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Politics : Manmade Global Warming, A hoax? A Scam? or a Doomsday Cult? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (3810)	2/14/2014 1:10:42 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4326

Pulling a battery out and pushing another in is not a big deal or dangerous. Not compared with squirting petrol out of a nozzle into a tank and that doesn't lead to many accidents. Even with totally untrained people doing it, I have never yet seen an accident at a service station, other than some spilled petrol. And they would not be "extremely heavy". Avoiding extremely heavy is the point of having frequent fast swaps. Of course they would be "non-standard", in the same way that cellphones used "non-standard" batteries, and many iterations of them. But "non-standard" has never yet stopped innovation. All innovation is non-standard. If there is great merit in standardizing, such as there is in petrol and diesel, then standards bodies are formed and committee members set standards. I used to run petrol and diesel standards committees, and also argued against a diesel standard in Europe, explaining to the EU environmental officials that downtown Stockholm in winter for little cars is different from Spain in summer for big transcontinental trucks. A standard diesel would be very expensive and not as good for one or the other. They gave in. They are maniacs wanting standard everything. In the oil industry, while we had standards, developed in conjunction with engine makers and adapted according to the balance of vehicles in operation, we would also make our own innovations. For example Europe was going to go with a standard 95 octane. I got BP to introduce 98 octane because high-end car buyers don't want bog standard fuel when they have paid big bucks for high performance. 91 was also introduced because granny going to the supermarket in a little runabout doesn't want to pay big bucks for fancy fuel. The same sort of process would happen in the swappable battery industry. That's the wrong idea <Consumers would be extremely upset if a bad battery pack was swapped into their vehicle and they got stuck buying a new unit.> Car owners would not own the battery. The battery would be owned by the battery charging and supply business. As batteries lose functionality, they'd be discounted until uneconomic. People who can get by with limited range, perhaps people who get a Halo charge at home each day and have short commutes would be happy with cheaper ergs even if the battery life was limited. People who want to travel a long way would rather pay more for a full charge unit needing fewer stops enroute. Rotating tyres done properly can be very cheap. <What price would you expect is a reasonable fee for having an entire battery pack removed from a vehicle and replaced by a fully charged unit? $10, $20 - $100? You can barely have tires rotated for less than $25.> I have seen Formula 1 people do it in 7 seconds. So, assuming a human does the job, the cost of 30 battery swaps per hour would be about $1 to pay the operator. $30 per hour is serious money for an unskilled job, so that should get enough people to do the job. 2 minutes per swap would be heaps of time. The operator wouldn't break a sweat, especially since they'd be sitting on a battery-powered machine which would do the heavy lifting, which wouldn't be very heavy at something like 100 kg, or maybe only 50kg. Some tiny city car batteries might be only 20 kg. The Segway I hired was light enough for me to lift and I could go for about 10km if I remember rightly. Here's one that could use a hefty battery to help avoid it capsizing, by providing a lower centre of gravity. If those cute little cars were allowed to use bus lanes, just as bicycles and motorbikes may, then they would soon be very popular as avoiding traffic jams is great fun. Parking would be a fraction of the cost of a car as about four could fit into one car space. You are right that not every idea is a good one. BetterPlace for example was a battery swap business that went bust. They took ages to swap them, had almost no customers and the old chicken and egg problem stopped them. People won't buy battery-swap cars until there is a chain of swap stations and people won't build swap stations until there are customers. There has to be significant economic advantage to get the chickens hatching and the eggs being produced. Normally, it would start out with something like, for example, a taxi fleet which decides to operate a battery swap system around town. With 3 or 4 sites, they could cover a city. With 1 they could cover enough to et going, allocating journeys to the cars that stay in the area. But if there's big economic advantage, big bucks will be thrown at it in the same way BP threw big bucks at CNG stations in New Zealand. In the end, I told Alan Revel, the CEO, that we should stop building them as the price of crude oil was falling and it looked as though they would soon be uneconomic. Sure enough, crude oil went to $10 a barrel in 1986 and that was the end of the 5 year BP Oil project to build CNG stations. The existing fleet of CNG cars continued to use CNG, but no new conversions were made to cars so the business was stopped. It is not yet a sure bet that a battery swap business or that battery powered cars are good ideas, but in London, there are a lot of battery-powered cars so it's working for quite a lot of people. Qualcomm is developing Halo which would make home and parking space recharging very convenient indeed. Simply park and on return, the car is recharged. No cables, no hassles, no danger, no tripping, no stealing the cables, no vandalism, less intrusive than the old system: Mqurice