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150 comments on Better Place - Bringing Electric Vehicles Powered by Renewable Energy
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150 comments on Better Place - Bringing Electric Vehicles Powered by Renewable Energy
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Given that most of our electricity comes from coal, electric cars still use fossil fuels, just coal instead of oil; and they produce as much greenhouse gas emissions, just out of a smokestack instead of a tailpipe. Will the scheme be setting up or buying renewable energy to power the things?
Currently, 1,750 people each year are killed in car accidents; a quarter of them pedestrians, with a total cost to the community of $17 billion. Will the cars being electric reduce this?
Currently, around $10 billion is spent by federal government on roads, money which could be spent on much better things. Hell, it was $55 million a kilometre just for EastLink. Will the cars being electric change this?
Currently, the presence of cheap personal transport in the form of cars means that large shopping malls miles from anywhere come to dominate the landscape, causing small shops to close, destroying small businesses and communities. Will the cars being electric change this?
To make Australia a better place, we don't need electric cars, we need less cars altogether. And eventually none at all.
Yes - as the article noted, AGL will be providing the power and creating it using wind farms.
As to the other issues, the answer is no in all cases. However, I still view a switch from oil fuelled vehicles to electric ones powered using clean energy as a huge step forward - at the very least it mitigates the peak oil and global warming problems. And large swathes of Australia aren't really viable without personal transportation - public transport needs some minimum density of travellers to be worthwhile.
As the saying goes, don't let perfect be the enemy of good...
I'm not. I'm letting good be the enemy of pretty crappy.
Thank you Big Gav for your post. I think the concept is well worth exploring. I posted comments and links to Shai Agassi earlier this year. As I pointed out then, the idea has great potential for a symbiotic-like relationship with PV generated power.
There are two things limiting massive PV usage at present. 1) PV is still very expensive. 2) PV only produces power during daylight hours and storing the electricity is a major hurdle to overcome.
My feeling is that PV costs will decrease soon with thin film technology but the storage problem will not go away easily.
If large numbers of vehicles have storage batteries, as envisioned by Agassi, this might well be the answer to the second problem. Providing recharging during the day would help use the PV generated energy without having to employ pumped water technology (to higher elevation reservoirs for turbine-produced energy later) or other schemes to store the electricity - which usually entail large energy losses.
This alone makes the concept well worth exploring.
The economics of solar for this use look pretty good for some areas of Australia.
If you take Nanosolar's idea of building Municipal power:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/04/solar-thermal-municipal-power.html
Then you have a reasonable 2-10MW power system, which can be built on the ground and so would have easy maintenance and erection, and which would not need transmission to distances or even stepping down.
If we then throw away some of the first advantages, and build the solar arrays as a roof structure then you have garaging shaded from the sun.
First solar quoted a cost of $1.29/watt some time ago, so by the time you have put it in a system you might come out to $3/watt or so.
EV's do around 3miles/kwh, so if you allow 20 miles as the average two-way commute you might need 6kwh or so.
At 30degrees from the equator this is the pattern of solar incidence over the year:
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/chapter1/Chapter1.htm
See figure 1.6
So at that latitude just eye-balling it you might get around 40% of the rated capacity over the course of the day at the spring and autumn solstice.
If you rated the system at 1.5kw per car that would give the needed 6kwh at those times of the year, with a shortfall in the winter balanced by a surplus in the summer when it is most valuable and of course a power supply to the grid over the weekends when the office would perhaps be closed.
Putting the numbers together that is around $4500 per car, over 7 years or so that is about $650 per year, or $3.5 per working day (200days)
A lot of people would pay that to park their car in a shady spot anyway! - and the fuel is then 'free'
You need to also include the cost of the batteries, and their short life, which probably ends up costing more per day than the electricity to recharge them.
That is a different subject to the cost of the electricity supply, and anyway inaccurate.
Even lead acid batteries when allied to capacitors and some excess capacity have decent life, and many of the new batteries such as 123 systems and Altairnano have the ability to cycle many thousands of times.
Both maintenance and longevity are far better on an EV than for an ICE car.
Have to agree there buddy! This is simply a fantasy being foisted on a gullible public that BAU is possible into the idefinte future. Having electric cars does not negate all the other oil inputs into happy motoring such as the road base itself(bitumen); the ongoing maintenance of roads which still requires large trucks and other heavy equipment which presumably won't be electric; the components of the cars themselves from the plastic coated steering wheels to the paint on the plastic bumper bars.
The car culture has encouraged suburban sprawl that must be serviced by cheap individual transport ofthe drivers choice. You want a peoplemover, no problems just buy one. You want a family car that can do soccer as well commuting? No problems. Wahtever car you need to make your life work? Just get it. You want all this choice in electric vehicles? No way!
Once the punters find out that their choices will be limited due to powerto weight ratio limits, Their enthusiasm for EVs will be underwhelming and no amount of marketing is going to change that in a hurry. What people will conclude is that sprawl doesn't work that well without cheap oil, and we better get to and start reconstructing our human habitats to accomodate the new reality.
