Thread for alternative energy, electric cars, new fuels, etc

[HAL9000]

Here is a video of the electric taxis in Tokyo, where they adopted the Better Place business model of swapping batteries at "gas" stations.

http://www.betterplace.com/tokyo-electr ... rplace.com"
This is just one small step in demonstrating that this technology works even with short range batteries that only yield 100 miles per charge. And by 2015 batteries will be much better and considerably cheaper.

But by 2020 both israel and Denmark will have closed most of their gas stations and they will rely mostly on electric cars because this charging/swapping infrastructure will be everywhere and the system is popular already.

Here is a long interview of Shai Agassi:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11323"

It turns out that in order to rely on pure electric batteries the electric grid must be expanded only by 10 %, which is not difficult if it is done in 10 years until 2020.

[HAL9000]

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One remarkable new development is that some Japanese companies are already developing high performance electric motors that do not need Rare Earth Elements.

This is a fundamental breakthrough because of the shortage or Rare Earth Elements in the market.

This means that the development and mass-production of electric cars will not be hindered by the shortage of Rare Earth minerals.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69R1OY20101028

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/101996/ ... metals.htm

[Alph]

Actual, literal, consumer prices for solar panels have been falling by 1-2% per month for years. (Measured by watt of production, which is the best measure of their actual hourly energy output.) This has caused a ~15% annual decrease in price for the last few years, but solar industry companies report production costs falling at twice that rate for 2009 and 2010. Profit margins are now running as high as 60%.

Despite the current inflationary commodities climate, in the month of December they fell by 3%.

Any conversation about new energy sources besides solar is irrelevant. In the next few years, solar energy will begin permanently lowering the cost of energy worldwide, in real terms. By the end of this decade, it will be the source of essentially all new energy production. This seems pointless in the face of the massive size of the industry until you recall that prices are set by marginal consumption, and the marginal consumption in the energy industry is an extremely small sliver of high cost on and off power sources. Marginal energy consumption growth (which will be low and even negative in some places already due to the trends of lower population and greater efficiency in the developed world) will be entirely satiated by solar by the end of this decade, freezing prices (which will cause them to shrink to insignificance in the face of economic growth, energy productivity and inflation) or even causing them to fall as expensive marginal on and off sources are replaced by solar power.

By 2020, at 15% per year reduction in cost, it will cost less to install a watt of solar electricity production (which produces a kilowatt of power every month or so) than to buy a kilowatt of power at current prices. And because, at the current rate of production cost decrease, profit margins will be 99%+ by 2020 at that price, I believe that this estimate is conservative. This will make energy production trivial, and produce vast benefits to the economy when combined with the information revolution now in full swing, the likes of which we have never seen before. With incredibly cheap energy and the use of industrial machines the cost of mining, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, construction, and any number of other economically useful endeavors will plunge. This will be a revolution as pervasive and significant as the information revolution were now in the first stages of and the industrial revolution of the last century, and our standard of living will likely rise by another order of magnitude from it, as it did in the industrial revolution and certainly will in terms of absolute economic utility and value available to the average person from the information revolution by itself.

If that seems abstract, think about it like this: What is the cost of entertainment, education, information and communication in the digital age? None. It has no cost. Whatever expense there is to it is just profit to someone who sat around and made something. This is a very peculiar thing, as entertainment, education, information and communication have historically been incredibly expensive and are all highly economically valuable. The solar revolution will do that for furniture, cars, clothing, travel, raw materials, agriculture, and construction. Think about it.

[HAL9000]

[Alph]

[Tinker]

Alph Solar and Batteries are necessary components that complement one another. Solar charge must be held in batteries if you want to drive at night. So both are quite relevant.

[Alph]

[~]

I'd like to see a replacement for High Density Liquid Fuels as much as the next guy, but I don't think we can handwave the battery bottleneck away.
Moore's Law doesn't apply to battery tech, and most of the recent advances in batteries have come at a high cost, both in research time/effort, and in dependence on rare and exotic raw materials and techs.


The US Navy, for one, has invested billions in battery research. They'd love to go back to diesel/electric subs instead of nukes, but they can't yet. Electric subs are quieter and it takes a whole lot less training to swap or charge batts than to run an atomic pile steam engine.

[Tinker]

[Colonel Sun]

A "Sputnik moment" indeed.

[Sennacherib]

[Colonel Sun]

[Sennacherib]

[Sennacherib]

[Sennacherib]

[Colonel Sun]

[Sennacherib]

[Sennacherib]

[Apollonius]

[Sennacherib]

[Sennacherib]

[Sennacherib]

[Torchwood]

Well, I hope that Alph is right, because nuclear is now f*cked and Sennacherib points out that even geothermal has drawbacks. You cannot power the world on wind and waves, and for all sorts of reasons it is time we left the carbon age.

There is a good chance that he is, indeed in some sunny high cost places such as California and Italy you probably are close to grid parity already, but that is deceptive because the quoted costs are often for peak output which is only about third of the day at most. The biggest technological advances and cost reductions in percentage terms tend to be early in a technology; even so sheer scale brings competition and volume to components ($5000 bucks for a household DC to AC inverter? Shouldn't be more than the cost of a television, its less complicated).

Alternative energy types are obsessed with electricity, and electric cars – but electricity is only a third of total global power consumption.

Then there are the questions of scale, and transport. Global total energy consumption of 15 terrawatts is about 50 billion solar-panel- rooftops (assuming 3000 KWHr/yr from the latter) – but it is also about 150,000 kms of empty desert land at that rate of generation, quite doable. Mid latitude deserts extend for millions of square miles..

However PV doesn’t scale well. It is most economic small scale, without the need for grid connection/distribution; indeed some rural third world areas may miss out on the substantial fixed costs of a grid, just as they did with telephony. That is no good for urban areas, industry or transport however. Moreover electricity does not store well except small scale, suitable pumped hydro sites were taken years ago. Convert it to hydrogen by electrolysis – on the scale you need, where is the fresh water required, especially near deserts – coastal deserts have seawater, electrolyse that you get chlorine. Anyway that whole cycle has low efficiency. Nor does electricity travel well long distance – power losses high over 1000 kms.

Concentrated solar thermal power (CSP), lots of mirrors focussing the sun is less high tech but has the capability to reach the temperatures needed to thermally split water into hydrogen with a catalyst (it is being tried out in Spain). Seawater would do. You could then transport it, directly by pipeline or converted easily and cheaply into ammonia (liquid at the sort of temperature Yukon and Marcus would consider a balmy winter day), there are ammonia pipelines around for use as a fertiliser already. Costs of current CSP plants in Spain and California about 15-20c/Kwh, but scale and mass production should halve that , which is within sight of current “grid parity” (which is going up anyway). Ammonia will easily dissociate catalytically back to nitrogen and hydrogen, or can be used directly as a fuel anyway.

CSP uses only the heat from the sun – PV only the energy of the light photons (indeed solar cells don’t like a high temperature). Elegant solution to use both suggested , by separating the infrared/long wavelength light (for heat) from visible and UV (for photovoltaics). That should be more efficient.

[Torchwood]

[Colonel Sun]

Modulo Torchwood's pertinent observations about a Li batteries . . .