Yes, they are both by Tesla. Does that make them invalid? Have you provided proof that this is not the case?
I don’t know about the USA but I’m pretty sure here you can pay for a separate electricity connection that only uses renewable sources, I don’t know why the same can’t apply to gas.
Still, I fail to see any numbers or references backing your own claims, while dissecting others.
I would have thought it was an obvious conclusion to come to that EVs are far more efficient ‘Wheel To Well’ to anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds, but apparently not in your case!
With the advent of latest battery technology like capacitor batteries and lead acid battery technology and free energy source such as solar energy, wind power, or hydroelectric power for charging the battery, it would be feasible for energizing future transportation using electric cars and light motor vehicles.
It puts them into question – their own technology being the one pimped and all. Do you automatically believe it when three different toothpaste commercials all claim that “9 out of ten dentists”? How about when a political advert calls a candidate “A Real American” (as if that’s somehow not true of his competitor).
paying more for the fuel than it normally would cost – doesn’t that change one of the consideration factors for if it’s a good choice or not?
Yes, in the US impractical because the infrastructure isn’t in place, and some fuels are simply not practical in some climates. Like you don’t see a lot of natural gas in New Hampshire; You’d think that 40 to 50F temperature swing in the spring between night and day compromised the lines, tanks and regulators… You’d think natural gas sources are five to ten times further away than coal mines or something… There’s more to that 48% coal figure for US power generation than the coal lobbyists. (despite wild claims to the contrary).
(their losses numbers omitting substation to ground faults during underages, which gives you another 10-15% over their 6.5% number – such underages and overages being what led to those two oh-so-wonderful east coast blackouts as transmission stations faulted down the line from an overage)
Oh, and if you have a High School level physics book handy or paid attention during physics you might remember a lot of what I’m talking about? I’d quote MC Hawkings, but then I’d get a warning.
I can’t imagine where you’d think it was the obvious conclusion… Maybe you’ve just never paid to heat your own place? Given how bad electricity sucks for heating compared to oil ($1000+ a year to heat my last apartment of almost identical floorspace to this one, which only consumes 60 gallons of oil over the same period; 250 gallon tank I filled three years ago still has over a quarter of a tank left!), how piss poor the performance of the best efforts so far on electricity have failed to surpass what was available 100 years ago, etc, etc…
Much less the simple efficiency of conversion – the cornerstone of all this that frankly, doesn’t seem to be in Tesla’s numbers accurately. Of course, that’s card stacking for you. Omit enough small details and include the ones that favor you – and poof, instantly you look twice as good.
How do the efficiency of gas based car compare with battery car, assuming that the power required to charge the battery comes from conventional energy source? If they both have same efficiency factors then it doesn’t matter whether one uses gas or battery. However, if the battery vehicle results in better efficiency levels, it is recommended to use the same.
How does linking to 3 irrelevant wikipedia articles show anything? The first has no figures, and hardly even mentions electric, the second is pretty irrelevant, and the third as well. You’ve made no comparisons between the 2 methods, only linked to some articles which explain 1 or the other on wikipedia, that most reliable of sources!
Oh, and if you have a High School level physics book handy or paid attention during physics
Don’t patronise me, you make yourself look like an idiot. I took Physics all the way through school and still have a keen interest in it today.
I can’t imagine where you’d think it was the obvious conclusion… Maybe you’ve just never paid to heat your own place?
I’ve lived in flats with electric heaters only for 6+ years now. Again, don’t assume you know everything about me.
And you have still failed to tell me in what way Tesla’s quoted figures are wrong, or provide a correction.
Ok, are you just being deliberately obtuse, did you simply fail to comprehend the articles, or did you just flat out fail to read them? If you find those “irrelevant” you lack the mechanical knowledge to even weigh in on the subject!
The first one explains what the topic is, and the mechanical reasoning behind how certain engines deliver peak power to fuel consumed at certain RPM’s…
The second one lists where power generation in America comes from with all those pesky percentages I’ve been saying (+/-1%) about where electricity COMES FROM.
