Malcolm

You failed to mention at what speed the roadster gets the range of 240 miles. My research shows that the faster the vehicle travels the faster the charge dissipates and correspondingly the shorter the range. And you have to figure in stop and go factors which can drain the batteries even more. This is comparable to MPG city vers highway for an ICE. And at $110k your talking a lifetime investment for the average consumer, so in 25~50 years a more practical vehicle could come along. There's also the cycle life of the batteries that is a significant cost.

And where is all the extra power going to come from? Wind and solar power are expensive when all costs are figured in. You could have charging stations of battery packs run by solar and wind as 24/7 is not a priority. Just pull out the depleted pack for a fresh recharged pack. and frankly I think those stupid prop stalks of wind generators should be replaced with something more efficient and esthetically pleasing, who wants a bunch of those hogging the horizon view? Obscene!

For local transportation of 100 miles or so it may be a good alternative, but for hauling or long distance it would require an onboard ICE powered generator or perhaps a sterling engine. It will take some engineering to make it competitive with current ICE's.

My dream technology would be a maglev system interconnecting different hubs and the ability to rent some sort of chemical or electric powered vehicle for local travel. If solar cells got real efficient you could recharge from them but I doubt it as the physics shows a limit of 50% absolute efficiency conversion. When a 4 wheel vehicle is invented that has a range of 300 miles and can be recharged off solar cells or replaceable chemical cartridges, I'll be impressed. It will probably take nuclear to power the whole system.

It has fast acceleration because all electric vehicles have great low-end torque compared with IC engines. That's just the way they are. Using the motor windings to double as a charge has been done by many folks. AC propulsion did it with the tzero back in the late 90's.

Tesla's biggest contribution has been to illustrate the possible. It's battery pack uses a brute force approach and is otherwise inelegant. Perhaps using the motor windings for charging is creative. Perhaps the software that manages energy use is something special. I believe the rest is clever adaptation of existing technologies. Nothing to sneeze at, but I'm also not sure how much hype it deserves.

Also remain unconvinced that electric cars will be the "load shifters" that everyone anticipates. Let's take the average Joe doing his 50km commute to the city. Car is charged overnight or is it....not if he or she is a shift worker...it will be charged during the day when sleeping. But let's say that the worker does not work shift and is a 9 to fiver. Does the 50 km commute will expect to be able to plug it in at work otherwise may not be able to get home if all electric. If hybrid will not want to use the gas engine. Therefore will plug in as soon as he/she gets to work (that is peak period). Car now fully charged again (at Peak rates - much cheaper than gas) and drives home after a hard days work. Worker is now going to wait until off peak times to charge the car....think again. The worker will plug it in as soon as he/she gets home because will want to use it to do shopping and all the other chores requiring a vehicle. Again this will be at peak or near peak rates.

In other words the behaviour you expect (charging only on off peak times therefore flattening out grid load) is almost certainly not going to occur. It will likely make peaks worse if used on a large scale.

I like Scotts mode of transport - maglev systems.

Malcolm

The car battery might store 20 kWh. If it costs $20,000 and lasts for 2000 cycles, then the cost per discharge cycle is $10 which works out at $.50/kWh. You get back 80 to 90% of what you put in.

So you start off with windpower costing say $.12/kWh, store it in a battery and then try to sell it off for $.60/kilowatt-hour. Dream on!

Not only that, but one day you will come downstairs to your car, switch it on and a little notice comes up saying “I am afraid the wind didn't blow in the early hours of this morning. Therefore I was unable to recharge your battery. I do hope you find some other way of getting to work." How many times does it have to happen before you abandon the process?

What intermittent new energy technology needs is a cheap, efficient storage technology that will store electricity for days, weeks and even months. No such technology exists or is even on the horizon. But coal stockpiles, gas storage and nuclear fuel all do the job nicely.

Instead I found two ridiculous cars, the kind we might have seen in comic books 70 years ago. Except the comic book batteries would have been recharged en route by ray guns mounted on towers spaced along the highway.

