So who thinks they will be driving electric in 10 years?

Yeah, Mr. Fusion would be awesome. Sadly, it violates the laws of physics. :)

Real fusion has been 30 years away for 50 years or so now. :) Not to say they shouldn't work on it, but maybe not bank on it happening anytime soon.

Everything else has various issues and tradeoffs like any engineering. I'd love everything to be zero emission, having asthma gives one an appreciation for clean air. But I don't expect to have it happen overnight, maybe not ever. Market forces seem to be helping us go that way. I'd be thrilled to get to even 50% and phase out coal. Gas is less of a problem, and nuclear fission is at least a contained issue. Does that make me light-green? :)
 
ttabbal said:
I don't claim to be an expert, but there are a number of sources that seem to back it up.

www.forbes.com

Plunging Prices Mean Building New Renewable Energy Is Cheaper Than Running Existing Coal

New analysis shows renewable energy is beating coal on cost cross the U.S.: The price to build new wind and solar has fallen below the cost of running existing coal-fired power plants in Red and Blue states.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com

blog.aee.net

The Numbers are In and Renewables are Winning On Price Alone

We knew this time was coming: Call it the crossover point, when technologies like large-scale wind and solar come so far down the cost curve that they become cheaper than legacy sources of electric power generation.
blog.aee.net blog.aee.net

Most of the data comes from these guys.

www.lazard.com

Levelized Cost of Energy and Levelized Cost of Storage 2018

Lazard’s latest Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 12.0) shows a continued decline in the cost of generating electricity from utility-scale solar and wind
www.lazard.com www.lazard.com


Reasonably well sourced, if perhaps biased discussion of the subsidy of nuclear insurance.

How much of a subsidy is the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industry Indemnity Act?

thinkprogress.org thinkprogress.org

We're getting into the weeds for a topic on EVs on a machinist forum, but I was asked for sources. These are just a few of top hits from Google search on cost of energy.
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And seem is the operative there. Each of those articles was written during a period of elevated coal prices. Of course, the price of any commodity will fluctuate with time but the past spikes in prices were caused almost entirely by over regulation of coal due in no small part to the Paris Climate Accords. Over the past 10 months of 2019 coal prices have fallen as regulatory burdens are eased and production increases. Fallen by about 45% in fact so at least the portion of cost of electrical generation which falls to fuel has decreased dramatically since those articles were written.

The US has huge recoverable coal reserves. In some areas it is literally more common than dirt. Only regulation has caused the cost of recovery to be inflated artificially. Obama said it, "These jobs aren't coming back" in reference to coal production. Turns out he was wrong.
 
ttabbal said:
Everything else has various issues and tradeoffs like any engineering. I'd love everything to be zero emission, having asthma gives one an appreciation for clean air. But I don't expect to have it happen overnight, maybe not ever. Market forces seem to be helping us go that way. I'd be thrilled to get to even 50% and phase out coal. Gas is less of a problem, and nuclear fission is at least a contained issue. Does that make me light-green? :)
Click to expand...
What is it about driving electric that triggers that "feeling greener" thing? It is mostly undeserved! The electricity came in large fraction from burning fossil fuel.

We know the demand for energy is huge, and will keep going up. Sometime in 2018, UK ran for a week without using coal, though that does not necessarily mean the fossil content was much less. Only 23% was renewables. The rest was gas and some was from nuclear. Coal is less than 1% now, and in a few years, will be gone altogether. That there are huge available coal reserves is not the point. Setting aside that coal is the king of polluting ways to get energy, and even if the profit were reduced to use some technology to "make it clean", the point is that it is Sun energy captured over millions of years being expended in a few decades, and hurting the planet gas balance. We may not be able to burn every last lump of it before life becomes unbearable!

