600HP Electric Car

flint338 said:
yeah .. but that big power plant is FAR more efficient at burning oil or coal than your little internal combustion engine. bigger scale = more efficient.
Click to expand...

Hmm..It would be interesting to see some actual figures. It may be more efficient but it still does not solve the problem of fossil fuels becoming scarcer nor does it solve the problem of global warming.
 
Found this from google:
One pound of coal has roughly 14,000 Btu of chemical energy in it. Any reference textbook says that. When that pound is burned in an electric powerplant, steam is made, which drives turbines at high speed, alternators are turned, and electricity is made. When everything operates well, all that turns out to be generally around 30% efficient, meaning that 30% of the chemical energy that started out in the coal has become actual electricity. (The other 70% all becomes various forms of heat, all of which contributes toward Global Warming and other problems). (It turns out that nuclear power is slightly better, at around 32% efficiency, and petroleum and natural gas turbines tend to be around 28% or 29%, but all are essentially the same.) That electricity then has to travel long distances through transformers and wires to get to your house. If you lived right next door to a power plant, it would be fine, but for average Americans, it turns out that around 60% of the electricity put into those wires and transformers never gets to the customers at the other end! It is mostly wasted because the wires become hot because of all the electrical current flowing through them, and they act a lot like giant toasters! People are therefore not generally aware that only around 13% of the chemical energy burned in the coal is actually available as electricity in your house! (The rest, the other 87% all winds up being various forms of heat, all contributing to global warming!) So, for a pound of coal burned, your house electrical outlets then receive around 1,820 Btu of electrical power. Around 1100 Btu of that can actually get put in the batteries, due to efficiencies of battery chargers and batteries. Of the energy STORED in the batteries, the efficiencies of batteries, motors and gear trains are such that around 450 Btu of that are eventually available at the wheels as motive power. (Remember that this is out of 14,000 Btu of chemical energy that was produced when that pound of coal was burned!)

http://mb-soft.com/public/cars00.html
 
POINT: Around 60 pounds of coal (with 840,000 Btu of chemical energy in it) must actually get burned to provide the electricity such that a battery-powered car can do the equivalent to a single gallon of gasoline! (60 * 450 = 27,000) (This is a VERY "losing proposition"!)
 
I don't believe heat is the big contributor to global warming, I though greenhouse gasses were the suspect :p Anyways, I'm all for nuclear power, too bad 95% of the population is too retarded to realise slight amounts of radiation won't turn you into a zombie/cancer patient.
 
wtiger said:
So, we're burning fossil fuels to boil water to spin a turbine to generate electricity, sending it across the city/state/country, charging a battery, and using the battery to run a motor. All this instead of burning fossil fuels and using the gases to run a motor.

Am I the only one that recognizes that not only are you not getting better mileage, you're probably getting worse mileage, just moving the problem elsewhere? That power has to come from somewhere, and as long as we're burning fossil fuels to generate electricity you're not changing anything.


While this is true to an extent you're totally ignoring the much higher efficiency, the ability to clean the exhaust much more effectively, lower cost, plentiful supply of domestic coal, clean burning methane siphoned off of dumps, wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, not to mention fission power and hopefully one day in the not too distant future fusion power. As well as using existing infrastructure. And one other thing that you're ignoring current internal combustion engines are 10-15% efficient at best. A coal fired plant is 30% efficent at worst and 40% at best. Need I say more?
Click to expand...
Good points, but with cleaner fuel sources; hydro-electric, wind, geothermal, solar, etc. it could eventually become a possibility. Honda has a test center on an island in the pacific that get so much rain per year they run everything off of power generated from hydroelectric. The rainfall is enough that it produces an excess and they transfer the power to neighboring islands.
 
tacosareveryyummy said:
POINT: Around 60 pounds of coal (with 840,000 Btu of chemical energy in it) must actually get burned to provide the electricity such that a battery-powered car can do the equivalent to a single gallon of gasoline! (60 * 450 = 27,000) (This is a VERY "losing proposition"!)
Click to expand...

pfft... hello. Nuclear energy. Coal is obsolete.
 
tacosareveryyummy said:
And what exactly do you propose we do with nuclear waste. Either way we are going to polluting.
Click to expand...

Recycle it for other applications.
Burry it where it sits and does nothing. Its not toxic slime leaking into groundwater like in zombie movies. Then when someone gets off their ass and invents other uses for spent fuel which still gives off tons of energy, use it.

Nuclear waste != pollution

If that was the case, oh em geeee extinguish the sun!

You get more radiation per year from the sun by over 100 fold than you do from any spent fuel being stored at a secure facility.
 
