Bishop Hill Driving into the future?
Oct 18, 2012 Energy: electric cars From Today's Moderator
An article by Andrew English on the future of hydrogen fuel-cell electric cars appeared in the Telegraph yesterday.
In January, the Government unveiled its latest hydrogen initiative which, according to Mark Prisk, the business minister, will “ensure the UK is well positioned for the commercial roll out of hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles.”
The 2007 Department of Energy white paper, Meeting the Energy Challenge, concluded that “fuel cells and hydrogen technologies face significant technical and economic challenges… A huge international effort (both public and private) is being devoted to overcoming them. This will require fundamental and applied research, development and demonstration.”
In 2008, Professor Peter P Edwards wrote in the government-commissioned study, Hydrogen and fuel cells: towards a sustainable energy future: “together, hydrogen and fuel cells have the capability of producing a green revolution in transportation by removing CO² emissions completely.”
Will it really? Three government departments (Business, Innovation and Skills, Transport and Energy and Climate Change) are involved, but have any of them ever read any of their own publications?
Reader Comments (76)
AlecM said, "The reason why the big manufacturers like Toyota are discontinuing battery only vehicles is because ... "
Which shows that while he is wrong, he is persistantly wrong. Toyota is shipping two new battery only vehicles (Scion iQ EV and RAV-4 EV); MINI has 450 MINI-E vehicles on the road, Smart is taking orders for the $25,000 Smart Electric Drive; Audi is launching the E-Tron and Mercedes the SLS AMG E-Cell; Nissan continues to sell the Leaf; Renault is taking deposits/reservations for the ZOE and BMW is moving forward with its BMW i sub brand.
There may be others but as far as I know, the only modern electric car that has been discontinued is the GM EV-1.
But doesn't Hydrogen and Oxygen make a greenhouse gas?
Electric:
"The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge," said, [Takeshi] Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota's development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s."
Hybrid:
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/03/23/bmw-520d-beats-prius-in-gas-mileage/
jamesp
Today's Moderator is just filling in for the Bishop while he has some time off while his family is on half term. BH will be posting again soon.
TM
Law of unintended consequences is a wonderful thing. I make this prediction: if compressed hydrogen is used widely the ATM will become extinct.
Thieves currently like to blow ATM's out of the wall using acetylene and oxygen. But these gas cylinders are fairly rare. If hydrogen is easily available from every vehicle our direct action capitalist friends will rapidly run out of ATM's to explosively crack open.
After that I can think of all sorts of things that a whiff of hydrogen/air mix could make more exciting. Guy Fawkes would have loved compressed hydrogen.
Oct 18, 2012 at 1:19 PM | chris y
I agree. Gasoline has been very badly marketed.
Dress it up like the rest of the snake oil in this discussion and it sounds really like it ought to be the fuel of the future. It's going to be soooo hard to beat.
The problem with fuel cell powered cars is the technology does not exist, or to be precise the technology for a safe fuel cell car that performs well and which can be produced at a remotely competitive price simply does not exist and is probably decades away, if it is ever possible. That's apart from the fact that no hydrogen infrastructure exists and the stuff gradually leaks away through the walls of containment vessels and disappears. Quite possibly hydrogen powered cars could be mass produced today. However they would likely have to sell for a few million each and so would have rather limited sales. This is the problem with discussing non-existent technology. Talk is cheap but reality isn't. The cost of the thing would have to be reduced by two or three orders of magnitude before it would be even worth talking about it. What on earth is the point of talking about something which exists only in the imagination and is decades way?
The electric car is not the answer to the problem of CO2. That is firstly because CO2, or plant food, is not a problem anyway, doesn't cause measurable warming, and we need more of it. Then of course when electricity is largely produced from fossil fuel the electric car doesn't reduce the amount of plant food produced anyway. The whole question is a nonsense.
Slightly off topic. This makes me angry. What IS the point of all the incredibly learned pontificating and detailed research about the cause of the three quarter of a degree warming over the last couple of hundred years? If we accept that climate reconstructions over the last twelve thousand years are reasonably believable then that miniscule warming is part of a completely typical fluctuation which has a occurred repeatedly during the holocene. In fact it is not in any way unusual. Hence if scientific research into causes is called for at all it should cover the processes influencing climate over the whole twelve thousand years, not just a snapshot of one half (the rising half) of one cycle out of many. And as regards whether such research is necessary - it is of little or no practical interest because we clearly have no power to control natural processes which have been in operation for thousands of years. Scientific interest - yes of course, practical interest - no.
Tim Worstall says-
"I do expect this to be subject to something like Moore's Law. "
Don't invest any money in that expectation.
Moore's Law is one of the most misused phrases around, and in particular when applied to energy devices. It was an observation of the doubling of integrated circuit device count per die every 18 months or so. Since feature size reduction was the driver behind this trend, a host of other benefits accrued, such as higher complexity, higher speed, lower voltage, lower power, all at about the same price.
There is no analogous metric with solar panels.
