a 3X to 4X improvements in lead acid cycle life and it makes me wonder whether all this talk about li-ion won't end up being like a highway engineer that wants titanium bridges because they last so much longer and are so much stronger.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 08 11:57 AM
    Nissan is a hoax, so far as Electric cars go. Nissan knows SQUAT about the batteries; its failed Altera and Hype-rmini all had to be destroyed presumably because Nissan, like GM, was ashamed of their own failure.

    Toyota, on the other hand, willingly sold the last 300 RAV4-EV, using NiMH, and they are almost all on the road still, added to hundreds of fleet-run RAV4-EV.

    Ghosn is a jokester and a hypester.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 08 11:59 AM
    The Bike is a known liar. We are driving 100-mile-range Toyota RAV4-EV, last sold in Nov., 2002.

    They drive GREAT.

    But there's never been a Lithium car that drove over 100,000 miles on the same battery.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 08 12:37 PM
    @nerfer

    "compressed air (an Indian company is just now starting production on a vehicle powered by compressed air)."

    Good call. Don't underestimate this. The "Indian company" you mentioned is TATA Motors. The same TATA that just purchased Jaguar/Land Rover from Ford. This company has 23,000 employees worldwide and they want this air engine technology to make low cost cars for developing markets. Hmm... so what about all those nitwits that keep saying "just wait until everybody in India wants a car" regarding oil. Yea so if they are powered by air -- big deal. This is a real and exciting technology created by a former Renault Formula One engine builder and his son who was an engineer on the $1.8mm Bugatti Veyron. Real and credible technology in the hands of a company with the resources to make this happen in a big way. Good stuff...
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 08 04:00 PM
    I just recently became aware of the E-Bike phenomenon. Apparently 4 million were sold in China last year (www.extraenergy.org/ma...). E-Bikes sound like an excellent zero emission option for short distance commuting (and fun!), until there are more electric car options in the market.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 12:14 AM
    NiMH worked well enough for pure electric RAV4 EVs, or Solectria's Sunrise, which added composite construction like Tesla's Roadster. Another un-mentioned battery technology with a decade of proven capacity is the thermal Zebra NiNaCl from MES-DEA. Lithium chemistry is far from universal. The question comes down to a given level of performance for the lowest price.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 11:36 AM
    All the folks looking for affordable electric cars better get used to driving their Priuses and other assorted hybrids.

    The advent of mass produced electrics isn't a horse race, as the author suggests, it's a MARATHON that will last well into the NEXT generation of human endeavor.

    Chevy will be introducing its Volt in late 2010 they say, IF they can decide on the most viable battery. It is predicted to cost around $50K, including its $15K REPLACEABLE battery pack.

    Next!
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 01:37 PM
    A fleeet of pure electrics (Pb-acids and Fe-Ni's while R&D'ing Ni hydrates, Ag-Fe's, Li-air, etc.,) existed in the late 1960's early 1970's while waiting for the cost of electricy and gasoline to cross and also while waiting for the consumer to latch onto the acceptable idea of a small, underpowered, commuter car: never happened.

    However, there's a role and market for the pure electric <50 mile range; it will take a hybrid for the market >50 miles. Battery maintenance, life, cost and lifecycle cost will forever be basic issues sans consumer related issues of safety and practicality, etc.

    In the meantime, the reduction in transportation energy will evolve as it did during the several 70's oil/gas crisis'.\: REDUCE/REUSE/REPLACE which is the order of increasing cost of change.

    So we basically are in the REDUCE mode, except for those that can afford to REPLACE (buy a Prius, etc.). For the general Joe Public that means he/she must lose or yield some FREEDOM:

    0) DON'T GO!
    1) walk, ride a bike, (NO CONSUMPTION WHATSOEVER).
    2) double-up via car-pool, van-pool (ECONOMIZE).
    3) use public transportaion (REALLY ECONOMIZE).

    All of the above will reduce consumption of fuel. They REALLY work. They have immediate results (at reduced out-of-pocket costs). The cheapest way out of Dodge.

    Someone should instigate a NATIONAL REDUCE CONSUMPTION EXPERIMENT for a week or month to see what the effect can really be. The result may be that many of the people actually like it.

