Having an Electric Car Would Solve A lot of the Worlds problems

But isn't that exactly what I tried to ask?

Seems to me it really doesn't matter if people go to electric vehicles if the power to produce the electric-recharge is produced from Gas/Oil - yes?

Dallas

I agree but the consumption of oil will fall by people changing over to electric, to produce the electric doesn't have to be fossil fuel.If the scientists of this world got their act together there are many forms of producing energy that doesn't rely on oil.

I think what Bulldog is trying to say is that the electric motor has the potential to be more efficient than the traditional combustion engine. And with the use of solar panels it would be free to fill up

Now before anyone starts shouting "THE TECHNOLOGY AINT THERE YET" "THE BATTERIES ARE TO BIG" blah blah blah... just think of this...

How big where mobile phones 15 years ago and how long did the batteries last???

I remember when a mobile phone was the size of a suitcase and you were happy if you got 10mins talk time. But with investment and research we now get days of power in something the size of a credit card and it can also be used as a camera/mp3 player/radio/personal organizer etc...

Truth is... governments will only invest money, in a technology, if they stand to make money. And if the government invests money in a car engine that can be run for free, using nothing but the Sun, they will lose hundreds of millions of dollars/pounds in tax alone...


Greed is the main problem here.

The Electric car will be with us in the next ten years, America and Britain will loose out , China annd Japan will have the technology looks like were not as good as we think we are.

Originally posted by undercoverchef
I think what Bulldog is trying to say is that the electric motor has the potential to be more efficient than the traditional combustion engine. And with the use of solar panels it would be free to fill up

Now before anyone starts shouting "THE TECHNOLOGY AINT THERE YET" "THE BATTERIES ARE TO BIG" blah blah blah...

It takes 746 watts of battery power to equal 1 horsepower. Motors are not 100% efficient. I'm not sure of the efficiency of motors (I'm sure someone here can tell us) but I'm sure 75% is a good starting point. I would also assume the electric motor would need about 50 horsepower to give us a decent speed and break wind resistance. We will use 25 horsepower to be conservative.

25 Horsepower x 746 watt / .75 efficiency = 25 kilowatts of power per car.

If you consume 25 kilowatts of power from a battery then you must put 25 kilowatts back in to get it fully charged (actually slightly more but we ignore that for now). I don't care if you can charge the battery in 1 minute, 1 hour or 1 day; it will take 25 kilowatts to recharge that battery.

Now, how many cars would you like in a city? Lets say a nice size city like London or New York ends up with 1,000,000 of these electric cars (small percentage of all cars). You would need an additional 25 megawatts of power just to charge these cars. That means more power plants, more transmission lines, more distribution plants, etc...

Where are you going to put the power plant and transmission lines? Land is at a premium already and people are already screaming "not in my back yard". Want to put it out in the country side and destroy more trees???

And we haven't even discussed what type of fuel to run the power plants on.

Electric cars are the answer for selfish people who think in short terms instead of long time frame. Electric cars will work for a few but when they catch on the results will be far worse than our present day cars.

The logic that a cellphone batteries are better now than 15 years ago is also bad. That is because the cellphone uses less power not because the batteries are that much better. If batteries are that strong, why don't we have battery powered toasters, coffee pots, and microwave ovens?

Solar power is not free. Solar cells are very expensive, produce only a few watts, and last just a few short years. Solar technology has a long, long way to go before it is a plausible answer.

[edit on 6/4/05 by Qwas]

www.unitednuclear.com...

this seems to be pretty cool idea, its a conversion kit for normal cars to switch between hydrogen and gas and supplies solar pannels to run the converter.They have not released it for sale yet because they say the converter takes to long to produce Hydrogen.I am not sure how reliable this company is the price seems a little low and i have not heard any thing about there hydrogen storage method.

I Know BMW has a Gas-Hydrogen hybrid in design that gets about 200 miles on hydrogen then you swap it over to gas(another 400 miles)until you can refill your hydrogen.Any way they are using the liquid with cooling method.seems like BMW whould use this companys way if it was any good,but you never can tell.

Any way the point being is that if you could convert your own hydrogen with you own converter with solar panals then that would solve many of the known problems posted in this thread so far.

originally posted by Qwas
The logic that a cellphone batteries are better now than 15 years ago is also bad. That is because the cellphone uses less power not because the batteries are that much better. If batteries are that strong, why don't we have battery powered toasters, coffee pots, and microwave ovens

because no one needs to cary a microwave around in there pocket,although acoffee pot would be pretty cool

[edit on 4-6-2005 by TahoeSkiBum]

Er... i was just trying to explain how it "could" work...

Now, how many cars would you like in a city? Lets say a nice size city like London or New York ends up with 1,000,000 of these electric cars (small percentage of all cars). You would need an additional 25 megawatts of power just to charge these cars. That means more power plants, more transmission lines, more distribution plants, etc...

