The Alternative Energy Thread

Sounds great. Parts should be available, and your average meat head knows how to use electricity now.

I fully expect that once we reach the point where it's getting difficult to buy an internal combustion engine car there will be a vibrant aftermarket for battery replacement and refurbishment.

The incidents of battery degradation beyond the car being usable during its chassis' useful life are really low. But even today you can do a full battery replacement with many options. Not cost effective, but if you have your freak on for a specific car I guess you can keep it going.

Full disclosure:

Owner since april 2019 of 2015 Leaf. Paid $9K for it. Had 25K miles 85% battery when I bought it 4 years old.

3 years later, now 7 years old with 53K miles at 77% battery with 64 mile usable range (down from 84 when new). I've replaced the tires and wiper blades. Filled the windshield washer reservoir.

It commutes 40 miles round trip to midtown Atlanta daily where it charges for free at work. When I charge at home it's $0.12/KWH. 40 miles uses about 12KWH so if I were charging there it would cost $1.44 in electricity. How much gas do you use in 40 miles?​

It really depends upon the make and model of the car. There's a guy at Hemmings Motor News (pretty much the place for car geeks) who's ripping apart a Nissan Leaf in order to convert a classic car to electric on the cheap. From what I understand, the Leaf doesn't have the kind of battery life that a Tesla does, but it's easier (and cheaper) to rip apart the Leaf than it would be a Tesla. I've also heard that the software in charge of the batteries on various electric vehicles tends to underestimate how much life there's left in the batteries and that if you're willing to risk installing software created by hackers you can get slightly better performance than that which the manufacturer says is possible. This falls into a grey area, in terms of legality, so many folks will be unwilling to do so.

If, however, right-to-repair becomes the law of the land (over the objections of lots and lots of companies) then not only could one expect to be able to buy an electric vehicle that it is far easier (and less expensive) to swap batteries, one could get better performance out of their vehicle, be it in terms of longer battery life or longer range, or faster speeds.

no grey area. It doesn't affect emissions. It may affect your warranty (that right to repair laws do affect) but I doubt anyone is ripping apart a car under warranty. If it burns up and hurts someone then liability will rest with the hacker.

You’re forgetting DMCA laws which make it illegal to futz around with the software in your vehicle.

This applies to phones.

Cars' ECUs and other controllers are not password protected.

The only thing altering cars' software affects are emissions.

here is a EULA for flashing software for cars' ECUs. It does caution the user that any IP laws are their own responsibility.

I've never heard of a manufacturer sending a C&D for any of the tuners out their willing to flash your ECU. Some are even CARB legal.

Leaf Spy is an app to alter read and alter data on the Leaf's processor. I've used it to turn off the annoying sounds it makes to scare pedestrians. It's pretty limited but then there isn't a big market to hack electrics like there is for ICE cars.

DMCA doesn't merely apply to phones. And while there's been some exemptions granted to aftermarket folks, they haven't really been tested in court as to what they might mean. John Deere's involved in a bunch of legal action over DMCA-related stuff.

As you pointed out upthread, dealers don't like electric cars because they don't need the same number of repairs as ICE vehicles do, so they aren't inclined to sell them. Note that dealerships in Texas have such a stranglehold on things that you can't buy a Tesla from a Texas dealer. I believe the same is true in a few other states (and if you want to dig back all the way to the government bailout of automakers back in '08, you'll find a lot of threads here referencing the fact that even though the automakers wanted to dump dealers, they were prohibited by law from doing so). Now imagine a scenario where folks are largely able to bypass dealers entirely to do modifications, repairs, or what have you, to their electric cars. Do you think that the dealers are going to sit still for this? Or that they're going to start making legal challenges to it? Where the automakers will come down on this is another matter entirely.

Tesla has made it hard for folks who've fixed wrecked cars to get them back on the road. Even if they managed to get through those hoops Tesla denied them access to its supercharger network. That's changed, but don't be surprised if other automakers try to do the same thing.

I think India's already doing this.

This study appears to not include potential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the increase in available solar power, as well as the increased plant growth in the Sahara.

