GM suspending production of Chevy Volt

[sdmsanjose]

Originally Posted by sdmsanjose
Every American auto comapany, every Japanese auto company and most of the Eurpoean auto companies are now making Hybrid vehicles. They have increased in every year for the last 10 years.

That tells me that there is a future for hybrid vehicles.


Reply by Grasping the after Wind
It only tells me that they have had a past. Predictions from such meager evidence are unwise.

I based my statement on facts as summarized below:

All hybrids sold in the U.S.
1999 = 17
2000= 20,282
2004= 84,199
2011 = 268,752
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_electric_vehicles_in_the_United_States

Quote of Grasping the after Wind
“Predictions from such meager evidence are unwise.”

What facts do you have for your statement above?

 

[EdwinWillers]

Hybrids don't need to be plugged in, the battery is charged by the engine, and by regenerative braking. The big potential advantage in hybrids is that when you put on the brakes, it kicks a generator into gear, so the energy that would otherwise be lost in a conventional petrol or diesel car is instead put into the batteries, which can deal it out later when it's needed.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. Sorry; I was being general and thinking more in terms of strictly electric re that particular objection.

There is one plus to hybrids though - in order to make them viable, they're having to pull all the stops to make the gasoline portion of the drive more efficient - but then that raises another objection - the need for most of them to run on premium gasoline to do so.

The most efficient vehicle though, regardless the motive power source, will always be the one with but ONE motive power source since using one motive source to drive another motive source will always experience a loss of overall efficiency in the transfer of power from the one to the other. The only reason a hybrid might be more efficient than say a strictly gas engine is if the gas engine of the hybrid is more efficient than the gas engine of the gas-only vehicle. But put an equally efficient gas engine in both, and the hybrid will then become less efficient overall by comparison.

 

[EdwinWillers]

Well, using solar thermal with a high specific heat capacity oil or eutectic salt as the working fluid can keep high enough temperatures overnight for a more or less constant generating capacity. However, this is even more expensive than solar PV.

I think wind is a very viable option at low grid penetrations, it's cheap, clean, and well-established, and every megawatt produced is one that doesn't produce nasty emissions, or hand power to some unstable country blessed with a little oil.

Wave and tidal are a lot less variable than wind, but are still very much in the future. There's no reason why they couldn't become as cheap as wind with a little more research though, and tidal power especially is completely predictable, and can be used as reliable base load, especially when the stations are staggered across a long enough length of coastline.

I think we could probably realistically get 50% grid penetration in the UK from renewables in say 30 years time. Wind isn't going to go much above 25% because of dispatchability issues, unless there's a huge investment in pumped storage, that is. I don't think solar will be that huge, simply because of the climate, maybe 5% tops, but I can see a small proportion, maybe 10%, coming from wave and tidal by that stage. There'll be a bit of hydro, and a bit of biomass making up say 5%, and the remaining 5% from miscellaneous technologies, such as geothermal.

The other 50% is going to have to come from nuclear, and gas, again, unless there is a major breakthrough in carbon capture, or "clean coal" technology. Nuclear at about 40%, providing base load, gas at 10%, smoothing out the fluctuations in the output from renewables.

Other countries will necessarily have to have a different energy mix to this, but I think think that, even if it isn't realistic in the medium term to have 100% renewables, the more we have the better, for both environmental and energy security reasons.

Of course, electricity is the poster child of energy, but it's only about 20% of the UK's energy demand:

We'd be a lot better off funneling the waste heat from electricity generation into district heating schemes, putting in proper insulation, installing ground source heat pumps in every new build property we can, and working on increasing fuel efficiency of transport (intelligent town planning, car pooling and public transport, as well as technological solutions).

But of course, there's no problem with trying to do both!

Again, I'm all for being as efficient as we can with whatever it is we do - and all for being as creative as we can to get there - though at times the return might not always justify the effort.

As you suggest, wind (and even solar) deserve consideration for a place in the process, but neither are capable alone or even together to garner a majority as far as penetration goes. I'm not as sure about wind hitting the 50% penetration point as you are, but I do see it having a greater potential impact, yes.