If this is true then this engine is quite inefficient. Using the data supplied in the article, i.e. 1200 HP, 26.4 gal tank then at 25% thermal efficiency 26.4 gal would last about 15.8 minutes. If it only lasts 12 minutes we would say the engine is no better than (12/15.8) x 25 = 19% efficient, quite shameful, but who cares anyway in such an absurd machine.

@Bryan, there is a lot of work going on in this respect (power storage technology), much of it confidential, so I think it is hard to say with authority that there is "nothing on the horizon". I know of a technology in advanced development for utility scale electricity storage with 80% efficiency at costs cheaper than pumped hydro. I am sure there are others - the rewards are so great and the range of applications so wide that it would be amazing if that were not the case.

There are quite a lot of electric vehicles available, and more coming, most rather mundane compared to the Tesla, but perhaps more practical. Again, the Tesla isn't designed for commuting; to measure it against that requirement is unfair. The Reva G-Wiz is, and there's quite a few in London, for example. Don't mock what there is now; look where it's heading! I get James' point in his article that advances in power storage technology may not come from within the electricity industry.

Finally, @Scott - wind turbines are close to theoretical maximum efficiency if you correctly measure what they are doing as converting energy in wind to electricity, and don't just divide MWh generated by the product of time and generator size (which is daft, but common). So I don't get your point about asking for something more efficient.

BTW Bryan: I'm not proposing that the "storage" factor comes from the car batteries feeding power back to the grid (except perhaps in rare extreme emergencies). But with controlled charge times, esp. if controlled by the grid, a fleet of cars can act a "virtual storage", eg. staying out of the market when it is tight, then diving in when there is excess capacity. Result is the same as large storage with dumb chargers.

If you crank through the conversion you find that that a gal of gasoline is equivalent to about 48 HP-HRS at 100% e. 120,000 BTU/gal x 778 ft#/BTU/(550x60x60)ft# per HP-HR = 47.15. (I could just as well have chosen a gasoline with 122,000 BTU/gal.) Anyway, at 25% e we would get 12 HP-HRS per gal, a handy rule of thumb.

We are told the engine can deliver 1200 HP at which output it would consume 100 gallons per hour. If e = 25% the 26.4 gal tank would last 15.8 minutes. The article claims 12 minutes. Hence a best estimate we can make with these data is e =(12/15.8)x.25, or 19%. (If the engine doesn’t peak at max mph then the e is even worse than 19.)

Somehow I don't see the load shifting happening as expected.

Malcolm

The tank holds 26.4 gal or 12 x 26.4 = 317 (at e = 25%) HP-HRS per tank full or, x 746 = 236 kwh. My all-electric house uses (typically on a yearly basis) 48 kwh/day. So “some experts” instead of saying 10 homes for a year should have said one home for maybe 5 days.

After a great deal of arithmetic and counting lots of zeros I would have said “about 432 x 10^3 seconds” rather than “about 5 days.” (Or does the system require, or only recommend, using this notation: 4.32 x 10^5 seconds? )

Sort of funny, when I first started reading the article I immediately saw this “ten houses for a year” business was grossly in error and I almost gave up reading at that point. I wonder if those thinking in the cgs system ever recognized the enormity of the error?

No-one rational doing engineering or science uses U.S. Cust., By that definition, US Auto industry is rational, while US mould-making industry is not, perhaps why Husky Moulds, largest maker of moulds for plastic forming in the world, has re-located back to Canada from Vermont.

Honestly, I really wasn’t suggesting that even a guy doing the weirdest physics should say 432,000 seconds rather than 5 days even though it clearly violates the system. Let’s give him a pass. Until these current comments I had never heard of “U.S. Customary.”

Len, you seemed to have missed my point again. If the data for the error about enough energy to supply 10 homes for a year had been framed in ergs and seconds I would not have at a glance recognized even a 700% error. (10x365/5=730) In fact I probably would not have gone to the trouble to check it out for plausibility. Once again, use the units that fit the case.

The “Metric System” has been legal in the US since before Germany existed as a country.

And given the size of your gallons, quarts, barrels etc. its IMHO wrong to assign the name Imperial to your units system. “U.S. Customary” came from Wikipedia.

That plus the then-doable managed auto charging eliminates the electricity storage question.