Costs for panels came down since 2005 because huge subsidies, tax credits, feed in tariffs and portfolio mandates approved by governments created market demand, cheaper labor started building them (China), processes were automated (China), and companies were subsidized (China, Germany, Spain, US). With the recent financial apocalypse among solar PV manufacturers, the latest news from the PV world is that higher panel prices are required going forward, to achieve a sustainable business model.
That's the good news. The bad news is that, even if solar panels cost $0.00 per Watt, a solar PV system still takes many years to pay for itself.
Sorry, hydrogen and oxygen put man and vehicles on the Moon. Unsafe at any speed. Not necessarily forever, however.
======================
@Speed
AlecM said, "The reason why the big manufacturers like Toyota are discontinuing battery only vehicles is because ... "
Which shows that while he is wrong, he is persistantly wrong
...
Dunno whether he is wrong on the former Speed but have to strongly disagree with your latter statement that he is persistantly (sic) wrong.
Notwithstanding his opinions on Co2 warming mechanisms for which I have no background to challenge or agree with, I have the highest regard for the undoubted understanding of matters scientific that he is good enough to share with us.
Yes he is persistent but isn't that a sign of a strong character rather than a trait to be dismissed as a flaw?
I do like the idea of SOFC's. Combine small ones with cheap shale gas and you will probably be abled to generate home electricity for less money that connected to the expensive grid.
And as if right on queue...
Exclusive: The scientists who turned fresh air into petrol
Not so exclusive because the Telegraph has it as well.
This is just a press release/campaign, accepted verbatim as valid. Where are the questions? What I want to know is how much energy you have to put into the system? No mention, just some linking to "renewable energy". Why do that? Why does is need to ride on the back of climate change to be a valid idea?
If it has any scientific/engineering validity why a PR campaign linked to CAGW?
It should be able to stand on its own two feet.
Link this time:
Exclusive: The scientists who turned fresh air into petrol
jamesp,
The Hillman Imp perhaps bests sums up why this country lost its manufacturing capability. One of the best engineered (and greatest cars) this country has ever produced let down by a combination of bad (atrocious) management, political interference, cultural incomprehension (English versus Scots versus US) and labour relations.
A great read, highly recommended, sadly now out of print:
Apex: the inside story of the Hillman Imp / David & Peter Henshaw; [Foreword by Tim Fry]. - Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire U.K.: Bookmarque, 1990. - ix, 164 p. - 2nd extend. ed.
ISBN 1-870519-02-7 (Out of print)
ISBN 1-870519-51-5 (reprint 2004)
Electric cars do appear to be a bit of a money pit for manufacturers and therefore a deadend. Being a gold start googler (DuckDuckGo actually because I can never trust a company which has "Don't be evil" as a motto but that's a different issue). In the USA, still the market that counts, sales of electric cars up to August appear to be:-
Nissan Leaf 3,543
Ford Focus EV 121
Chevy Volt 10,666
Toyota Prius 5,035
The Ford Focus EV is the worst sellin Ford since the Edsell, still a by-word ford a financial disaster in the motor industry? The Volt is a bit of an exception, probably because of the hype around a car built in Detroit, but still a disaster so far the US government must have lost 100s of millions of $ on each one.
So if manufacturers haven't already pulled out as per AlecM then it can't be long.
I worked in electrochemistry. My last patent was 8 years ago and an ex colleague was R&D boss at Ballard. I also midwifed a major UK metal - ceramic SOFC [they considered an invention of mine as the substrate for the plates].
So, what I have seen is a bit of propaganda here. Li-ion batteries are touchy and fail in high temperature environments. The issue is the temperatures spiking in the battery packs. Basically, you need to divert a lot of power to keep the temperatures under control and in cold climates you waste energy in windscreen wipers and demisting etc.
The cost of Li-ion with Fe-Li PO4 was amortised by defence money and is unlikely to be duplicated for other systems because if you select the cells, it's reliable. And that's the problem - a manufacturing cost issue with breaks in the anode material and dendrites growing. [This is why the Ballard system spectacularly failed - the intercalation anode was the fix.]
There are two hopes left. One is the warm Na-S battery with a nano-engineered Na--beta alumina solid electrolyte. Haven't hear much in the past year about this. The other is Ag-Zn which has a very high energy density and recycles easily. Also, you need to swap batteries on the road to get range.and I calculated you'd need 20 swap stations the size of Fort Dun;op on the M1, using 20 GW power in an 80 GW society. It's just not feasible compared with methane to petrol and diesel. Hydrogen by the Cella transport process may work because it's liquid-like.
As for fuel cells, someone quoted emissions. What emissions? Methane isn't polymerised because the first stage is to reform it to hydrogen in-situ. Do we have another disinformation campaign?
Once again we are in the realm of advocacy of measures which are irrelevant to the supposed problem.
If there is a problem with CO2 emissions, it is of a scale which will only be solved by eliminating the internal combustion engine in totality, and not simply in the UK, but globally. Eliminating even all the UK cars and trucks would make not a jot of difference to global temparatures. Even eliminating all the UK's carbon emissions, every single molecule, would not. The idea that swapping over a few cars here will help in any way is like urging the passengers on the Titanic to start bailing with teaspoons on the grounds that every little helps.
