ceacar99 said:
why cant people admit that electric cars are actually great town cars? its indeed true that they rarely have a limit more then 200-300 miles in a charge(which usually means 200-300 mile limit in a day) but they are great for getting to and from work in lots of cases and going to the store. they can even exhibit superior performance to combustion systems. there are electric cars that can out accelerate almost anything on the street, 800hp electric cars and because the dynamic way you can design the drive systems in those cars they can even be designed in such a way to have superior agility.
Certainly better breaks that don't wear out easily. Dynamic breaking doesn't actually use break disks; it breaks by taking power form the engine and using it to recharge the batteries. Due to conservation of energy, this causes very rapid deceleration.
sorry had to talk about that because a lot of people have been picking at electric cars in this thread when the fact is that other then range limits they are excellent machines and operate for less money then anything else on the road.
Electric motors last longer and actually have a simpler design. They do not generate anywhere near the same kind of heat and thus can be oiled using vegetable oil instead of expensive motor oil. Because they don't really heat up, they don't need oil changes, or rather, they typically don't need an oil change for a good 50,000 miles or more. The drive system is completely different and doesn't require a transmission.
When all is said and done, electric cars have almost no maintenance costs.
Biodiesel made from foodcrops such as soybeans and sugarcane add to the concerns about rising food prices due to the shifting of crops from food production to energy production. Maybe it's wrong to call that a scam. Let's simply call that 'inhumane'.
its quite obvious that 99% of all the crops that produce fuel are impractical, however thats why there is such a sudden surge into algea. nothing on this earth can grow as fast as algea and so pretty much if we cant produce enough fuel with algea(which can be grown pretty much anywhere, not just in large open outdoor spaces) then its time to shift away from fossil like fuels and go for something else.
QFT
Ethanol from corn is simply a play to get votes from corn farmers. It was a play to the corn farming lobby and nothing more. Honestly, Obama supported it because he wanted Iowa. Since Iowa really is responsible for giving him a chance at the primary, I'd say his strategy worked.
Ethanol from algae however is a good idea. You can grow the stuff in buildings.
Change all cars to electric ones and the Olduvai cliff comes in sight: the electric network will not be able to cope with that, resulting in brownouts, temporary blackouts and eventually: permanent blackouts. Woohoo! Alternative energy rocks!
Not.
it'd result in more power plants, not brownouts....
Again QFT.
Supply and demand. Actually, while energy consumption would change, much of that energy would be at night, when people plug in their vehicles. Power plants run 24/7 and they don't magically store any excess power they produce. So increased consumption at night would really just result in more efficient usage of the power they are already generating that is simply going to waste.
Any truly new requirements for additional energy would result in more power plants being built. The only roadblock to that would be legislation preventing them from being built at the state or local level. This includes cost prohibitive taxes and fees as well as pricing regulations like we have in Pennsylvania. Currently there is a hard cap on electricity generation billing prices. This cap has not been adjusted for inflation or increased costs on the part of the power companies. Thus if we do not let the rate cap expire, power companies will have no incentive to provide Pennsylvanians with electricity since it will cost more money to generate than they are being paid. The result is brownouts and blackouts.
A very meaningful comparison: gasoline stores 20 times the energy per pound than the most efficient batteries.
how about hydrogen? it actually can be considered to be a battery. i mean you apply an electrical charge to a substance which causes a reaction, you collect the "charged" part and then later down the road you use another chemical reaction to release the energy. sounds like a battery to me....
gasoline may not be an option, conventional batteries either, but you COULD use electricity to create hydrogen thus charging up a unconventional battery, and that battery could be used to power something in all manner of ways, it could even be used in a conventional style combustion engine.
The issue with hydrogen is how to store it. Hydrogen is more rapidly combustible than gas is. We have the tech to use methane to recharge hydrogen fuel cells, but again, methane is highly combustible. Additionally, both methane and hydrogen are gases and difficult, expensive, and dangerous to keep under high pressure. The kind of pressure needed to be maintained in a gas tank for an automobile.
However, there is research being done on Methane clathrate. It is basically a solid "sludge" form of methane. It's ice with methane trapped inside. This form of methane storage is EXTREMELY dense, and very very stable. It is the ideal form of storage for methane. Unfortunately, currently we don't have a very efficient way to extract the methane. Nonetheless, if we can discover an efficient way to extract methane from methane clathrate, we'd have a very good storage medium for material used to recharge hydrogen fuel cells.
Besides hydrogen though, there is a take on an old technology that's seeing great possibilities: capacitors. Step capacitors specifically. In some ways they are far superior to batteries. One big example is charge speed. They recently developed a flashlight for example which uses a capacitor instead of batteries; it charges fully in 90 seconds and you get something like 30 minutes of charge or more. As capacitor technology improves, recharge time decreases, and usage time increases. Capacitors are also far less toxic.
Then there's a new battery technology involving nano technology and genetics. IIRC MIT has developed a form of liquid nano battery. Why is this particularly good? Because it would allow a car to refuel in the same amount of time as they do currently. How? Instead of recharging their "batteries" (the nano batteries), they would swap them out for new ones. You'd go to a nano-battery station, pump out your old batteries, and then pump in new ones. The station then recharges those batteries, and once charged, sells them to someone else. The cost would be slightly more than standard electricity generation, but the speed and versatility would be far greater. Additionally, they could be recharged at your house like any other battery.
No it is not. Look around your house. I guarantee you that everything you see there is there because of fossil fuels. Whether it is in transport or manufacturing, fossil fuels made it possible.
they could have collected the wood for my table by chopping down a tree with a hand axe, letting it float down a river to a mill and cutting it up with machinery powered by MUCH more efficient electricity, then it was put together by both hand and electric tools.
i've allready posted a LOT of shit that demonstrates that PETROL IS NOT NEEDED TO RUN MACHINERY, its just the damn truth.
It is however required to make most plastics. Many people forget that.
There are only so many rivers, waterways.
but plenty of nuclear material, things to burn, sunlight and wind....
Not to mention, Fast Breeder Reactors make their own fuel and can continue to do so for a good 500+ years straight without ever needing outside fuel. The spent fuel that is left over is inert and non-radioactive.
How are you going to erect windmills in the middle of the Northsea or even close to the shore in the sea if you only use manpower?
as said before the machinery in the world is powered by petrol because its been practical till recently, however its not the only option......
There are newer and newer ways of transmitting power. You probably didn't know but currently, you can safely install outlets in your house that generate "wireless electricity" that can safely power quite a lot of stuff. You plug one module into an outlet and another module into the device you wish to power and the electricity is "beamed" to the device. There is a limit however to how much power can be drawn in this way safely currently. But it's enough to run a vacuum cleaner, a TV, a DVD, etc. Not enough to run a high powered desktop computer though. Not yet at least.
Also, there has been new research into other wired forms of transmission. One particularly promising one has the potential to be able to convert light of a very specific frequency directly into electricity with almost 100% efficiency. No this isn't applicable to solar tech. It is however applicable to powerlines. Why? Because 90% of all power generated is lost over powerlines due to electrical resistance. No light however is lost over fiber optic cables. Thus, where we currently have transformers for high voltage lines, there could be boxes which convert that specific frequency of light into electricity. Thus we'd have the same effect as transmitting power over superconductors. It would also be safer and easier to maintain. Fiber is cheap; in fact with current rates it is cheaper than copper. Fiber is also safer; if a big fiber optic cable gets severed in a storm, you don't have to worry about it setting everything on fire like you do about electric lines.
If you had powerlines converted to this type of system, you'd need one tenth the number of power plants we currently have.
