"In July, the Indiana Department of Transportation and Purdue University announced plans to develop the world’s first contactless wireless-charging concrete pavement highway segment.... The multiyear project will use a magnetizable concrete technology — developed by the German company Magment — enabling wireless charging of electric vehicles as they drive.
The technology works by adding small particles of recycled ferrite — a ceramic made by mixing iron oxide blended with slivers of metallic elements, such as nickel and zinc — to a concrete mixture which is magnetized by running an electrical current. This creates a magnetic field that transmits power wirelessly to the vehicle. A plate or box made of the patented material, roughly 12-feet long by 4-feet wide, is buried inside the roadway at a depth of a few inches.... Surrounding the transmitter is normal roadway material — concrete or asphalt. The transmitters would be embedded in the roadway one after the other, allowing for a continuous power transfer.... 'Magnetized cement? Crazy, man,' said Chris Nelder, an energy analyst and consultant.... 'I would love to see it work. But this would be very early-stage technology, needing cars to be redesigned to use it as well as the actual implementation of the charging capability. But the need to redesign the cars is non-trivial.'"
I look forward to the amazing future, but I note "the need to redesign the cars." So it's no motivation to buy an EV now. You'll just need a different one.
As for charging stations and the problem of range anxiety, the spending bill that just passed has a "$7.5 billion initiative... the goal of building a nationwide network of a 500,000 high-speed electric vehicle charging stations by 2030." That "with the goal" raises my skepticism. As does "2030."
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115 comments:
I'm sure it would be great for your health driving over something like that regularly.
Unfortunately, high-speed charging actively destroys battery capacity so taking long trips will decrease your range for further long trips.
This has insane overhead and perhaps some value for heavy commuter routes in dense urban areas. But probably not, as those apply to short-haul trips and people can plug in at home or work for less money. I see this technology's greatest potential as Disney park ride.
Way back in the 1960s some thought to embed guide strips in roads to facilitate self-driving vehicles. That went nowhere. That has the same conceptual problems: high build costs and complexity, maintenance costs, the need for redesigning vehicles and convincing people to pay more for unproven technology, and the need for new physical infrastructure for highway-side power supplies.
The Simpsons said it best: "Monorail, monorail, monorail"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM
building a nationwide network of a 500,000 high-speed electric vehicle charging stations by 2030
I first heard about the plans to widen the road outside of my housing development almost 20 years ago. Have attended several public meetings about it, saw a myriad of potential plans, even seen a couple of buildings bought and torn down. The road is still not any wider.
Electric cars are toys for townies. Full stop. Excepting maybe Tesla, but the Biden regime's doing all it can to disqualify Elon Musk from any subsidies, and the Big Three are too incompetent to do better.
Robert Heinlein totally explained this tech, in novella, Waldo
hint: it Does NOT end well
fun questions no one is asking
Can our electric transmission system deliver enough electricity to power 100% of vehicles?
Can our electric system Generate enough electricity to power 100% of passenger vehicles?
{how is solar going to work at night? just asking}
Can our earth provide enough lithium to make batteries for 100% of passenger vehicles?
Right now, the only incentive to get an electric car is as status symbol. Even with all the taxpayer money flowing to purchasers ibn order to warp the market, they are out of the price range of most people. It is a subsidy for the wealthy.
So the fact that people will have to buy new cars when the roads are updated is not a disincentive. Besides, most EV drivers will go through 2 or 3 cars before any significant amount of roads is changed over anyway. You might see a handful of our biggest cities update their busiest roads, but that's the best they can hope for in the next 10 years.
We have roads with potholes so big they'll swallow vehicles, and now they're talking about electrified highways? I can envision some guy with money to burn installing this gadget in his garage floor to facilitate charging, but if any government at any level thinks this will work large-scale they are frigging crazy. Of course, the advantage to EV owners/producers is that everyone will share in the cost of this so battery packs won't need to be as large/costly for decent range; therefore, lower sticker price (in theory!) EV's with infrastructure cost passed along to the larger community. Just as there are HOV lanes in some cities we'll see EV Charging lanes for the select few...how egalitarian.