The third discusses the infrastructure of electrical generation, mentions the 7% line loss (though oddly the parts about substation loss are missing now), etc, etc…
As for it being wikipedia, that’s why you check the REFERENCES listed at the bottom. – and why I said “excuse the truthiness” (that’s a joke… you didn’t get it)
So you’re familiar with newton’s laws, the inefficiencies of energy conversion or more specifically the more times you change and energy source – like say from fuel to electricity to momentum instead of fuel to momentum – the more you lose to to heat, stray magnetism, friction…
'cause it sounds like those are alien concepts to you.
Then I assume you’ve never paid for oil heat… Since you’re only defending HALF the statement.
Either that or the -10F nights and 40F+ days of December through February here color my opinion on the efficiency of electricity as a heat source… or should I say the complete lack therein. (of course we have 40 to 50 degree temperature swings for 9 months of the year so… Real fun when it’s the pneumonia inducing 70 degree days and 20 degree nights – hell it was 80F here yesterday and got down to 38 overnight – in JUNE… thankfully it’s a nice 64F today, but that probably means near freezing tonight meaning I’m turning the heat on IN JUNE one day after running the air conditioner)
You mean apart from their source fuel listing NOT being where it’s likely to come from in most places? When the first thing thing you linked to opens and it’s whiskey tango foxtrot land…
But sure, lets go to something with some meat, that pdf.
First off, notice they ALWAYS relate it to a barrel of crude – yet, only only 48% of a barrel typically becomes gasoline – by using the full barrel and not including the practical energy use produced by the rest of it, they’re able to skew the numbers for gasoline by over 50% in their favor. Watch out for that particular lie by omission, it’s used a LOT.
They flat out omit where the calculations of transmission are, and simply state their numbers – said numbers fluctuating as much as 50% depending on geography. (see why natural gas here costs 40% more than what #2 heating oil does by usage). It’s why their cherry picking fuel sources throws all their figures into doubt.
They literally chose the best fuel in terms of recovery/processing cost (97.5% by their numbers), the best in terms of generation (GE H-System) which is 60% – by their own numbers the well to outlet efficiency is 52.5% total using the “perfect fuel” that isn’t available everywhere and/or is impractical in many climes. They may as well have listed hydroelectric for all the good those numbers mean to someone on the US East Coast. (though sure, West Coast that makes a bit more sense)
… and it’s easy to see why Natural Gas is an also ran – for all it’s highly vaunted “efficiency” it costs twice as much because it’s four times harder to get and find… Also explains why for all the *****ing about petroleum, in the US power generation world it’s less than 1% of the source. (all THREE plants – two in Massachusetts, one in Maine).
As anyone working in the electricity generation field will tell you – until something better comes along, coal is king… because it’s cheap, not because it’s efficient.
So let’s talk burning coal… which has HALF the efficiency of natural gas at the plant. Food luck finding concrete numbers on coal though, it’s a tight lipped secret as to how the efficiency of coal burning… well, efficiency isn’t a word used in such discussions.
Neither being what I’d call trustworthy or citing their sources – but the numbers are inline with what I’ve heard in the past.
If we plug 33% “at the plant” into their figures replacing their ideal perfect world natural gas 60%, that well to outlet efficiency drops from 52.5% to 33%*92%*97.5%*97.5% == 29%… and that’s assuming a ground to plant efficiency on coal that’s the same as natural gas – which is 100% fantasy-land given the cost of getting coal out of the ground in manpower and energy required of mining vs. drilling. I can’t even find numbers on that anywhere, but I very much doubt that mine to power plant sees the 97.5% recovery efficiency well to plant sees for natural gas.
Check it out… dirtiest plant in the nation pushes out 40 pounds of SO2/MWh… the national average is much lower around 6 pounds per MWH, but compared to… well…
Nice little chart there showing the emissions based on energy use. Brown coal, the most commonly used is the dirtiest of fuels ESPECIALLY in terms of particulates… hard coal isn’t a whole lot better – while you can see natural gas’ numbers are HALF on Carbon dioxide and Nitrogen Oxides, and by comparison non-existant in terms of Sulfur dioxide and methane compounds… and particulate? WHAT PARTICULATE?