Len, I used the word “imperial” once (and then parenthetically) and only to warn non-Americans that I was NOT using imperial, i.e. British gallons.

I have not bought gasoline in Canada for many years but at that time it was retailed in imperial gallons - although their petroleum barrel was 42 US gallons. I got great mileage.

Doing great things like landing a Man on the Moon has not much to do with the units one uses but the passion of the people with the dream.

Thomas Telford designed and built the first iron bridge in the world using fps and the currency at the time was pounds shillings and pence where one pond was equal to 240 pennies and one shilling was twelve pence.

Sufficient evidence I think to demonstrate that units of measurement have nothing to do with achievement.

The USA is always a puzzle to me since the currency is metric but nothing else is. Wierd.

Let us not forget that the biggest beneficiary from gasoline sales is not the oil companies but Governments. An age of electric cars will cause that burden to shift to either other energy sources or to general income tax.

Malcolm

Well, not exactly. We have coins of ½ (no longer used), 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 cents and a dollar. Only the dime can be called metric. And we speak of eighths of a dollar in terms of bits – two bits is 25 cents or a “quarter”, 50 cents is 4 bits. (With inflation this practice is dying out and is getting irrelevant.) That goes back to Spanish coins that were scored to break into halves, quarters and eighths – remember “pieces of eight.”

Our paper money in ones, twos, fives, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. I can remember seeing 5 dollar gold pieces (now quite valuable) and two dollar bills (minimum bet) were seen in great profusion when a nearby race track was “running.”

Speaking of horse racing, the same system of eighths persists. The mile is divided into 1/8th, a furlong. A track announcer will give the time at say the 5/8th pole. It is also the distance between “blocks” in many cities. The distance between 12th Street and 20th Street in Chicago is 8 furlongs or exactly a mile. The house numbers go up a 100 per block. In Chicago numbering is based on distance from the intersection of State Street and Madison.

System based on base 2, that is ½, ¼, etc. are not any weirder than based on tenths – derived only from our number of fingers.

Europe very badly needed a uniform system of “weights and measures.” The metric system” supplied this need. The US did not have this problem. The pound, degree Fahrenheit, foot and mile worked vey well, as it still does.

It's also likely that an SOFC owner will need thermal storage anyway to balance off their home's electricity demand with its thermal demand. Only thing missing then is a proper market.

Bottom line people use the units they understand and are comfortable with which is why horse raceing fraternity still use furlongs and the size of a horse is still measured in hands. Scientists like the SI system.

Personally I use them all and it doesn't matter to me.

Malcolm

The point I was really trying to make is not the case for dismantling the grid but challenging the assumptions that costs can continually be passed along to the consumer with no effect. Consumers are being forced by price and encouraged by Governments and utilities by persuasion to lower their consumption. That is called demand destruction. When enough people switch their electric furnaces, ranges, ovens, baseboard heaters to gas and all their lighting to LED's and energy intensive industries leave for cheaper pastures there will be very few consumers left to pay the bill. It is therefore very plausible that we will have lots of bright shiny new power plants and nobody to sell the electricity to.

Utilities need to wake up that they are pushing many consumers into this mindset right now and when the right technologies do emerge - as they are right now - the landslide move away from grid supplied electricity may be too formidable to stop.

I think we are getting very close to that tipping point right now.

We hear costs for new nuclear plants now coming in at 10 billion for 1000MW yet nobody - especially the utilities - seem to question why or insists on reduced costs.Since it is only the consumer that pays in the end utilities need to wake up and realize who is going to pay those bills when there are dwindling number of consumers. The old paradigm of perpetual growth of electricity demand is, I am sure, about to end. I would not have said so 10 years ago when gas was also in short supply - but the current situation is vastly different with estimates of 100 to 200 years of supply already discovered in North America and similar vast supplies being found and exploited across the globe.

But back to your point about being able to make supply available to the grid. The key point here is that with large numbers of SOFC installations where will the grid peaks come from to be flattened? The peaks will be shifted to gas supply and there are plenty of gas storage facilities to smooth out those bumps very easily.

I think the actions of Governments and utilities are fast forcing us down the road of distributed energy and a collapse of the grid system of delivery.

Malcolm