Also, with all these things, to think logically, one has to reverse the process. Lets go to hydrogen so as to eliminate CO2 emissions from cars. Yes, how many cars worth of emissions will this eliminate, and at what cost? You say a few thousands in about 10 years? OK, is there any other cheaper way that we could get these emissions eliminated? Lets say, cheaper trains? More bike paths? Paying people to not have cars - a sort of set-aside?
This is the most infuriating thing about the green movement - the advocacy of supposed solutions to a supposed problem which even in its own terms have no more effect on it than standing on one's head.
Petrol and diesel work so well for cars that in the absence of anything that can get anywhere near competing at all, much less without massive infrastructure investment, that this is not the front on which any CO2 emission reduction should take place. Far better, if we must, to reduce CO2 in areas in which alternatives exist. And that is power generation. And the answer is nukes. Maybe not as we have them today, nothing developed in fifty years, but state-of-the-art nukes. All we need is somebody with the gumption to get it done.
Did I say all we need?
The technically-naïve imagined battery cars on charge could, like hydro, absorb wind speed^3 power surges. Presently the Danes dump half their wind energy to hydro otherwise CO2 rises ~5% as the steam turbines cycle too fast. Their energy costs are immense, the population is in revolt and they’ve embargoed more windmills.
However, they are required by Marxist UN Agenda 21, so the fellow travellers in government are trying to foist battery cars on us. That the plan has got this far is because for a decade they kept professional engineers out of the loop. This is because we immediately see through the fake ‘black body IR emission, GHG absorption’ claim.
Brainwashed Cameron has a problem: windmills and battery cars are incompatible with democracy. US paramilitaries have been issued with dum-dum bullets presumably to control insurrection if the $ collapses [Obama using the EPA to force Agenda 21].
Shale gas/oil has stopped that plan but because the bankers and energy corporations bet the farm on carbon trading, there has been desperate lobbying of No 10 and equally desperate claims about extreme weather and Arctic ice melting, now freezing at an unprecedented rate: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
[The August storm mixed stratified salt and fresh water, extracting enormous quantities of heat from the strongly negative partial molar heat of mixing. The winter may be very cold because of this unprecedented lurch towards thermodynamic equilibrium.]
To summarise: the Euro depends on carbon offsets, as did the putative Amero. Battery cars, a dead end technology, are a cynical attempt to keep Agenda 21 and the windmills.
Oct 18, 2012 at 7:51 PM | Speed
""AlecM said, "The reason why the big manufacturers like Toyota are discontinuing battery only vehicles is because ... "
Which shows that while he is wrong, he is persistantly wrong. Toyota is shipping two new battery only vehicles (Scion iQ EV and RAV-4 EV);"
Methinks Speed is not upto speed on this: Reuters: Toyota drops plan for widespread sales of electric car (24 September 2012).
"The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge," said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota's development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/24/us-toyota-electric-idUSBRE88N0CT20120924
Thanks Albert; I tried to get that but at the moment my internet connection is very slow.
The electric cars idea is failing now in exactly the same way as Henry Ford explained why it failed in the 1920s 0- too few recharging points and too little range. Speed seems to be working for vested interests.
AlecM Oct 19, 2012 at 5:21 PM
Apart from Obama's Volt most of the development in the motor industry is paid for by shareholders who want a return on investment, that should kill electric cars stone dead for another 80 years.
Sandy
AlecM - You are on the right track, except Na-S is the only feasible option from a materials availablity standpoint. Any system which uses relatively uncommon materials will suffer the same economic issues that REE have in the last few years. Price spikes until the batteries are uneconomic.
Lithium is not feasible for large scale usage as there isn't enough. NiMH uses expensive Ni and La. Ag-Zn is a bit better, but Ag would spike in price like Pt did in the fuel cell/cat converter space. Na-S is OK because we won't ever have a shortage and they're pretty easy to purify.
BTW completely avoiding dendrites in a zinc system will be fun. Winand's playground. I have made many a dendrite in Zn EW R&D. They're pretty but the bang from the short sparked H2 explosion is not good for the eardrums.
Agreed BofN: the Na-S development is being funded by Coors of Denver. The brewers are experts in ceramics because the D&I process uses ceramic tools.
AlecM wrote, “Battery cars are being dumped as a dead end technology by the major manufacturers.”
Albert Stienstra wrote, “Methinks Speed is not upto (sic) speed on this: Reuters: Toyota drops plan for widespread sales of electric car (24 September 2012).”
Note the word, “widespread.” Note also the earlier quote, "Toyota believes battery-electric vehicles have the potential to play a role in future mobility strategies," says Chris Hostetter, group vice president of strategic planning at Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc."
Note also the presence of Mini, Smart, Audi, Mercedes, Nissan, Renault and others who are either producing and selling or taking orders for electric cars.
Oct 21, 2012 at 5:17 PM | Speed
If you want to react and quote, do that on the key message from Toyota:
"The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge," said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota's development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s.
That says enough. Current electric vehicles are no use to society, according to Toyota. What you may see in the showrooms is irrelevant. You have to see what happens in Toyota R&D and strategy planning.