Frankly, I'd prefer to see far more nuclear sources than we do today - and hydroelectric too. I think you get far more bang for the buck with both than you could with wind or solar - at least in some places (probably not places like Britain for hydroelectric of course, but still...). I come from a nuclear background (Navy) where proper operation of such reactors has been the standard for over 50 years with rarely an incident in all that time. We've been unduly indoctrinated over the decades to fear nuclear power too much; it can be done safely, if done properly. But my real reason for sticking with nuclear power is the promise [some day] of fusion - fusion technology being by large a function of work done on the nuclear side. We've a breakthrough or two (or more, dunno...) before we can see that becoming a reality, but the promise is certainly one that would do away with any discussions about fossil fuels, solar, wind, and nuclear. It [fusion] is imho the "holy grail" of true energy independence.

 

[Vylo]

Thing is hybrids are really city vehicles, that is where they get their efficiency.

I will never see a return on buying a hybrid vehicle out here in the country... so I will never buy one.

 

[trunks2k]

Thing is hybrids are really city vehicles, that is where they get their efficiency.

I will never see a return on buying a hybrid vehicle out here in the country... so I will never buy one.

But if you can get one that will run 50 miles or so on a battery before switching to a gas engine?

I like the idea of the volt as a good stepping stone while battery technology can get up to snuff, and would like to see hybrids moving in that direction.

But for me, there's two major set backs.

1.) I live in the city and commute out. I don't have a place to plug my car in to charge. The battery charge could make my commute all battery, definitely if I could plug in somewhere at work. But no place to park at home for a charge makes it worthless there. This is going to be a big issue with electric vehicles. Unless a fast charging system is made that can charge a battery in 5-10 minutes, cities are going to have to start putting in some sort of charging infrastructure at the curb.

2.) Simple cost. Even if I DID have a place to park and charge, its priced way too high for me. But I expect those costs to go down over time.

 

[chaz345]

That's a shame. It seems like a nice car, maybe a bit ahead of it's time and a bit overpriced, but still nice.

Contrary to how they market it it's more of a hybrid than a true electric though. The electric range is a measly 35 miles. It's no ahead of it's time, it's behind it if we're talking electric vehicles. There's people who have, been selling purely electric vehicles, usually converted from normal ones, with twice that range for more than 10 years.

 

[trunks2k]

Contrary to how they market it it's more of a hybrid than a true electric though. The electric range is a measly 35 miles.

25-50 depending on conditions. Overall combined mileage is somewhere around 60MPG, which is pretty darn good, especially if you commute less than 50 miles a day (which would push your MPG more to 90+ assuming you charge every night).

Curious as to the actual return of a Volt for me assuming I only use it for commuting:

I do just under 50 miles a day (if I had a Prius it'd probably be less as I'd take the city driving route both ways, as it would be more fuel efficient for that particular car, which is significantly shorter distance wise than the highway route but takes an extra 15-20 minutes in the afternoon). Assuming I do 30 miles of that trip solely on battery, that's around 20 miles I'd do on the gas engine. Assuming 35MPG average on the gas engine, then I'd use .57 gallons every day. I put in roughly 8 gallons of gas every week in my car so I use at least 1.6 gallons of gas every work day. So I save 1.03 gallons every work day, so that's 5.15 gallons I save a week. Let's say it costs me $2 to charge it every night before work, so that's $10 a week to charge it. If gas costs $3.65/gal, then that's roughly $18.80 in gas savings. Minus the $10 I spend charging it, then that's $8.80 in savings every week, or roughly $422/yr.

Those are very conservative numbers in favor of my all gasoline car. Even if you triple it, that's still really not worth it for me to spend the extra money on a Volt. If the Volt was in the Prius price range, it'd be a different story.

 

[Cromulent]

Yeah, I'm aware of that. Sorry; I was being general and thinking more in terms of strictly electric re that particular objection.

There is one plus to hybrids though - in order to make them viable, they're having to pull all the stops to make the gasoline portion of the drive more efficient - but then that raises another objection - the need for most of them to run on premium gasoline to do so.

The most efficient vehicle though, regardless the motive power source, will always be the one with but ONE motive power source since using one motive source to drive another motive source will always experience a loss of overall efficiency in the transfer of power from the one to the other. The only reason a hybrid might be more efficient than say a strictly gas engine is if the gas engine of the hybrid is more efficient than the gas engine of the gas-only vehicle. But put an equally efficient gas engine in both, and the hybrid will then become less efficient overall by comparison.