Toyota and Yamaha like hydrogen.

Apparently scientists in France were able to sustain nuclear fusion for five seconds. They're building a bigger facility that should be able to sustain fusion for an hour.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633

I usually last 5 seconds too.

Not to mention screwing over the existing ecosystem because we can't figure out how to use less energy or use distributed generation (which should reduce transmission losses).

Would be great to see more hydrogen vehicles, but are giant engines more efficient or something?

It's sort of an infrastructure issue. There's a shitload of people out there who know how to work on ICE vehicles, plus there's a ready supply chain for parts, etc. that can be used with minimal changes, you also don't have to do a lot of re-engineering of your existing vehicle designs if you can keep using the same engine and transmissions you presently are.

The big issues are the lack of hydrogen fueling stations, the fact that hydrogen doesn't contain as much energy per pound as something like gasoline does, and storing the hydrogen in vehicles. I believe that the storage issue is somewhat licked, in the sense that you can now store enough hydrogen in a car to give it a comparable range to a fossil fuel-powered vehicle, without it being mostly a fuel tank. Certainly, the fuel cell-powered vehicles being offered by Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai all have a range of at least 300 miles, but fuel-cells are more efficient than a hydrogen-powered ICE vehicle.

Assuming that they can get the kinks worked out so that the vehicles perform as well as a standard ICE-powered one, there's a few unexpected benefits from doing so, besides the ones that I've mentioned. One is that you can strip off most of the pollution controls from the vehicle, not only does this save weight, but it saves costs as well. Catalytic converters (which basically take care of any unburned fuel in the exhaust) use pricey materials like platinum in them and aren't needed on a hydrogen-powered vehicle. And since the engine isn't burning a bunch of hydrocarbons, you don't need to change your oil as often. So, instead of needing to do it every 5K or so miles, you would only have to do it every 10K miles (or so). Potentially, this would also mean longer life for some of the gaskets inside the car as well.

I mean, why 8 cyclinder, though? Why not 4 or 6, have a smaller vehicle and not need as much energy to move it.

(I feel like the answer is "because America")

A larger engine is naturally going to have more horsepower (and lower fuel economy). What they will be able to do, however, is stick that into a luxury vehicle, such as a Lexus, and advertise it as a "premium" vehicle (not to mention that buyers won't mind paying more for the cars to cover the R&D costs). If you're buying a luxury car, you want it to have a high-performance engine, and a 6-banger (even if it has as much HP as a high-performance V-8 from a decade ago) isn't going to cut it.

Horseshit.

Both answers are because America.

There is no reason to keep ICEs. The most efficiency possible is 40%. The rest is lost as heat

The rest of an electric car is like any other except wear and tear are a lot less.

As far as working on ICEs, used engines, factory rebuilds, and new crate engines are the solution when needed. Only hobbyists are building their own engines.

Electric motors don't wear out. No brushes. Better bearings. No extreme heat or pressure. The power curve is steady.

This is from a Stanford course back in 2011, so the numbers are a bit out of date as to what one can find on sale today

The theoretical maximum one can get out of an ICE is 83% efficiency, but that's basically impossible. Still, one needs only to look at the HP ratings, engine block sizes, and fuel economy numbers of cars built in the 60s to those being built today and realize that we're getting far more energy out of gasoline than we used to. That's not even taking into account the fact that cars in the 60s often needed high-octane fuel to operate, while a 6-cylinder grocery-getter that runs on standard pump fuel coming off the assembly-line today has even more HP available than did a 60s muscle car.

You've also clearly never had to deal with logistics and don't understand how long it takes car companies to come up with new designs and put them into production. Five years, plus around a billion or more dollars, to put a new design into production, and that doesn't include all the costs for doing so. For example, thanks to Roger Smith (of "Roger and Me" infamy), many of GM's plants are "single-platform" designs. Meaning that they're fairly inflexible about the kind of vehicles they can build. Sure, they can, for example, crank out Chevy 1500 and GMC 1500 pickup trucks all day long, but if Suburbans, which use many of the same parts, are selling better and outstripping supply at the plant that builds Suburbans, they can't switch the plant over to building Suburbans along with the trucks. It's literally one or the other. If they have two plants building pickup trucks and want to switch one of them over to building Suburbans, they have to shut the one factory down, furlough the employees (while still paying them, and providing them with training), retool it, and then start it back up. (The vehicles mentioned are for illustrative purposes only, as I'm not going down the necessary rabbit hole to find specific examples. If you want details on what Roger Smith did, how he did it, and it fucked up GM, I recommend the book Car Wars by Jonathan Mantle.)

