It is a -really- old study like 15 years. A significant number of things have changed.
However, that being said, at least in the US, we have moved to NG to replace coal, which the study said gave the best results. NG has single handedly wiped out about 17% of the coal generation share since 2002. The UK only gets 6% of it’s electric from coal now too.
No one said you couldn’t try to do all of the above. Something’s will work, some won’t. If you need to develop technology, you can’t wait until the last minute.
So of we are doing the easiest thing by switching to ng generation, then you kind of understand why I’m not so paranoid about not having complete electric solutions for vehicles at this point.
It is a long way to go before saturation issues. The grid can handle like 15℅ of variable renewables without doing anything and like 40℅ after we finish flattening it. We are at like 5%. Adding storage improves the number.
Long term storage is an issue eventually we might find something less expensive, but right now it is probably cheaper just to overbuild. So calculate the solar array for 2.5 hours of winter light rather then the 5.5 hours of summer light. It isn’t necessarily a bad problem to have…
Agreed, the study is old, but the underlying analysis seems sound. As Steve eloquently pointed out, presently electric road vehicles might as well be running on coal in many regions, especially keeping line, charging, discharging losses in mind. Compared to those losses, vehicle combustion begins to look like high grade CHP…
I offered the study due to it’s basic concept that until we near grid sufficiency on renewables, it actually results in lower over all CO2 production to expend the available energy judiciously. Manitoba and Quebec, perhaps some west coast states and British Columbia with significant hydro power may be exceptions. How long until that balance is achieved widely? Maybe never. We still need to see a breakthrough in generation and storage first.
I think we have the break through technology in products like aquion batteries already. They look experience at the moment but they expect to drop to about 1/4 their current cost once they reach economy of scale. Aqion only has 1 of 5 production lines going in the very first factory. It is the early days but once they get these new factories up and running to full production costs will come down. The question is when is it cost effective for each of us to invest in out own power systems or do you choose to stick with buying it off the grid. I am at grid parity for my own personal power needs if I can figure out the funds to set it all up. I could easily have an electric car for part of my system because I don’t drive far enough every day for it to be much more then just additional battery storage. I was actually playing with that idea tonight. Could I trade in my TA for a chevy Bolt and use it as the main battery bank. It might actually be about a toss up in both kWh of storage and cost out of pocket. Of course I wouldn’t have my 2000 TransAm but I hardly ever drive it anyway and I would have a new car. Of course I would need some battery storage outside the car because I do travel some and I couldn’t take the power system down when I go. But that is the type of out of the box thinking that will lead to economy of scale. Alot of America’s have more then one car so there is some potential for dual usages.
I wish I had your faith, we may see a change in some years, I hope to see it.
As Koen pointed out, the real challenge is to systematically re-examine consumption and resource use, and aim to reduce first of all. The personal automobile as it is presently accepted is hardly part of that pyramid.
An electric tractor on the other hand seems like a pretty decent application, especially for a solar system. It dovetails nicely with a northern latitude, peak solar and peak farm work in the summer, coincident with minimum home electrical consumption, the possibility of using the battery for winter home consumption.
A lot of it has changed because the technology improved and come down significantly in price. If you redid the study, you will get vastly different results today.
This is true, but the number of regions has shrunk drastically. You can change sources behind the scenes. Or even go offgrid if you are that upset about it.
The biggest political fight was with the coal industry and what was trying to get the 20-25% efficient plants offline that were past depreciation which is 50 years. There is another group in the 2030s that are 30% eff and will have fully depreciated and bonds will be paid off and such. The new plants are like 40% efficient, and will be around for quite a while.
Wind and solar are competitive today in price. The midwest has a -ton- of wind energy already so you can add that to your list. Iowa generates like 30% of their energy from wind. I know what article you read, but there is a better, updated map based on more current information, that actually goes to essentially the county level. I can’t find it atm, but it has changed a -lot-.
