If and When Cars become fully electric........

If there was a rapid replacement of ICEVs with EVs, oil prices would fall precipitously. However, there are a lot of obstacles to EVs that remain and I think it's more likely EVs will gradually replace ICEVs and therefore the impact on the cost of oil/gas will be seemingly subtle, but very real. People love to claim they want EVs now, but they are too expensive for the mainstream so they will be bought by well-heeled celebrities, eco-chics and tech lovers. Beyond the (battery) cost of EVs, the range issue, remote charging availability, impact on power grid (peak/off-peak) are all obstacles. But without an alternative to ICEVs, oil/gas prices will only increase long term so EVs will automatically become cost effective in time. 100 years from now I would expect oil to be a minor transportation fuel and the oil industry will be smaller and less dominating, but how it will play out between now and then is anybody's guess.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car"]Electric car - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

With the intermittent nature of solar and wind, I don't see how that's even remotely possible. Batteries? Solar and wind should/will be developed but neither can ever be more than a portion unless we are all willing to do without when they aren't generating.

 

Hi All,

The displacement of a good fraction of Coal fired electricity with petroleum fired electricity would be a step forward. Petroleum has less carbon than coal, per BTU and burns cleaner, and does not have mercury in it.

The use of petroleum based resins for car chasis would also be beneficial. The Fiberforge technique is using Carbon Fiber reinforcement, but the matrix of the material is a thermo-plastic , usually PEEK. Which is a purely organic compound.

 

If you want to see gas at $12/gal or who knows how high, let's substitute oil in coal fired power plants. None of us will be able to drive anywhere, so that will reduce emissions even further...

 

Spain already gets 20% of its electricity from wind power. The secret is being able to move the electricity from the wind turbines to the consumers. Ask T. Boone Pickens. Same for solar power. When you have 300 plus days a year of sunshine, it's hard to think of solar power as intermittent. But that just reminds us that we need to look at all non-fossil fuel options- tidal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and yes, nuclear (although I'd rather wait for nuclear fusion if we can!), and then supplement them with natural gas or petroleum if necessary. I for one think it would be sad (but it is likely) that we will all be driving EVs in 30 years. I would prefer it if we didn't put all of our eggs in one basket... gas, diesel, natural gas, EV, PHEV, fuel cell- no more OPECs, please.

 

I think the point was to use oil in power plants when we're all driving EVs.

 

How about every night?

Good thought, I did not make that connection. That would make more sense --- other than the dependence on foreign sources aspect, would be nice to have more secure supply sources.

 

Hey Midpack,

The conjecture of this thread was when almost no cars use gasoline, but run on electricity. My point is they may very well still run on oil used to generate the electricty, and economically.

That is, with no demand for transport fuels, the price of diesel like fuels would plummet, and be competitive with Coal.

 

I did not make that connection as I acknowledged above. The OP talked about full EV (no ICE), not everyone owning an EV. Peace.

 

Actually one solution has been operational for decades. The nine SGES solar plants out west have natural gas backup for when the sun is not available. This is only a limited number of days per year, but the plant was required to provide dependable electricity every day for the entire year. That proves solar plants, correctly engineered, are as dependable as coal or nuclear plants for daily peak load period.

 

I don't follow how that's a cost effective solution. If you have to make the capital investment to provide full natural gas backup power, the additional capital for solar is above and beyond so the total fixed cost of power generation is increased. I suspect the reduction in natural gas when solar is operating will not offset the additional capital investment for solar.

I don't doubt we'll have to do this someday, but it's going to be noticeably more costly. I get the sense many people think wind and solar are no-brainers and from a utility cost standpoint that's not clear. We are going to pay noticeably more, something I don't think most people will like.

I don't want to be argumentative, I just want to understand the economics, something many people don't seem to bother with.

 

According the DOE, a 100 square mile power plant in Nevada using today's technology would produce 800 gigawatts- the current production of all power plants in the US. The problem of course is that transmission of electricity isn't so very efficient, and not every state has as much sunshine as Nevada. The DOE does note that replacing all 5 million acres of brownfields in our cities with solar power would generate 90% of our electricity.