Why am I reminded of the infamous "railroad to nowhere" which was supposed to connect LA and SF. Or Solyndra. Another Democrat boondoggle.
I don’t even pretend to play an engineer on TV but I smell really high-grade bullshit here. What is the energy loss in such a system based on “magnetized concrete”? How does it perform on roadways covered with water or snow or mud, or worn by use? What is the precision or tolerance needed in machining parts and aligning the power track relative to the vehicles? This is not a well-defined environment and until we know a WHOLE lot more about how it might work, how much it would cost, how many trillions are needed to retrofit the roadways with this crap AND ADD GENERATING CAPACITY TO THE GRID to power it all despite the inefficiencies —without all that information (well-sourced, peer-reviewed, actually tested) we are just being fed another Green fantasy that usefully distracts us from the hard fact that these people are quite mad and intent upon spending our last dime to ruin our entire infrastructure.
/rant
I think electric cars are awesome and cool technology but they are still not ready for prime time.
I get almost 400 miles on my current transportation for one tank of gas. Most electrics will get 250-300 in the south and in places like WI in winter about 100 per change.
Fast charging station will get you only top 80% and take 15-45 minutes. So that even lowers your range when charging on the go. This is so inconvenient that for me precludes the purchase of electric cars.
Until we get a much better range and/or changing times in 5 minutes or so range electric cars are not worth it.
Then there is the power generation issues. We as a country do not even have 50%of the power generation needed for all these cars. So unless we go into overdrive on power plants, and regulatory issues in come places make that a 20+ year battle for each one, we cannot power the vehicles.
As for charging stations and the problem of range anxiety, the spending bill that just passed has a "$7.5 billion initiative... the goal of building a nationwide network of a 500,000 high-speed electric vehicle charging stations by 2030." That "with the goal" raises my skepticism. As does "2030."
There are already at least two privately funded major nationwide networks of EV charging stations- Tesla’s and EV America’s. I’ve used them, they work and more privately funded capacity is on the way.
We won’t be eliminating ICE vehicles any time soon but a fleet of 5 to 10 precent EVs is a fee years away, like it or not. Higher in the EU…
If we go over to electric cars wholesale, I hate to think of the environmental costs of mining all the materials for all those batteries – not to mention, of disposing of all of it once those batteries won't accept a charge anymore.
The other thing pushing EV adoption- they are fun and fast and if you’re not making a Cannonball Run once a week you can plug the thing in at night instead of jockeying for position at the Costco station like you’re at the start of an America’s Cup race…
I think a bigger reason why no one really wants electric cars is because they are overpriced and have dubious environmental benefits. I live in a town full of nerds and every engineer I know thinks that they are super hot shit for buying a Tesla. It allows them to virtue signal and simultaneously denote themselves as high income and an early adopter of new tech (which matters to certain nerds.) My idiot brother bought two of them.
They are nice cars I guess, but I honestly can't understand why anyone would pay $60-$100k for one. The difference in price between a normal car and a Tesla will buy a hell of a lot of gas over the lifetime of the car, so it isn't like you are saving money.
I sell EV chargers, and this charging idea of using pavement is pie in the sky. EV cars using plug-in chargers isn't. Every major automaker has one of more EV cars in their line up.
The bigger issue that has to be addressed is that the electric grid cannot handle the additional demand that EV cars create. This is especially true in the south west and west coast already experiencing brownout issues, yet are spending billions promoting chargers.
Lastly, it's not range anxiety. It's charging anxiety. They know what range they have left. They worry where their next charge will come from.
Hope I am never forced to buy electric. I have range anxiety. Don’t want a car that can’t reliably get me a few hundred miles away from a potential disaster or further with a few extra gallons of gas stored in the trunk. And with what i am seeing with lockdowns and quarantines lately - why would anyone give the government the ability to turn off power to your vehicle. They control the roads then they control movement.
