5PM, I'm in a hotel in Santa Barbara. We had a late breakfast in San Francisco. We stopped for gas once, for about 5 minutes, and ran 75-80 MPH most of the way. And we climbed some serious hills towards the end.
There weren't many traffic lights.
Do you warm up your car? It's not good for it.
Does your car need "motor testing" every day?
John
engine
the same output?
World-wide, it's 16% hydro and 15% nuclear. Together, they constitute almost a third of the world's electricity generation.
Coal is 40%, gas 20%, oil 7%, and "other" is 2%.
S.
Transmission losses can be between 1 and 2 percent. Even a really bad grid should be able to keep the transmission losses to under 5% .
GE will sell you a 60% thermally efficient combined cycle unit (H1). It definitely will run on natural gas. It may run on oil. Using it to burn pulverised coal will drastically shorten its service life.
Nuclear plants should be able to achieve gobsmacking efficiencies if we can conquer the psychological and engineering barriers of designing the reactor pile to be a thoroughly contained, ball of radioactive, incandescent gas. The reactor is based on the gaseous cored, nuclear thermal rocket engine (check out The Atomic Rockets Homepage
If you are afflicted with that horrid bugbear from ancient times named 'the carburator', there are instances where warming up is a necessary evil. I had a '76 T-bird that would flood with the least provocation in cold weather and losing the power assist to the steering of that nose-heavy land yacht, in a turn, threatened to break your thumbs as the steering wheel spins along with the castering front wheels. I let the car warm up, after that.
Not that bad either. On the low end there are the older single-cycle (coal fired) steam plants which get some 35% efficiency. But modern combined cycle gas rankine turbine plants get close to 60% efficiency. Many such plants have been built and are in operation today.
The general idea is that it is easier to control emissions from a few large power plants running at optimal efficiency than it is to control it from thousands of vehicle ICEs.
These plants have amazing filter systems. Better than what would be affordable for automobiles. Besides that, they run at optimal RPMs, reducing pollutions to a minimum. That cannot said about automobile ICEs in city traffic.
Rob
Sevenhundred Elves wrote
engine
the same output?
Like hell it is.
That neither.
Nope.
You've plucked those numbers out of your arse. We can tell from the smell.
It's a long trip for an electric car ... I am thinking about commuting, about 50 km range.
NiMh or Li-ion batteries and new electronics for energy recovering, will take all "serious" hills with a breeze.
:)
R.L.Deboni
Ehm, ... engine "tuning"... How many time, in a car life time, the engine is powered before and after repair work ? And the do-it-your-self tuning? You can't do it without starting the engine :-) I am wondering how it will sum up on the end.
All this is not necessary with an electric motor.
Old times. Anyway, what is the efficiency of a cold ICE ? How much time/fuel it takes to peak ?
And how many owners keep their engines in perfect order ? Talking about 10'000 cars, how many ? And for what percent of their life? Sum it all up ... it's all nibbling energy every where.
Mainly in suburbs. I can't build roundabouts in the city center and European citys are mostly old, with narrow streets ... :-)
How about remote locations ?
Hmmm, we could split the total efficiency on all products, on quantity or economic value.
R.L.Deboni
Total rubbish. Unless you live on the doorstep of the power plant.
Graham
I know, I just posted about it in this very thread.
Graham
How mnay cars with carburettors still exist other than in museums ?
Graham
But the bulk still comes from those old coal fired plants. And have you noticed that natural gas for those GE turbines is getting in short supply these days ?
Never heard of catalysts ? Saab's 9000 claimed to actually CLEAN city air as it drove through it and they did a crazy demo to prove it too. It's on youtube or Google video or somewhere.
But they produce very different pollutants. Not directly comparable.
Series hybrids can.
Graham
Then there's the pebble-bed reactor, whose fuel is uranium carbamide, a refractory ceramic that stays solid well above the melting point of metallic uranium. The PBR further encapsulates its fuel in silicon carbide "pebbles", allowing operation at much higher temperatures than water-cooled reactors, though not as terrifyingly high as a gas-core reactor. Some of these have been built in South Africa, and there is an American company called Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. (Don't you love the Golden Age SF resonance?) that has designs for small (10-50 MW) package systems that could replace big diesel generator sets. Unfortunately, their Web site,
""" ...Although half the [USA] uses coal-fired plants, EVs recharging from these facilities are predicted to produce less CO2 than ICE vehicles. According to the World Resources Institute, EVs recharging from coal-fired plants will reduce CO2 emissions in the country from 17 to 22 percent.
Reductions in pollutants such as HCs, CO, NOx, SO2, and particulates vary according to a region's power plant mix. If EVs were introduced on a global scale, urban pollution would improve significantly...
...
In a study conducted by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, EVs were significantly cleaner over the course of 100,000 miles than ICE cars. The electricity generation process produces less than 100 pounds of pollutants for EVs compared to 3000 pounds for ICE vehicles. (See Table 3)
Engine Type CO ROG NOx Total Gasoline 2574 262 172 3008 lb. Diesel 216 73 246 835 lb. Electric 9 5 61 75 lb. Table 3. Pounds of Emissions Produced per 100,000 miles
...
... in Arizona where 67 percent of power plants are coal-fired, a study concluded that EVs would reduce greenhouse gases such as CO2 by 71 percent (6).
...
A study conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that EVs in the Northeast would reduce CO emissions by 99.8 percent, volatile organic compounds (VOC) by 90 percent, NOx by 80 percent, and CO2 by as much as 60 percent (7).
...
According to the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM) study, use of EVs results in significant reductions of carbon monoxide, greenhouse gases, and ground level ozone in the region, with magnitudes cleaner than even the cleanest ULEV.
"""
""" ... EVs are significantly more efficient in converting their energy into mechanical power.
EVs & Power Plants ICE & Fuel Refining Processing 39% (Electricity 92% (Fuel Refining) Generation) Transmission Lines 95% - Charging 88% - Vehicle Efficiency 88% 15% Overall Efficiency 28% 14% Table 4. Operating Efficiency Comparison Between EVs and ICE Vehicles """
The facts go on and on...
Just out of curiosity, what have law or politics got to do with relative energy conversion efficiencies?
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There is nothing more important about this issue.
Locking in anything, particularly power generation, to what is known at any one time, like the present, is a mistake, at best.
Electricity specifically being something wide open to new discovery as it itself is new in terms of human ability to know enough to manipulate it. Solar is in the wings. They both should have been coming center stage 30 years ago.
From what you have described correctly, "systematically shut down", I fear the country I live in, the US, is going to be watching the rest of the world pass bye-bye on this front which relates to many others.
I have never had to tune an engine in about 20 years. The ECU does it every second..
Graham
Who said CO2's the problem or do you just believe everything the news media says ?
Graham
Subsidies I expect.
Graham
You're new at this obviously. Listen and learn.
Graham
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