The event on Oct. 1, 2022 in Alexandria that is part of National Drive Electric Week is a big one. Need to pre-register to do a test drive. There are scheduled activities from 1:00-5:00pm, including featured presentations. Also will include electric bikes and scooters. The event is free, family friendly, and sponsored by Arlington County and the City of Alexandria.
Think BIG! About the Future of Movement
pagamony wrote:
Thanks. I'm on my 3rd EV. Highly recommend you all get one :)
What do you have now?
We have two RAV4 Prime PHEVs at this point. Daughter got the first one as a belated college graduation present when I got a new one in August. Had to get the first from a dealer in central NY, so could get the second faster than we expected. Really fun to not need more than half a tank of gas when I'm home for a month. Appreciate having a hybrid for the long drives to New England. Even drove it to Colorado last December in 3 days and planning to do that again.
Those Toyotas are great. Keep on plugging in. I've had 2015 Leaf, 2018 Tesla M3, then 2022 Tesla M3 I picked up last week. Fabulous cars all of them. Never a real problem. Now that I work from home mostly Tess is our main car and the Santa Fe is used when needed, like for bags of mulch.
Roger that and 💯 correct. Baby steps are going EV with current power sources. When we are ready Hydrogen-Oxygen fuel cells will be the next step. Output after the reaction is mostly water and contained in steam when combined to produce electricity - it will need a catalyst or maybe go hydroxyzine - you could even run a micro-turbine off of it an generate enough power for propulsion like this compact gas turbine ( frinkin' awesome - 400 watts in a suitcase ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8elCF816g. Overhead from HydRox production is unknow but way back in the day ( Like high school ) I was studying this and couldn't build anything except a small hydrogen extractor using electrolysis but collected enough in my little system in my room to make a small rocket engine that fired for 5 seconds but it worked. I was 13 years old so I imagine it can be improved a lot now ha ha! It is the future.
snowsmith wrote:
What many anti-electric car people tend to forget is we can’t pump oil out of the ground forever. We’ve already seen the instability in the market as a result of war in Ukraine. When we reach what is known as ‘peak oil’, when demand exceeds supply, the cost of petroleum products will go thru the roof. While electric cars are not the ideal solution, it beats walking or riding your horse. I believe that hydrogen is the ultimate solution.I suggest you watch this documentary(Crude Awakening)done by oil company professionals. While a little dated, it will give you an understanding of what’s going to happen and what is happening:
Hydrogen is, generally, not the future. Hydrogen is commercially extracted from fossil fuels (AKA HYDROcarbons) and large scale electrolysis hasn't really taken off due to both materials constraints and electrical supply concerns. You end up losing a whole lot of potential power at each step with hydrogen.
Now, eventually, we might see industrial scale electrolysis for grid storage - say, using excess solar or wind power to make hydrogen and later using that hydrogen in giant fuel cells or burning it in actually clean power plants. Those are at best in the design stage at the moment. As for transportation, if you look at construction, operation, and recycling/reclamation, hydrogen power is behind batteries and barely ahead of good ICE tech. It's also far more difficult to handle hydrogen and to work on hydrogen storage systems as compared to fuel tanks or even battery packs.
Please read (given it is 2018 ... more advances are possible) - royalsociety.org
Electric cars often still involve getting "something" out of the ground, because power generation significantly depends on coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Using an EV just changes the location of where the carbon is burned. The current power grid is not designed to handle large numbers of EVs, and when we try to increase the numbers of EVs, the price of recharging your EV will also go through the roof. We need a LOT more nuclear power plants if we want to run more EVs, but I don't see a lot of support for that. (Nuclear power is "scary" or something.)
snowsmith wrote:
What many anti-electric car people tend to forget is we can’t pump oil out of the ground forever. We’ve already seen the instability in the market as a result of war in Ukraine. When we reach what is known as ‘peak oil’, when demand exceeds supply, the cost of petroleum products will go thru the roof. While electric cars are not the ideal solution, it beats walking or riding your horse. I believe that hydrogen is the ultimate solution.I suggest you watch this documentary(Crude Awakening)done by oil company professionals. While a little dated, it will give you an understanding of what’s going to happen and what is happening:
Mongo - interesting take re: Nuclear Power. Way back in the day when I was in engineering school at GWU my Thermodynamics professor Dr. Ali Cambel, advisor to Pres. Kennedy findingaids.library.northwestern.edu often spoke in class about how the thought was in the 70's Nuclear Energy produced electricity would be so cheap it would cost no money for the consumer. We saw nuclear-powered vehicle plans that looked great.
