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- One of key competitive advantages the fossil fuel industry has had is the huge capital, complexity risk and high level engineering skills required to develop them. This has two impacts. Firstly it created huge barriers to entry in the market – a disruptive entrepreneur can’t build a coal power station, drill in the deep ocean, buy an oil tanker or develop a coalmine. They can play on the edges, like shale gas, oil trading or mineral exploration, but they can’t play the main game. Secondly the industry has had huge incumbency power – it’s very expensive and politically hard to consciously and deliberately close down such a powerful industry and replace it. Thus action on climate change has stalled for decades.
- Both of these benefits are gone when you combine “energy as a technology” with most growth in energy demand being in developing economies. With renewables already competitive today without subsidy in some markets and the above trends playing out, it is inevitable that before long – maybe a decade – virtually all new electricity generation will be from renewables. Add in the need to be clean – not just for climate change reasons but for local air quality – and the choice developing countries will face will be between large, old, dirty, hard to finance infrastructure that requires heavy government support or small scale, easy to finance, more convenient, popular and clean energy and transport that will get even cheaper over time. Tough choice?
What I'm about to say may bring to mind the old saying about how a man won't believe anything his paycheck is dependent on not believing...but I'm still unsold on the electric car as "disruptive." (Firstly, that's not a word that applies in this case, as electric cars aren't new, and Tesla trades more on coolness than anything, but I digress.) GM tried to sell electric cars years ago, and they flopped. GM and Nissan are both selling electric cars now, and neither is getting customers to flock to them. Tesla sells luxury cars and keeps promising an affordable alternative, but can't come up with one. Anyway, it's not their wheelhouse, and as soon as they can make one, all of a sudden their diluting their own brand; they have a lot of reason not to make one. But anyway, all this is beside the point. Let's imagine a world where everyone is driving electric. My fundamental question that I've never seen addressed, and one that I think is non-trivial, is what will be the fate of all those batteries? Batteries are among the most polluting things you can put in a landfill, and if we're talking about, say, 20,000,000 cars per year (assuming they will sell more cars in the future than they do now), that's not nothing. I don't know if it's enough to make a large scale environmental disaster, but it's a problem of trading a low toxicity, huge volume pollutant, to a high toxicity, low volume pollutant. And this is assuming that the number of batteries is equal to the number of cars. It won't be, because they only way full adoption will ever take place is if batteries can be swapped instead of charged (as I doubt long driving distances will cease to be a thing if it's even cheaper to drive in the future than the present, especially if the cars will navigate themselves to your destination). All this isn't to say that I don't long for advent of renewables. I just think it might not be so cut and dry with cars.Then we add in electric cars, which are now on the same path – converting a staid, slow moving industry (traditional auto companies like GM) into a disruptive technology driven one (innovators like Tesla). Electric cars will accelerate the end of fossil fuels by joining with renewables to create a system shift, both directly by using clean power to charge them and indirectly by driving battery costs down to create storage for distributed renewables.
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Bad news, b_b. I'm stuck in a boring webinar on Facebook which means this is going to be even longer than it should be. And since I spent a year designing and building electric cars back when the GM EV-1 was king, I'm in a position to say lots of things. Otto Cycle vs. Electric: Efficiency. Chemistry and physics dictates this comparison. The efficiency of any internal combustion engine is governed by the temperature differential between the exhaust and intake strokes. This is a big reason why Diesel engines are used for everything big; they run hotter. It's another reason why the Great White Hope back in the oil crisis was turbine engines. An ideal internal combustion engine intakes at absolute zero and exhausts at plasmid temperatures but dinosaur blood pretty much limits gas engines to about 18% efficiency. Now check this shit out. Electric motors are so dominant from an efficiency standard that the IEA banned transpo-sized electric motors under 90% efficiency back in '92. And sure - maybe you've got to burn coal in order to power the motor. But that coal plant is twice as efficient as your 4 stroke gas motor and the emissions controls are hella better, too. 30% x 90% is still 27% - your worst-case electric car is 50% more efficient than your best-case gas car. Otto Cycle vs. Electric: Durability. A gas motor is a bunch of high-temperature reciprocating mass grinding around itself in subservience to thousands of petrochemical explosions per minute. A piston has to go up and down twice in order to contribute 18% of the energy of a combustion cycle to the crank shaft. Poppet valves have to go up and down once. This lateral motion is converted to rotary motion through force; there's a piece of heat-treated steel about two inches in diameter keeping things spinning about. That then interfaces with a fluid clutch system and a bunch of planetary gears all whirring and whooshing amongst fluid the rough consistency of Aunt Jemima. This rotating mass weighs somewhere between 300 and 1500 lbs, depending on where you define it, and none of it is contributing to getting you down the road other than as a system of constraint, turning explosions into rotational motion. An electric motor, on the other hand, has one moving part. It makes peak torque at zero RPM and since it has exactly zero reciprocating mass, can be spun up to hundreds of thousands of RPM (if that's what you choose to do with it). I've built three electric cars; all of them had transmissions, but none of them were ever used for more than "forward" and "reverse." Outside of the "hybrid" paradigm that we're using at the moment, the ideal electric car has a motor in each wheel and a controller. That motor is a brake, too - reverse current through it and you can absorb a percentage of your forward motion back into the batteries through power generation (although efficient motors do not make efficient generators). An electric car gets to ditch the radiator, the oil, the oil cooler, the transmission, the differential and the driveshaft. That's pretty goddamn disruptive. Otto Cycle vs. Electric: Sustainability. Back when I was studying