I saw a meme once commenting on how some NSFW videos gave kids an unrealistic idea of how long it took to get a plumber to come to your house. The infrastructure bill and its deadlines tell me that Democrats have an unrealistic view of how long it takes to even get federal, state and local approval to build anything in the United States these days, much less actual construction.
What is going to power those half-a-mill charging stations?
There is no effin way that a significant percentage (goal is 50%) of automobile purchases in 2030 will be e-vehicles. But like every other thing the Brandon administration has endorsed, it will be full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.
"That "with the goal" raises my skepticism. As does "2030.""
It should: it's a progressive policy, after all. BS detectors go off immediately, regardless of artful phrasing.
But who will be held accountable when it's clear still more billions have been wasted?
The technology works by adding small particles of recycled ferrite — a ceramic made by mixing iron oxide blended with slivers of metallic elements, such as nickel and zinc — to a concrete mixture which is magnetized by running an electrical current. This creates a magnetic field that transmits power wirelessly to the vehicle.
I think that the writer means that they will be constantly running an electric current through the highway to create an alternating magnetic field that could charge cars in the way wireless phone chargers work, but obviously, whoever wrote that sentence is utterly clueless, this reminds me of the Senator who described the internet as a "series of tubes." How much does the NYT charge for this drivel?
Still, maybe it will work. If electric cars could solve the range problem, ICE cars would go the way of incandescent bulbs, which will be almost entirely replaced by the superior LED tech as the old bulbs burn out, those that remain, and will be kept around only for aesthetic reasons. But that's a big 'if,' we have been waiting for breakthroughs on many things, Elizabeth Holmes was waiting for a breakthrough.
If the breakthrough happens on fusion, the conversion to an electric fleet would be almost overdetermined, if we don't bankrupt ourselves with hyperinflation before it can happen.
We can all hank Michael Faraday for discovering electromagnetic induction so early thus giving us two centuries of subsequent R&D.
My big concern is where does the electricity come from if we get widescale adoption of battery cars?
A back of the envelope calculation a couple months ago showed that to replace all gasoline cars would require about 300 additional gigawatts of additional electrical generation. The distribution system would have to be completely rebuilt to carry all that extra juice.
For reference, a large nuclear power plant is about 1GW. Many are less, in the 0.5GW range.
So we would need 300 additional large nuclear plants. Smaller, gen 4 nuclear plants are currently planned. These may be as big as 50MW (0.05GW). We would need 6,000 of them.
Solar anyone? We would need about 40,000 square miles of panels. (about the size of Ohio) That's just the panels. Probably about 60,000 square miles with access alleys, switchgear and so on.
So maybe wind? A really large windmill (4MW nominal)is perhaps 1MW effective. So 1,000 windmills per GW, times 300GW is 300,000 windmills.
And this is only for gasoline powered motor vehicles. Add trucks, trains, ships and all diesel transport and you probably need to double that.
Range anxiety is a secondary worry for me with battery cars. I am worried about where I would get the juice to charge it in the first place. An uncharged battery has 0 miles range no matter how much power it can potentially store.
John Henry
I also worry about the effect of battery cars on the potato chip industry.
https://www.packagingdigest.com/flexible-packaging/will-electric-vehicles-put-pouch-machines-out-business
John Henry
Charging stations are gonna require a lot of windmills. So long, for spacious skies!
Thanks to the early adopters who pay a high price and suffer from poor performance to fund the development of new consumer technology.
A large amount of skepticism should follow any large governmental plan for rearranging society. Transportation will be changed by the free market, not by a central committee in Washington DC or anywhere else. That said, this Purdue development is how it's done. Something out of the box. A redesigned highway system to work with magnetized pavement and newly designed cars to work on those new 'tracks'. I hope Purdue can figure out how half of the world- mired in snow for months- can drive on these magnetized roads with ice and snow levels between the car and the road. Maybe heated, magnetized roads?
Anyway- today's electric cars are cute. They work for small distances, are good for metropolitan areas where you don't have long drives, just runs around town. But the central problem for 'renewables' remains the same whether it's for solar panels, windmills, or electric cars.