Of course, then you have your “clean coal” whackjobs – who are a bit like the car emission standards whacko’s in commiefornia… the process of cleaning the emissions reduces the delivered power so much, you end up burning more fuel resulting in another zero-distribution… or worse, exacerbating the problem. The most recent California emissions standards sure knock another 3% off the exhaust of gas powered vehicles from the previous standard, but it costs 5% fuel efficiency to implement meaning you’re burning 5% more fuel to go the same distance. They talk about pollution per gallon burned when they should be talking pollution per mile traveled… which again is the classic propaganda technique of card stacking in action. The whole “clean coal” thing takes and already inefficient and dirty (but cheap) process, and triples the operating costs, involves the costs of building new facilities (in a country where 90% of the power facilities were built before 1975) and worse, decreases the already low mine to outlet efficiency… To the point some think it might be more efficient to convert to burning #2 and #4 oils instead of “clean coal” (especially since with biofuels #2 and #4 oils can have a non-fossil renewable source)
Which is why Tesla’s choosing something that was only 20% of the supply source in what are basically glorified advertising materials – one that is impractical and overly expensive to implement in most places, and is the cleanest burning of the natural fuels is card stacking! If they had averaged based on the national (or better world) costs from ground to outlet, I’d take their numbers seriously – but cherry picking the perfect fuel source is little more than the classical propaganda lie by omission.
Well, to be fair they didn’t cherry pick the fuel source that REALLY would have skewed the numbers – but that one would have been too obvious given it means next to nothing if you don’t live within 100 miles of the Colorado river.
That PDF is funny though as it is filled end to end with card stacking to give the pseudo-science eco-nuts something to get wood over (Teak? Mahogany? Ebony? Don’t worry, just **** with you padre!) while barely mentioning a point that made my eyeballs bug out.
COST… They’re claiming 110 watt/hours a kilometer (DOUBLE what I last heard for a EV); That’s 178 watt hours a mile!!! HOLY HANNAH!!! (I’m saying that in an impressed/good way!)
Using the classic “270 mile” range figure most of your sources like to pimp as a practical range for a vehicle (heck, it’s even in their fictitious but well crafted “plain folks” sidebar in that PDF) that works out to 48KW/h… which by my last electric bill (16.9 cents/kwh by the time all the taxes and supplier charges are tacked on) works out to $8.10 cents… Using the uber-efficient hybrid 63mpg Honda Insight using their numbers, that’s 4.2 gallons worth of gas – at four bucks a gallon right now that’s basically 17 bucks worth of fuel.
Meaning the Tesla costs less than HALF to operate per mile than the most efficient hybrid on the market. Figure it out for the average 30mpg highway road car and that’s 9 gallons of fuel [/i](which is EXACTLY where the 270 figure originated – 3/4ths of a tank on a typical road car – 10 gallon + 2 reserve)[/i] or a $36 fillup.
Hmm… $8 or $36 dollars to cover the same distance. Gee, let me think. Over 400% the FINANCIAL efficiency of a road car. TO HELL with it’s environmental impact, there’s your selling point!!! Rather than lying by omission about how “green” their electric is, they should be trumpeting that from rooftops. Given the average commuter travel of 32 miles (16 each way) every weekday, that’s 8000 miles a year meaning compared to what’s on the road for most people now… that’s $1040 in gasoline vs. $231 on your electric bill… basically $809 a year extra back in your pocket.
But of course, this is why most hybrid owners want to plug into the grid even with cars that don’t come with a plug. It’s one of the most popular after-market mods for first and 2nd gen Toyola Pious’, FINALLY looking to be offered on the 3rd gen.
So environmentally with the current power infrastructure – NO. It’s no better and they’re card stacking their numbers by basing it on natural gas. In terms of your pocket however… But then I’ve always been a fan of anything that speaks to my wallet.
I can’t read all of that as I’m too busy right now, or even pretend to understand the science behind it, but I have a question about diesel fuel.
I learned about 3 years ago that diesel fuel is VERY VERY toxic. It’s the black fuel that comes out of all those semi trucks that pollute the air (GROSS)!
