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2013-05-26 Science & Technology

The death of Better Place; electric car company to dissolve

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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2013-05-26 05:10|| || Front Page|| [5 views ] Top

#1 Electricity needs to be generated by something. If it is not in local neighborhood then it goes through transmission lines of some sort so typical energy loss to generate and deliver to the home is about %86. If the power then needs to charge up a battery. This is typically a %50 loss. But we've already lost %86 so %14 is useful and one half of that is %7. Now an electric car is not much more than %50 efficient so of the original power we are down to %3.5. Unless the power was from nuke or non-fuel infra-structure like hydro... Think about it ... no fuel based autos are only %3.5 efficient. NONE. On top of that mining of battery material is nasty and disposal isn't real clean either so just run the damn cars on some sort of fuel!

Posted by 3dc 2013-05-26 11:56|| 2013-05-26 11:56|| Front Page Top

#2 I think some of your numbers are wrong.

The figure for power transmission seems to be off; I understood it to be around 90%.

For a single plant it's going to be around 40% efficiency of coal to electricity. For a fancy combined-cycle plant (liquefied coal, or oil, or natural gas) it would be 60%. (Thermodynamic cycle efficiency).

So: .6 cycle efficiency (being generous)
Times .9 power grid efficiency
Times .5 battery charge cycle efficiency

You're down at .27

Which is actually typical for a lousy gas engine but below an efficient diesel.

(For a single-cycle power plant you'd be at
.27 * 2/3 = .18

18%.

Hmm.

Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2013-05-26 13:08|| 2013-05-26 13:08|| Front Page Top

#3 Five or ten years ago -before they became communist - Scientific American article said the only way to electric cars was nukes. Period. But it took five pages to explain it, of course.

Posted by Bobby 2013-05-26 22:13|| 2013-05-26 22:13|| Front Page Top

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