In fact, the current power grid could handle millions of electric cars without having to increase total capacity, simply by ensuring that the electric cars are charged during off-peak hours.
You could do even more with a new-generation ‘smart’ charger that communicates with the power company and draws power when it’s told to, so the power company could load balance the demand.
But the important thing with electric cars in the short-term is that they decouple the energy-consuming infrastructure from the energy-producing infrastructure. This has big ramifications for the grid being resilient to change. Look at current electric power - your electricity may have been generated by coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, hydro, or solar energy, and none of your appliances or computers care.
An all-electric infrastructure can swap in and out any number of different energy sources inexpensively and rapidly. If oil becomes too expensive, you can stop burning as much and turn on the natural gas turbines and start building nuclear plants, and charge accordingly. You don’t have to build new types of gas stations, get rid of a 100 million vehicle fleet, etc.
Everyone’s going on about batteries and their drawbacks, but it’s quite possible that a large battery will not be necessary. Instead, the cars of the future may store their energy in flywheels which are likely to be much lighter and smaller than batteries.
OK, they’re still under development, but I think it’s much more likely that they’ll be a long term solution rather than battery-electric vehicles.
I would not be betting on flywheel cars. When I was in regular correspondence with one of the original Tucker designers, the subject came up and he flat out shot the idea down. He’d crunched the numbers, went over every possibility he could think of as far as materials that could be used in them, and the like, and unless we manage to develop unobtainium, there’s no way to build them so they work economically. Word has it that the reason Chrysler killed it’s Patriot Car was because even at moderate speeds the gyroscopic effects were so severe that they made the car undriveable.
Gyroscopic forces shouldn’t be an issue: All you have to do is install two flywheels, spinning in opposite directions. The problems are going to be in material strength, to make something which can reliably hold together while storing enough energy to take a car on at least one leg of a commute.
I think the pure electric car (battery powered, recharged at home) has a niche for future use, but is not a long time solution. Right now, I think the electric car makes sense for use in heavily congested areas where concentrated pollution is a problem. It is true that there is usually fossil fuel burned somewhere to create the electricity, but in an area like the Los Angeles basin, it makes sense to use an electric car there to cut down on polution in that area, and have the electricity generated someplace where the pollution will not have such an impact.
A plan that will work for me, will also work for a lot of people, even enough to make a difference. I live in San Antonio, and I can do most of my driving without ever getting on the highway. Even if I need to go across town, I can do very well without doing much highway travel or can take a little longer and use an in-town route. This means I seldom have to go over 45mph. A small electric car can easily handle this traffic and can get me around town on a full charge. If I need to go farther, or leave town, I can use a regular gasoline powered car. I think that a lot of Americans should consider the use of two cars; one for in town and one for out of town. A great many people in this area have more cars than they do licensed drivers, so the concept of having cars specialized for certain styles of driving (just like you see with motorcycles) is not a bad idea.
I think the more immediate future of automobiles is the turbo-diesel. A small, very strongly constructed engine that can make decent power and performance under demand, but still provide good mileage under cruising and light-duty use. This engine will also be versatile since it can be designed and tuned to run on a variety of fuels produced by a variety of sources, many of which are renewable.
Eventually, I think the electric car will be the best bet overall, once the technology has eliminated the weight, construction and enviromental hazards of the onboard battery. Capacitive storage will solve this problem, and with a nationwide grid already in service, the rest of the infrastructure is there. Like diesel, electricity generation can be done in many different ways using many different fuels. It also has the benefit of being produced by wind and solar power which further reduces the power and pollution needed to make the “fuel”.
This isn’t unheard of. Lots of people with SUV’s do the same thing – leave 'em in the driveway to commute, use 'em when they’re doing anything else. Lots of people have pickups in the same way. I’m down to one car now, but I mostly did such with my Expedition (so don’t call me names when you happen to catch me driving it). My next car will be a commuter, probably the new Ford B coming out in a couple of years. That’ll (a) appeal to my cheapness, (b) keep the “nice” car in good shape for several additional years. As is, when I have to go out of town, I rent rather than use my own. Of course, my company pays for that. But sometimes I rent personally, too, for long road trips. Mostly to preserve my own car, but I wouldn’t be averse to such if I had a pure, non-hybrid electric.
One other item not mentioned so far: energy used in braking. In a gasoline-powered car, braking dissipates the momentum as heat in your brake pads & tires – effectively wasting it.
But with an electric car, it’s fairly easy to design it such that the motors function as generators during braking, to recharge the batteries, so much of that energy is recovered instead of wasted as heat. Hybrid vehicles already do this. It’s not a huge amount for one car, but multiplied by millions of cars, it amounts to a sizable net gain.
It would depend upon what the range of movement for the gymbals was, and how freely they were able to move. Note that there is some doubt as to if the Patriot Car actually had a flywheel or not, and if the gyroscopic effect was what caused Chrysler to kill the project. It may have simply been that the car didn’t have one and it was killed for other reasons, or that the power transmission couplings needed to extract energy from a gymbaled flywheel were impractical.
This page has links to PDFs of government reports on hybrids/electric vehicles and synthetic fuels which were written in 1982. While the technical information in them is out of date, many of the issues raised in the reports are still valid. According to the reports, in 1979 there was ample power available to charge all cars and light trucks then on the road, provided off-peak recharging was used. Average electric bills would increase by 50%, though it’s not clear if this is on a per car basis, or not. Of course, in the years since, the electric grid has been rather neglected, with some experts claiming that it’s liable to collapse even if no additional demands are placed upon it, simply because nobody’s been willing to shell out the necessary money to modernize it. The report numbered 822807 says
One has to wonder if they were imaging a world where the two most rapidly industrializing nations were India and China, and that some 25 years after the report was written, the combined populations of those nations would be nearly 2.5 billion people.
