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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric who wrote (4066)	1/8/2009 3:02:46 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 86356

Dude.. quit being a Lithium shill and open your mind to the other less expensive, and mass-producible, options, even if it might take a few years to finalize the technology. Lithium is not available in the quantities necessary for putting over 1 billion cars on the road with that technology: The world has become enamoured with the LiIon battery. While this may be sustainable for portable electronics goods, it is not sustainable for EV applications. A balanced scientific and economic analysis concerning the sustainability of LiIon technology for EV applications has not been performed. One of the most quoted studies into material availability for a future Electric Vehicle fleet is that carried out by Bjorn Andersson and Inge Rade of Chalmers University. The study has been quoted to show that there is sufficient Lithium in the Earth's crust to power 12,000 million EVs with LiIon Manganese based batteries. In fact, there is a very wide range of uncertainty in Andersson and Rade's estimates: they estimate the figure could be as low as 200 million. There are currently some 900 million cars and commercial vehicles on the road worldwide. Andersson concludes (P35): "At least seven out of nine assessed battery technologies have a potential of more than one billion vehicles, but the constraints could materialise at a level that is at least one order of magnitude lower. We can not be sure that any of the assessed battery technologies could provide power for a fraction of a future vehicle demand that exceeds 10%. In addition, a successful diffusion is likely to create conflicts between preservation of local environments threatened by mineral exploitation and a secured supply of metals for electric vehicles."........ From a resource and industrial point of view, as well as battery performance, the EV and PHEV industry should focus its battery strategy on the ZnAir and Zebra NaNiCl / NaFeCl battery technologies. Unlimited quantities of the NaFeCl battery could be manufactured from Iron and Common Salt (with a reduced Nickel content). For practical purposes there are no resource constraints on the use of ZnAir technology either. These technologies are far cheaper and simpler than the various LiIon variants, much more rugged and stable, require simpler and cheaper control electronics and even outrank LiIon in performance terms, particularly the lower energy density LiIon cathode technologies which will be used for safety reasons - Iron Phosphate, Manganate Spinel or Layered MnO2. Production of rechargeable batteries for PHEVs and EVs should be prioritised now with the Zebra battery, which can provide raw performance superior to LiIon today. pdfdownload.org Note: Due to high operating temperatures of 250-350 degrees, I'm not so sure about Zebra batteries. en.wikipedia.org So I'm willing to hold out a bit longer and see if Kleiner Perkins and EEstor can come up with a viable ultracapacitor. Hawk

To: Eric who wrote (4066)	1/8/2009 4:41:01 PM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86356

BTU analsyis? Ran across this in a couple of comments to an American Spectator article. Can this be confirmed or refuted? COMMENTS Marc Jeric \| 1.6.09 @ 10:29AM In all this discussion about electric cars and their high initial cost one thing is forgotten - and that is the energy balance. When you put 1,000 BTU's (that's British Thermal Unit, a measure of energy) of gasoline into an internal combustion motor of a car, you get about 220 BTU's worth of motion; the rest of that energy is spent on friction (tires and wind) and hot exhaust gases. To produce electricity from, say, coal or oil or nuclear fuel, it takes 1,000 BTU's of that fuel to get about 350 BTU's of electricity; then to transmit that electricity to your plug will waste another 50 BTU's. Finally you have put about 300 BTU's worth of energy into your car; and now you drive it while overcoming tire friction and wind resistance (no hot exhaust gas loss here) in order to get about some 120 BTU's worth of motion. That is plainly almost twice as wasteful of energy as an internal combustion car engine. And who will build those thousands of new coal-fired or nuclear power plants? Our environmentalists - with the help of Abu Hussein and his Democrat cohorts? Dream on!