Electric Car Ferries Enter Service In Norway (bbc.co.uk) 99
AmiMoJo writes from a report via BBC: Following two years of trials of the world's first electric car ferry, named Ampere, Norwegian ferry operators are busy making the transition from diesel. It is thought that 84 ferries are ripe for conversion to electric power, and 43 ferries on longer routes would benefit from conversion to hybrids that use diesel engines to charge their batteries. If this were done, nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions would be cut by 8,000 tons per year and CO2 emissions by 300,000 tons per year, equivalent to the annual emissions from 150,000 cars. The Ampere uses an 800kWh battery, equivalent to 8 high end Tesla cars. According to a report from Siemens and environmental campaign group Bellona, long-distance ferries are not well suited to electrification, but about 70% of Norway's ferries cover relatively short crossings, so switching to electric power would pay for itself in a few years. The BBC report also mentions some of the challenges associated with converting the diesel ferries to electric ferries. For example, "during initial trials, the fast charging placed excessive strain on the local grid, designed as it was to service a relatively small population," reports BBC. "To lighten the load, high-capacity batteries were put on constant charge on either side of the fjord, ready to transfer the electricity quickly to the ferry's batteries whilst docked."
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Here, LMWTFY : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources [wikipedia.org]
Hence the comment "not technically zero"...
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>concrete production is a significant CO2 source.
On the other hand - concrete curing is a major CO2 trap. That's not actually ideal. Trapping the CO2 traps 2 oxygen atoms for every carbon atom - it doesn't restore the oxygen to the atmosphere, but it's still better than leaving the CO2 in there.
I sincerely doubt that the CO2 absorbed by curing concrete over the first decade or so actually matches that which is used to make it, but it must reduce the overall number by a not insignificant percentage.
countries (Score:2)
and after you factor everything (including battery manufacture), only China and a few others (India, Australia) end up having similar emission between both types of car.
On every other country, it range from "a bit better" (like in the US - where fossils are still burned for power generation, but efficiency is better as suggested by parent poster) to "really definitely better" (like TFA's Norway or Switzerland, etc. - where power generation emits very little pollution, thanks to [alpine/cold climate] hydro,
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And of course, the electric car is ALSO far more efficient than the ICE - so you got significantly more efficient work production at both ends - making the total emissions per mile MUCH MUCH less.
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All these arguments are like a bad penny. Lots of angry oppositional comments with nothing but existential butthurt to support them.
I read someone commenting 'you'll still need diesel for heavy tractors' So then I ran the numbers, and well no you don't need to run a tractor with a diesel engine, batteries would work well. I used a Cat5 tractor which comes in a hybrid already. Turns out enough batteries to run the thing for 8 hours a day would cost about 20% of the cost of the machine. When you amortize the
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"and then my entire commute will be emission free"
Said the guy driving an electric car.
*sigh*. Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway
Installed capacity (2007) 30.46 GW
Share of fossil energy 2%
Share of renewable energy 98%
GHG emissions from electricity generation (2007) 0.8 Mt CO2
Average electricity use (2008) 27 MWh annually per capita
"Norway has imported up to 10% of its electricity production during 2004-2009.[6] According to IEA the net electricity export was 14 TWh and the hydro power production 141 TWh in 2008.[22]
Norway and Sweden's grids have long been connec
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Who cares if it's "green"? Electricity from the grid is a cheaper "fuel" than petroleum, so electric engines save money. Case closed. Arguing over emissions is an irrelevant sideshow.
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What do you mean? Electricity is expensive where I live. This is why oil, natural gas and wood heating are far more common than electric by a huge margin.
None of which power the internal combustion engine in your car. This is an apples to oranges comparison and irrelevant.
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Actually no, it's because heating is one of the few things electricity does really, really badly. It takes long to heat up (which wastes energy) and it does so inefficiently. So directly-burning fuels like gas is a much more efficient way to produce heat -and that makes it cheaper for the purpose of heat. For moving things around - electricity beats fire every time though.
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Actually no, it's because heating is one of the few things electricity does really, really badly. It takes long to heat up (which wastes energy) and it does so inefficiently.
No that's completely wrong. There are many forms of electric heating: radiant [wikipedia.org], convection [wikipedia.org], fan heaters [wikipedia.org], underfloor heating [wikipedia.org], heat pumps [wikipedia.org], etc., each with their characteristics. For instance radiant heaters are very fast and an electric underfloor heater will be no slower than a gas powered one.