Partially true. Wear and tear is a lot less, but the fact that even the best batteries out there today don't have the kind of energy density that gasoline does means that you cannot simply take a vehicle designed for a gasoline engine, drop a battery pack in it, slap some electric motors on the wheels, and expect to get the same kind of performance out of the vehicle. Believe me, I've checked. To even hope to get the same kind of range, you basically have to convert all of the available space (such as the trunk, engine compartment, and passenger area) into batteries. This reduces the practicality of the vehicle considerably, even if you're able to still get the same kind of range out of the vehicle (which you probably won't). Kind of hard to haul stuff in a pickup truck if the entire bed is now a battery bank. Not to mention an ICE uses the waste heat from the engine to heat the interior of the car in winter. You've got to slap on completely different components if you're building an electric car. There's also issues with things like weight balance, and if you're going to put actual brakes on the vehicle, or just rely on regenerative braking to slow it down. (Regenerative braking, of course, stops the car faster than brakes do, but may not always work if something goes wrong. Ever been in a car with no brakes? I have. It also didn't have seatbelts because it was built in '65. How I managed to get it through rush hour traffic and over to the side of the road without shitting myself, I'll never understand.)

Then there's the issue of crashworthiness. How's the car going to handle a collision? Are rescue workers going to be able to safely cut into a vehicle to get the passengers out? What happens when the car goes into the water? There's also serviceability issues. Tesla gets pretty low marks because they can be hard to repair due to the way they're designed (we'll ignore the QC issues they're plagued with).

From a logistics standpoint, keeping things like the engine and transmission the same saves considerable costs. Not only because you don't have to keep parallel supply chains going as you switch from one technology to the other (if 90% of the engine and transmission of a hydrogen-powered car are the same as those used in a fossil-fuel-powered car, you only have to create a supply chain to handle the 10% difference). Keep in mind that automakers are legally required to continue to supply parts for a car seven years after they quit selling it. So, regardless of if they switched to battery-powered cars tomorrow, or fuel-cell, or some other power source, they'd still have to keep cranking out parts for the vehicles that are already on the road and are less than seven years old. That's one of the reasons why when car makers switched from carburated engines to fuel-injected engines, they just bolted the new systems onto existing designs, and rolled out newer, more-efficient designs based on FI as the years went by.

Even if batteries come to dominate vehicles in the coming years (as well they might), it makes sense for automakers to explore such things as hydrogen-powered ICE vehicles because it enables them to produce zero-emission vehicles while enabling them to utilize existing production systems and inventories. Remember, they've got less than a decade now before they're prohibited from selling fossil-fuel-powered cars in some parts of the world, and even when they do fully transition to battery-powered cars, they still have to keep churning out parts for the fossil-fuel ones for seven years. Now, imagine if a couple of years after fossil fuel cars can no longer be sold that some governments decide you can't even operate fossil fuel vehicles. Even if the government offers to compensate the owners, plenty of people are going to be pissed off, as they happen to like the design of their current car better than the designs the car makers are offering new. But suppose one can get, either at moderate cost or with government money, a conversion kit that allows them to keep driving the car they have, what then? Yeah, maybe the range isn't quite as good, and the performance isn't as good, but you get to keep styling away in your (then) classic 2031 Vette. That's a lot more palatable. (I'll point out that both Ford and GM are offering drop-in electric motors so someone can swap out the engine in their '68 Mustang as easily as they can drop in an ICE one, but they're not offering battery packs, which makes the thing kinda pointless.)