So my question is, why does everyone think diesel is so clean or so much better?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only car company that hasn’t come out with a GREEN car is Mercedes (unless I just didn’t see the right commercials on TV). They cite their green car is diesel.
Are there different types of diesel? Some clean, some toxic?
I would expect Mercedes to be top of the line in leading the way in Green.
I’ve had this question for a while now & would like an answer.
There’s a LOT of misinformation about diesel, especially when there are multiple TYPES of diesel fuel.
It gets a REALLY bad rap in America because our pump petroleum diesel isn’t sulfur free – which is why it smells like nasty beer farts in the deepest brimstone pit of hell coming out the back of cars and trucks running it. Overseas they get a wee bit cleaner a diesel, though it’s still not all that clean a fuel compared to gasoline… There’s a reason the Top Gear guys call it “the fuel of Satan”. (and ended up eating a bit of crow on that when they entered that race series)
Designed to burn a great many different fuel oils, not just petro-diesel. Diesel engines do not have spark plugs, alternators, ignition coils, or a great many other parts you commonly associate with a gasoline engine – they work by the fact that oils of certain burn rates and densities when mixed with air will actually detonate under pressure… If you mix the fuel with air during the ‘compression’ stroke of a piston, when the compression reaches a certain point it goes off – no spark plug needed. This simplifies the engine design and increases engine reliability; two more things to make it a more desirable design in heavy duty cycle environments – like long haul trucking, military vehicles, etc… They are, as I’ll explain below, also much easier to run improvised fuel sources in.
The thing is, for all the noxious sulfur oxides it delivers significantly more power per gallon both due to the chemical differences of the fuel and the efficiency of the the diesel engine. That’s a hefty part of why it’s been the fuel of choice for heavy haulers for ages; It can deliver way more torque which means less fuel to get yourself up to speed and stay there on heavy loads. Tractor-tailors, farm tractors, military tanks, heavy transports – if you can extract more power per gallon and the price isn’t that different, it’s a bargain… and can even pollute less. That’s something the “emissions are everything” people often miss (yes California, I’m looking at you) is that they always talk pollution per gallon instead of pollution per mile or more importantly, pollution per mile per ton. See diesel trains, another area where electric is cute, but diesel is cheaper and in the grand scheme of things pollutes less.
Though what’s probably really confusing you is the term biodiesel. The diesel engine can run on a great many different fuels – right down to left over deep fry oil from restaurants if you filter it first.
Biodiesel is a diesel type fuel, but it’s nowhere near the black oil most people think of. Generally speaking it’s just a #2 fuel oil. Fuel oils are rated on a mix of viscosity and burn rate, the most common of which are #2 and #4 oils, which in many places are interchangeable and or are blended to meet local needs. For example, home heating old where I am here in New Hampshire is 20% biodiesel now and they’re talking about introducing B40 next year (40% bio, 60% petrol). This has driven down the cost and makes it burn cleaner… In a pinch since diesel fuel is just a #2 oil, you can run it in a home oil heat system with no real problems. (handy to know if you run out during a snowstorm and nobody will deliver). Conversely I have a friend with a Diesel Volvo who’s been running it off B20 for three years – which hovers usually about 40 cents a gallon less than pump grade petro-diesel… though he’s been running B100 (100% bio) in the warmer months since a station over the hill in Peterborough added a pump for it. (fits with their whole Pink Ribbon truck thing, and being not just a petrol station, but full service home fuel oil too)
Unlike Petrol-diesel, biodiesel burns way cleaner, properly adjusted it has no real soot and significantly less hydrocarbon emissions, and when/if your exhaust has an odor, it smells like a McDonalds. It looks like vegetable oil, smells like vegetable oil, burns like vegetable oil because, well… it’s vegetable oil.
So, when people talk green and diesel, they mean running a engine on #2 fuel oil from renewable organic sources… like corn oil, peanut oil, canola oil, the output from thermal-depolymerization plants, rended fats left over from slaugherhouse processes, and other such “clean” oil sources. These processes can be more efficient than ethanol based fuels and tend to burn more completely – and the more completely you burn the fuel the better both in terms of extracting power and from dumping unwanted pollutants out the exhaust.