    Public transportation will love it. So will those that still commute alone at a higher cost.

    The next least capital expenseive move would be to put more hiway transport onto the steel-wheeled rail cars; be it people or goods. Like Switzerland does.

    Then Warren Buffet should fully electrify those rails and get rid of the diesel consumption (while Bill Gates electrifies the interstate highways/beltways AND Boone et.al. install solar and wind as if the world were coming to an end).

    And as many as possible Prius et.al. should be mfg'd to scratch the itch of those that can afford them.

    And "someone" should come up with that biofuel-injected no-moving-parts-burner with that waste heat solid-state direct-coversion-to-el... ChorusMotor driven hybrid that uses 100% of the energy in the biofuel, which we grow on the surface of dryland farms currently in CRP programs where farmers get paid to do nothing: as a starting point for ADVANCED REDUCTION/REPLACEMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCE ENERGIES (which is another name for no drill, no drill, no drill and no dig, no dig, no dig, etc.).

    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 01:47 PM
    ps - jIM - I forgot to mention and maybe you recognized it, that the biofuel hybrid I mentioned DOES NOT have an on-board stored energy device other than the tank of biofuel: no battery required; no flywheeL; no capacitor, etc. Any of which would be fine if they happen to really be required, which I doubt because the solid state conversion to electric devices would be at power instantly upon source of heat - which means when the fire it lit.

    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 02:31 PM
    Interesting comment on the lithium based batteries above.."No lithium battery has made it past 100K miles." ... Lithium still seems the most logical choice ... To bad I kept getting stopped on SQM... Kinda makes me wonder though... What about recycling of the batteries... Could be a future direction for a business.

    Oh yeah.. I live in the foothills of California and about 5 miles from town... I bought my daughter one of those $1000 36volt electric scooters... Charged up well overnight, and could make a 20 mile round trip, but even with 36 volts, it barely made it up hills.... She had to walk it up our driveway . The pedals are useless and more effort than pushing it, so we removed them Worked pretty well in flat areas of town though.

    jegan ;-)
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 03:45 PM
    Electric trains and trams do not carry motive batteries, they get their power supplied from an overhead power line or a live track on the ground. Nigh on a century now, this arrangement has been proved to work effectively, albeit requiring appropriate infrastructure i.e tram/train power lines, rather indeed and today's sophisticated alternative technology notwithstanding the fastest land transport in daily use still remains electric trains:- French TGV, Japanese Bullet train, to name a few, and crucially they are all PURE ELECTRIC (no ICE hybrid, and not even BEV's).
    The point I wish to make here is that the one single key to getting electric vehicles to work is to eliminate on-board batteries, period. This would seem so obvious that it actually baffles me why everyone is going on about expensive technology when all we need is to work on power supply infrastructure for battery-less cars!
    There certainly must be a way to 'tether' a moving car onto an external power supply without too much loss of independent mobiity (a 'dogem cars' style come to mind at most basic), and thereby reduce to a bare minimum the need for batteries on-board which is the sole functional drawback facing electric mobility. Whatever the battery type (Li-ion, PB-acid or even ESSstor) , they will probably continue to have inferior power-to-weight ratio compared to liquid fuel vehicles, and most importantly they all exhibit 'retro-progressive' range inhibition (i.e as the batteries get discharged, they not only lose power but continuously become simply dead-weight on the vehicle, which further reduces the P/W ratio, and so on in a vicious circle of inefficiency).
    While all the effort to find the best batteries around is laudible, however the transition to viable electric vehicles could have been much faster and simpler if infrastructure design began seriously to accomodate supplying power to electric vehicles (of course a level of standardisation over all key system parameters -voltages, technology,etc -would be called for). This means Municipal/Federal Authorities starting to look the idea as a national public service development akin to other services like road building, rather than letting private enterprise alone take all the lead on such an essentially public service issue.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 04:34 PM
    J.S. - You're more or less right on: fully electric steel-wheeled rails. Best for mass transport of cargo and goods as you say - and well-proven.

    Some transit systems do have on-board batteries for maintaining voltage over track/rail breaks, etc., but they are not motive power batteries.

