Only with the smaller battery packs. You could be looking at a day with L2 charging and a big battery pack.
Daily driving isn’t the issue. I could get away with 20-40miles for daily driving. It is the weekend trips, towing and hauling heavy stuff which is where I would start getting range anxiety. Because that 300 mile range starts dropping quickly under load.
They have been internally testing EV trucks for a while. They may have planned to use Rivian all along to avoid any internal issues and to avoid the expense of having to fund the whole thing themselves. GM forked it’s alternative fuel group into a different unit to avoid issues with people trying to kill off the technology. No one was sure how the union or stockholders would take it. But both companies got burned by EVs the last time around which about destroyed their companies.
L2 is able to provide 80 amps at 220 which will provide 52 miles of range on a Tesla model S per hour fully charging a PD100 in 6 hours.
Of course most days you would never need to replace the full range. If you where traveling you can always stop at a super charger and have lunch 30 minutes later you have a full charge.
80amps is more then some people have for incoming service to their houses. A lot only have 100amps. In the real world, you are looking at 30-50amps in the garage.
Second, the Model S is a car not a truck and it still takes like 45+ minutes to get to 80% at their supercharger. If you can find one.
Tesla crack is also outside the realm of this conversation because we are talking about Fords and Tesla wanted to charge everyone for Tesla compatibility.
I won’t argue with you about it. Just to say that not many people will drive hundreds of miles day after day to exceed the 8 hours of normal sleeping time to recharge. Because remember once you do finally deplete the battery you don’t have to wait for it to fully recharge to drive. Just like running out of gas you only have to put enough electricity back in to make the next trip.
I will say upgrading an old 60 amp service to 200 amps isn’t that expensive it has been a very common requirement in this area to upgrade old services pushed by the insurance companies.
As to Tesla sorry if you don’t like them but they make the most EVs with the largest batteries. So at the moment they have set the charging bar. You can be certain anyone designing an EV today will meet or exceed the charging specs of the Tesla model S which is an old design by now. That was the point of using it for a baseline. Not sure why you think they run on crack I mean everyone knows it is an electric car company.
In serious response Tesla doesn’t have the only design for fast charging Nissan offers it for their cars at their dealerships. My aunt refuses to charge at home because the lease includes free charging at the dealership so one or twice a week she and her husband go to the dealer and them travel around the Boston area on foot for a “date”. She claims it takes less then half an hour for their leaf to be done charging at the dealership.
I am sure Ford is working on a fast charging system as well. Or more likely pushing to get more of the fast chargers which are non Tesla standard installed.
Sorry, but we are off topic anyway. That is exactly why I came back on woodgas. We have the little Tesla. Unbelievable what a car. And it saves us 4000 euro a year on roadtax and diesel. PV is doing great job in the summer. Now in wintertime it would be nice to have an old watercooled Lister for electricity. Wife can drive the car and me getting dirty. Excellent combo imho. I think government is steering this way, so I just go along. Swimming upstream makes me tired.
I like those Lister engines but a non spark engine seems tricky for wood gas. I have wondered about running one on used vegetable oil I could definitely get a supply of that from some of the restaurants around here. Ironicly when I try to look that up all I find is old diesel rabbits running directly on waste fry oil. But I thought the old lister diesels where actually designed to run on vegetable oil.
I am personally leaning towards a PTO generator for a backup. My plan is to eventually convert one of my old gas tractors to wood. I think this will make it easier to keep the generator at the correct frequency for the hybrid inverter to be happy.
Is it? Compressionratio is nice, maybe convert it to spark, but dual fuel is nice too. I thought they run ok on woodgas (first I still have to start a gasifier). Wood/sawdust is easier to get hold on then waste fry oil. The only thing is hydraulic oil. Big steps fast home (free translate from dutch), but that is very smelly and not to good for your health. Rather not, I will burn that together with woodgas… No spark conversion needed.
Growing and harvesting oil in quantities that would be needed to run a Lister generator would be an issue. Lotsa labor and oil extraction equipment needed. I’d rather try using a stirling engine or (monotube) steam generator engine system running from the heat of wood. Some stirling designs are amazingly simple and can be scaled up to output a couple hundred watts. Enough to charge batteries to briefly run higher powered stuff like well pumps.
Sugar beets require a sandy soil for easier digging and specialized equipment and a bigger tractor because you need essentially a rock picker. You could grow sweet sorghum, which is used to make molasses. You might actually be more interested in bio-diesel vegetable oil from beans, or corn. Given you said you will have pigs, you will have a use for meal that is left over. Then you need a press and not a still. You can run 100% vegetable oil in a diesel with some tuning, but it has a shelf life. You can also process it and blend it with diesel.
The -other- thing you can do is distill the wood using a closed retort. then you get a bunch of stuff that includes methanol. You might want to do it anyway, since wood vinegar (which is a mixture of the distillates) is the same process and it is used as a pesticide/herbicide, and you can collect and use the tar for various things as well as use the charcoal. The downside is you probably need a distillers license to be legal. But if you use aluminum for some of the piping, they know you aren’t drinking it and probably won’t bother you after the first inspection.