It’s not a perfect solution as biodiesel has many of the same problems as the thick-end of the #2 oil spectrum; It turns to jello around 30F meaning you need to either have a true diesel supply to start the engine and warm up the biodiesel before you can go driving, and you need to keep it warm. Mixing it with petroleum based fuels can also prevent it from gelling, and provide some of the benefits reducing the reliance on fossil fuels and being cleaner per mile.
Though turbines are where the real chemical fuel to other power types efficiencies lie… too bad between jet lag and only being efficient at very specific power ranges are beneficial – which is why I’m surprised we don’t see more hybrids with turbines in them, though there have been prototypes. That would be the ideal IMHO – electric at the wheels, battery off the grid, with a flex fuel turbine to charge the battery during long distance driving.
Frankly DS, I stopped reading when you again missed out most of the links in the chain that gets oil from the ground and eventually turns in into motion, something which you are basing your entire argument on. I explained it in a previous post, but you simply ignored it, claiming you didn’t understand what I was talking about. And no, the scientific theories you mentioned are not alien concepts to me, so don’t try and act all superior about it, because you again missed off most of the chain in petrol production there, which makes a huge difference to your assumptions.
I’ll come back to this when you stop ignoring the majority of what goes in to getting a tank full of fuel into your car, because at the moment either you don’t realise, or you are deliberately leaving the figures out as they disagree with your argument.
Hey guys, I’m a car and motorbike guy but I know internal combustion engines are not good for the planet so I’ve been looking for something to take their place for some time.
If I can’t find something to buy then I’ll do a conversion. Probably something like a Dodge Neon to electric. The downside of this type of conversion is the lack of range. You can get to and from work no problem but a trip beyond 100 - 200 miles without a charge is out of the question. That said, I can always take one of my motorcycles or rent a hybrid if I’m off on a trip. It’s a start.
The best thing I’ve seen lately is this: A BETTER PLACE (it’s already underway)
The “problem” with diesel fuel compared to gasoline (besides the sulfur issue Crusty mentioned) is that diesel fumes have large particulates, which when inhaled cause more lung irritation than gasoline fumes.
These can be filtered out (might reduce some efficiency), and using biodiesel for example doesn’t emit these large particulates, so the issue where you are is simply, they are offering crappy diesel fuel to the public. The US and Canada have harsher rules against diesels than in Europe, where you see plenty of small cars running on it, not belching out black smoke or sounding like cargo trucks (though they do sound different than gasoline cars if they are old enough to be noisy).
Rudolph Diesel ran his engine on peanut oil at some point. Then he got on a boat and apparently committed suicide. Maybe because everyone was calling him a German when he insisted he was a “Bohemian”. Or something.
Diesel cars compete easily with hybrid-gasoline-electrics like the Prius, Civic and Insight (tho Insight is not a “full” hybrid) when comparing by weight/class. So of course, I would love to see a diesel-electric hybrid for commuters on the streets taking place of both straight-diesel and straight-gasoline cars.
The diesel engine can run on a great many different fuels – right down to left over deep fry oil from restaurants if you filter it first.
Well, usually you do one or the other. People running straight veggie oil tend to have two sets of fuel lines (though this may have more to do with the higher gel point, since most days you start up with regular diesel until the engine and oil pan warms, then switch manually over to veggie oil). With biodiesel you don’t need to modify anything, except after you first run through a tank of it you usually have to change/clean your fuel filter… since the biodiesel will clean your engine out pretty well of all the leftover junk from the petroleum-based oils. Clogged fuel filter is maybe one of the most common “problems” people run into when first trying biodiesel.
At hippy shops you can usually get some sort of crap to add to your biodiesel to lower the gel point.
You can make the stuff in your back yard, just let it sit… (though most of us don’t want barrels of lye powder sitting in our garages) but you do need to figure out what to do with the glycerin sitting at the bottom. The people I knew happened to know arts-n-crafts soap makers. The quality is too low to sell to actual soap companies though.
Short-range electric cars are meant for the majority of people (who drive an average of 20 miles per day). Though this wouldn’t be an issue for any commuter if the infrastructure matched oil’s. Remember how GM, Standard Oil and Bridgestone/Firestone invested HEAVILY (also politically) in getting this infrastructure as ubiquitous as it is in the US… this idea spread to Europe, but was harder to implement wherever things were already ancient and built for narrow carts, bikes and pedestrians.
