Neo, you are doing religious arguing. You set out with a belief, then try to squeeze reality into it. You believe that hybrids are wonderful, so argue any way you can that power stations are worse.
It's just garden variety economics, not religion.
Large power stations are VASTLY more efficient than little motors in cars even if you do like hybrid cars.
You obviously haven't done much or any commercial work where money matters and are obviously a spender of OPM. In the commercial world of fuel, if a supplier can get a 1% price advantage, that's something worthwhile. If they can get a 3% one, they can get lots of customers. At 10%, they get all they want.
I used to sell fuel when it was about 30c a gallon, and we used 4 significant figures in pricing. If I offered two truckloads for each truckload my competitors offered, I would have needed to work one day a year to get all the customers our refineries could handle. That's what 45% efficiency means compared with 22% efficiency. That's a VAST price difference.
With oil at high prices people become more interested in saving money. If they can save money by using swapped batteries and power stations and electric motors, they'll do it. If they can't they won't. It's all just simple economics. The physics is nothing new either. Nor is the engineering. Battery technology is improving so advantage is swinging towards electric cars though the efficiency improvement in petrol engines has been amazing over a century.
A petrol engine is a miniature replica of the 19th century industrial revolution and electronic revolution of the late 20th century all squeezed under the bonnet. It's a veritable Gordian knot of technological complexity with 100s of moving parts and bits and pieces.
A battery and 4 electric motors is relatively simple. Just 4 moving parts = the wheels.
If you calculate the energy and capital required to build and move the two types of vehicles, you'll find that the advantage is swinging to the all electric type. That's because of the VAST improvement in efficiency from large scale power generation instead of carting around a tiny little power station right there on the cars.
If a car maker can leave out the petrol motor from the hybrid, make the battery a bit bigger and recharge it inductively or by plugging it in, they can boast of even better efficiency and lower costs.
You must be very wealthy on OPM to not be excited by the difference in cost between 20% and 45% efficiency. What is or was your job? It must be a government job.
To get a gigawatt hour of energy to where the rubber meets the road, you can either build a BIG power station and 1000s of electric motors and batteries, or 1000s of petrol motors and automatic transmissions and electric motors and batteries.
You add up the costs and see which is cheaper. Having a fuel efficiency advantage of 45% instead of 25% is a great help to the large power station. When fuel was cheap and efficiency didn't matter so much, it made more sense to put tiny power stations right there in the cars. Now, it's more economic to produce the energy at a large power station.
You need to add up all the costs such as catalytic converters. Check the price of platinum over the last few years - it's cheaper to clean up large power station exhaust than that of little engines running around on cars. At power stations, it's even practical to collect the CO2, liquidize it and pour it to the bottom of the ocean to sequester it from the atmosphere which is a patented idea I invented in 1987 [not that I think that there's a problem needing that solution as CO2 in the air is a GOOD thing]. You can't do that on cars.
An all-electric car would be much nicer than having the industrial revolution bolted under the hood.
If photovoltaics become economic, thermal stations will lose market share too. Mobility is high value energy and if there are swarms of cars needing recharging, photovoltaics would be more economically attractive in places like the road to Las Vegas from Los Angeles and across Australia. At $140 a barrel, power stations in cars are not as attractive as nuclear, photovoltaic, and large thermal power stations.
Mqurice |
