Ford Airstream Electric Concept Car 202
Not to be upstaged by GM's plug-in electric concept vehicle, Ford has unveiled its own concept. The twists are design by Airstream and a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to charge the battery. From the AutoblogGreen article: "The fuel cell, made by Ballard, turns on automatically when the battery charge dips below 40 percent. With the on-board charger (110/220 VAC), the battery pack can be refilled at home. Ford says the HySeries Drive is 50 percent smaller and less complex than conventional fuel cell system and should have more than double the lifetime."
Plug in electric cars. (Score:5, Informative)
No, its not. There is no self contained sustainable fuel that is remotely viable at this stage.
Your non-renewable options are:
Petrol/Diesel
Natural Gas
Your renewable transport options are:
Hydrogen (*)
Biodiesel & Alcohols (+)
Electricity
Other esoteric energy stores.
The joy of electricity is simple - it piggy backs off whatever we decide to power the world with for fixed structures. That solution may be nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal or hydroelectric. It really doesn't matter, as long as we can store the energy sufficiently well in a car to get around. If you think that is going to be too hard, explain to me why its going to be easier to store hydrogen, because I see alot more things running off batteries now that hydrogen energy sources.
Just my opinions here,
Happy to see what others think,
Michael
(*) Right now all hydrogen is formed from hydrocarbon sources. Its hard to hold as it destroys the metals that hold it in compressed form. It loses most of the energy put into it in the compression cycle to get it into its container so that you only get about 30% of the energy put in.
(+) Definitely an option for some parts of the world, but not really going to work well for many countries as they don't have enough arable land to make all the biomass. And to make it replace fossil fuels for cars will require so much water to irrigate the crops we will probably have to start building massive numbers of desalination plants, etc. Personally I'd rather keep the land areas untouched and go for renewables, but some countries do manage this option ok.
Re:Uhhh Hello Earth to Detroit (Score:3, Informative)
Confusing Article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Uhhh Hello Earth to Detroit (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes, just charge off-peak (Score:3, Informative)
A big enough electric-vehicle fleet would let you take advantage of surplus energy at any time of the day, not just at night. This would be great for Texas, because Texas wind could supply 1190 billion KWh/year [sustainableenergy.org], about 30% of US electric demand by itself. Take 20% of that (238 billion kWh), use it to charge vehicles consuming ~400 Wh/mile (much more than current EV's) for a state average of perhaps 20,000 miles/year, and you can run about 30 million vehicles on nothing but electricity. (You'd need about 90 GW of wind generation at 30% capacity factor, but today's ramp rate will have us there in 15 years or less.)
You can also use surplus juice to make ice for A/C the next day, or next week. You just keep topping up the bank whenever energy is available, and if you run too low you start up the extra fossil-fired plants. Meanwhile, you save $billions on expensive and depleting natural gas and the oil Texas now has to import from hostile countries.
Re:"The innovator's dilemma" (Score:3, Informative)