What's inefficient is not the electric heating it's most forms of electricity production.If you burn stuff (coal, oil, gas) to produce electricity you lose two thirds of the calories, whereas you could use more than 70
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1 kg of fossil fuel (coal, diesel, whatever) has between 30 and 45 MJ of energy. Coal has about 30 MJ/kg, gasoil about 45 MJ/kg.
If you want to pull 45 MJ of energy from an electric power outlet at 32 Ampere/110 V, it will take you about 150 seconds. Burning 1 liter of gasoil is much faster given the right burner.
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Your calculations and values are all way off.
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This was actually a concern when I bought my EV because heating the cabin would be a significant drain on the car's battery and badly affect the distance it can travel. Well there's a few things you can do. My car can be set on a timer to preheat while it is still plugged into the mains but I've never needed to do that because the car uses a heat pump and that's amazingly efficient. It is literally blowing hot air before I have even backed out of the garage. Also, there's direct heat coming from the heated
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Mostly the same experience with maintenance costs here after 2 years of owning my Nissan Leaf. My monthly electric bill went up ~$15 and my maintenance so far has only been new wipers and topping of windshield fluid. However, saved myself the initial sticker price by buying Nissan-certified pre-owned, 1.5 years old, 10K miles, for ~$15k. So, I'm admittedly bragging, but I'm also pointing out the initial investment in an EV car doesn't have to be high.
Also regarding the EV car's cabin heating, the heated ste
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Electricity is also much more flexible. Once you have the distribution and consumer infrastructure in place, you can easily swap generators.
Re:typical delusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes - and externalising them is exactly the key to reducing them.
By putting them at the generating station, you allow that generating station to use wind, waves, gravitational potential energy, light, nuclear decay, ... to power the vehicle, rather than petrol.
Further, you also simply make the whole system more efficient - petrol motors are horribly inefficient, typically around 30-35%. The very very very best, used in Formula 1 cars only achieve around 50% efficiency. And that's ignoring all the other efficiency losses involved in a petrol vehicle, such as the efficiency of the gearbox, the transmission losses of petrol from having to drive a truck carrying it out to the petrol station, and the generation losses in refining the oil.
Finally, that's all assuming that you're right that the generation station causes emmissions... Which you aren't. Currently, 99% of electricity production for the Norwegian grid is from renewable sources.
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you allow that generating station to use wind, waves, gravitational potential energy, light, nuclear decay, ... to power the vehicle, rather than petrol.
This is completely true, hands down! And a Good Thing.
Further, you also simply make the whole system more efficient - petrol motors are horribly inefficient, typically around 30-35%.
Here it goes wrong. How can you compare the "efficiency" of solar and combustion engines? Besides: afaik the efficiency, aka "how much energy potential is there in the source and how much can we extract" of nuclear is far worse than that of a combustion engine, but that doesn't matter because the energy density in the nuclear fuel is infinitely higher. The "efficiency" of solar panels is also much lower than the 50
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How can you compare the "efficiency" of solar and combustion engines?
For a solar panel, you can calculate the amount of fossil fuels that went into producing the panel, and determine total amount of useful output. You can then put the same amount of fossil fuels directly into a car, and also measure total useful output.
Re: typical delusion (Score:2)
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Not true, Norway produces 90% of its own energy needs, and the only partner it imports energy from is Sweden, which guess what, also produces all its electricity wholly from renewable sources.
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So legally Norwegian citizens are using German electricity, from dirty peat-burning plants, while Germans are using Norwegian hydro-electricity. And as Norwegian hydro-electric production is pretty close to its maximum, all extra power needed in Norway will likely be produced in those German plants.
Errm yeah. Just that there are no peat burning power plants in Germany. Or anywhere else in the continental EU. The only peat PPs in the EU are in Ireland - and how would you get the power from Ireland to Norway? By electric ferry?
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The best gas turbine engines are around 40% efficient. F1 engines are around 51% efficient.
Re:typical delusion (Score:4, Interesting)
Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.
Bullshit.
1) Not all generating stations cause emisions
2) Even if yours does - it still causes FAR less. The best ICE's are only about 25% energy efficient. Most electric cars are 2 to 3 times that. This means that, even from a dirty grid, the same amount of carbon burned will take an electric car two to three times further, or to put it another way - an electric car on a dirty grid still produces only between a third and two-thirds as much CO2 per mile as a car with an internal combustion engine.
