electric car follow-up

[mckitterick]

Another cool electric-car company is Hybrid Technologies (thanks to gryphonrose for the tip). They also make products for moving your house off the electric net:

Click the image to see the company's website.

Here are some really cool things about electric cars: It'll be much simpler to update our driving infrastructure to suit electric than hydrogen. Also, I read a great article recently about how the electric grid doesn't actually need more power plants if we have 220-volt electric cars that serve as power storage. The argument goes thus:

If we leave our electric cars plugged in all the time, they spend 90% or more of their time sitting parked, charging or selling power back to the grid during high-demand times. Most of the time, the grid produces much more power than people use, but they have to keep it charged at full capacity that might get used or we'll have brown-outs. However, the grid could be buffered by using millions of electric cars sitting idle, drawing from their batteries (which would provide refunds to the cars' owners) as needed.

I love it! More electric cars could equal less power-plant construction.

Best,
Chris

Comments

[fortyozspartan.livejournal.com]

"charging or selling power back to the grid during high-demand times"

This is actually really interesting to me. I work in sewers and as such I'm aware of "high" and "low" demand on systems. I can't say I have spent a lot of time considering demand on power grids so this opened up a whole new avenue of thought for me.

This seems like a great way to improve efficiency and possibly lower costs across the board.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

I know! I was really excited to read about it (where did I see it? It was a recent editorial in... I think one of the motorcycle mags or maybe Hot Rod).

So not only would going the electric-car route reduce the amount of pollution we each produce (especially nice for cities), reduce our dependence on foreign oil (we can make electricity via renewable resources), but it would also have a multiplier effect because doing so would reduce the pollution from power plants running beyond necessary output levels.

We should do this now. Heck, the US gov't could build a renewable electric grid and remove our entire dependence on foreign oil if it just decided to do so (see my post from a while back).

I'd buy an electric car instantly if it were part of a larger program to save the world!

Chris

[fortyozspartan.livejournal.com]

"So not only would going the electric-car route reduce the amount of pollution we each produce"

That really needs to be coupled with:

"the US gov't could build a renewable electric grid"

To be trully effective. I haven't done very much research into coal burning but I know it used to be more polluting than gas. I can't imagine that the majority of coal plants are "clean burning," yet, but as I said it isn't something I've looked into. I just assume clean burning are the minority.

"I'd buy an electric car instantly if it were part of a larger program to save the world!"

Producing a cheap electric car is going to be really important. So far, I've mostly been seeing expensive ones (Tesla motors, this one). If they can nail one of these things as "normal sized" and $15,000-$20,000 the market will adopt them much easier.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Though coal burning is less polluting due to stringent emission laws, coal plants do put out lots more carbon dioxide.

Cheap electrics are on the way. There's an automotive X Prize right now, to go 100 miles on a gallon of gas (or less, including the electric equivalent). The Aptera is an amazing vehicle, for example, that they're planning to release for that price.

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

Hybrids are catching on, but the same problem -- cost -- keeps some people who would love to buy them from doing so. And converting to plug-in voids the warranties on most. (Toyota, I believe, has come to an agreement with Cal-Cars concerning the modifications that company does.

This all-electric sounds wonderful.

As far as sustainable, I don't know how things are in Kansas (I would think wind farms would be big there) but here in NY, I was able to opt of an "all sustainable" energy source. For 1.5 cents/khw more (about six dollars extra a month) I get green power.

They offered me a free skiing lesson in return for doing this. (Stop laughing, Chris! I didn't use it, obviously...)

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's so cool! What a great way to help fund building a renewable infrastructure.

Skiing, eh? That would be interesting - I'd avoid the trees if I were you *g*

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

Yes, it seems very clever. Sometimes politicians have good ideas, or at least companies have good ideas and sometimes politicians let them.

The problem, of course, is that hundredth monkey. When I bought my car, my mother said, "Wow. I can't believe you did that. I would have waited for them to go down, the technology to be proven..."
I responded, "Someone has to be the first 99 monkeys."
I was thinking about it earlier today, driving home. So many SUVs. And the lies people tell themselves. "I need to be higher up to see. It's so good on snow." (That accident I had in December? *My* low-slung car didn't even skid when it was hit by two tons of Chevy Pick-up.)
"Natural Gas is more expensive than oil." Well, when I moved in and oil was what I had, I decided right then that when the thing died, I'd replace it with natural gas. (The entire hill behind town is basically hollow, riddled with ng wells -- it's a no-brainer.) Just got my first ng bill, and it looks like heat's going to cost half as much as it did with the ol' dirty thing.

>Skiing, eh? That would be interesting - I'd avoid the trees if I were you *g*
...hard to do in Upstate NY...

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

I never thought of the idea of using electric cars as power buffers. That's freaking brilliant.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

And that chopper is the coolest thing I've seen on wheels in a long time.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Me either, until I read that article. But surely other energy-policy people have thought of this, which begs the question: Why isn't the gov't pushing hard for electric cars (and motorcycles, and buses...)?

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

I think it might be a good idea to talk to Jay Inslee and others who are interested in energy policy. (He was my Representative briefly, until I was redistricted out of his district, but I think he'd pay attention anyway.)

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

It is brilliant.

The thing is, I never even thought about it until I started to research
"alternative" vehicles, but energy spent braking or going downhill is wasted in a "traditional" internal combustion engine. In a hybrid, it's stored and used later. In a plug-in vehicle, why the heck not recycle the energy the vehicle doesn't use and feed it back into the grid?

Let's obey the Laws of Thermodynamics here, people!

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Yup! So much energy is wasted by traditional transportation. Internal-combustion engines waste the majority of the energy they produce in the form of heat, not to mention energy lost or wasted in braking, idling, and coasting.

I've designed a new type of engine that recycles some of that waste heat by injecting water as another stroke in the gas engine, converting heat to more power, with steam for exhaust, but discovered someone else is currently working on this design, too. Which made me wonder again why the big companies have missed that, if two independent people (at a minimum) have thought of it.

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

It is not, alas, a matter of "they missed it."
Big auto companies and big oil companies have been in each other's pockets from the beginning. Hybrid and electric car technology is not new. Had you been around in 1909, and wished to purchase a car, your chances would have been about equal of getting an electric vs. an internal combustion vehicle. Through the years, independent folks have developed engines that run on water, run on garbage, run on gas but get 150mpg... Detroit quietly buys the patents, then never puts them in production.
I'm sure you've read (or seen the documentary of the same title) "Who Killed the Electric Car?"