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Once someone develops an EV that can be fully charged in 5 minutes, and someone develops a service station charger that can charge up that vehicle, then you have something serious to offer.
ABB introducing new DC fast-charger in Europe for €9,988
The Terra SC. Click to enlarge. ABB launched the Terra Smart Connect (SC), a low-cost DC fast-charger that the company says will significantly improve the business case for installing electric-vehicle (EV) fast chargers throughout Europe. The Terra SC will be available for delivery in Europ...
ExDemo:
Please do not engage in use of defamatory words like "libtard".
You come across as every bit as much a buffoon as left wingers who sling around defamatory rhetoric like "racist" and "teabagger".
State Department releases final environmental impact statement on Keystone XL Pipeline Project; analysis of GHG emissions
Comparison of the percent differential for WTW (well-to-wheel) GHGs from gasoline produced from WCSB oil sands using different production processes relative to gasoline produced from reference crudes. Source: FEIS, Appendix V. Click to enlarge. The US Department of State (DOS) released the f...
"Hydro power plants, with their huge water reservoir (energy storage units) and easily varied power output, are ideal companions to fill in for Solar/Wind low power production periods. To take full advantage of Solar/Wind energy production, those two intermittent power sources have to be used for base loads and hydro for peak and fill in periods."
That doesn't always work, though. Look at the situation in the Pacific Northwest. With > 20 GW of hydropower in the region, it is probably as good as anyplace in the world for hydro to serve as a fill-in for the intermittency of wind. But this spring the Bonneville Power Administration had to tell wind producers in the area to shut down their turbines because the huge spring runoffs necessitated the dams being run at full capacity.
A123 Systems to supply Li-ion energy storage system to Dongfang Electric Corporation for evaluation for wind power solutions
Li-ion battery manufacturer A123 Systems will supply a 500kW Li-ion energy storage solution to Dongfang Electric Corporation (DEC), the third largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the People’s Republic of China and the country’s largest exporter of power equipment. Expected to be installed at...
I'm not familiar with automotive HVAC technology, but just off the top of my head I would think using a heat pump for heating would have limited use since heat pumps only work well for moderate delta T's.
I imagine whatever the constraints are on heat pumps for home heating would be valid also for automotive.
Unfortunately, ground source heat pumps, which are a great way to get efficient heating in cold climates, are only viable for heating a stationary object.
OSRAM says automotive lighting trending to all-LED; particular benefits for electric vehicles
Projected global LED penetration in vehicle production. Source: OSRAM Sylvania. Click to enlarge. The automotive market is inevitably trending to LED lighting for reasons of reliability, appearance, functionality and efficiency, says OSRAM SYLVANIA. OSRAM SYLVANIA, together with OSRAM GmbH (...
This strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.
I would think it would be a whole lot simpler to just stick an "electrical nozzle" into an "electrical tank" than to have to drive onto a specific location to charge your car.
Advice to Volvo: Your engineers would be better utilized working on improved performance of electric vehicles, than coming up with novelty items.
Volvo Car participating in project to develop inductive charging for EVs; 20 kW system
Inductive charging schema. Source: Volvo. Click to enlarge. Volvo Car Corporation is participating in an inductive charging project led by Belgian technological and development specialists Flanders’ Drive (owned by the Belgian state), along with bus manufacturer Van Hool, tram manufacturer B...
Prototype 3.6 kW.
I hope this is scalable to a lot higher. We should hope that cars with 50 kWh battery packs chargeable in 10 minutes will exist eventually. (i.e. a car with enough battery energy to run 200-300 miles and recharge at a service station)
That would require a charging rate of 300 kW.
If inductive has any problem with that, you can always just go with old fashioned wires and contacts.
Siemens developing inductive charging system for plug-in vehicles with BMW; testing in Berlin in June 2011
At Hannover Messe 2011, Siemens presented a development project for inductive charging (“Contactless Charging of Battery-Electric Vehicles”), developed in cooperation with BMW. In June 2011, the capabilities of this non-contact charging system will be tested in a project funded by the German Env...
I'm also skeptical about V2G.
The big problem with EVs so far is insufficient battery capacity to allow an EV to provide similar functionality to a gas car. That anyone would want to dump their EV's charge into the grid seems really farfetched for the forseeable future.