I don t share the same opinion. Phillips has been busy with the stirling for forty years or so and didnot get the job done. I dont even think I am smarter. Have been looking to adapt a turbocharger from a car and take some power off. Someone in Eindhoven spend 10 years plus on that one. It is working now and for sale, not tried with woodgas yet. It is doable, but I dont have the time. So, after surfing around for 10 years , I came back to a ic engine. Find it anywhere and efficiency is not bad ether. Take a diesel and it is even better. No big powerplant can beat you on efficiency. Narrow minded? Maybe, but realistic. A Lister will outlive me. Gridconnected asynchro motor and off you go. Not much needed for controls. Grid is very reliable over here. Maybe a generator for emergency later on.
Sure, not my plan. The last years I tried to collect waste oil. It tuned out you have to beg for 50 liters and still have to pay. Hydraulic oil runs great, is for free and goes by the m3. Did that some time in the car, old Mercedes and even a cdi. But not for around the house and not very sustainable.
Maybe look at what Ben Peterson is doing with plastics to liquid fuels.
I dont know about the smaller Lister engines but the big ones are terribly inefficient. This machine in the video consumed this full hopper in just over an hour verses the V8 versions at the same output could go 4 hours on the same amount of fuel. A heavy rotating mass will aid with loading but that mass still takes energy to keep going. The cost to ship that thing was ridiculousness as well. It weighed twice what the V-8 machines. Big engines are not the way to with stationary systems. Much better to build teams with smaller engines that more easily to maintain and rebuild. Rebuilding a small engine is really not that big of a deal. Much better option than some heavy duty beast that will consume more fuel. That adds up in the end is by far less economical than refreshing a little Honda engine once a year. If you break the Lister or any large engine your going to be down for a long time and its going to cost you. Very complex and wood gas could care less how heavy duty an engine is, no engine is bullet proof here they all break. A small engine it breaks oh well, did you get your moneys worth? Most likely yes, just go get a new one.
Such simple engines are relatively easy to scale up since they have so few moving parts. You are right in that there is a gap between stirling engines having milliwatts of power and a few rare ones outputting 20 kilowatts, with nothing in the middle range which most people would want. If the one I’m tinkering with works well enough to produce 100 watts or more, I’d consider making them for a profit. I believe that lotsa survival types would be interested.
The top one looks more practical. The LTD (low temperature) models will never have practical efficiency due to Carnot’s law. The metronome stirlings have no piston rings, yet accomplish the same function using a rubber diaphram with a very high cycle rate. They also can tolerate high temps and use regenerators which improve their efficiencies.
Sugar beets were originally dug with a one furrow plow / lifter similar to what would be used for potatoes. The tops were cut off manually or later they developed top cutters as a preparatory pass, or a combined digging and topping operation. Lighter soil is preferred, but here the major sugar beet planting used to be done in heavy clay soils, there will be a reason for that, possibly moisture being most important. Nobody cares about how dirty the beets are coming out of the field, as they will just get piled and power washed before slicing and boiling.
Sugar beets are a more efficient source of sugar than sugar cane. They will prove hard to beat as an energy source. Jerusalem artichoke has been looked at, it may offer greater yield per acre as ethanol feedstock, but it is also a potential weed, and harvesting it would take fine dry soil and something like a chain potato harvester but with smaller spaces or some sort of sifting screen.
Oilseeds can be done, sunflower might be the best, but you need dry fall weather, otherwise the seed will retain too much moisture to store, and birds love the treat, so a fairly large planting would be necessary to sustain the losses. Soybeans and the like have potential, especially considering that they fix nitrogen, but they won’t compete well with weeds, and the pressing requires costly gear.
Yeah Billings Mt is a huge supplier of beats. They produce mountains of them and Billings is not sand or dirt. The ground there is like clay. The fields though I dont know could be they are cultivated for growing I dont know.
There is a company in Michigan I believe that builds at this level as well. But they are more crude looking devices with a crazy price tag, sort of like my machines.
Maybe I am just old fashioned but I still like the Robertson Stirling
I watched one of those for a long time ago a engine show years ago. The design is very basic you could use it for a water heater as well as there is a water cooling jacket across the top and with a modern wood gasification firebox they seem like an ideal combined heat and power system. I tracked down a set of plans for them a while back I don’t remember where it was at the moment that I ordered them from. But someday I will build one. Even if you only got 1kw of power out it would be enough to ballance out an off grid solar system in the dead of winter.
Those modern Stirling engines depend on special gas mixes and pressures they might be very good designs but it seem counter intuitive to me because the orginal goal of a Stirling engine was low speed low pressure to be safer then the high pressure steam engines.
Anyway that is my dream shop heating and power system. It would burn normal 16 inch stove length wood. Providing some power while heating the workshop.
Yes, 1000 to 1500 watts combined heat and power is where I want to go in the future. But with the approach of using SOFC technology.
A system like this will be much better then a system that is bulk charging. To some this may not seem like much power. But you need to look at the daily kW/hour production. A system at lower output cycle charging around the clock can produce the same daily output as a system that is more of a bulk charging system.
This would be more economical as the system itself is smaller, so its lower investment cost. This type of cycle charging will make the battery systems last longer. Were this is more of a float charging system verses traditional systems allowing draining to the low voltage cut off and then charging to the top limits. Then if the unit is silent then the power unit can be brought inside for direct heat. Does not get more efficient than that.
But that is only a dream for now, I still plan to play with my battery tech. I believe it can be made to work. Just add water and apply heat = power comes out, no noise and cheap to build.
