Electric Cars Continue to Make Inroads

That's similar to here then. We have 110v 15 amp household circuits and

Three, two, one? I'm not following. Are you saying they will wire up an oven to two legs of a three phase circuit? I thought the power company hated that as it unbalances the current.

On Saturday, December 31, 2016 at 6:52:47 AM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrot e:

to have to accept it because solar just won't cut it.

Thermal solar will cut it - you can stored a day or more's worth of solar h eat if your molten salt tanks are big enough. Getting them that well insula ted isn't difficult if they are really big.

But nobody has worked out how to deal with it's radioactive footprint. Wast e that remains dangerously radoactive for 100,000 years is more of a proble m than CO2 in the atmosphere that takes 800years to equilibrate.

ey weren't SUPPOSED to be enriching uranium) some people are afraid of it, like guns, just having one means it is going to go off. They don't realize that there are thousand of nuclear power plants around the world and what, half dozen of them ever had any real problems?

But you really don't want to live anywhere near the ones that have real pro blems.

That's not a serious problem.

for these cars. It would be nice to come up with a way to make them easily rebuildable or refurbishable.

You can recycle spent batteries. Nuclear waste is a bit harder to deal with .

I think the 33 kWHr/gallon number is a bit bogus. EVs get around 3 miles to the kWHr. 33 kWHr would give you 100 miles. How many gas powered cars get 100 miles to the gallon?

So rather than doubling the required electrical production, it would only require raising it by 20%. I think over a 20 year spam that is entirely doable, no?

I'd like to know what power companies are doing in terms of planning for this. They were planning to add another nuke reactor here, but put it off when the price of electricity dropped. It takes years to build these things. I guess it won't hurt them to let demand get ahead of supply and let the price run up! I'd put solar on my roof, but I'd have to remove trees. Maybe I can put it over the drain field.

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hough you could use a single phase if you have the time

no it is not hard, but if everyone starts doing it the supply and distribution network can't keep up

yes some will use 2 out of 3 phases, sure it unbalances the currents but i can also use my 2400W electric kettle, that only loads one phase

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The oil industry spends enough on lobbying to get all kinds of sweetheart d eals. Ever heard of depletion allownances?

Unless it's for lobbyists with a habit of supporting Republican politicians . Jim Infhofe comes to mind.

ant > corrupt mess, with everyone begging for handouts.

That is the American way, set up by the incompetence of the founding tax ev aders, and sustained by all the fat cats that stay rich by exploiting it.

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Trump hasn't paid any income tax for a decade by exploiting the same kind o f loophole. If you can get your hands on a big enough loss - and GM has ple nty to get its hand on - you can do as well.

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Electric vehicles are more important as a mechanism for not burning fossil carbon for fuel than they are in their own right.

If the US could wean itself off its dependence on imported oil, it might ev en be able to get back to a positive balance of trade, and there's areal ad vantage in turning sunlight into useful energy - it's free and there's a lo t more of it than we will be able to use up for quite a while yet.

We've already dug up a lot of the fossil carbon that's available to be dug up, and what remains is getting progressively harder to find, and more expe nsive to dig up. Even if anthropogenic global waerming weren't a problem (a s James Arthur likes to claim) there's still an overwhelming argument for g oing over to renewable energy as fast as possible.

The Koch brother's don't like the idea - it would cost them money - so Jame s Arthur doesn't either.

I'd have no trouble driving to FL, at all. In fact I did, when I lived in NY. It's about the same distance to visit the kid in VT, now, too. We drive up at least once year (we did fly once but it was too much hassle and turned out to save nothing).

I bet you do think EV ambulances would be a good idea.

Three phase is inherently different from single phase or split phase. Converting requires special and expensive equipment. The power company distributes three phase at high voltages and supplies 240 volt split phase to homes (split phase is two 120 volt legs with opposite phases). I don't know how they convert or balance the three phases, but that is their problem.

Homes are typically supplied with 240 volts at 200 amps. The standard charger from Tesla will use up to 80% of the available 50 amps on the standard 240 volt connector. That's 9600 kW. So a full charge (200+ miles) will take some 8 to 9 hours.

Single phase. My house has two 240V 150A drops. I don't think I'd want a third for an EV (or if they'd even allow it).

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but you are right for a gasoline powered car it is unrealistic, it doesn't take the 33% (if you are optimistic) of a combustion engine into account

-Lasse

Without the multiple subsidies and artificial incentives, the electric car biz would die quickly.

I hope my Tesla (when I get it) isn't the last straw that melts down the nuke plant. :(

I don't know about "dying". Certainly it would be stunted. It will be a few more years before the industry will be fully functional and ready to take off the training wheels.

It is bogus because it is comparing the energy content rather than the usable energy content. Anything running through a heat engine loses a

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though you could use a single phase if you have the time

you use all 300A so there isn't room for 50A charging?

What losses does GM have these days? Everything from the bankruptcy is on the books of the old company.

What do EVs have to do with fossil fuel imports? We still need the energy.

Contractors don't just throw money away when they builld. As Rick noted, 200A is pretty standard but that's no enough so they essentially were forced into 300A service (larger panels are really expensive). No, there isn't that much to spare that could be counted on (i.e. without some expensive load shifting - and perhaps a long walk to work).

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The point about internal combustion engineer cars - and planes - is that th ere only get their energy by burning fossil carbon. The energy available fr om solar power isn't - technically speaking - unlimited, but it's a couple of order of magnitude higher than you use at the moment.

It would take a lot of investment, but you could get all the energy you nee d from solar power right - or at least from technology that is available ri ght now. The necessary economies of scale would make the power you generate d cheaper than what you pay for energy right now, but the capital investmen t would be pretty dramatic, though probably exactly what your economy needs ...

On a drive from Foxboro, MA to Putnam, CT the other day, around a 1 hour/ 50 mile ride about half on 65 mph divided highway and 45-50 mph undivided two lane road through the backwoods of northwestern RI and eastern CT, running purely on 87 gas I got around 43 mpg, not a problem at all.

About 20 miles of that was on the 50 mph undivided two lane road through the hilly country of the RI/CT border area, and for that portion my "B" trip counter was reading nearly 50 mpg - the Voltec system does very well at energy recovery on the downgrades.