Having experienced the "Tesla trip", I would also like to go electric, and that inevitably brings the mind to giving consideration to the various "green issues" that get plugged, if not hyped. The electric car is not a "green issue icon". It has not the benefit of "Mr Fusion". It still burns fossil in the end. Even so, the green propaganda that comes with it has made me consider this stuff more carefully. It has to be about more than a lovely car that can pull away from a Porsche being revved in launch mode on full tap!
 
After a visit to Japan, I can tell you electric vehicles are in extensive use, hauling millions of people every day. They are called trains, and they work great. Batteries never run down, and they are on time, usually within seconds of schedule. Japan has never had many fossil fuel resources, and what they did have is already gone, so they import pretty much all their energy. Cars are expensive, most people have migrated to large cities (and the trend is continuing) and their public transit network is excellent. My prediction for the far future is that as fossil fuels become more rare and thus expensive, they will be replaced by bio-fuels, which will put our energy needs in competition with our food needs. This will cause the price of arable land to skyrocket and the people who are not needed to farm the land will move to the cities. In a lot of ways, this is what has happened to Japan. It's pretty unlikely for anyone on this forum to see this happen, unless they are quite young and live to a ripe old age, as I see this for the next 50+ years. Cars will be scarce, whether they are electric or bio-fuel and most people with take the train or bus.
 
What struck me about Japan and Singapore come to that is how clean it is.
 
I'll admit renewable may be cheaper than coal as stated by your sources, but I wonder if that's mainly due to the Obama administration. They did shut down many of the coal mines that are now beginning to re-opened.
Is the higher cost due to lower cost of renewable or higher cost of coal ? Can you say Supply and Demand ?

A true comparison is hard to come by when it comes to a comparison between nations. Japan and many European nations do indeed have wonderful mass transient systems like train and they work well, but they are also countries that are smaller than some of our States.
California, the epitome of GREEN and traffic jams, has been incapable of finishing their high speed train.

If you look at the graph of electricity usage vs time of day for the US, you see a peak demand during the time of day that wind and solar are the least reliable and lowest average value for daylight hours. And unless they develop a solar panel that works on infrared light, solar doesn't work at all at night.
The ability to store electric power on a large scale will definitely be a game changer regardless of the generation source, but there's also the issue with the rate that power can be accessed. With the two current methods of storage, batteries and capacitors, there is the issue that batteries don't tend to like large power drain rates or fast changes in rate. Capacitors handle this, but the power density isn't there.
Systems that combine the two work well, but are extremely expensive and limited in size and amount of power storage capability.

Myself, I believe a hydrogen based energy system would be a better way to go. A lot of the infrastructure is already in place when you consider storing hydrogen as ammonia. I wish I'd kept the link to the article about he development to store ammonia in a salt based storage medium that would allow a cars fuel tank to store an amount of ammonia safely that would give the same range as a tank of gas in approximately the same space and weight. The part that needed to be solved was an efficient method to split the ammonia back into hydrogen and nitrogen so the hydrogen could be used for either an ICE or fuel cell.

There's also the need for a better method of combining the hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia, but consider the possibilities.
Using renewable energy sources to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then combine the hydrogen with nitrogen to create ammonia.
It can then easily be stored and/or shipped anywhere it's needed. Long term storage isn't an issue like gasoline and diesel that need stabilizers for long term storage and it's totally renewable since combusting hydrogen and oxygen creates energy and water and the nitrogen is just released back into the atmosphere where both could be recycled with almost zero pollution.

Other then Big Oil stifling this technology or the peoples fear of the "Dangers of hydrogen and ammonia", I just don't understand why this technology isn't being pushed more than it is.
I say many articles and videos showing great strides in the development when gas was $4+/gallon, but almost nothing since prices plummeted. It makes one wonder....
 
Norseman C.B. said:
Hydrogen use just makes sense, it's clean burning and nearly limitless ...........
Click to expand...
I agree that hydrogen burns absolutely clean in an engine, with only water as the exhaust. I would love it! The Toyota Mirai is already here, but it is a fuel cell design. Honda have a hydrogen fuel cell electric design (FCX), and a battery-electric something as well. There is a South Korean thing (Hyundai) as well.