    The glitch comes with selfish, individualized personal transport.

    For that, I again suggest to you my final last paragraph(s) posted above: whatcha think?:

    ... a biofuel injected no-moving-part-burner encapsulated by no-moving-part direct-to-electric solid-state waste-heat converters powering a ChorusMotor hybrid, with the only on-board stored energy being the biofuel...... (the technology exists for everything including the waste heat conversion which is already used in space, etc., which is about to go even more advanced as nanotech; much beyond the 1960's Mechanics Illustrated Strontium Motors which were decay-heat electric conversion devices directly powering individual electric motor drive-wheels on moon-buggies). Same stuff only better. Nothing new under the sun.

    So these,

    1) the fully electric rail transport for cargo and people, including high speed transport between major commute and coastal US cities, which you mention; and

    2) the electrified inter/trastate hiways and biways and beltways, including electried ferries for individual (people and hybrids) transport over longer distances than your doggie method; and

    3) the biofuel 100% energy-efficient hybrids be they trucks to motorscooters - and with that, ZERO CRUDE.....

    ....... REAL independence. Let 'er rip; let 'er roll.

    Come on Boone, Warren and Bill; do your things.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 04:42 PM
    What's wrong with that Objectivity guy. He spews nonsensical stuff about things he thinks he knows about and condemns others that actually do know about them. I guess there always must be people in the second quartile...

    "A car with "Compressed air power" is not a car powered by air. It is also not powered by "compressed air"."

    Why don't you take up your syntax arguments with these guys

    Tata Motors, India’s largest automobile company, has signed an agreement with MDI (Moteur Developpment International) of France for the application in India of MDI’s compressed air engines.

    www.greencarcongress.c...

    And then maybe these guys here

    www.growthconsulting.f.../$File/TI%20Alert.htm

    And then here.

    www.edmunds.com/inside...
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 05:46 PM
    Jim - great article. “If the people will lead,” somebody once said, “leaders will follow.” Nowhere has that been more true than in the U.S. auto market. CEO Carlos Ghosn seems intent on verifying this truth when he explained why his company now aims to be the first to bring an electric vehicle to U.S. auto showrooms: “What we are seeing is that the shifts coming from the markets are more powerful than what regulators are doing…”

    As recently as 2005, Ghosn called battery-powered cars “niche products.”
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 07:05 PM
    The compressed air to be used in the MDI car is going to be pressurized to 4500PSI. Personally, I'd rather not sit in a car with a tank pressurized to 4500PSI in the back. If that sucker ruptures, whoever is sitting in the driver's seat is going to become hamburger.

    Objectivity is right. Imagine the amount of power needed to compress that air to 4500PSI. When you buy a fillup of that air at 4500PSI, you are paying for the gasoline to run the compressor to compress that air to 4500PSI. Sorry air-car fans, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 07:16 PM
    Has anyone thought about how many mechanics it will take to repair all these different engine designs if they truely come into use?

    Objectivity, I think you should just back off. All energy comes from the sun and everything is just storage, so contribute something useful, thank you.

    Single people will want a car that can cover a long range and I don't think it will be all electric (unless it is very small) for a long time. This will keep hybrids or PHEVs viable. There are companies like Cyclone Power CYPW that are bring new combustion engines to market. Another one is Turbine Truck engines TTEG.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 09:02 PM
    StateofConfusion doesn't just get a cookie he gets a gold star on the refrigerator.All power does come from the sun,those dead dinosaurs and ferns,the daytime heating of the land which creates wind ect. ect.Semantics aside,first one to produce a 4 wheeled 4-5 passenger sedan WITHOUT (disclosure,usually don't shout talk) a frigging weird or ugly body style is a m....-Billionaire. Why the disconnect?Don't know but Bill Gates donations do not impress me.My sis has spent time in the elevator on campus with him and he's not particularly friendly I'm told.That would make sense because he could singlehandedly make a difference,but chooses not to.Malaria?We wont have to worry about malaria after the oil shock wars.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 09:08 PM
    @ Objectivity

    Ok ok so what you want me to say is that the air is a storage mechanism. The air doesn't actually power the car but it is part of the conversion to energy.