I did say that the cars could be charged from Solar Power!!!!

The logic that a cellphone batteries are better now than 15 years ago is also bad. That is because the cellphone uses less power not because the batteries are that much better. If batteries are that strong, why don't we have battery powered toasters, coffee pots, and microwave ovens?

You are correct that phones use less power but batteries have also improved. Lithium Batteries where not available 10 years ago!

People do not put batteries in their microwaves because people do not need to take their microwave ovens on the train with them.

Im sure if there was a market for portable microwave's we would soon have the technology to do that. Point i am making is that if the right amount of money were invested we would soon (maybe as soon as 5-10years) have a clean and free energy source for cars.

Solar power is not free. Solar cells are very expensive, produce only a few watts, and last just a few short years. Solar technology has a long, long way to go before it is a plausible answer.

Only a long way to go because there is not enough investment. At the start of WW2 America still had a mounted Calvary and Britain still used Bi-Planes. 6 years later the atom was split and the first jet fighters were in the air. When there is a need we can make massive technological advances in short time.

I really don’t understand why you are so opposed to solar power and electric motors... sure the technology aint there yet but why does that mean we have to give up trying???

Originally posted by undercoverchef
Point i am making is that if the right amount of money were invested we would soon (maybe as soon as 5-10years) have a clean and free energy source for cars.

Only a long way to go because there is not enough investment. At the start of WW2 America still had a mounted Calvary and Britain still used Bi-Planes. 6 years later the atom was split and the first jet fighters were in the air. When there is a need we can make massive technological advances in short time.

I really don’t understand why you are so opposed to solar power and electric motors... sure the technology aint there yet but why does that mean we have to give up trying???

The only free energy source I can think of is gravity and we still have a way to go to get there.

I don't think you grasp the idea of free energy yet. Energy is never free. It is derived from something, somewhere, and has to be transported, and converted. Energy is not a solid that you can hold.

You know, we could go back to the horse and buggy days. Isn't that free energy? No, because you have to feed the horse, and if you have 1 million horses in one town, that's a lot of food and a whole lot of crap.

All future energy decisions need a lot of thought before implementation. An electric car is not going to save money, it's going to raise your electric bill. It will lower YOUR pollution but it's going to RAISE the power plant's pollution. What did we solve???

I'm not against solar power; just the opposite. I live in South Georgia with plenty of sun and heat. Yet no one has solar powered hot water heaters. It can be easily done by running black pvc pipe across your roof or using a heat exchanger on your air conditioner.

But converting solar to electric is another matter. Plenty of research has been done for 20+ years but little progress has happened. Not everything is as simple as the computer world with it's speed doubling, disk capacity doubling, etc...

I've been in the electronics industry for 30+ years. I've spent those years working on computers and seen what has happened (by the way, I can show you computers systems working at 8 MHz that are performing more than a 300 MHz PC). I've worked with pagers and cell phones and know those industries. But that doesn't mean the same can happen everywhere else in life.

I am not advocating to give up on solar power. I think it has a lot to offer. But it is many years away. The same with wind and ocean current power. The future answers are going to be a combination of many things working together. Don't be so quick to jump on one of them and advocate every one should switch to that and save the planet.

We have enough sunshine in Georgia to power cars. I don't think it would feasible in England or the northern US. Wind is a great answer for middle US but not any one else.

The big question is who is going to come up with the next big energy source? Personally, I think it will be related to gravity. So where do we have students learning about gravity, learning how to think on their own, learning scientific reasoning? Another source might be from the heat generated from molten mass in the center of the Earth (don't need to tap it, only get close enough to get the heat).

I'm in my late 40's and am not capable of learning (too set in public school learning/ TV news brainwashing). But what can you do?

[edit on 6/4/05 by Qwas]

Some very good points indeed... Taping into the earth energy is great idea... but again i cant help worrying that human greed is what will prevent us from doing this. You have given me a lot to think about though

Three cars that are on our streets right now that rely on electricity for half of their power. As for power generation, there is wind power, geothermal, tidal power, hydro-electric, and a little known technology that harnesses ocean currents by constructing underwater 'windmill-like' generators which produce many times the power that the landbased type can, due to how much more dense water is than air.
Still, there is one issue that needs addressing if we are to make electric cars ecofriendly, and that is the problem of producing and then disposing of batteries. It takes a great deal of power to make a battery, and when it is no longer usable, the waste is a serious environmental threat. If we were to switch over to electric cars now, the impact on the environment would be no better than that caused by fossil fuels.
Bicycles are a great mode of transport, and they are much more nature friendly.

Originally posted by dave_54
...and battery technology has a long way to go before it becomes practical for most people. Batteries have a very limited range and need complete replacing every few years.