Then the question gets into cost. The problem is defining cost. Up front, it's hard to beat a coal-powered plant. It's a lot less than a nuclear power plant or a solar power plant or a wind farm. On the other hand, coal is more expensive than sunshine or wind. As are natural gas and oil. Then there are costs to society. Given the price of health care (just in dollars!), coal and other fossil fuels cost a lot of money. As for the redundancy- I think subsidizing alt fuel plants takes care of a lot of that, and they should be subsidized if we aren't going to make fossil fuels pay their real cost to society.

The one hope that I have is that Americans never become as dependent on any one fuel source as we are now. Diversity is a good thing. It's part of my thinking with a Prius (and soon a PHEV I hope [gasoline, regenerative electricity and plug-in!]). And why I use Chrome, Opera, Firefox and (if I have to) IE. And why I use Windows XP, Vista and Ubuntu Linux.

 

How does it provide power at night (no, I am not being cute here)? If we still need full conventional power when wind or solar are not generating, it sounds like it will be very costly. I still get the impression people think wind and solar can completely replace conventional power and I don't know how unless we are willing to go entirely without power at times (not likely IMO).

 

OK, solar doesn't work at night. Night is traditionally the time when we use less power anyhow. Geothermal, wind, tidal, and hydropower should all work quite well in the dark. Existing fossil fueled plants will still be around, and could be used at night if want. Nuclear has been in a bit of a slump lately. The new pebble bed technology looks promising and would work nicely in the dark.

When we add up the costs of a fossil fueled society we should probably include the costs of our various wars in the Mideast, Asia & Africa, and the Homeland Security budget too. There is also the somewhat troubling issue that we are busy making our sworn enemies wealthy. If they were poor and hated us we wouldn't really care.

All these fossil fuels are slowly changing the composition of the atmosphere. We are not quite sure what that will do. We do know that the atmosphere is intimately involved in maintaining the conditions present at the surface of the Earth. We are mostly well adapted to current conditions, and random changes are likely to make someone unhappy. We'll want to add in these costs as we identifying them. For example, I live downwind from a number of coal plants. I have reliably acidic rain, that's just the way it is. I have observed that all of the older cement structures in my area are crumbling, particularly at the top, edges, and where they are out in the weather. I believe this is due to the acidity. What is the cost of prematurely replacing the entire infrastructure for a region?

The non-fossil fuels will have costs associated with them. Hydro changes rivers considerably and I expect that wind power will kill birds and bats. I however am ready to bite the bullet and find out.

 

The economics is simple, the Natural Gas component is only for an inline heater, the rest of the power plant is already in place. Please note that many conventional power plants have almost the same arrangement, NG backup or supplements for peak loading or backup power for the main boilers. So this component is not an additional capital cost for solar anymore than for conventional.

The part that is more convincing is that these nine plants are real, working, and making money. (They are mostly owned by Florida Light and Power.) How can one dismiss that?

Someday has already arrived. The solar building boom is in full swing. The limiting factor is on capital component construction.


Edit-Added picture
http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA9679/

 

Quite right, without a major advance in daytime energy storage, solar is just a daytime peaking plant. However, that particular daytime need constitutes many GigaWatts of power, so it will be quite a while (at least a decade or more) before solar plants become faced with having to solve that problem.

In the meantime, quite a few things are happening to address this:
1) Thermal heat storage that takes the excess solar heating during the day to run the turbines at night has been demonstrated, but still has not reached a mature enough point to leave the experiment stage.
2) Molten metal batteries have been proposed by MIT as a way of storing electricity directly at a production scale. Still in the paper stage.
3) MIT has developed a very high efficiency electrolysis storage method. This converts water to O2 and H2 during the day and recombines at night. This is been proven in the lab and is being developed for large scale expermentation.
4) Many other methods involving reserviors, air pressure storage in caves, and other unusual ideas.

In the end, economics will pick the winner....and there will be a winner. The fuel itself is rather cheap.

 

If there was a rapid replacement of ICEVs with EVs, oil prices would fall precipitously. However, there are a lot of obstacles to EVs that remain and I think it's more likely EVs will gradually replace ICEVs and therefore the impact on the cost of oil/gas will be seemingly subtle, but very real. People love to claim they want EVs now, but they are too expensive for the mainstream so they will be bought by well-heeled celebrities, eco-chics and tech lovers.