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Looks like Saudi Arabia just found a way to market their ultra-heavy crude as a "green" energy source: crack it for hydrogen. It might even work, too, as long as you buried the carbon.
A very high percentage of REs (Hydro, Solar and Wind) may be used during production hours and may not have to be stored. Of the 3, only hydro has any kind of inherent storage mechanism. Even some hydro cannot be stored; many dams have reservoirs too small to contain spring runoff, so they must generate power immediately to avoid using spillways and killing fish by nitrogen supercharging. Hydro energy can be stored in existing water reservoirs at no extra cost and use when Solar and Wind energy production is low. In many places, including the hydro-heavy BPA, wind is at its strongest during the same storms which bring lots of water into the reservoirs. This allows neither to be stored, as both must be used immediately once reservoirs are full. REs production and storage cost will go down year after year while NPPs cost keep going up, at least for the next 10 to 20 years. NPP cost is driven by supply-chain experience and intrusiveness of regulation. Lightening NRC regulation back to AEC levels would slash NPP costs overnight, as the volume of paperwork would be greatly reduced and workers could spend more time working and less time planning to minimize already-trivial radiation exposures on the job. If NPP operating costs went down and stayed down, there would be an increase in construction which would put more experience in the supply chains. This would further drive costs down. Today's handful of NPPs being built in the West are costly because the bodies of experience were destroyed following the crash of the 1980's. If government can mandate wind and PV, it can mandate nuclear and keep production going and experience current.
Yeah, right. Materials and energy cost ALONE for Li-ion are $80/kWh. To supply 1 kW continuous for 3 days from Li-ion storage thus costs at least $5760 (then you have the cost of the system to charge it). Nuclear costs less than Li-ion storage and is its own charger.
My actual working investment in EV infrastructure has so far been $0, and I've been driving on electric power for 3.5 years.
Don't forget how many deposits Tesla has taken for the Model 3.
Automated taxis can't do what some people think they can. When everyone has to go to work in the morning, most of them are going to be travelling solo. Then the EVs have to charge before they can do much else. 500k cumulative? The Gigafactory is intended to make enough batteries to build 500k EVs every year. If we're trying to cut petroleum consumption and air emissions we'd be better off with start-stop for everything not hybridized, with downsized supercharged engines. The 35 GWh/yr of batteries from the Gigafactory would be better employed turning 3.5 million vehicles into PHEVs with 10 kWh apiece. With another 3 Gigafactories you could turn roughly the entire US flow of new LDVs into PHEVs. Assuming a 2/3 cut in liquid fuel consumption in the new vehicles, gasoline use would fall from ~9 million bbl/d to ~6 within 5 years, and head for ~4 million in 10 years. When battery production came up far enough, EVs would start displacing PHEVs and the ramp toward zero would steepen again.
Perhaps they'll also recover uranium from the ash. I read that the Manhattan project commissioned the mining of a particular deposit of lignite, which was burned so that the ash could be processed for its uranium. Emissions of uranium, radium and radon from coal plants are far more radioactive than anything a nuclear power plant is allowed to release.
Indeed. If that can be generalized to most light-duty vehicles, it puts 2025 GHG targets that looked impossible well within reach.
My method has been proven on a large scale. O RLY? Where? Tell us what Green country has gone petroleum-free that way. I find it both amusing and revolting that people suggest collecting CO2 from fossil-fired powerplants to produce other fuels. This STILL dumps fossil carbon in the atmosphere in planet-killing amounts, YOU IDIOTS! The only way to make this sort of thing work is to cycle the carbon from some kind of store (e.g. the atmosphere, or CO2 in wells) into storable energy and back again. You can't mine fossil carbon any faster than weathering removes it. I'm not sure I'm interpreting Figure 5 in the paper correctly, but it looks like the bulk of the applied energy at 1.2 volts potential is converted to EtOH, CO and H2. The CO and H2 fractions are suitable for synthesis of MeOH, and the fraction turned to CH4 can be used for short-term storable fuel. This is amazingly close to the Holy Grail of the Renewablists: they can turn electricity into storable liquids, and with SOFCs they can turn the liquids back into electricity. Ultimately, it comes down to "what does it cost?"