Furthermore, it would stand to reason that EV batteries will always be much more expensive than fixed energy storage devices. Stationary batteries don't have the constraint of having to be low weight like EV batteries do. And, lower-cost mass storage approaches other than batteries are likely going to be the mainstay of a renewables-based energy economy, e.g. molten salt storage systems accompanying "power tower" solar thermal plants.
Study Finds PHEV Li-ion Iron Phosphate Cells Show Little Capacity Fade Under Combined Driving and V2G Usage; Economic Model Suggests Incentives Will Be Required for Vehicle Owners to Participate in V2G
[This is a revision of an earlier post, which had been pulled due to the status of the referenced papers as working papers. Both have now been revised and accepted by the Journal of Power Sources and are in press.] Degradation as a function of (a) capacity (Ah) processed by cell or (b) energy...
I wonder about the environmental tradeoffs to using high tech composites for the car body.
I can believe it makes sense to use composites for aircraft- weight has a lot bigger penalty when you are trying to keep something in the air rather than on the ground. Furthermore, I would expect that airliners get many hundreds of thousands of miles of life before they are scrapped. That means the environmental impact of producing the composites is amortized over a lot of miles of use, much more so than with automobiles.
Velozzi Provides Some Details on the SOLO Crossover; Micro-Turbine Extended Range Electric Vehicle
The SOLO. Click to enlarge. Velozzi released a rendering and some preliminary detail on its upcoming electric-drive crossover, the SOLO. The SOLO is an extended range electric vehicle equipped with a combination of supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries for energy storage and a multi-fuel m...
Great, an impressive advance in the technology of buggy whips.
Integral Powertrain Developing New Variable Ratio Drive B-ISG System for Stop-Start Applications
A variable ratio pulley allows improvements in cost and functionality. Click to enlarge. UK-based engineering consultancy Integral Powertrain has developed a new generation of belt-integrated starter generator (B-ISG systems) for stop-start applications using a new multi-mode, variable ratio d...
Now that the leftist regimes in Sacramento and the cities and counties of California have finally demolished the economy to the point where it has no hope of recovery:
They couldn't even lie their way into passing the "stab the taxpayers yet one more time" ballot measures.
Now, after the regimes have inflicted all the pain they could extract from the taxpayers without a popular uprising, they realize they have run out of games to play, and in some cases are beginning to begrudgingly take the actions they should have taken decades ago.
Sorry, Californians, it's all a day late and a dollar short. Put a fork in it, your state is headed toward economic parity with Bangladesh.
And those of us who fled California, realizing that the leftist wackos that run the state and local governments would not rest until they had demolished any remaining vestige of a civilized and prosperous society, well don't expect us to bail you guys out from the consequences of electing extremist wackos to office for all these years.
L.A. County plans to check immigration status of all inmates [Updated]
[Updated, 3:15 p.m. All local police agencies in Los Angeles County plan to begin screening the immigration status of all inmates booked into jails.] Los Angeles County plans to begin checking the immigration status of all inmates booked into its jails this month in an effort to identify and d...
It seems to me this research is on the wrong track.
I believe there is a substantial consensus that barring some breakthrough allowing solar energy to be converted to hydrocarbons at a far greater efficiency than you can get from photosynthesis, biofuels will only be able to provide a fraction of the energy we have previously obtained from fossil fuels.
Thus, biofuels will need to be devoted to uses where hydrocarbons are irreplaceable- chemicals for example. And, things like aircraft fuel, barring someone coming up with a revolutionary new way to run an aircraft.
As an energy source, the primary virtues of biofuels are its storeability and its energy density. You wipe out those benefits when you convert it to electricity.
Yes, we should run cars on electricity rather than hydrocarbons, but the electricity should not be produced from biofuels, it should come from wind or solar or nuclear or whatever.
Hydrocarbons will be a far more rare and expensive resource in the future than electricity. Consequently it will make no sense to convert hydrocarbons to electricity.
Study Finds Bioelectricity Better Option Than Liquid Biofuels for Transportation Output and GHG Emissions
Kilometers per crop hectare for switchgrass feedstock with a small SUV. Campbell et al. (2009) Click to enlarge. A new life cycle assessment comparing the performance of bioelectricity and ethanol from a variety of pathways with respect to transportation kilometers and GHG offsets achieved per...
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