Termoil,
Wouldn't it be great if the public abandoned BAU, moved into the inner city,or countryside, only used mass transit.
It's not going to occur unless we have a Paul Pot dictatorship. People want to make the minumum change to lifestyle, keep their nice suburban homes and gardens, have private transport.
But wait, maybe they don't have to abandon what they have saved for the last 20years, we are running out of oil, not electricity, we have to reduce carbon dioxide, not eliminate electricity consumption, we have to save water, not stop watering gardens, or stop showers.
Electric cars will not elininate the need for oil, but they can really dramatically reduce oil consumption, giving us time to replace diesel. Mass transit infrastructure can help to reduce oil and traffic, but it takes decades of investment to really make a difference. Cars are replaced faster than houses, roads, rail, so its logical to make the maximum change initially in vehicle transport. Replacing coal generated electricity will take longer, but EV/(battery powered) will stop CTL or hydrogen fuel cells.
I've never really understood the belief that we will just abandon suburbia entirely if there is any feasible alternative open to those who have their life savings sunk into it.
Electric cars are a feasible alternative, and thus their adoption seems inevitable to me.
In my day job I'm frequently in the position of proposing options for projects that aren't able to generate a good enough business case to get funded - and often have to settle for second-best alternatives that acknowledge dismal BAU reality.
That's life unfortunately - no one has an infinitely large amount of money and our starting point is what is out there today. Better place will make suburbia a better place if it succeeds - its not an enemy of Transport Oriented Development and the like - just an alternative which will be necessary for a lot of people - at least for the next couple of decades.
As we've seen in California, real estate in the farther suburbs crashed harder than real estate in nice urban neighborhoods. Gas prices and long commutes certainly played a part, but the bigger reason is that the relative affordability of these areas attracted more first-time and subprime borrowers who took out option ARM loans.
As energy prices rise even more, you can expect the discount on suburban housing to grow even larger, maybe enough to offset the fuel costs of commuting. When cash-strapped governments can no longer afford to maintain utility lines, suburban housing may get even cheaper.
I expect that you are right Neil in that people won't abandon their homes in the suburbs. What they might junk is tripstothe mall, endless weekend sport trips for kids, road trip holidays, long commutes to far flung jobs, large scale home improvement projects, and generally all the other discretionary lifestyle car trips that can be avoided. Given that we are not going to run out of oil, there will still be fuel for ICE cars and probably plenty of them for the next 30-40 years. We can retain the existing vehicle fleet and use it much more efficiently for a lot less investment than this EV proposal. Doesn't it make much more sense to go down that road first? Getting traffic off the roads will assist with longevity of them and we may just find new ways to make suburbs more inhabitable so that people don't have to travel as much.
I don't know about you, but I live in a commuter suburb that is essentially abandoned on a daily basis and it's a weird palce to be on a weekday. I have developed a plan for my immediate neighbourhood which would transform the place into a workable self reliant village in a fairly short timeframe. I now believe that it won't be an oil shortage that kickstarts the plan but widespread unemployment in the next few years. The net effect will be the same. My neighbours and I will have a shortage of money to buy energy to transport us out of here each day so we going to be stuck here. In that situation nobody is going to have the money to even buy a bicycle let alone an EV. We do have plenty of cars though and there is still petrol to be bought and I expect that we will do a lot of car pooling for essential trips. We're going to have an awful lot of bloody good rolling stock that could be mothballed for decades and brought out one by one as we need them.
Not quite sure why think the market is going to just jump at EVs rather than evolve to less driving unless they are forced by some dictator? Thats the great thing about the free market: people are free to choose and once people realise that happy motoring is going to be increasingly expensive (or lame) they will make other choices in how they live. Even if EV's are an alternative, I still think that many people will start to rethink the whole commuter lifestyle.
I appreciate your right to advocate for this new and as yet unproven technology. But as Einstein said "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." I suggest that this fantasy of EV's is simply an extension of the thinking that has created the problems of a society completely dependent on cheap motoring. It is an attempt to treat the most obvious symptom of a much greater systemic disease and as such is doomed to ultimate failure.
The main planks of the EV economy need to be developed anyway, most particularly batteries, as otherwise transport of goods from railheads, small agricultural tractors etc will not be possible.
It is also a stretch to call EV cars an unproven technology. Performance does not yet approach ICE cars with which they currently compete, but they can certainly be done, and battery technology has been improving at around 8% a year for many years.
What is far more unproven is any notion that without extensive use of electricity to power transport people can keep eating in an oil-poor world.
Perhaps I should have framed the context a little better. While electric cars undoubtedly exist and function just fine, the technology is yet to prove itself is widely deployed system which has reached critical market acceptance.
People have been eating for a long time without electricity or oil. Lots of people will keep eating. It is just those that rely exclusively on cheap transported food could have some real difficulties. This is one of the most powerful forces that will force societal change in profound ways. Long before you can roll out the elctric trucks and tractors, people will have found other ways to keep eating if it gets that bad.
Without oil and electricity only a fraction of the present world's population 'kept eating', so there is no evidence at all that this would be possible in the modern world.