    Fine.

    You know what I say to that? It's an air powered car you nitwit! Ha ha ha! While you sit there and try to do your best "Scientific American" peer review on everything, I think that most people will realize that when you take this car for refueling, you connect a pressurized air hose to it and then you drive away on said air, then you have an air powered car. But go ahead and keep coming back with your highly visible presentation of somebody with little social skills. You think that if you repeat something enough, if you add a smart ass tone to it all then you are naturally right. Classic definition of someone socially maladjusted.

    You remind me of that one person all of us know. Quite intelligent but trapped in a lower socioeconomic lifestyle because they can't seem to convert their smarts to money. George Soros said it well. I'm paraphrasing "I have been never able to find a correlation between intelligence and the ability to make money"
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 09:08 PM
    @ Objectivity

    Ok ok so what you want me to say is that the air is a storage mechanism. The air doesn't actually power the car but it is part of the conversion to energy.

    Fine.

    You know what I say to that? It's an air powered car you nitwit! Ha ha ha! While you sit there and try to do your best "Scientific American" peer review on everything, I think that most people will realize that when you take this car for refueling, you connect a pressurized air hose to it and then you drive away on said air, then you have an air powered car. But go ahead and keep coming back with your highly visible presentation of somebody with little social skills. You think that if you repeat something enough, if you add a smart ass tone to it all then you are naturally right. Classic definition of someone socially maladjusted.

    You remind me of that one person all of us know. Quite intelligent but trapped in a lower socioeconomic lifestyle because they can't seem to convert their smarts to money. George Soros said it well. I'm paraphrasing "I have been never able to find a correlation between intelligence and the ability to make money"
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 09:13 PM
    @User 169775

    The vessels are special carbon fiber storage tanks to supposedly mitigate your concerns. But it is a valid point. But as you mentioned their is no free lunch as in the combustibility of gasoline or the inherent dangers of Hydrogen. OK let's here it from "the professor" AKA Objectivity (which is criminally ironic coming from someone that doesn't even understand what the term objective means) about hydrogen not being dangerous -- Hindenburg -- Nazis -- Rocket fuel silver paint blah blah blah...
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 11:10 PM
    Objectivity,
    You are right, he used the wrong words to describe how air is technically involved in "driving a car".

    You are right, YOU ARE RIGHT. YOU ARE RIGHT. YOU ARE RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...

    EVERYONE, PLEASE STOP WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING RIGHT NOW AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT OBJECTIVITY WAS RIGHT.

    Dear god, he was right, he is right, he will always be right.

    For the love of all that is holy, you are RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!


    Now please, Please PLEASE....use your brains for something constructive and stop giving English lessons and messing with everyone else on here.

    You're obviously smart, and I'm serious about that. So please do something constructive and give us something interesting to read here.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 11:14 PM
    In all this discussion of the compressed air car, nobody mentions the cost to buy the compressed air per mile of car operation. The cost is probably one figure if the compressor is powered by gasoline at approx. $4 per gallon, and another figure if electrically powered (or LNG or something else). At any rate, a 40 mpg petrol car costs $.10 a mile for fuel at $4 per gallon.

    What is the potential range of cost per mile using compressed air?
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 11:20 PM
    Lets all hope that algae development efforts work out and we can
    have algae based gasoline for $2/gallon as one company is suggesting is achievable.

    Should this happen, probably all the electric technologies will go by
    the wayside, except for possibly uses where carbonless operation
    is really important.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 09 11:52 PM
    Have any of you ever witnessed folks in a movie theatre following the alarm "fire" continue to sit there watching and discussing the cartoons as the building burns to the ground.....very similar to every discussion since my earlier post above ...... there, that should do it.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 10 12:22 AM
    JohnTC...

    Here's some objectivity on the subject of autos, fuels, fuel economy, pneumatic storage, and design of the same subjects ... and before you get too excited, this is something a even a 2008 first year engineering student should be able to comprehend...

    The problem with any particular motive system isn't whether it is feasible, but whether it is sensible, overall, in the context of it's production and use. Design analysis provides the answer...

    Start with this... Good Design is a function of intelligent compromise. Good engineers and designers understand this.