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All generating stations and all cars cause emissions when they're built though.
In the case of fossil fueled cars, it's around half the total emissions.
Country dependant (Score:4, Insightful)
*sigh*. Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.
Which usually given the electricity generation available in the country, tends to be much more efficient than the ICE in a car. (with a few exception like China, India and Australia - according to source which are easy to Google, but I'm too lazy to find yet again for the nth argument about the same subject).
Yes, the US burns fossils to create electricity, but over the life time of a car, even taking into account the initial manufacture (a battery is more complex to build), an electrical car in the US still causes less emissions than a gaz-powered one.
In TFA's Norway, electricity comes mainly from hydro. And even if it's not an Alpine region, the climate is more or less comparable and thus hydro has a very tiny output of green-house gazes and other pollution.
Electricity is *definitely* cleaner there.
You need to travel to a country that produce most of its electricity by burning coal (like China) to find a situation where there isn't much difference between an ICE car and an electric one.
(And in that last situation: well if China adds more clean energy production to its power offering, all the electric car suddenly get better emissions as a consequence. Whereas all the ICE cars would need an engine swap to suddenly have better).
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Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.
Surely, the resident nerds of Slashdot can understand the benefits of abstraction. By externalizing your fuel source to the grid you're basically creating a structured program. You can just put include 'fuel_source.php' at the start of you "program". Then the power engineers can deal with making a more efficient fuel_source function and you automatically get any improvements pushed out to you.
Charging a battery to charge a battery . . . (Score:3)
Lithium-ion batteries are 80-90% efficient at charging, meaning that if you have to charge a battery on the pier in order to charge the ferry (explained in TFA as necessarily to buffer to load on the grid), then your charging efficiency is about 72% (0.85**2). That means the 150KWH that you have to spend on-ferry means you have to draw 210KWH from the grid. YMMV, but here in the US that's gonna run $35-40, much more than "a cup of coffee and a waffle".
Other than the double charge loss, which stood out as kind of costly, this seems like a solid and sensible engineering project. What I'd really like to hear is someone to do a 10-year follow up on whether they met their cost estimates and what else was interesting (hopefully nothing).
Actually, in general, following up seems like a good idea. We do a lot of hyping about the future and the present, not a lot of the boring work of "hey, so what happened to $COOL_IDEA or $NEW_PROJECT?" Maybe there should be a /. category for that :-)
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Given that the most efficient diesel ferry engines are about 52% efficient, 72% from battery losses doesn't seem too bad. Also, given that all of Norway's electricity is generated from renewables, there's a massive efficiency gain in not having to refine oil or transport it.
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To be fair, that's 72% of whatever efficiency you get at the pier after accounting for losses in production and transportation of energy.
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Yes, and oil and gas has no energy cost in "production" and "transportation"?
You should once look at a pipeline more closely to understand how the oil is actually "pumped", or more interesting how that is donw with gas. Hint: the amount of gas getting out of the pipeline is significantly less than the amount you put in at the other end ...
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Sure, thankfully though, the production and transmission losses for electricity are far lower than the production and transmission losses for diesel.
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Other than the double charge loss, which stood out as kind of costly, this seems like a solid and sensible engineering project. What I'd really like to hear is someone to do a 10-year follow up on whether they met their cost estimates and what else was interesting (hopefully nothing).
I think the project is cool, but quite limited in application to Norwegian fjords. "Geologically, a fjord or fiord is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created by glacial erosion."
Long = going around is pretty hopeless
Narrow = sea distance is quite short
Steep sides = big depths make tunnels or bridge supports super hard
All of these contribute to rather unique environment where electric ferries make sense. Currently there's 7 ferries on the main coast road and the estimated cost to make a "fer
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I think that there are other places that could use these ferries too. If not the all-electric ones at least the hybrid ferries. On the west coast of Canada between Vancouver Island and the mainland there are a number of islands that have service with small ferries. I'm sure that converting these over to electric or hybrid would be worth looking at. I bet there are many other places across the world where there are many islands in close proximity.
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ferry means you have to draw 210KWH from the grid. YMMV, but here in the US that's gonna run $35-40, much more than "a cup of coffee and a waffle".
Price of electricity for Norway, via Google, is about $0.04 per kWh, so 210 kWH is about $8. That isn't far from the 0.06 USD I pay from the hydro dominated BC grid. I'm sorry if you live some place that is paying 0.17-0.20 per kWh, as even a couple years ago when I lived in areas that were fossil fuel dominated, I paid only $0.14.