Well, I don't agree with that fully. A hybrid is always going to be more efficient than a petrol car with the same engine, because of regenerative braking (unless it is a horribly designed hybrid!). You're going to lose a bit of power due to inefficiency, sure, but there is a net gain because without the electric motor, you'd be losing all your kinetic energy every time you braked. Of course, it all depends on where and how you drive as well.

The big losses come when you start trying to ramp up the performance by bleeding off power from the internal combustion engine to charge the batteries for fast acceleration.

Again, I'm all for being as efficient as we can with whatever it is we do - and all for being as creative as we can to get there - though at times the return might not always justify the effort.

As you suggest, wind (and even solar) deserve consideration for a place in the process, but neither are capable alone or even together to garner a majority as far as penetration goes. I'm not as sure about wind hitting the 50% penetration point as you are, but I do see it having a greater potential impact, yes.

Well, I don't ever see wind hitting that figure alone, unless there is huge investment in pumped storage. It's definitely technically possible, but as soon as you start hollowing out mountains, it pushes the price of energy up loads.

On a bit of a tangent, but an interesting one, we had a tour of a pumped storage station in Ireland when I was at Uni. Despite not generating any actual power of its own, it had actually paid back its construction cost about three times over, because it could absorb any excess power, or supply any extra that was needed, allowing the big fossil fuel plants to run at near peak efficiency no matter what the demand was doing.

Frankly, I'd prefer to see far more nuclear sources than we do today - and hydroelectric too. I think you get far more bang for the buck with both than you could with wind or solar - at least in some places (probably not places like Britain for hydroelectric of course, but still...).

Britain's hydro is pretty much all exploited at this stage, as far as I know. There are a few locations with a bit more spare capacity, but not many.

As for nuclear, I don't think current nuclear is going to be the solution. We're running out of Uranium even quicker than we're running out of oil, which is why we need to either perfect breeder reactor technology, or get Thorium reactors up and running. Neither one of those is going to be easy.

I come from a nuclear background (Navy) where proper operation of such reactors has been the standard for over 50 years with rarely an incident in all that time. We've been unduly indoctrinated over the decades to fear nuclear power too much; it can be done safely, if done properly. But my real reason for sticking with nuclear power is the promise [some day] of fusion - fusion technology being by large a function of work done on the nuclear side. We've a breakthrough or two (or more, dunno...) before we can see that becoming a reality, but the promise is certainly one that would do away with any discussions about fossil fuels, solar, wind, and nuclear. It [fusion] is imho the "holy grail" of true energy independence.

If fusion works, it will first of all put me out of a job (I work in conventional nuclear), and secondly, yes, it will solve any energy issues we have, probably forever.

However, fusion is about 20 years away, even if there was a major breakthrough tomorrow. It's an old joke in engineering, "fusion power is just twenty years away, and has been for the last fifty years". The amount of money that's been pumped into fusion is staggering, and we're still not looking like cracking it any time soon.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if we had clean, unlimited energy, and I'd be more than happy to go job hunting if it ever came about. However, I'm very mistrustful of fusion's potential to become a viable power source in our lifetime.

On the naval nuclear reactors, well, civvies like me aren't allowed to know too much about them, but I do know they are incredible pieces of kit. However, I believe that they are hard to scale from submarine size to full power plant size, and that it would be prohibitively expensive to use the sort of technology they do on a large enough scale.

Added to that, there's the proliferation risk of using weapons grade fissile material as fuel.

Ultimately, though, nuclear power's worst enemy is public opinion. Yes, there are nasty waste products, and yes, it would be better if we didn't have them, but I'd much rather some horrific caesium and rubidium sitting in a vault, or buried in the crust in a subduction zone, than choking smog over our cities, and rising sea levels. However, people see things like Fukushima (where two people were killed, seven people die each day in China's coal mines) scare the living bejayzus out of people, and public opinion is always just one major incident away from swinging against nuclear power.

 

[sdmsanjose]

Cromulent
Thank you for such informative posts!!



Edwin,
I don’t usually agree with your political points of view but did enjoy your input on the subject of energy with Cromulent. Thank you for such interesting discussion on a very important subject

 

[Cromulent]

 

[heymikey80]

Yeah, I agree, Cromulent, that was really informative!

I do appreciate learning information like that.