    Try also this... in the system we live in (earth) there are clearly limitations in our ability to overly satisfy all of our whims and wants, and sometimes even our needs. Efficiency is the key factor, in many cases, in deciding between success and failure.

    Transportation needs (transporting goods, economically necessary travel, etc.) and wants (trips by car to WallyWorld) are both possible when good designs results in efficiencies that enable TOTAL (the integral of the function) Transportation Demand to be met.

    When we downsized cars and doubled fuel economy in the 70's, it was a fairly easy exercise. How do I know? Because I was there, and doing it. Why did it happen? BECAUSE we could not, as a nation, meet our fuel demand with the inefficient fleet of 13 mpg autos.

    Congress (the People) mandated higher mileage, and The Big Three ordered weight taken from components, and we re-designed and re-tooled to make it happen.

    If you had been there at the time, you would have heard plenty of people smart enough to argue why we really needed the bean-counters out of top management then... as they only responded because it was mandated. We were plenty pissed off that once we reached the 27 mpg targets for CAFE, it would all stop, and be effectively rolled back.

    Unfortunately, 30 years have effectively rolled by, and we are in far worse a predicament now than we were then.

    Crude oil derived gasoline and diesel are "fuels". They exist, are energy rich (high specific btu) can be extracted at extremely high EROEI, are relatively safe, cheap enough (at least in the past) that burning it at 30% efficiency was still fairly economical, etc...

    Unfortunately, cheap oil is over.

    What REPLACES cheap oil, and how we do it (for transportation need) is the critical problem we face today.

    We should have all been driving cars like Audi A2 turbodiesels at 75 mpg long ago. But the beancounters wanted really big profits, and our women wanted SUV's. And the bulk of the human brain-mass of the USA wasn't quite smart enough to see that $1 a gallon gas wasn't a God given right. The bean counters blew the profits, the SUV's sit in garages, but the brain mass that went along with it all seems not to have learned a thing, but to bitch in all the wrong directions.

    Idiots who do not understand any of this are all around. Smart loses to stupid in a democracy every time, however, if smart fails to educate stupid first. If you doubt any of this, at this point it's obvious where you stand.

    Back to intelligent design... so what is the real problem?

    THE PROBLEM IS LACK OF SUFFICIENT, and CHEAP ENOUGH... fuels.

    And... their efficient use.

    Not alternate energy transfers, or methods... I said FUELS.

    Hydrogen isn't a fuel. Why? Because it's an energy SINK, not a SOURCE. If you don't grasp this then go learn, come back, and start again. We will all wait.

    Compressed air is also not a fuel. It is like a spring, a pneumatic one. The losses from compressing the air means also, that it is subject to all the iron rules of efficiency that bind us to this struggle. TANSFTAAFL. No perpetual motion machines either. simple right?

    Electricity also isn't a fuel. Unless you can harness lightning, that is.

    Wind? Actually, yes, in the context of us humans... it's a fuel. But a transient one. WASTED if not captured. Sunlight? Same thing. The issue for both is the capital cost and EROEI of capture, including all inputs and infrastructure. Again... efficiency. Makes sense if it's efficient, but there we go again, design decides. Not idiots with opinions.

    Why does any of this matter here?

    Because... The PROBLEM is, idiotic nonsense like ... "we can all just have solar powered cars! I saw it on TV!" or "wouldn't it be great if cars could run on water! They can, I heard all about it!" or "chicken waste will be our next oil, I read it in Pop-Mech!" ... abounds whenever those unfit-to-design attempt to force a "solution" onto a problem they cannot even fathom.

    Just like bean-counters running car companies.

    So... those that understand better start helping the rest learn this quick, otherwise it will be a repeat, and add in more resource wars to boot.

    And we don't have time to blow this chance, like we did the last thirty years.

    Reply
  •  
    Aug 10 12:24 AM
    By the way if you want to hear Carlos Ghosn's comments about Peak Oil and how Nissan is "preparing for the worst"...

    www.hybrid-car-show.co...
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 10 01:39 AM
    Objectivity,
    Now that was a helpful post. I'll ignore the few jabs you took at everyone in the crowd because a lot of it is true....just try to be nice to the great, unwashed masses as you educate them. A good deal of them are the politicians and bosses who are making the decisions that affect us all so try and explain why they are wrong rather than tell them why they are stupid...please.