What about minor repairs, like putting on a new oil pump? Electrics don't need those. And if there's a lot of wear on your engine cylinders, it's cheaper to put in some oversize pistons (or piston rings) than it is to get a rebuilt engine.

Yeah, so? In WWII, Patton, Eisenhower, and Omar Bradley pushed for our tanks to be diesel-powered. The Army decided that because more people were familiar with gasoline-powered engines that it made more sense to use those, even though it meant that more soldiers would die because gasoline is far more volatile than gasoline. Because they wouldn't have to spend as much time training mechanics on how to repair the engines.

Interestingly enough, after the war, because there were so many mechanics coming out of the Navy who were trained on diesel engines, the railroad companies opted to switch to diesel engines over steam, even though at the time, steam engines were cheaper, had better fuel economy, and used fewer parts.

Additionally, the reason Toyota introduced the Prius, wasn't because the cars were better or cheaper than the ICE cars that Toyota was currently building, but because the then president of Toyota felt that they were the future and were worth selling, even though they lost something like $20K on each car. Contrast this with GM, who'd figured out that while battery technology wasn't at a point where they could take the EV-1 nationwide, and that a hybrid version of the EV-1 performed beautifully, they opted to kill the whole program. We know what happened a decade later.

Believe me, @steve2^4, I have been digging into the technical, engineering, and practical aspects of alternative energy powered vehicles since '94. Not to mention I've worked in the automotive industry. Battery-powered vehicles are only just now becoming able to hold their own against ICE powered ones, and even then, you cannot convert any old ICE vehicle to battery power and expect to get the same kind of performance out of it in terms of range. That'll eventually happen, but I don't expect to see it for at least another decade or so. And that's being optimistic. New battery-powered vehicles, of course, will be able to do far better, but that's because they were designed around the battery pack and its limitations.

Good grief. Electric cars are simple compared to ICEs and all the crap to manage power to the wheels.

They have the range today. The only nut left is charging times and stations.

Okay, let's put this another way: When did CD players first hit the market, and when did radio stations stop using not only analog items like tape and vinyl records but also give up using tubes for things like their radio towers? And when did radio stations switch to digital-only broadcasts over the old-fashioned analog radio transmissions?

When did vinyl pollute the air? It still does for enthusiasts.

There will be a paradigm shift to EVs in the next few years. It's an existential moment for ICEs. People gonna be walkin' the walk, not just talkin' irregardless of how the sausages get stuffed.

Making vinyl has polluted the atmosphere since the product was invented.

There's already been a shift. Tesla has the largest market cap of any automaker, despite building fewer cars than they do. None of that addresses the economics involved in dumping ICE for EVs. Of which there are many. I've mentioned some of them, and rather than responding to them, you've chosen to ignore them and say, "It'll be different in a couple of years" with no explanation of how the details of all of that are going to work out.

You work in an unnamed media company in Atlanta (Gee, wonder who that might be? Not a lot that operate out of high-rise buildings that have views like you've posted from your office.), you've previously said that you've worked for radio stations in the US and France. I've worked in probably a half-a-dozen or so distribution centers for various industries including books, farm equipment, clothing, and some others that I've forgotten. I've also worked in the Nissan plant in Smyrna where they build cars and trucks. I've worked for parts manufacturers for Ford, GM, Nissan, VW, and other transportation companies. I've helped figure out the process for product launches, I've worked with start-ups in figuring out how to organize their operations to get products out the door. I've helped design components for freaking German military satellites. I've even crawled around basically abandoned parts stores to snag parts for a 1948 Tucker that was once owned by George Lucas. (That's the car in my avatar.) I know a thing or two about manufacturing and all the shit that it entails. GM and Ford have basically given up building non-electric cars, and the only ICE vehicles they make are SUVs and trucks.

ICE vehicles are on their way out, but without massive investment from governments or insane price hikes by automakers, they're still going to be made until probably 2030, if not longer, because the economics of continuing to do so make sense (without severe penalties being attached to ICE vehicles, or large subsidies being handed over to EVs). Last year, GM sold 2.2 million vehicles. If they were to magically transition to all EVs tomorrow, they'd still have to keep ICE parts in production until 2028. Do you know how many EVs GM sold in the last quarter of 2021? A whopping 26. The total number of vehicles GM sold during that period of time was over 400K, while Tesla managed 300K. I'm not going to bother to figure out the numbers for the other automakers out there, because I'm sure you get the idea.

nope. no media companies. Airlines, banks, hotels, payments. That media company is down the street and across the way.