Many are already hauling around a substantial fraction of that much capacity.
I strongly suspect that any vehicle which can handle that much charging power will have its battery thermal management system integrated with the air conditioning. Dumping 50k BTU/hr is a lot, but it's not extremely difficult either.
The idea only goes back to WWII and before. This has take far too long to get into road service.
48 V @ 100 A is only 4.8 kW, less than 7 HP. You're going to be very limited. The reason for the 48 V limit is to get by regulations on shock hazards. If you can achieve sufficient isolation to run higher voltages, 300 V @ 100 A is getting serious (about 40 HP). Splitting 40 HP between two in-wheel motors would be sufficient for some AWD action, thrust vectoring and other improvements to vehicle dynamics.
New feedstock approvals for cellulosic biofuels produced from short-rotation poplar and willow trees, cellulosic diesel produced from co-processing cellulosic feedstocks with petroleum, and renewable diesel and biodiesel produced from non-cellulosic portions of separated food waste. Meaning, land taken from conservation easements or other production. This should be flatly prohibited. We've got lots of waste that currently goes into landfills. Frank Shu is working on "supertorrefaction" (actually, fast charring) of biomass using molten-salt baths, with a hot-section process cycle time of about 10 minutes. Doing this with MSW and crop wastes would involve no land-use changes and consequent impacts on carbon inventories and wildlife. Converting non-farm land to biomass plantations... ugh.
Needs TIGERS and its all set.
Self-driving vehicles will update a real-time map of potholes every time they detect one (either by scanning or by suspension movement). Once the first one hits an un-scannable pothole (e.g. because it's obscured by snow) all the rest will avoid it.
Peter XX: batteries don't have to, any more than tires do. They just have to have a low enough TCOE. Li-ion appears to be up to 400 Wh/kg already:
@Patrick Free: Now divide 1000 full cycles by depth of discharge to get what you'd expect in daily use.
Speaking from experience with a Fusion Energi, it depends a great deal on how fast you drive and what accessories you run.
Interesting. What I can find on the Tesla Model S packs is that they're about 1000 lbs of which about 250 lb is packaging, leaving 750 lb (340 kg) for cells. 340 kg @ 400 Wh/kg = 136 kWh. At 380 Wh/mile, that's more than 300 miles of cruising range there. Average drain rate would be about C/4.
All of this relies on hydrogen. Hydrogen is key to the biofuels, and it has to be cheap. Of all the adjectives to describe hydrogen from RE, "cheap" is not one that I've seen.
WalMart asked for it, Navistar delivered it. Now to get it all rolled out. I've been seeing incremental improvements on the highways. Skirts on semi-trailers are now commonplace, and I've begun to see collapsible boat-tails on the doors. It comes bit by bit.
The current retailed price for electricity in France is between $0.16/kWh to $0.19/kWh (USD) depending on max load purchased (3 KW to 36 KW). The current average retailed price for homes anywhere in Quebec-Canada is $0.065/kWh (CAN) plus sale taxes. Which is not comparable in the least. In France, "there are several taxes that are applied to electricity consumption (see below), and when put together, they represent about 31% of the cost of electricity for residential customers" [1]. In short, the French taxes alone are almost as much as the HQ base rate. The German "renewable" surcharge alone is MORE than the HQ base rate, at €0.06354/kWh (USD 0.0714/kWh) [2]. electricity cost 3X and/or 2X more for nuclear energy in France and Ontario than for clean Hydro-Wind in Quebec. So tell us, Harvey... how are you going to give Quebec's low population density and large amount of rainfall and relief to France, so the French can live up to your expectations for them? That says it all? NPPs are more costly to build and operate. And they're both cheaper and much cleaner than the "Green" solutions of Denmark and Germany; the German rate is about €0.287/kWh (USD 0.323/kWh). HQ should have refurbished Gentilly in the anticipation of carbon taxes and cross-border sales opportunities, but ideology triumphed over economics and the environment both. Links in next comment, because they send it to moderation.