>Battery storage. We currently have not yet developed battery storage that is enough for us to operate freely for hours or miles. We cannot power cities yet. We cannot power cars to travel far to other cities yet. We do not yet have the energy storage issue figured out. Musk is working on it.
>How do you power electric cars? What is the source of the electricity? Coal? If you get a nation full of electric cars needing to be charged up, you're going to need far more electricity availalble than solar panels can produce. (windmills are a joke).
>Minerals and materials. Rare earth minerals are required to make solar panels. They are, as named, rare. Not readily available. China is currently the main source for these minerals (and China is hoping their newly found friends in Afghanistan will allow them to find more, there.). For these magnetic roads they mentioned iron oxide, nickel, zinc. So those will need to be mined and in large quantities to cover the worlds roads.
>Disposing of the waste: We've never figured this out. Even if we do come up with better battery storage, we'll have chemical waste when making the batteries and when disposing of old batteries. We don't yet know what to do with the poisonous waste from solar panels. What do we do with this stuff that looks all fluffy and nice, but doesn't produce enough power and creates poisonous waste? Is this progress? (again- not to mention windmill turbines and blades- how do you dispose of those humongous blades? We have yet to figure that out).
So much more to get figured out before I go electric. My neighbors all have hybrids and they're cool. I get it. Just don't need it. Yet.
I drive back and forth from MN to CA annually. There's no fucking way that's possible in an electric vehicle.
The problem isn’t range anxiety. It’s cost. $60,000 for a Tesla 3. That’s a thousand dollars a month for five years at zero percent interest.
If all of the money for this work went into creating hyper-efficient gas engines we wouldn't need electric cars.
No sign yet that the proponents of EVs have addressed, or even considered, the fact that millions of EVs cannot be re-charged given the limitations of our present electric power generation capability. And, no, millions more windmills and/or solar panels won't do it. (See: laws of physics).
Last night I asked where the generating capacity was going to come from to recharge those cars, where the transmission capacity was going to come from to keep those charging stations running (or the concrete magnetized), when are we going to make our grid resilient enough and robust enough to handle the increased load, and where were we going to get the lithium to make all those batteries. How about Mayor Pete answer those questions?
Inventing magnetized concrete doesn’t solve these more basic questions.
A charging system embedded in the highway would be hideously inefficient. We would have to produce electricity at an order of magnitude higher than we do currently. Does no one think anymore?
We'd be lucky if Biden's multi-trillion dollar "infrastructure" bill fills a single pothole.
If you don't park your car in its dedicated charging garage, you won't have a car. That is the goal.
This is not going to work. It will increase the cost of road pavement by multiples.
Electric vehicle technology will be fine without these stupid government slush funds. This is just politicians and bureaucrats pretending they are engineers.
There is a reason most of them are lawyers and not engineers.
They are too stupid to make design decisions like this.
I would like to see a technical discussion of the efficiency of this system. Typically, magnetic field strength falls off very quickly with distance (it has an inverse cube relationship). It's why wireless charging for mobile phones needs such proximity. Metal detectors, for example, use large coils and very sensitive electronics -- they do not transfer a significant amount of power. But this kind of system would, on average, need to pass hundreds of watts to a car to be worthwhile. The peak power would probably have to be much higher to allow gaps so that adjacent charging panels do not interfere with each other.
I also wonder how this would bill users. Tolls that consider time as well as distance?
According to my friend the internet, there are 168,000 gas stations in the U.S. So 500,000 EV charging stations sounds like a lot. But whereas a gas station can fuel up dozens of cars per hour (i.e., no more than five minutes per pump per vehicle), even a high-speed charger takes something like an hour to fill up a single EV battery.
I suspect the unstated strategy here is to make it SEEM like EVs will be convenient to own and use, while nevertheless ensuring that the problem of keeping vehicles charged doesn't ever go away. The powers that be really want Americans to drive a lot less, so obviously they don't care if the end result of these plans is to make it inconvenient and time-consuming to re-charge your electric car.