I've worked on cars all my life (in the US and France) and did a stint at Sears Auto for about 3 years in my early history.

GM's EV sales were curtailed due to the problem with Bolts. They're selling nicely, otherwise.

2030 isn't far off.

Your point is, if I may paraphrase, that car makers need an interim non-polluting ICE engine to fill the gap between fossil fuels and electric.

No they don't. And certainly not a firebreathing hydrogen monster at 40% tops efficiency. There is no infrastructure for clean hydrogen generation, distribution, sales. Go fish.

We have that infrastructure today for electrics.

I love me some ICE, but they've jumped the shark.

This was my stable 12 years ago:





And this is it today:

I stand corrected.

So, the most you've been is a grease monkey and a shade tree mechanic. I've done more than that.

Them catching fire, to be specific.

Nope. And Chevy has 13 different main models in production (that's not including the variant models or their electric or hybrid vehicles). Mind you, that's down from back in about 2008, when they had 14 different model cars in production. That's $13 billion they need to spend (at least), in order to convert just one division of GM to all-electric. This will necessitate closing plants while they retool. They can't do it all at once. Well, they could, but they wouldn't be able to sell any cars. I'm not going to bother figuring out the total number of models across all of GM's production lines, since they have 5 divisions in the US, and I don't know what else in the rest of the world. Some of those designs use the same basic platforms as other models, others use their own unique ones. (Chevy, rather notoriously, responds almost violently to the idea that Corvettes share parts with other GM products.)

Not quite. Without substantial support from governments, it's impractical for automakers to ditch ICE-powered vehicles for EVs all at once. Not to mention we've no real idea of what the final form of energy storage EVs will use in the future. Right now, lithium-ion batteries are king. What happens if someone figures out a battery that is the size of a conventional gas tank, and holds enough electricity to give the car a 1,000-mile range between charges? Suddenly, a whole bunch of infrastructure and parts become obsolete. That gets expensive to replace.

How do you know? Have you spent any time dealing with logistics? Manufacturing?

I'll just point out that this is a higher percentage than current solar cells.

There are hydrogen fuel stations in places like CA and HI (a few other states, but I'm not going to dig for them.) Granted, not a lot, but then again, when the first Teslas graced the market, there weren't any public charging stations for them, either. Yet somehow, it worked out.

All depends upon where you live. For example, the town square where I live had a few stations for folks to charge their electric cars, most of them are gone now. Nobody in the trailer park where I live has an electric car, and doing the conversion to enable someone to have an electric car would be problematic according to my landlord. It seems the place wasn't properly wired up when it was built, and he's having trouble getting it converted (even though this is the responsibility of the local utility) to handle the normal loads. I dunno what'll happen if someone gets a Tesla and needs to have their place wired for higher voltage than they normally use.

Don't care. Poke around in the history of technology and you quickly find out a shitload of "new" technology isn't all that new, but it lost out to things that happened to be cheaper at the moment. One of the first hybrid cars was built by Porsche and went on sale in 1899 (not a typo), and the technology remained in use until the 1920s. Since nobody gave a shit about the price of gas in the 20s (or the fact that it contained lead), the better tech lost out to the cheaper stuff.

How'd that steam powered Chrysler turn out?

I had to sell the car before I was able to do much with it because that's how poverty in America works. You know why I wanted to go with steam? Because it was a fairly compact system and was relatively energy input agnostic. I wasn't expecting to get incredible performance gains out of it, I was just aiming to get something that matched the original performance of the car, but I never had to worry about emission regulations. If everything but zero-emission vehicles were banned from operating, I wouldn't have to worry about it as a steamer can burn hydrogen just as easily as it can anything else flammable.

Kia Dealers Are Going To Kill The EV6