Hooray - in related news, the UK have announced 8 new nuclear power stations, despite all the FUD surrounding Fukushima & Japan. A step in the right direction! Hopefully we will build more in the future.
If emissions were all the problem I’d maybe be for nuclear energy.
I won’t be until they solve the leftover/waste problem. It’s full of energy: I want them to use it instead of pouring concrete all over it and throwing it in the ocean or burying it or blasting it into space and calling that a “solution”. It’s no more a solution than burying our garbage. Well, except if/when garbage leaks, that’s not nearly as bad.
In Petten they’ve reduced the half-life of the waste to 300 years. While way more awesome than 1000 years or whatever, but so far as I know only being done at Petten, which is an experimental/research nuke station.
Yeh. It is possible to use the waste, just quite expensive. Although I see nothing wrong with burying it - it isn’t all that much (a warehouse full or 2 for a country this size over 75 years probably), and it isn’t that difficult to just put it in a protected area and keep people from going in, especially for all the benefits you get (zero carbon after building, highest efficiency, cheapest per unit of electricity in total). Is burying it / storing it really as big an issue as people make out? Especially if they are using old / abandoned coal mines for it like they are here I think. Just make it secure, seal it off and make sure noone goes in, job done.
Just make it secure, seal it off and make sure noone goes in, job done.
Then I require we spend the bazillions necessary to make it earthquake proof. People make assumptions like “New Zealand isn’t geologically active” and then suddenly whoops now we have all these seismometers everywhere showing that actually it’s practically ALL fault lines. Whoops.
And also spend on being prepared for what-if scenarios. So that for example say there was nothing Japan could have done about their reactors (it happens, nobody can control everything anyway)… fine, but so there’s no way now to remove all tehe radioactivity from all the groundwater and soil? Someone somewhere was surely begging for grant money to continue research into ways to clean that stuff up for decades and maybe only in the last few months has actually gotten any attention. It always takes a disaster doesn’t it? Guess that sucks for paleontologists, unless we ever get invaded by space dinosaurs… but anyway…
Basically if we take on the responsibility of nuclear power we’d better be damn ready and willing to completely pay for it.
…the way we’re still not willing to pay the true cost of the other fuels: what people pay at the pump, oh they complain, but it’s a FRACTION of the true total cost. (plus they always seem to forget all the taxes they pay going to subsidies, so we’ll leave that out for now)
We’re so used to our cheap fuel. When we finally get around to valuing it the way we should, we’ll finally accept that we need to pay a lot for it. Until then, we’ll take whatever way seems cheaper because we’re just used to that. I expect people to take shortcuts with anything they can. They will with nuclear power as they have with everything else, because that’s simply how human beings work.
Hippies living in their solar powered homes quickly learn to stop just automatically throwing the light switch and then forgetting to turn it off. The rest of us? No thought at all.
In any case, I would totally support my tax money going to more and serious research in getting energy from stuff like spent fuel rods. Seriously burying that is such a waste.
You mean like how the Yucca mountain facility was planned to be smack dab in the middle a caldera chain criss-crossed by faults? Cost billions of dollars already and nothing’s even been stored there yet – if ever with Odumba canceling all it’s funding, leaving the US with no long term radioactive waste storage? (unless you count the WIPP, which won’t accept 90% of nuclear waste produced? Let’s just stack it all up outdoors next to the plants!)
I agree… I hope they are clean Thorium (molten salt) reactors which can not melt down and can not be weaponized. Also Thorium reactors can be fueled by nuclear waste which would be handy.
I have no idea about the situation in the US but I imagine it’s all very political there as the US is generally pretty anti-nuclear, even though it is the most sensible option at the moment.
I’m not saying it doesn’t have its problems (and yet noone has suffered any ill consequences from Fukushima still), but the cons are easily outweighed by the pros as far as nuclear goes. It’s the only way to meet the increasing demand for energy - fossil fuels WILL run out or become economically unsustainable in time.