    What you said above is what you should have been telling A247 all along. The problem is that a lot of these ideas just don't make practical sense. Using electricity or gas or whatever, to compress air and then use that stored energy to drive a vehicle just doesn't make sense. Too much loss to compress it and then reuse it.... unless you can prove that storing compressed air is somehow a more efficient way to store energy than in a battery or some other medium.
    Too many steps and I've never seen a mechanical system that was very efficient at storing and then burping back up it's energy.

    You are right that too many people who don't understand the impractical side of the "next great thing" they read about somewhere on the internet or hear about on the evening news are making decisions that affect all of us.

    I feel so sorry for them sometimes. About once a month, a local tv station gets this great story about some guy in his garage who can produce hydrogen from water!!! And then it gets picked up by someone like CNN or even worse it ends up on Youtube and suddenly everyone is waiting for their car that's going to run on water. And this poor guy in his garage who has "discovered" electrolysis has no idea that he's doing something we've been able to do for centuries or that it uses more energy than it can ever produce. But what can you do. People are looking for solutions and trying to help.

    All you can really do is be patient and try to explain to them why it's not practical and not turn them off so they stop listening when someone really does come up with a good solution.
    Reply
  •  
    Aug 10 02:05 AM
    Objective - frustrating, yes - but somebody's got to tell 'em, unfortunately. On the other hand, maybe you have to better pick your audience. But that's been a problem the past 40 years even when you supposedly had the best audience.

    Anyhow, I'd go for a whole lot of REDUCE fuel (real FOSSIL energy) first and significantly, while we work on the REUSE (waste energy RECOVERY via solid state thermalelectric devices and REUSE in electric drive hybrids) and then ultimately REPLACE the limited real energy source in TRANSPORTATION, oil with biofuels, and burn them in a no-moving-part injected burner encapsulated with such TE devices (get rid of that IC engine/transmission/ex... etc).

    Do all this while we implement all the ALTERNATIVES to REPLACE coal and nat gas POWER GENERATION with unlimited solar PV and wind (and even more homegrown biofuels w/whr and some actual storage as solar thermal and pumped hydro).

    The comparative cost of capital and operation to capture any effeciency which is gain from solar and wind into electricity should not overlook all the capital and operating costs involved in exploration, drilling, extraction, shipping, processing, transportation, conversion, remediation, enviornmental, regulation, legal, etc..for oil, coal and nat gas from which we throw away 70% of it's energy.

    Any applied KWH from solar and wind that REPLACES any applied KWH from the burning of any coal, oil, nat gas is an immediate 70% reduction in hydrocarbons; in other words, we need to extract only 30% of the energy from wind and solar to equal the useful energy from burning hydrocarbons, the way we do it today. What a way to go.
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    Aug 10 02:17 AM
    hi,
    ok. I gathered 2 thoughts whilst reading
    :
    1) There probably is alot of energy used to transport the single or few commuters. And I think alot of the requirements for batteries are high because of the weight they need to propel. Recreating commuting vehicles for single person (or 2 or so) might reduce the necessary power requirements, in that they can be lighter weight.

    2) I think harvesting lightning is doable. That is one thing I would like to see with a viable ultracapicitor. Since they can take and store a BIG charge at once, they can become a mechanism to harvest that power.
    ...I can be more informed on any science with regards this if someone has some insight.

    YT ~M
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    Aug 10 02:30 AM
    JohnTC...

    If you'd seen all of the alpha24-7 posts (I can't say dialogue, that woud imply more from his side than existed), not just here, but other pages, you would have understood.

    As for suffering fools, been there, done that, and if they are just misguided souls, it still happens. Freakingly obtuse moronic donkeys with bad attitudes, like alph here... now that's a horse of a different color.

    To "schmicknick"... there's a better chance that Ghostbuster's equipment is a plausible scenario than solving harnessed lightning. Or... in the immortal words of Winston Zedimore... "That's a big twinkie!"

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