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Before you decide how cost effective this is, you have to consider how many passengers there are on the average trip. If the answer is 100, then the fuel cost per passenger is only $.35 or so, much less than it would be if they all had to drive cars over a bridge, especially when you factor in the fact that the ferry company's buying their fuel at wholesale rates, not retail. And, if you take a look at how f
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Was thinking about the same thing and wondering if it might be more efficient to swap the batteries each time. Would have to design them for relatively quick swaps but would remove the double loss and the need for high speed charging. Would probably also need a smaller set on board that didn't get swapped to maintain power during the swaps.
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Coffee is very expensive in Norway.
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It is actually very easy to google how efficient lithium ion batteries are in charging and recharging.
E.g.: https://www.powertechsystems.e... [powertechsystems.eu]
There is no reason to make up your absurd numbers and use them for a pointless argument.
For those who are to lazy to read: lithium ion batteries charge and recharge with nearly 100% efficiency.
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but here in the US that's gonna run $35-40
That would be very scary, until you saw just how much fuel a ferry uses and how much that costs.
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That means the 150KWH that you have to spend on-ferry means you have to draw 210KWH from the grid. YMMV, but here in the US that's gonna run $35-40, much more than "a cup of coffee and a waffle".
$40 to fuel a ferry run for 200+ people?
Naming of Ships (Score:3, Funny)
Of course it would be named after Andre-Marie Ampere, the next one will be named after Alessandro Volta, but there was a lot of resistance about naming the third one after Georg Simon Ohm.
AC
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So, who's on first?
Watt's on first, Who's on second
And third base?
I Don't Know
What?
I just told you, second base.
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Yeah I find myself reacting to the idea as well.
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Of course it would be named after Andre-Marie Ampere, the next one will be named after Alessandro Volta, but there was a lot of resistance about naming the third one after Georg Simon Ohm.
AC
So name it after Ernst Werner von Siemens, who is the reciprocal of Georg Simon Ohm.
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There are lots of possibilities here (Score:2)
What other options did they consider? For example, physically swapping the batteries might be feasible here, rather than rapid charging which tends to wear out the battery. I wonder how a flywheel would have performed?
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RTFA?
The batteries weight 11tons.
What is wrong in your eyes with simply recharging them over night and "topping" them a bit at every stop?
Norway is in an almost unique position (Score:1)
Unfortunately, most countries don't have such an abundance of the almost perfect renewable energy source. So they'd end up burning coal or natural gas to provide base load electricity at 40%-50% efficiency, transmitted
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Your math is right, your conclusion is not. At 32% thermal efficiency your still much better than petrol or diesel engines. At perfectly equal positions burning coal is much better for the environment than burning diesel or petrol. Butfew countries burn exclusively coal.
As for carrying something, of there's one thing shops are good at then it's carrying something. Your post makes sense in the context of an aircraft which would be crippled by the weight but not in the context of a ship.
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Your efficiency numbers make no sense. Same your ideas about "cost" ;D
I suggest to google a bit.
The point of the ferry is: don't have smoke/fumes/dust/soot in the harbor.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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The cost of it is the killer; there is no way you would see a return on investment at the moment plus many ports would ban you outright.
Apparently though when oil was expensive in the 70's the running costs were the same.
Nuclear Cargo Ships are like Concorde - a technically brilliant idea that could, with time and investment, have evolved over a num
Are these the best solutions? (Score:1)
Surprised there are any gains to be had here. Hybrids are great for stop/start vehicles like commuter cars and especially buses, but we get losses through various inefficiencies as well. Are they really stopped/peak accelerating for long enough to get serious gains? Well, I guess so... Still seems surprising.
As for the regular ferries, if we're using batteries anyway, it seems like t
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I don't know how this compares to the "hybrids" of this article, but it doesn't seem to be that different, maybe except for the batteries, thus the opportunity for fully-electric operation?
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Strictly speaking, a lot of boats have been hybrid for quite some time now (diesel-electric propulsion, for example).
Trains too. If they're not pure electric drawn from overhead lines (or third rail), they're almost certainly a diesel-electric hybrid. To the GP: In the case of trains (and with the ferries), it's not like a hybrid car where the ICE drives the wheels and electric motors assist. Instead, the train is electric drive, and just happens to carry around its own diesel power plant.
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That's the way it works monster cargo ships anyhow (Score:1)
But I wouldn't call them "electric".