The basic analysis is valid, and not based on price. Price is a very poor measure of efficiency in power generation while the backbone of the system is FF generation. (And oil and gas production prices are also skewed with subsidies). The analysis remains valid because it looked at total CO2 emissions. As Steve rightly pointed out, although it eases the minds of a subset of the population, the electric car isn’t right, or ready for the general motorist, it’s actually a way to make matters worse. For certain fleet, or special applications I imagine there’s a better case, which will address the R&D stage hopefully to lead us to a promised land.
As for renewables generation, I suspect mostly it’s a manifestation of subsidies also, or in cost comparison to FF generation, or percentage has risen as a reflection of the deindustrialization that’s been going on. Wind has certainly gotten more cost effective, but it’s questionable how much more efficient it can become.
Garry I am confused. You are saying cost is a poor thing to base the comparison on. Then you go on to argue that the cost of wind has come down but you don’t know if it can come down enough?
Do you think we can’t build enough alternative energy to meet out needs or that it will cost too much?
Personal I fell the technology is out there we need to decide if we are willing to pay the price to apply it or if we want to continue to use FF and pay the environmental costs involved with them.
But at the end of the day most people don’t look past the cost out of their check book today to do what they need or more often want to do.
There are 2 different themes being discussed here I think. Total CO2 emissions, and individual costs in a variety of markets. Considering those different criteria, and a whole range of subsidies for various energy systems at utility, state and national levels, varying costs comparing energy to coal and gas plants, profit margins of private utilities, all sorts of investments may make sense monetarily in a particular jurisdiction, as did solar in Germany, though it has probably no ROEI.
The observation about wind efficiencies is recognizing improvements in market efficiencies ,probably incremental improvements in blade design, but none of that promises great future advances.
If we are going to compare apples to apples, I think the only objective ground is total CO2,which is a decent measure of total societal efficiency, or best over all use of resources.
Unsubsidized onshore Wind is the least expensive form of energy we can massively deploy today. They already made it more efficient and more reliable to get to that point.
The “extra cost” associated with variable renewable energy, is a magnification of how inefficiently the grid resources have traditionally been managed. The grid from day 1 was built around the philosophy, “it is cheaper to waste energy, then it is to be more efficient.” They literally use a “best guess” system to fill contracts a day ahead. It is actually a pretty complicated system because it takes time for the resources to become available. It is like 45minutes for a peaker plant to come online, and if you don’t have it online, you experience a brown out which is a no no for reliability. If you have it online but don’t need it, it costs you a lot of money to have it run idle which increases your costs. so flattening the grid, and adding immediate available storage like batteries actually helps reduce overall costs. You only need to fire up a peaker -if- you actually need it. It eliminates part of the guessing game.
Germany started because they didn’t want to pay 1 trillion euros to upgrade their nuclear facilities. They thought it would be cheaper to install solar, then to upgrade their facilities. So their ROI is in part based on the avoided cost of upgrading their nuclear facilities. in otherwords, if they spend less then a trillion euros, they win. eROI has little to do with it. In fact CO2 has little to do with it. They ran into serious frequency regulation issues which is that “best guess” issue I previously discussed, and they are waiting for power lines to be built to help flatten their grid.
In the US and Canada we started with the power lines in response to the NE blackout for reliability. Power lines in the US can take 15 years to plan, permit and build, that is after you come up for a reason for them, can justify the line capacity and come up with financing. Several thousand miles have been built or are in the process in the US. Most of it is in response to the renewable energy, since you need to hit the line capacity qualification.
Just to prove there is research being done on long term storage. Beyond like aluminium air batteries, and the electric +co2 → ethanol nanotech.
They haven’t published how it works, they just said it was 10x more efficient, then traditional catalysts, which I assume is the electric + CO2 pathway similar to the ethanol nanotech.
Holy cow. Workhorse is making hybrid electric delivery vans. UPS ran 125 test vehicles through a 250k miles. They are getting 30mpg, which is more then slightly above the 5-8mpg they typically get. The USPS has a bunch on order. Workhorse is making a hybrid electric truck out in 2018.
Sweet!!! I think ups will be ordering some new vans. Just looking at the 12.6 billion dollars those vans would save that must be about 5 billion gallons of gas or diesel fuel. That is amazing to think that is just ups. Add in FedEx and all the other delivery vehicles and you are looking at removing an incredible amount of FF from the roads.