Agree - the current power grid will not support a full-scale move to pure EV right now - again problematic just like hydrogen production for simple combustion or electricity-producing.
I am very confident in generation using Nuclear but the spent fuel problem is troubling especially during the Trump administration trying to tuck it away in various states including my own (NV) the little [redacted]. Vitrification yields good results but still must be stored somewhere as it is still dangerous. Tough problem to solve. It does produce lots of Tritium gas that is handy for the luminous hands and markers in my Luminox watch! 12 year half life!
Mongo wrote:
Electric cars often still involve getting "something" out of the ground, because power generation significantly depends on coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Using an EV just changes the location of where the carbon is burned. The current power grid is not designed to handle large numbers of EVs, and when we try to increase the numbers of EVs, the price of recharging your EV will also go through the roof. We need a LOT more nuclear power plants if we want to run more EVs, but I don't see a lot of support for that. (Nuclear power is "scary" or something.)
snowsmith wrote:
What many anti-electric car people tend to forget is we can’t pump oil out of the ground forever. We’ve already seen the instability in the market as a result of war in Ukraine. When we reach what is known as ‘peak oil’, when demand exceeds supply, the cost of petroleum products will go thru the roof. While electric cars are not the ideal solution, it beats walking or riding your horse. I believe that hydrogen is the ultimate solution.I suggest you watch this documentary(Crude Awakening)done by oil company professionals. While a little dated, it will give you an understanding of what’s going to happen and what is happening:
The problem with hydrogen is that *cheap* hydrogen is made from carbon sources - methane or carbon monoxide - by the water-gas shift reaction.
This type of hydrogen is what is now called 'brown hydrogen' in the EU and UK.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/hydrogen-colour-spectrum
It solves no carbon footprint problems whatsoever, and generates transport and logistical problems (remember that hydrogen likes to penetrate directly *through* metallic crystal lattices so container design is super-fussy).
Electrolytic hydrogen is expensive because it takes 3x the amount of energy to do the electrolysis as you're going to get out of it - and that truth is not going to change unless some incredibly bright people develop catalysts to use sunlight directly.
They've been trying for 40 years.
Yes, Crush, I looked at your link. royalsociety.org It's a conceptual method summary and they absolutely do not talk about how much energy goes into any of the pathways. Incredibly energy intensive pathways are plotted to similar results as self-driving ones.
The problem with nuclear is that it does not scale. There simply isn't enough uranium on the surface of this planet. If we were to scale it to where we actually cut back on carbon, we'd run out in 15-20 years. All it would take is 10 countries trying to nuclear up to France's level, and we'd run out of mineable uranium. Sure it's fine as a boutique, stable, no-refueling-for-years power source for US Navy use. But it isn't going to solve the carbon footprint problem.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521002330
Thorium is even more pie-in-the-sky : the US has negligible reserves and every thorium reactor requires an active electrolysis unit to recover reactant. The Indian navy might eventually use it as their fuel source - but your great-grandkids won't.
Summary: actually *green* hydrogen and pervasive nuclear are solutions we will not have in time to solve anything, and may never have on the scale that's actually needed.
Agree - unfortunately none of these bleeding-edge solutions will come to fruition in my lifetime. Energy will just become more and more expensive and we'll just have to accept the cost and so forth. Sad we as humans have so much hubris and not enough brain-power to solve our own self-imposed problems that are mostly egotistical/self aggrandizing. Glad to see we'll have our backs against the wall and have to make some hard decisions - or perish due to our own stupidity.
djop wrote:
The problem with hydrogen is that *cheap* hydrogen is made from carbon sources - methane or carbon monoxide - by the water-gas shift reaction.
This type of hydrogen is what is now called 'brown hydrogen' in the EU and UK.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/hydrogen-colour-spectrum
It solves no carbon footprint problems whatsoever, and generates transport and logistical problems (remember that hydrogen likes to penetrate directly *through* metallic crystal lattices so container design is super-fussy).
Electrolytic hydrogen is expensive because it takes 3x the amount of energy to do the electrolysis as you're going to get out of it - and that truth is not going to change unless some incredibly bright people develop catalysts to use sunlight directly.
They've been trying for 40 years.
Yes, Crush, I looked at your link. royalsociety.org It's a conceptual method summary and they absolutely do not talk about how much energy goes into any of the pathways. Incredibly energy intensive pathways are plotted to similar results as self-driving ones.
