Skeptic's view re: Why EV is Not the way

When batteries are used to recover and reuse braking energy that would otherwise be wasted, a single kWh of capacity can save up to 107 gallons of fuel per year. When batteries are used as fuel tank replacements, a single kWh of capacity can only save 19 gallons of fuel per year and most of the fuel savings at the vehicle level will be offset by increased fuel consumption in power plants.​

Full hybrid does more than regen and reuse braking energy. The small 1.31 kWh battery in the Prius also enabled the gas engine to be more efficient. I agree with the rest.

 

He was comparing the effectiveness (gallon of gas saved) of the battery usage of EV against HV and PHV. Battery in HV and PHV would last as long as EV, so 1 year calculation should reflect the same ratio for the lifetime.

 

I found this quote the hardest one to swallow

Where the author totally ignored that their maybe a reason to reduce oil use, and that the slower flow of dollars out of the country to pay for this oil may be used to help speed the greening of the grid.

But as investment advice I can't say he is wrong about A123

JCI already supplies Limh to ford, bmw, mercedes, and many chinese car manufaturers. They also have advanced lead acid for auto start stop with ford, and pay a 2% dividend.

People still would try to save the whale even if oil was never found. There is always vegetable oil, algae etc. Substitutes abound and increase with scarcity.

I think if you take a look at a Compaq luggable versus a macbook air you will see batteries have indeed vastly improved. Edison was wrong.

They aren't, but if you notice the US spends much more subsidizing oil and other substitutes for oil than electrification of the fleet. The test of these policies should be likely outcomes in 2020 and beyond not in 2011.
There are good arguments for cutting all these subsidies, but the "skeptic" didn't really accurately advance a good argument. For some PHEV and BEVs are already viable with today's battery technology. Many of the higher costs have to do with low volumes and new designs.

 

Correct so far as it goes, but society money that can be put to the task is finite -- quite finite -- so an alternative approach to this question is "what is the greatest CO2 reduction/$ available ? Or the top 3 ? This is where straight EV fails, PHEV if done right may be competitive with an HEV Prius, and PV loses to solar heating and many conservation measures.

This pecking order is always in flux, so I only vouch for it today

 

Wow, I wrote about this back in January. http://priuschat.com/forums/toyota-prius-phv-plug-in/77178-prius-plug-in-2011-a-7.html

By my calculations, a hybrid would save about 385 gal / kWh of battery pack at 1.3kWh as the Prius has over a span of 100,000 miles. So savings of 107 gal / year is highly questionable right there. But further calculations show that (only for example and not to criticize or be negative about the car or those who purchase it) the Leaf saves about 44 gal / kWh over the 100,000 mile calculations for the additional 18 kWh of batteries that have been added. I had calculated a Prius with a 6.3 kWh pack (original + Hymotion) would get 125 mpg.

 

Here's another way to look at the issue: The world's people, collectively, are going to burn all the oil that can be recovered at a price they can afford to pay. The only oil that will be "saved" (i.e. left in the ground) is whatever is too expensive to extract.

Note that you do not "save" any gasoline when you drive a Prius. You merely consume less than a car that burns more, leaving it for others to burn. And there are plenty lining up to burn it.

Once we have burned so much of it that extracting the rest costs more than we can afford, then people will turn to alternatives. The sooner we begin building the infrastructure to provide and utilize the alternatives, the cheaper those will be for the generation that sees gas become unaffordable. But since our policy makers are mostly old men, who due to their age have a very short time horizon, and since few people are willing to pay money now to ease the transition for their kids or grandkids, we are dragging our feet.

Driving a more efficient car (Prius, BEV, etc.) or better yet using a bicycle or public transportation, slightly extends the time until gas becomes unaffordable, and slows slightly the inevitable climate change due to CO2, but in the end, fossil fuel is a devil's bargain: It has a limited time span and will have disastrous consequences for the environment.

In a way it's true that BEVs are not "the answer." Our technological society requires energy in huge amounts, and oil cannot meet that need for much longer, especially given the industrialization of the third world. Coal will last longer, but puts even more CO2 into the air, not to mention mercury and other heavy metals.

The real advantage of BEVs is that electricity can be generated from sustainable sources. They are not "the answer," but they can function using energy sources that have the potential to be the answer. But those sources require investment, and with an economy in shambles due to tax breaks for the rich, stupid and counter-productive wars, and the plundering of the economy by crooked businessmen and bankers, there's no money available to invest in a long-term program that will only help people presently too young to have any political influence or yet unborn.