Silentbob343 said:
(It turns out that nuclear power is slightly better, at around 32% efficiency,
Click to expand...

Uh no. Coal plants are thermodynamically more efficient than nuclear plants. Nuclear plants that use water as the working fluid are usualy right around 33-34% thermodynamically efficient. Those that have more complex feedwater heating systems bump that up a bit. Coal plants are somewhere in the upper 30s.
 
Nuclear power sounds great and all, but nobody wants another Chernobyl. Not sure where you'd be able to build the power plant. I know nuclear power is really safe, but humans makes mistakes, and eventually there will be a huge accident. People would rather deal with a few deaths a year (in coal power plant related incidents) than a huge catastrophic incident over a lenghty period of time (nuclear power).
 
Yeah, every western designed reactor is a Chrenobyl waiting to happen. :rolleyes: I don't mean to come off like an ass, but do you know anything about reactor design?

As of this moment, US utilites and conglomerates are looking at building a total of 33 new nuclear plants. Many are going to be applying for COLs in the next year or two. Trust me, they aren't having problems finding places to build them.

Coal plants contribute to the deaths of more people than just a few industrial or mine accidents. I wonder how many people have died as a result of commercial nuclear power operation in this country? 0.
 
If the gas powered car did go the way of the dodo the domestic gasoline supply could be used in a Gas turbine combined-cycle power plant which reaches efficiencies in the area of 50% to 60% that even with the losses of transmission and charging would still be more efficient than burning the fuel in your car; which I said earlier is at best 15% efficient. And also as I mentioned earlier it could also see the benefits of scale like being able to better clean the exhaust before it is released into the atmosphere.
 
California's electric grid is over 90% capacity during summer months when everyone turns on their air conditioner. Now add in everyone getting home from work and plugging in their 180KW car (each of which draws more current then the rest of the house in total). Charging the four cars at my house would probably melt the wiring going to it (in reality they would just charge reallly slowly).
 
tickle_me_emo said:
Nuclear power sounds great and all, but nobody wants another Chernobyl. Not sure where you'd be able to build the power plant. I know nuclear power is really safe, but humans makes mistakes, and eventually there will be a huge accident. People would rather deal with a few deaths a year (in coal power plant related incidents) than a huge catastrophic incident over a lenghty period of time (nuclear power).
Click to expand...
this paragraph made me giggle.
 
Nuc_E said:
Uh no. Coal plants are thermodynamically more efficient than nuclear plants. Nuclear plants that use water as the working fluid are usualy right around 33-34% thermodynamically efficient. Those that have more complex feedwater heating systems bump that up a bit. Coal plants are somewhere in the upper 30s.
Click to expand...

Just quoting what the the other poster's quote said.
 
Nemesis999 said:
So, we're burning fossil fuels to boil water to spin a turbine to generate electricity, sending it across the city/state/country, charging a battery, and using the battery to run a motor. All this instead of burning fossil fuels and using the gases to run a motor.

Am I the only one that recognizes that not only are you not getting better mileage, you're probably getting worse mileage, just moving the problem elsewhere? That power has to come from somewhere, and as long as we're burning fossil fuels to generate electricity you're not changing anything.
Click to expand...
As opposed to gasoline which must be drilled out the ground mostly in a foreign country, with untold billions of dollars spent "securing" it, shipped over on a cargo ship, thrown in a refinery to which not all of it is turned into gasoline, then shipped on trucks which also use gasoline, out to service stations all over the country, and then we can fuel up.

At least with electricity it has the prospect of being local, ie coal.

And you are changing thing by removing the pollutants from where the cars are, which typically are where most of the people are located. Not to mention you theoretically could have ways to capture/scrub the pollutants that can be monitored way better than any smog test, of course current administration has given them a free pass and turned back what they should do for cleaning... but I don't want to get off track on a political rant.

But it would be interesting to see the total energy used to get 1 gallon of gas to your car vs 30 miles worth of electricity to charge your batteries.
 
wtiger said:
If the gas powered car did go the way of the dodo the domestic gasoline supply could be used in a Gas turbine combined-cycle power plant which reaches efficiencies in the area of 50% to 60% that even with the losses of transmission and charging would still be more efficient than burning the fuel in your car; which I said earlier is at best 15% efficient. And also as I mentioned earlier it could also see the benefits of scale like being able to better clean the exhaust before it is released into the atmosphere.
Click to expand...


Subcritical fossil fuel power plants can achieve 36–38% efficiency.
Click to expand...

Nuclear power plants generally cannot reheat process steam due to safety requirements for isolation from the reactor core. This limits their thermodynamic efficiency to the order of 34–37%.
Click to expand...