Just as a sideline, I don't see fusion solving the basic radioactivity problem anytime soon. Fusion still generates devastating amounts of radiation, and anything nearby is going to be affected, and often radioactive.

 

[Wayte]

Yeah, I agree, Cromulent, that was really informative!

I do appreciate learning information like that.

Just as a sideline, I don't see fusion solving the basic radioactivity problem anytime soon. Fusion still generates devastating amounts of radiation, and anything nearby is going to be affected, and often radioactive.

You do realize they shield nuclear plants in such a way that not significant radiation gets to the environment right? Or at least the military plants do; I would assume commercial plants are kept just as stringent.

 

[Cromulent]

Yeah, I agree, Cromulent, that was really informative!

I do appreciate learning information like that.

Just as a sideline, I don't see fusion solving the basic radioactivity problem anytime soon. Fusion still generates devastating amounts of radiation, and anything nearby is going to be affected, and often radioactive.

Well, fusion does generate huge amounts of radiation, but this is because of energetic neutrons, not because of the products of the reaction, as in fission. So when the reactor is turned off, the radiation stops. Basically, it's no less dangerous than a boiler in a coal power plant. Sure, it's got some pretty nasty stuff inside, and you wouldn't stick your head in there if you valued your eyebrows, but when the plant's not running, it's just a large enclosed space.

You do realize they shield nuclear plants in such a way that not significant radiation gets to the environment right? Or at least the military plants do; I would assume commercial plants are kept just as stringent.

Yup, there is a huge amount of shielding around a reactor, you can stand on top of one quite safely (and several of my workmates have, apparently it's a weird sensation having a million horsepower beneath your feet, and the only evidence is a gentle vibration)

The waste goes into storage as well, not into the environment, so the only releases are very small.

There are a few very minor sources, the primary coolant is carbon dioxide, which is very slightly contaminated, and does leak at a slow rate, as an example. However, going back to coal power plants again, there is a small amount of naturally radioactive material contained on coal, and this is released into the environment when coal is burned, and the level is such that a coal power plant will release more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant (provided nothing goes catastrophically wrong, the chances of which are reducing all the time, with passively safe designs and more stringent safety regulations.)

 

[chaz345]

That's a bit of a canard. According to Toyota, who has quite a bit of history on batteries in the Prius, there are many Priuses that have 200k miles on the original batteries.

But the Prius battery is set up to stay between 10% and 85% of charge capacity. Great for a hybrid, but the excess size needed in a full electric to stay in that range is prohibitive. The reason that Prius batteries last so long is that they aren't being used anywhere nearly as hard as the batteries in a pure electric would be.

 

[chaz345]

Enegy density of alcohol is about 20% less than gasoline, to say nothing of the amount of energy it takes to produce. You have to use quite a bit more energy to refine ethanol than oil.

Depends on the source of the biomass involved. The return with corn sucks. The return with sugar cane is better. And in lab sized quantities the return from algea is phenomenal.

 

[chaz345]

I like the idea of the volt as a good stepping stone while battery technology can get up to snuff, and would like to see hybrids moving in that direction.

Battery technology exists for a pure electric to have a 200 mile range with the car having truly insane performance numbers. I suspect that if the performance of the Tesla were dialed back to something in the range of what is truly needed range could be pushed into the 300 mile range. Batteries aren't cheap though as evidenced by the car's price tag.

 

[chaz345]

If one considers the fact that almost every joule of energy on the planet is actually stored solar in one form or another, then solar makes a lot more sense. Storage for night time use is a challenge but not an insurmountable one. Use the excess during the day to split water into hydrogen and O2 and then consume it in a fuel cell at night. Or use it during the day to spin up a giant flywheel. Or use it to pump water up hill and drive a turbine at night.

 

[Cromulent]

If one considers the fact that almost every joule of energy on the planet is actually stored solar in one form or another, then solar makes a lot more sense. Storage for night time use is a challenge but not an insurmountable one. Use the excess during the day to split water into hydrogen and O2 and then consume it in a fuel cell at night. Or use it during the day to spin up a giant flywheel. Or use it to pump water up hill and drive a turbine at night.

It's the expense to do all of that that's the killer though. At the moment, it's far easier to let plants and geology, or air convection and its related effects, convert it into a more easily recoverable form of energy, for free.