vehicle design, we were fond of pointing out that the energy density of gasoline was such that if it were discovered today, it would be banned. Here's a scary chart: gasoline has a higher energy density than TNT. It has double the energy of LPG and quadruple the energy of hydrogen. It's a stone-cold bitch, pound per pound, to match gasoline. But it's not "recyclable" either. You burn it up and it's gone. The win gasoline has is effectively "rapid charging" - I can pour 120 miles into my Benelli in about 30 seconds. But hey - right now, a Tesla Supercharger will dump 170 miles into your Tesla in an hour. Long-haul trucking? No, not really. But the benefits of electrics are such in around-town driving that I see more Teslas than I see Astons & Maseratis combined... and they're priced about the same. I know three people with those little electric Fiats. They're selling like hotcakes around here. By the way, recyclability has gotten way better. Tesla recycles 60% of their packs by weight, and 1% of the weight of a lithium-ion battery pack isn't recyclable and environmentally friendly. Best guess, that's 10 pounds of waste for the entire thousand-pound battery pack. GM's electric cars didn't flop. They were artificially limited. They had a waiting list. GM killed them right about the time they introduced the Hummer H1 because margins on sport utility vehicles are ridiculous. An electric car, on the other hand, is an electronic device, which means it's tied into Moore's Law. The controllers really do double in power every eighteen months. We used to say that one gallon of gas held the same energy as a thousand pounds of batteries. That was 20 years ago and we said it would take a moon shot to make it any better. Now? Now a gallon of gas has about the same energy as about 200 pounds of batteries. Our moon shot was cell phones, and they're still going. A Tesla Model S right now is basically a luxury car with a five gallon gas tank. For 95% of the driving most people do, that's more than enough. The problem with electric cars at the moment is that 95% of the market thinks they're that last 5% and they're not willing to pay one-percenter money for that 5% limitation. That won't last. Tesla and Panasonic are operating the Gigafactory jointly and Panasonic is the largest supplier of EV batteries by far. Their whole brand strategy has been exotic to high-end to mid-market to budget and they're dominant from a high-end standpoint. This ran just this morning. In short, you are disregarding a number of important factors that put your sentiments in dispute, to put it mildly. Electric cars are a big fuckin' deal already and they're only going to get bigger.
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Do you think we're likely to see battery swaps for the people who need rapid charging? But it's not "recyclable" either. You burn it up and it's gone. The win gasoline has is effectively "rapid charging" - I can pour 120 miles into my Benelli in about 30 seconds. But hey - right now, a Tesla Supercharger will dump 170 miles into your Tesla in an hour. Long-haul trucking?
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Never. You're much better off tucking batteries in odd corners where they don't interfere with things. You shape them like wadded up bunches of playdough and tuck them under the seats. Pretty much anywhere "accessible" you'd put batteries you'd rather put cargo anyway. Presume you've got only a 200lb battery pack (you're more likely to have 800-1500lbs). Offloading 200 lbs of barbells out of the trunk isn't a quick thing you'd want to do at service stations; a unitary thing under the chassis ain't gonna happen.
I get all the stuff about efficiency (although I have to point out that this is backward: "An ideal internal combustion engine intakes at absolute zero and exhausts at plasmid temperatures"; the hot reservoir is where you take from, and the cold is where you dump to [work being the difference in the intake heat and output heat]), as I have a degree in ME also. I'm not arguing against electric cars; I'm wondering about what challenges they'll face and how the world can cope with them. The fact that to date, we haven't seen a mass market EV shows us that the challenges are real, even if surmountable with time.
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Points for fact-checking my thermo. But. The Tesla Model S is a mass-market EV. The MiEV is a mass-market EV. The Nissan Leaf is a mass-market EV. There's a long list of mass-market EVs that are absolutely, 100% ready for prime-time and they're selling. They aren't selling in Detroit, that doesn't surprise me at all; everywhere that isn't 100% committed to an obsolete technology is all over it, though. I built with Advanced DC 9" motors and Optima yellow-tops back when I was in college. Shit might as well have been Kitty Hawk. Motor efficiency hasn't really changed in 50 years but the controllers we had back then were fuckin' through-hole circuitry. We were saying things like "some day soon there will be 1 farad capacitors." Aerodynamics doesn't change, electric motor efficiency doesn't much change, but the thing between the cord and the motor is virtually unrecognizable. We piled twelve hundred pounds of Sonnenschein NiMH batteries into Viking 23 and it cost $50k. The same equivalent energy from Honda is under a thousand dollars. We're there, dude.
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I guess we're disagreeing on the definition of "mass market", which is ok. To stick to hard numbers, Tesla sells something like 10,000 cars per quarter (at an operating loss, even at $80k or whatever they are), and the Leaf sells about 4,000 (in the US; I don't know about their global). The Corolla, by comparison (which I consider to be the gold standard of fuel efficient cars), sells more than 80,000 per quarter, while the Cruze sells about 60,000. Sure they're selling, but they're niche at this point.
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C'mon, man, you're better than this. Google tells me that there were 16 million cars sold last year. Inside EVs tells me that 160,000 of them were electric. That's one percent. Not a lot no matter how you look at it. But these are durable goods we're talking about. The IRS depreciates cars over a 5 or 6 year period and for our purposes, EVs weren't even available until 2011. Compare and contrast: the first DVD player was introduced in 1996 and didn't match VHS sales until 2002... and DVDs cost $20, not $20k. There were under 20k electric car sales in 2011; in 2014 there were 320k. That's a 100% increase, year over year, every year. Tesla wasn't even a manufacturer five years ago and now you're arguing that because they aren't outselling the Corolla they never will. If you can walk down to the dealership and see one on the showroom floor, it's mass-market. The difference with electric cars is there's likely to be a waiting list.
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It ain't like we're talking lead acid, yo. all it takes is economics.