Those electric trucks are great I want one! A couple of vehicles like that would give me all the batteries I need to be off grid without a dedicated battery bank. I would need two or a small battery bank so there was something to provide power here all the time as I can only drive one at a time… The vehicle to grid technology is the coolest part. If the hybred vans do that you would have a free genorator for your solar setup. That would be the best batteries storage and the inverter all for free with your purchase of a van that gets 30 mpg. Just add solar panels and a charge controller for the panels and you are off grid. And best of all you can drive your genorator to the gas station. Or convert the small motor to wood gas. Man Wayne needs one of them so he can design a nice small motor version of the gasificer for us all.
If the math is right… Even if they are just break even, it is a win. It minimizes their future risk of getting burned by high energy prices which resulted in billions in losses and almost killed them a couple of years ago. They will be dabbling until they see some huge benefit. It is a lot cheaper to dabble in alternative technologies now, and help drive the technology, then it is to take billion dollar losses because FFs went up in price. UPS is also investing another 18M in solar panels for their facilities.
You can basically go right down the list of corporations who are merely trying to break even with the newer technology. It gives them a fixed cost on their balance sheet, rather then a variable cost that is a risk.
As far as vehicle to grid. BMW is testing something with their i3’s in cali. i don’t know if they needed to make mods to the cars or not. Bluebird school buses are incorporating it. Nissan is working on it. I am not sure it will pan out. Namely because battery prices have dropped 50% in the last two years, and I expect them to continue to drop in price. The big benefit is not having to buy batteries, but if batteries continue to drop in price it isn’t nearly as big of a long term issue.
In general, the us/canada system isn’t set up for compensation from storage which goes down to the regional and state level laws and regulations. It is a problem.
I thought about doing that with the VIA Silverado and the Chevy volt. The Volt doesn’t have enough space, so you really just need to find a cheap one, and use the electronics. But I think it would be a lot cheaper just to find a junk lawn tractor, hook it to an induction motor, and then run the output through a rectifier to your solar system inverter. It cleans up all the messiness in the output.
They make nice pto generators but they aren’t cheap. You can buy a gas one cheaper. I was just trying to find more reasons to justify replacing a car I don’t drive in first place but about once a week. Life on a farm not much time or reason to go somewhere else
The Workhorse delivery vans; regionally here not wide in service hybrid Urban bus’s ALL build onto former USA’s CIA director J.Woolsey’s just-DO-It-Now opinion. He bought a second generation Toyota Prius. Labels his car as, “the one OPEC hates”.
If all of the new stop and go delivery put into service were today available Hybrid; if most DID new vehicle replace insist on full Hybrids (not the make more acceleration power BMW/Audi/Lexus/fullsized pickup types - but the recover deceleration/braking types) our transport FF usage would soon evolve down to at least 30-40% less. Screw over OPEC nnd the seven sisters BigOil all at the same time.
No change in current supply structures needed.
No new fueling/charging stations, safety regulations, operator training programs needed.
No new electrical Grid stress created.
No need for more new Nuke, coal, natural gas generating plants.
Just a You-Can-Do-It, personal choice from the bottom up solution. Screw the Gov’Mint incentives. University endeavors panderings.
Have your “electric vehicle” getting 50 MPG.
Want your fun? Plaster the 100% Dino-hogs with sticky bumper stickers as “Dumb-dumb Dino-Hog”
There is another company that is doing something similar with the drivetrain as workhorse. where you can retrofit your vehicle your vehicle to electric by essentially replacing the driveshaft, and figuring out where you are putting the electronics.
As far as buses go, BYD and Proterra are already selling electric buses. Proterra has a wick cool application that will take your current route and show you were to put chargers and which bus model you need. There is another company who is a huge seller worldwide coming in 2018 to the states. For school buses, but NA manufacturers bluebird and the canadian one, are developing the products.
Regenerative braking is wicked. It is efficient for stop and start, but it saves on brake maintenance costs as well and it is coming down in price. That being said people are starting to pick up on the plug-in hybrids over the non-plugin variety.