Any new technology faces hurdles to it's introduction, but the understanding of what is needed for electric transport to be introduced at a large scale is well understood - the context under which it has so far operated is one in which oil has been cheap, and that is unlikely to be the case for much longer.
Here is one example of what can be done at the moment in trucking:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FZX/is_2_74/ai_n24381330
The costs are high, but not out of line with the costs for petrol driven alternatives, and can only improve.
The British supermarket, Sainsbury's, is also in the process of making 20% of it's home delivery fleet electric.
60 million electric bikes are on the road in China.
In any project it is a good idea to consider upside and downside risks.
On the upside, if this works then BAU could presumably continue, at least as far as transport is concerned.
However, I would view this as the less likely alternative, but development of EV cars should be very helpful just the same.
At the moment huge sums are being spent on developing batteries, and large sums are likely to go on the power systems to run them.
These sums are based on the assumption that tens of millions of cars will be produced annually, so the cost of the research and factories can be spread across them.
The crashing economy means that, in my view, this alternative is unlikely to happen, but considerable personal mobility and also electric tractors etc will benefit from this development work, which would not be carried out if the only market was reckoned to be for a much more modest transport system.
Millions of electric bikes are already on the roads in China, and all sorts of bikes, trikes and EV motorbikes seem likely to take to the roads, at much more modest expenditure and capability than full cars.
The battery research will also benefit buses, and trucks for transport of goods from railheads.
In more densely populated areas, mobility be on demand shared taxis would provide much of the convenience of having a personal car, at a fraction of the cost:
http://www.taxibus.org.uk/
Emergency vehicles will also make life much more possible as a result of this technology, as the outlook might be grim without.
The energy cost of this sort of network and use of EV's would be tiny fraction of current costs, whilst providing some degree of convenience and allowing much more possibility not to immediately abandon suburbs, which would mean that accomodation would be much better than would otherwise be possible and solutions like in-filling for more dense living and re-zoning for more local work could take place over a longer period and the fall in house prices would not be so drastic, which is a major source of financial instability at the moment.
The reduced convenience from current practise should mean though that the pressure would still be on to reduce distances routinely travelled and alter living patterns, but at a rate which would be more practical.
BTW, Ireland is also considering a grid of this kind:
http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=IRELAND-qqqm=news-qqqi...
Of course, it is not nearly as challenging to provide this for a small country as for Australia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
Hi Kiashu,
Currently, 1,750 people each year are killed in car accidents; a quarter of them pedestrians, with a total cost to the community of $17 billion. Will the cars being electric reduce this?
E-Cars even pose a greater risk to pedestrians etc. since they are almost silent. (This problem, however, can be solved with artificial sound or so.) There is research under way (by Toyota, if memory serves) to construct cars which automatically detect pedestrians and slow down. I do hope that the alternatives in carbuilding will include this, and significantly decrease the overall weight of cars. We shall not forget that SUVs cause most terrible fatalities, due to their insane weight. There is a disarmament necessary in all the industrialized nations - this would be a 'better place'!
Currently, around $10 billion is spent by federal government on roads, money which could be spent on much better things. Hell, it was $55 million a kilometre just for EastLink. Will the cars being electric change this?
Lighter cars would reduce the abrasion of streets. But I agree with you: significant reduction of all motorized traffic is necessary.
Currently, the presence of cheap personal transport in the form of cars means that large shopping malls miles from anywhere come to dominate the landscape, causing small shops to close, destroying small businesses and communities. Will the cars being electric change this?
Alas, no. And you might have added congestion as well, which costs a lot and causes many problems. But, even being generally opposed to cars, I like Agassis project.
$17B for 1750 deaths? There are some zeros missing. Or maybe one missing on the "deaths" side and one added on the "costs" side? $10M per individual can't possibly be accurate.....
Practical valuation of human lives is another topic that needs to be addressed in the US, but which cannot be politically managed.
yes, that can be true, but it's a potential cost.
like the wounded soldiers coming from war, people crippled or killed in accidents are removed from the "productive" society. they will not earn (and spend) wages, they will not pay taxes (if dead), they will be added to healthcare costs. on top it all, there's the money multiplier effect, you know, one buyes bread, the bread maker buys flour, the flour maker buys gasoline, and so on :)
I think Kiashu's figures refer to Australian statisitics. Ironically as cars have become safer,you are much less likely to die ina car accident than you are to suffer serious injuries. The lions share of the $17Bn quoted would go towards treating and rehabilitating th injured.
I was unclear; the total cost of all road accidents in Australia is $17 billion and there are 1,750 or so deaths. The cost comes from a University of Queensland . Or you could consider this South Australian look at it.
Costs soon add up.
- destruction of vehicles, and lost time of operation
- Overtime for police, fire and ambulance
- trauma & intensive care
- rehabilitative care
- lost work income of injured and killed people
- coronial and police inquiries
Perhaps you're unaware that in addition to the 1,750 or so dead, we have 70,000 severely or permanently injured people. Brain damage, lost or crippled limbs, and so on. The ongoing treatment of those people is very expensive.