The problem with nuclear is that it does not scale. There simply isn't enough uranium on the surface of this planet. If we were to scale it to where we actually cut back on carbon, we'd run out in 15-20 years. All it would take is 10 countries trying to nuclear up to France's level, and we'd run out of mineable uranium. Sure it's fine as a boutique, stable, no-refueling-for-years power source for US Navy use. But it isn't going to solve the carbon footprint problem.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521002330
Thorium is even more pie-in-the-sky : the US has negligible reserves and every thorium reactor requires an active electrolysis unit to recover reactant. The Indian navy might eventually use it as their fuel source - but your great-grandkids won't.
Summary: actually *green* hydrogen and pervasive nuclear are solutions we will not have in time to solve anything, and may never have on the scale that's actually needed.
That is partially true. MIT and Michigan put out a biannual (or so) report on the effective gas MPG of an EV in all 50 states. The value depends on the amount of non-petro utilities. In WV and Wyoming, with strong coal use, the effective mpg is about 65 mpg. In NC, my state, it's a litle better, something like 80 mpg iirc, but not good enough. In California and New York and others, it rises above 100 mpg. Each new industry has to be bootstrapped by the prior. Coal was boostrapped by wood. Oil was bootstrapped by Coal. Nuclear was bootstrapped by Oil. Solar, Wind, and others are progressing now. You don;t hvae to buy an EV, just don't discourage others. I pay 12c per KWH, but the side effect benefits make it worth much more.
Mongo wrote:
Electric cars often still involve getting "something" out of the ground, because power generation significantly depends on coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Using an EV just changes the location of where the carbon is burned. The current power grid is not designed to handle large numbers of EVs, and when we try to increase the numbers of EVs, the price of recharging your EV will also go through the roof. We need a LOT more nuclear power plants if we want to run more EVs, but I don't see a lot of support for that. (Nuclear power is "scary" or something.)
djop - 💯agree. Me personally I'd have a Tesla X right now if I could afford it. My friend T bought one in 2015 and he still claims it is the best car he's ever had (the one before it was a Porsche 911 Turbo). I'll tell you this - we were all taking a ride ( four people) on 395 near Shirlington and he floored in the on-ramp it is was like a rocket ship ... I got totally squished into my seat! Love the parking app that comes in handy in Old Towne Alexandria and I love the attention we got from people on the street when T moved it out of its parking space and brought it to us using his cell phone - so cool! Geez I am such a nerd !
Haven't been following the hydrogen story. Not surprisingly, there is an online magazine about the topic called Hydrogeninsight.
EXCLUSIVE | Shell has quietly closed down all its hydrogen filling stations in the UK - October 17, 2022
The more interesting story in that mag is the electric/hydro cost of trains:
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/will-no-longer-be-considered-hydrogen-trains-up-to-80-more-expensive-than-electric-options-german-state-finds/2-1-1338438
Just like the movie "Three Days of the Condor" - as long as big oil takes the initiatives it will be buried. They will say "look we tried" ha ha. Garbage. A good industrial chemist like my friend T -- not the guy that bought the Tesla, a COO of a company that has many brilliant ideas - frikin geneious and twice as smart as I am -- could engineer this. Problem is threats from the "big guys" ... he will be killed by you-know-who. That is why he has a concealed carry permit and many full-auto firearms. I'm not making this up there are a lot of bad actors out there. Complicated to say the least.
marzNC wrote:
Haven't been following the hydrogen story. Not surprisingly, there is an online magazine about the topic called Hydrogeninsight.
EXCLUSIVE | Shell has quietly closed down all its hydrogen filling stations in the UK - October 17, 2022
I Know I am dredging up an old topic so eye-rolls are appropriate. Check this out!!!
I observe the fewer-than-100-units and the partnership with Toyota on this project.
I begin to suspect that, for Toyota, this is all intended to tie into the new Japanese market for Aussie hydrogen.
If BMW are trying to replace or rebuild the in-house engineering expertise that left after the i3/i8 fiasco, without committing to production lines, then it sort of makes sense for them too . I also notice the project has nothing to do with the SGL carbon fiber part of the company, but uses vehicles off US production lines. Which means it's probably not going to be the investor-politics hot potato the i-series were.
Crush wrote:
I Know I am dredging up an old topic so eye-rolls are appropriate. Check this out!!!
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