I wonder the same thing. First they design a plug-in car which they know won’t go as far as most people want on one charge. Then they design a hybrid which you CAN’T plug in. Finally it takes a third party to come along and convert hybrids to plug in. Seems like a big “duh” to me–a ten-year delay of the obvious.
Why would everyone need to stop and plug in to recharge? There could be “Battery Stations” just like gas stations, where for a fee you swap your low battery for a freshly charged one.
Not going to happen. The amount of space that this would require, start up costs, safety regulations, and the like prohibit this from being a viable idea.
There are certain high density battery designs that aren’t suitable for automotive or general consumer use because of the dangers associated with charging them (too quickly or too much). Nobody wants to sit by their plug-in overnight monitoring, and no company wants to have a lot of “my car exploded and killed my family one night” because of a problems with the monitoring circuits. Having the batteries be removable to be charged at a service station with properly maintained and safeguarded equipment isn’t a bad idea economically. Think of it like a compressed gas exchange, you bring in the empties tank from your grill or welding kit and they give you a different set of full tanks… it allows them to inspect the tanks to ensure they’re safe and ensure they’re filled safely.
It also takes away the hidden cost shocker associated with the current fleet of electric vehicles: you have to refurbish the battery about every 5 years. This usually costs about a fifth to a third of the price of an already not-inexpensive car. Instead you don’t ever really own the battery, pay the cost of upgrading as a small surcharge on every fill up, and will have the most current battery technology at a faster rate than installed systems.
And it might be possible to remove or eject the battery in the case of a vehicle fire and thus not have to deal with the joy that is a HAZMAT fire.
It’s a bit more complex to have a universal battery back to power electric cars than propane tanks are. First of all, propane tanks all have a universal connector and don’t need electronics. Next, battery packs are way larger than a propane tank. Generally, they’re about the size of the rack that propane tanks are stored in.
Then there’s the volume of traffic that goes in your typical gas station. Busy stores can handle more than 1,000 customers in an 8 hour shift. How are you going to approach even half that number of vehicles if you’re swapping batteries?
Not to mention, the poor bullet catcher who works in the store is a low-paid flunky, and a great deal of them are going to have problems figuring out how to do the ol’ battery swap. You could require car makers to have an identical system (and location) for removing batteries, but I wouldn’t bet any money they’d go along with that idea willingly. Given how much they fight against any regulations, I’m sure they’d fight that tooth and nail. If you can’t trust (or it’s too dangerous) to have a human swap the batteries, then you’ll have to go with robotic equipment (programmed to recognize what make and model the car is, and where the battery access point is located), which ain’t going to be cheap.
Then there’s the liability costs. You scratch the paint on someone’s brand new car when you swap the battery, you can expect to be sued if you don’t pay to have the car repainted (and even if you do agree to paint it, you can still expect a percentage of car owners to sue you).
I’m sure that there’s more issues that I’m missing.
Tuckerfan, it didn’t take computer manufacturers toooo long to figure out things have to be pretty modular and universal in order to sell products. Likewise videotape formats narrowed down pretty quickly. And think of all the different ways camera manufacturers could have come up with for handling and loading 35mm film. . .
If electric cars become the way of the future, I am quite certain that someone will figure out a simple way to to dock and undock a battery pack to a vehicle. Instead of crying “It can’t be done,” someone’s gonna say “Figure out how to do it.”
And there in lies the difference between the automotive industry and the computer industry. It can be done, but the automotive industry will fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. Airbags first appeared on cars in the late 1960s, but the automakers didn’t bother to tell anyone about them, so no one bought them. Then when the Feds mandated them, the automakers cried that it was impossible.
All of that is beside the point, however. The risk of legal liability is simply not something that people are going to want to deal with when it comes to operating a battery exchange station. Scratch somebody’s BMW, Porsche, etc. and you can expect to be sued. Automated equipment, even if there’s a unified access point on all vehicles to get to the batteries, will be very expensive. Then there’s the matter of replacing bad battery packs. Who is going to pay for that? What happens if someone comes up with a vastly superior battery technology, which is incompatible with current designs?
Two words for you: Jiffy. Lube.
Standardize on an undercarriage accessible battery.
No scratched paint. Standardized reference points for the automated battery swapping machinery to use for alignment.
Also, the chassis of a real electric car will consist of the battery and the four motors that drive the wheels. Maybe you have an onboard power plant for charging the battery on the go, maybe you don’t. Maybe you have a transformer for at-home plug-in charging, maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s a truck-style superstructure, maybe it’s car-style, maybe it’s delivery-van style, maybe there’s nothing there but a set of handlebars like it’s some freaky electric highway surfboard. None of that matters, you can still open the guard panel under the car and lift down the battery.
Who pays for bad propane tanks? Who pays for bad acetylene cylinders? The cost is shared across all users of the service.
Then you put in a spacer for the now-too-large battery hole in the older cars. I’m not sure what technology you’re envisioning, but when the device in question is a magic box full of energy, it doesn’t much matter how that energy is stored or produced.
We have a piece of equipment at work that is about 90% air because all the solid-state bits have been replaced by a credit-card sized circuit board but the mounting bracket (and the box housing the equipment) is still the same size. It takes four D-cells, but the original design of the battery well took two honking great dry-cells the size of a beverage can… so they solder together two D-cells and mount them inside a plastic cylinder the same size as the old battery.