Maybe some day all-electric cars will be practical for large numbers of consumers, but we are not there yet.

Did anyone actually read what I posted??? Not singling you out dave_54 because you weren't the onlyone, but jeez . . . If ya'll want I can post links about two different companies who have working batteries, that they plan on selling, that recharge in minutes, not hours. One of them charges in 7 minutes, the other in about a minute. The one that takes 7 minutes lasts 10 times as long as normal rechargeables. THAT IS SIGNIFICANT!!! This means you can convert any gas station into a recharging station without issue. You just drive in, plug in, and allow it to recharge. Simple as that! It would not use as much electricity, because you aren't plugged in as long. Maybe I wasn't clear enough with my post or something . . . Who knows.

-P

How much does petrol , gas have to cost for the Americans to look for another form of energy to propel your rather large suv type vehicles. Would you pay anything to keep them. i think not, now is the time to dump petrol engines and move to something that isn't oil based, its common sense .

I used to commute 185 kilometers round trip 5 or 6 days a week for 2 years. This is not unheard of in North America. Just wanted to mention to any UK posters who think it is an option for us to give up our petrol burners. There is not a reasonable public transport system covering our continent, and distances between home and work, etc. are generally much farther than in Britain. If I switched to public transit back then, my 3 hour plus commute would have become 5 hours plus. That is just not reasonable. Canada and the US are over 5000 kilometers across, and it will be a while before our public transit comes close to what you take for granted in Europe. When I moved to the town I live in now, back in 1977, they did not even have a bus system. And to give you an idea of the size of this town, it is about 150 000 people spread out over a couple hundred square kilometers. Bicycling around is possible, but when its 10 below in winter and you ride a bike 10 k to work, let me tell you, it aint fun.

To me i think that people think that having cheap petrol will last forever , it wont , there has to be another source of energy to make your lives better. I feel Americans are so reliant on cheap fuel they forget that its running out and you will have to pay more for it.

Of course, I agree, it will become increasingly scarce. I feel that is why the west imports so much oil. There is more oil in the Alberta tar sands than in Saudi Arabia, apparently, but it is pricier to extract, they claim. I think it is more a case of saving our own sources while we buy and use up others'. Then when they run out we'll still have ours. Its just a thought. But imagine the fuel consumption that China will have if their industrial revolution leads to a dramatic rise in the number of vehicles, which I think it will. Canada's oil is going to look very tempting indeed. And our water is already a point of contention with the US, they want to have access to it whether we agree or not, and are using NAFTA to pursue that aim. It is going to get really interesting in a decade or so, maybe sooner....

Bulldog, I'm afraid you haven't been listening to what people here are trying to tell you.

You seem to think that you can make electricity from nowhere by just saying "solar", and it's not true.

I worked as a systems engineer for three years at Solavolt International, a photovoltaics (PV) engineering and production house in Phoenix, Arizona. I am a HUGE fan of photovoltaics, but it's simply not feasible for large-scale production of electricity.

The most power you can get from the sun is 1 kW per square meter at "full sun" which is roughly equivalent to summer noon here in the Sonoran Desert. Here in Arizona, there is the equivalent of 6 hours of "full sun" per day in the summer and about 4.5 hours of "full sun" per day in the winter. Since the best commercially-available PV modules are about 16 percent efficient, the best electricity production you can hope to get is 160 watts per hour per square meter of PV module. Such a module costs about US$800 (L442 UK) , and would, on a summer day here in Arizona, put out about 960 Watts. Assuming you need 25 kW to charge up your car every three days, you'd need about nine square meters worth of PV modules which would cost US$5600 (L3094 UK), with another two or three thousand dollars for the support structures, wiring, voltage conditioning, etc.

Figure about US$8500 (L4500 UK).

We haven't talked about the extra modules you'd have to buy so that you could make extra electricity to make up for those overcast days when you aren't making any, and we haven't talked about the fact that, if you live somewhere like Illinois or Pennsylvania, you'd have to at least double the price, since you only have half the insolation (not insulation, but insolation, which means sunshine). And if you lived in England, the cost would be even higher, given the fact that you receive less insolation.

And we haven't talked about the incredible costs of batteries which weigh a ton and have to be replaced every two or three years and a whole bunch more engineering details.

I'm really sorry that PV isn't the answer, because, like I said, I am a huge fan of PV.

But it isn't.

If you want electric cars, you're going to have to have big electrical generating plants, which means burning tons of hydrocarbons or building a lot of nuclear reactors.

You tell me which one you prefer.

[edit on 4-6-2005 by Off_The_Street]

I see these arguments over and over. I believe there are other alternatives further than just solar, nuclear, fossil, etc. according to what I have studied. I hope to prove at least one of the energy ideas works in the near future. It seems these alternatives are being suppressed, and are not wanted to be known to any great degree.