The efficiency of various types of internal combustion engines vary. Most gasoline fueled internal combustion engines, even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, have a mechanical efficiency of about 20%[citation needed]. The efficiency may be as high as 37% at the optimum operating point in engines where this is a high priority such as that of the Prius.
Click to expand...

Well made engines approach the efficiency of a fossil fuel plant.

1) You lose power in the lines from the plant.
2) You lose power charging a battery.
3) You lose power draining the battery.
4) You lose power to friction.

A high efficency internal combustion engine pollutes LESS then an electric car.
 
That electricity then has to travel long distances through transformers and wires to get to your house. If you lived right next door to a power plant, it would be fine, but for average Americans, it turns out that around 60% of the electricity put into those wires and transformers never gets to the customers at the other end!
Click to expand...

The fact remains, until the Luddites give up and we drop the fossil fuels completely/almost entirely for renewable and nuclear fuel sources electric cars will continue to require more fossil fuel then internal combustion engines.
 
On Topic: The Electric car in it's current form is neat but impractical due to issues of range and recharging, primarily steming from inadequate battery technology.

Larger Topic: Our energy driven economy is currently hydrocarbon based. We need to move toward something different such as improved Fission, or better yet Fusion sources for all sorts of reasons, the least of which have anything to do with alarmist notions about climate change.

Energy drives our progress. The more energy we've been able to harness, the more progress we've been able to achieve. However there is a limit to what hydrocarbons can provide. So just as we progressed from burning wood, to coal, to oil, we now need to progress to something else otherwise we face stagnation or decline of our civilization.

Forcing that change by artifically increasing the cost of hydrocarbons (taxation) or by subsidizing immatrure technologies (government subsidies for electric cars) is even more dangerous because both actions steer us away from our primary energy source before we have a viable alternative to rely on. Wind, Solar, Wave power, etc are all novelties in their current form, and too unreliable for sustained large scale production. Nuclear Fusion is probably our best bet for large scale reliable energy production to take us to the next level. Once massive amounts of energy are widely available and economically sustainable, we will see the next "revolution" of change in our society, similar to the amount of change that took place from the 1800's to the 1900's.
 
w1retap said:
Recycle it for other applications.
Burry it where it sits and does nothing. Its not toxic slime leaking into groundwater like in zombie movies. Then when someone gets off their ass and invents other uses for spent fuel which still gives off tons of energy, use it.

Nuclear waste != pollution

If that was the case, oh em geeee extinguish the sun!

You get more radiation per year from the sun by over 100 fold than you do from any spent fuel being stored at a secure facility.
Click to expand...

Now don't get me wrong, I am all for nuclear power. However there really aren't many uses (as of yet) for the spent fuel. The problem is fission requires 235U while the spent fuel is mostly 238U and other by-products. 235U doesn't occur naturally in large amounts. Thats where enriching technologies come in.
And besides, spent nuclear fuel sits in underground bunkers out in the middle of nowhere. Its not like its floating above us, unshielded, emitting radiation like the sun.....Yes, spent fuel is pollution while its sitting in those bunkers.
There is no way the general populous is going to allow more nuclear power facilities to be built. Most are too afraid of terrorism, radiation, or just don't comprehend the fact that we are better off getting rid of fossil fuels.
 
I'm guessing nobody knows about the next generation of co-generation nuclear plants..?
 
tacosareveryyummy said:
Now don't get me wrong, I am all for nuclear power. However there really aren't many uses (as of yet) for the spent fuel. The problem is fission requires 235U while the spent fuel is mostly 238U and other by-products. 235U doesn't occur naturally in large amounts. Thats where enriching technologies come in.
And besides, spent nuclear fuel sits in underground bunkers out in the middle of nowhere. Its not like its floating above us, unshielded, emitting radiation like the sun.....Yes, spent fuel is pollution while its sitting in those bunkers.
There is no way the general populous is going to allow more nuclear power facilities to be built. Most are too afraid of terrorism, radiation, or just don't comprehend the fact that we are better off getting rid of fossil fuels.
Click to expand...

No uses? Cough *Reprocessing* Cough *Fast Fission Reactors*


And BTW, the general population is in favor of new nuclear plants.
 
Steve said:
Check out this video of a 600HP electric car. Tech related and car related, sweet! That’s a double bonus!
Click to expand...

I dont want to come across wrong, but my view toward this is similar to the people who claim 1,000hp out of a honda civic engine anytime someone mentions figures about a V8.

Im not arguing that a 600hp electric "car" is extreme or unreasonable, and I wont argue that its impossible to make 1,000hp out of a honda civic engine. What I will argue and disagree with, its the point and practicality of it. Electric motors may be fine for pushing grandpa around in a wheelchair at a brisk pace, but the energy storage (batteries) still leaves much to be desired for passenger car and light-duty truck use. Much like a 1.5 liter honda civic engine producing 1,000hp... a passenger vehicle or small truck relying on batteries alone isnt going to go far, or last long.