So I'm a pessimist. I drive an electric car just because I don't like gasoline. It stinks, the engines that burn it are noisy, and we buy it from people who finance terrorism. FWIW, my electricity comes from hydroelectric dams. But I'd be driving electric even if my electricity came from coal and cost twice as much per mile as gasoline.

Arguments concerning how many gallons of gas are "saved" by hybrids or PHEVs as compared to BEVs seem to assume that the goal is merely to delay the end of oil. The more you "save" the longer we'll have. The goal should be to facilitate the development of energy sources that can keep us going after the end of oil. And to the extent that such sources produce electricity, BEVs are useful because they provide transportation using this electricity. But in the end, with an exponentially increasing population our technological civilization may be doomed. If we fail to make the switch, humanity may inevitably revert to the stone age, with a few million people on the Earth living short brutish lives, and cursing our memory until memory of us fades away. That may happen relatively quickly once the technology to print books and power computers is gone.

Our grandparents made a devil's bargain, a mere century ago, using oil to facilitate a hundredfold increase in national wealth. We are already past the peak of that wealth, if not of the oil itself. We can spend some of that wealth now to assure that future generations have another source of energy, or we can selfishly spend it all on ourselves and future generations be damned. Human nature being what it is, I expect we'll choose the latter.

 

^^ Well written Daniel!
The only fly in this story is whether climate change will destroy society before fossil fuel runs out. I think this will be the case.

 

You can add the numbskull in a big Ford Expedition (even bigger than the Explorer) who pulled up behind me to wait in line to pick up their child. We both got there about 30 minutes early. I turned the Prius off for 29 minutes. She needed the A/C running, on a 79° cloudy day, so I had to listen to that for the entire time, since I had rolled the windows down.

I once read a story about a brilliant scientist who came here from Poland. He said what he was most amazed at was in America people leave their cars idling for incredibly long periods of time, something that would never happen in Poland.

 

+1
The author is no slacker - and has decent credentials. As some of his comments show, he's big on finding problems, but short on finding solutions. Obviously we can't find enough carbon based fuel ... just like there's a finite amount of metal for batteries. On top of that, the author has 'double speak':

Here, and shortly after burning the corpse of auto EV's - the author claims the battery chemestry that HE holds lots of stock in - will be a solution to keep the EV alive. Yes ... the battery company he owns stock in is the silver bullet. What? I guess you CAN have your cake and eat it too.



Am I the only one here that's old enough to remember 'slot-cars' ?? Wouldn't it be something if down the road - maybe a decade or so from now, if we dug a 12" trench into some of our major highways - and electrified the slot ... and (like slot cars) in stead of putting hundreds & hundreds of pounds of batteries in cars, you simply kept capacity in cars down to 80 - 90 miles. Your car could tap into the slot for BOTH charging AND traveling ... and you could retract the slot's paddle to complete traveling with your (now refilled) battery power.

.
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A side benefit of this would be keeping cars in their lane (the slot & paddle would hold the cars in place) and make it easy to implement electronics to maintain a proper distance between cars and brake automatically to avoid collisions.

 

slotless was the next wave...for my childhood anyway. you could change lanes with a flick of your speed controller thing. i bet my parents attic still contains my old slotless racing set...hmm...just 'biggify' it all and you have a real world electric roadway system. patent pending.

 

Duh ... Petersen.

He basically hates Lithium batteries which are competitors to this Axion power that makes newer Lead acid batteries that he hopes will be used in hybrids.

All you need to know about him is this ... He has been on an anti-EV crusade for years. Everytime his arguments were countered in seeking alpha he would agree with the criticism but repeat the same arguments in another article. I no longer waste my time reading his "articles".

 

Why does that one slotless car keep stopping? Doesn't look good for enlarging the system to real cars!

 

Because it is being driven by a Prius owner.

Tom

 

if i remember right...switching lanes required a certain 'mometum' to cross over to the other lane's rail conductors. if you didn't choose the right time to change lanes, you ended up in between the conductor rails which powered your car. it wasn't a perfect system...but it was next to impossible to change lanes in the slot world! thus the slotless had some cool features...and some still to be worked out kinks.

come to think of the rear diff in slotless cars...it seems it had a worm gear that ran the rear wheels thru a 'power-split' planetary gear-set so that no matter the rotation of the electric motor, it would always propel forwards. this allowed the steering mechanism to go back and forth with the rotation of the electric motor...essentially it would reverse rotations, moving the front wheels to steer, but going forward all the time...hmmm...

http://slotmonsters.com/tcr-total-control-racing.ashx (scroll to the bottom)

 

What would those of us who live in snow country do?

 

^^ skis