One possibility (not the idea I will be testing). Think about enzymes and bacteria in our own bodies that break down foods, so we can use it as nurishment and energy. Something like this is allready being thought about for use in cell phone batteries. What about a Bio-Vehicle, that in a way eats (with enzymes and bacteria) to supply its energy? I think there may be all sorts of alternatives for energy.

And I hear the arguments against alternatives. Not efficient. Not feasable. Not this. Not that. What purpose does this serve? Hearing "it can't be done" gets old, and it helps us none. We had better figure out how it "can be done."

Troy

Cybertroy says:

I see these arguments over and over. I believe there are other alternatives further than just solar, nuclear, fossil, etc. according to what I have studied

.

Talk's cheap, Cybertroy. What have you studied and what do you have in mind?

I hope to prove at least one of the energy ideas works in the near future.

Fine. If you do, let us know. But right now, we're talking about a particular type of alternative energy -- in this case, photovoltaics -- and examining it in terms of what is, not necessarily what we want it to be.

It seems these alternatives are being suppressed, and are not wanted to be known to any great degree.

How can I argue that? You don't want to share with us what these particular alternatives are, nor do you want to give us any evidence for how they're being 'suppressed' or who it is that wants to 'suppress' them.

One possibility (not the idea I will be testing). Think about enzymes and bacteria in our own bodies that break down foods, so we can use it as nurishment and energy. Something like this is allready being thought about for use in cell phone batteries. What about a Bio-Vehicle, that in a way eats (with enzymes and bacteria) to supply its energy? I think there may be all sorts of alternatives for energy.

You have a possibility there. Scientists have developed a precusror bio-vehicle that does exactly that. It uses enzymes to break down biomass and convert it to energy for small-scale applications. However, its build and development time is long (three or more years) it is not all that efficient, and does not eliminate polluting byproducts.

It's called a "horse".

And I hear the arguments against alternatives. Not efficient. Not feasable. Not this. Not that. What purpose does this serve? Hearing "it can't be done" gets old, and it helps us none.

It does help us, unless you're afraid to hear the truth, because using basic science and basic math to determine what we can do and what we cannot will save us years of time and millions of dollars that would be wasted in chasing after solutions that don't exist.

We had better figure out how it "can be done."

Troy, that is exactly what we're trying to do here. If you know of an alternative energy source that works or that can be made to work, and you know how to do so, by all means share it with us.

But talking in vague generalities about "other sources" and conspiracies to suppress things may be nice for a sit-around-the-campfire BS session, but it's not doing a damn thing to solve our very real energy problems.

cell phone batteries keepo comeing up in regaurds to the fact that battery tech is comeing along. so why not use the same for a car? well my father was just complaineing the other day that a new battery for his phone is worth over $70. now figure that you would need quite a lot of those to power a car, as well as to actualy make it anywhere. so just the batery cost would be insane. figure needing at least a thousant to run a car, radio, heat (very important in winter), lights, ect. so just baseing battery cost as the sameas for an equil price as a cell phone you would be looking at haveing to spend something in the neiberhood of $70,000 just on batteries alone. and remember that you would have to continuasely replace them, figure at least once a year. who can even afford even a fraction of that cost every year?quite a few people need 4-5 YEARS just to pay for a $20,000 car.

then on top of that you will also have a large electricity bill on top of that. keep in mind that there will be a masive raise in the price for electricity to cover things like new plants (no matter of what variety it will cost a hell of a lot), more transmission lines. some sort of systom to recharge cars that owners don't have the luxury of parking at home. so figure an outlet every 10' on almost every road. plus a way to charge the person who owns the car. you would at that point also have quite a major problem with people illigaly tapping into those suplies, requireing more police to try to keep that from getting out of hand, as well as a raise in price just to cover theft of electricity. you would also end up seein vandalisim of power cords, which if the car is out of juice would end up meaning a loss of work for people.

you know the more i think about it the less sence that electric cars make. just the upgradeing cost to handle thousands of cars would be prohibitive to say the least. we DO NEED something to replace the fuel we currantly use. something that causes less polution. but i don't think electricity is what is needed. just think about the amount of old used batteries needing to be delt with. just to recycle them would basicaly require a new industry to start up. as things stant right now a car battery generaly lasts 5-7 years, those are the big heavy lead acid type. we sell at least 50 batteries a week (more in winter). the type that are used in cell phones tend to need replacement more often. a very expensive propposition to say the least.

.

Wasn't there a study done a little while ago in the States that essentially said that most people don't use their cars to the potential. That is that 80% of all car trips are done in the immediate area, and thus are suitable for electric vehicles.

The actual electrical generation is harder to do, but one only needs to look at a more distributed power system instead of having one huge power station serving hundreds.

In the end the chioce is we either start to learn how to live within the earth's limit's or we die. I'm abivilent about the chioce. LOL!