There are some problems! Notice that working the hydrogen into electricity for an electric car via a fuel cell technology is not the same as hydrogen internal combustion in a car engine. Getting a car engine to run on hydrogen is quite easy in principle, though one has to address corrosion effects of flame steam in a cylinder bore. The main problem is hydrogen is so light, you need a big volume of it at high pressure. Hydrogen tanks in cars are not very friendly!

Hydrogen is much more convenient in the form of a high energy density liquid by making a hydrocarbon. As for the limitless supply, right now 90% or likely more comes from fossil natural gas. We use some of the gas fuel to drive the extraction process on the remainder. To use fossil fuel to pull hydrogen back from water is worse than fuel cells, or burning the fuel direct in the engine in the first place. Renewables like hydro-electric, wind, PV solar, and maybe one day, fusion power, extracting hydrogen by tearing apart water, also make less sense than using it to charge a battery.

Fuel cells need hydrogen that was contrived by expending fossil fuel anyway. I think most fuel cell development is on the back burner now, the push being to battery electric cars.
 
You are absolutely correct, that's why I like the ammonia (NH3) solution. If you Google it, ammonia has 3X the amount of hydrogen per unit volume as liquid hydrogen and almost the same energy density as gasoline. It does come with its own issues though as it's very corrosive and can be toxic to humans. It's also heavier than air and cause complications or death in an automotive accident if the tank is ruptured.
When exposed to water, or even the humidity in the air, it does break down fairly rapidly back into its constituent parts of hydrogen and nitrogen so it doesn't pose any pollution problem.

Hydrogen can be burned in a modern internal combustion engine, but it isn't ideally designed to do so. The resultant water from combustion would be corrosive and can emulsify in oil causing bearing problems, but even gasoline & diesel engines result in water formation when burned. Just look at the tail pipe of a running car on a cool morning before the exhaust pipe gets hot, there's a stream of water pouring out.
To efficiently burn hydrogen in an ICE and address the corrosion issues, I do believe it would take a complete redesign, but I don't think it would be a far stretch. Consider the fact that Henry Ford's original concept for the Model T was for it to burn ethanol which, when used in an ICE, poses many of the same issues hydrogen does.

I'll have to look and see if I can find that article about a fairly new method of storing ammonia in a salt based matrix, interesting read if nothing else. It would solve the storage and range issues for hydrogen use in vehicles, but the problem of efficiently splitting the ammonia back into hydrogen and nitrogen on demand in a small scale platform like an automobile still needs to be solved. Another potential issue is that the high combustion temperature of hydrogen causes a fairly high production of NOX. Even if you separate the nitrogen from the hydrogen when splitting the ammonia, the air used for the combustion process is 70% nitrogen.
 
I'm not sure about an electric car, but I wouldn't mind trying out an electric garden tractor. As a kid I was always enamored by the GE Elec-Trak electric garden tractors. They seemed to be adequate for a relatively small property. The accessories available were a mower, snow blower, rototiller front blade, and end loader bucket among others. I really wondered how long they would last with just a couple standard 12 volt batteries for power.

I see today there are several manufacturers like Cub Cadet, Husqvarna, Craftsman, Yard Max, and a few others offering electric garden tractors. The downside is still longevity of battery life. Most are offering only an hour or so of runtime before needing to be recharged. Even the fastest recharge time seems to be 4-6 hours, with the more common recharge time being 10-12 hours.

Another downside seems to be the cost of the batteries. They're nearly $200.00 each and most machines need 4 of them. The manufacturers seem to be touting a 5 year lifespan, which in my mind isn't all that great. Personally I've gotten considerably longer battery life on almost every vehicle. Current auto and truck batteries have lasted an average of 8 years. Tractor starting batteries on the other hand have lasted a bit longer at about 10 years each.
 
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