You can sit here and say to yourself "oh things are getting better, the batteries are catching up". So are Gasoline/diesel/turbine hybrid cars. I would like to see GM or ford put effort into making small hybrid cars, which can be recharged from electrics or powered from gas/diesel/alcohol. Though I suppose, expecting GM or ford to design anything which has better fuel economy than a 30 year old toyota, is too much to ask for.

Anyways... On monster garage a year back or so, they built their own electric dragster using, I think it was NiMh cordless drill batteries?
 
JethroXP said:
Huh? That's probably the most rediculous thing I've read today. Incentives are the key to getting people to switch, and you want the government to pay for it? People will switch when it benefits them, but creating an artificial benefit at the expense of taxpayers is not the way to do it. Why should I have to subsidze your new electric car? When the technology is matrue enough it will sell itself without burdening the tax system.
Click to expand...


You're already subsidizing large SUV's in the form of a tax break. Why not just roll that subsidy away from the gas guzzlers and onto an electric car?
 
Nuc_E said:
And BTW, the general population is in favor of new nuclear plants.
Click to expand...

Not only that, but we are getting ready to build another nuclear plant at our site. The area is already approved, and the new energy policy act allows for more nuclear plants to be built. They are going to start breaking ground soon. :)
 
shadowfax said:
You're already subsidizing large SUV's in the form of a tax break. Why not just roll that subsidy away from the gas guzzlers and onto an electric car?
Click to expand...

And what tax break would that be? Nevermind that *not* taxing something is far different than choosing to spend taxpayer money on something.
 
w1retap said:
Not only that, but we are getting ready to build another nuclear plant at our site. The area is already approved, and the new energy policy act allows for more nuclear plants to be built. They are going to start breaking ground soon. :)
Click to expand...

I'm all for new nuclear power. We control it, without dependency on foreign sources for fuel. I just hope these new plants are being designed with multiple layers of physical security. I worry far less about an accident inside than I do about some whacko with a truck bomb outside. Air space for a 10 mile radius around the plants should be a no-fly zone as well. I'd have no problem with installing AA missles at these plants.
 
JethroXP said:
I'm all for new nuclear power. We control it, without dependency on foreign sources for fuel. I just hope these new plants are being designed with multiple layers of physical security. I worry far less about an accident inside than I do about some whacko with a truck bomb outside. Air space for a 10 mile radius around the plants should be a no-fly zone as well. I'd have no problem with installing AA missles at these plants.
Click to expand...
Current security is not to be discussed with the public. Lets just say you have no idea. :p
 
w1retap said:
Current security is not to be discussed with the public. Lets just say you have no idea. :p
Click to expand...

After 12 years in the Army, with over a year in Bosnia, I have a few ideas. Good to hear that it's not being taken lightly.
 
Nuc_E said:
And BTW, the general population is in favor of new nuclear plants.
Click to expand...

Many people are in favor of wind power too however, it always ends with one simple acronym

NIMBY

Not
In
My
Back
Yard

And this is what will stop nuclear power, this is what has stopped wind power from going into places where it's efficient, CapeCod/Martha's Vineyard... Tennessee for crying out loud! Everywhere there are people they dont want to see or "feel" the impact of that power .
 
All the hippies and libs against nuclear power should practice what they preach and educate themselves about nuke plants. Being open minded and accepting new changes should be a top priority, especially if it means zero greenhouse gases being produced.

Its pretty funny though. I was taught all through school that nuclear power was bad and dangerous. Now I'm working at a nuke plant, and I find it to be the safest out of any mass production of energy, and by far the cleanest for the environment. My family has along line in the power production industry, starting back in 1903 with the Edison company starting up.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Many people are in favor of wind power too however, it always ends with one simple acronym

NIMBY

Not
In
My
Back
Yard

And this is what will stop nuclear power, this is what has stopped wind power from going into places where it's efficient, CapeCod/Martha's Vineyard... Tennessee for crying out loud! Everywhere there are people they dont want to see or "feel" the impact of that power .
Click to expand...

The best place for wind power is the farmlands. Most farmers are more then happy to give up several small sections of their land for the building of wind turbines. The farmers get a guaranteed yearly land rental fee that is greater then anything they'd produce on that amount of land, and the rest of us get clean energy. There is literally room for hundreds of thousands of these turbines in North America, and I guarantee you that 99% of farmers would welcome the combination of a small boost in income, a reliable base income, and slightly less work to do (less land to tend).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top