With Bitcoin and EV's how will we generate all this needed electricity? Arent more than a couple states struggling with that now? Maybe they can put a whole bunch of pinwheels on cars.
How long to charge an EV? 15 minutes? that sounds nice too.
It’s not just charging stations that need to be built, it’s also power generating plants that need to be built to supply electric power to the charging stations. This need is evidenced by the rolling brown outs that occur on hot summer nights when people return home from work and turn on their AC. But I have no doubt that the environmentalists calling for electric vehicles will oppose the construction of new power plants.
Sounds fantastic, meaning a "fantasy." My state government can't keep the existing low-tech roads in good shape. How will they ever maintain a high tech road? They can't even maintain good lane lines painting, which is critical for cars with lane-keeping assist that need to "see" the lanes to make semi-autonomous driving possible.
Oh, and “range anxiety” is in third place, behind “where will I find the extra money to afford paying for two cars, but getting only one,” and “will the damned thing spontaneously catch fire in my garage and burn my house down”?
Well range anxiety is a factor. But let’s not overlook the fear of the unknown, because there ain’t no shadetree mechanic option— Teslas must be serviced at their sparsely located proprietary shops. Then there’s the tech aspect. So many features of evehicles rely on constant internet access and the operating can be buggy at times. Yikes! So beyond the huge up front costs and enormous replacement costs with batteries and powertrain parts. And charging is a huge time investment with the quicker systems costing the most. Finally, consider the skyrocketing rates for electricity now and ponder a future without cheap reliable fossil fuel. How much will charging your car cost three or even 13 years from now?
Recharging roads is an idea that hasn't performed well to date.
All this effort, and the jackbooted authoritarian thuggery that will be used to make us buy something that doesn't even reduce CO2, in service of a climate catastrophe hallucination promulgated by more jackbooted authoritarian thuggery. I think it's the bending of the populace to their will that is the point to all this. We see it as well in mandating vaccines that have disappointing results. The results don't matter. It's the thuggery they get off on.
I read ". . . to a concrete mixture which is magnetized by running an electrical current" and wonder how much electricity - per mile! - will be needed. And will said concrete mixture be magnetized 24 hours/day? Will the current have to be large enough to handle heavy traffic when many many electric vehicles will be drawing on current (via mag field) while traveling packed together at 5-10mph? Will electricity expense be somehow charged to each car, or more likely, put into overall state/municipal budget? If the latter, would this not be another indirect subsidy from the poor (who can ill-afford) such cars to the rich (who can)?
Where does electricity come from, and what will people do when the power goes out because of overuse?? They want to force everybody to take mass transit, but the poor black people who live in the boonies can't get to town to get an ID, how do you expect them to get to the mass transit when they don't have it in small towns?? Progressives are dumb, and never think things through before they force action. Who can afford electric cars for the whole family, let alone one???
"Only 4% of the passenger vehicles bought in the U.S. in 2021 are electric, and it's obvious why: "range anxiety.""
It's more than range anxiety. It's the long charging period; a period that increases with increasing battery capacity (i.e. range). Recharging roads addresses that, but the planet will be long dead (according to them) before this comes to fruition.
I think electric vehicles are cool. I would own one except for: Cost, range anxiety, and the issue of rare earth metals. I expect in the future many obstacles will be overcome. I am not an early adopter, so I will wait.
I looked at EVs when I bought my current 2018. I did not get one. I am not convinced that charging the EV is anymore eco friendly than using Gas. Coal or gas powered power plants pollute too and most electricity in the US is from these old plants.
Now Nuclear power plants should change that. Until the electrical energy grid becomes cleaner, EV are more a virtue or status symbol than practical.
Uh oh, I sense that Althouse is reconsidering buying the Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck for reasons of “obsolescence anxiety”.
To quote John Galt/Elon Musk: "Get the hell out of my way!"
I’ll believe they are serious about EVs when I see them allowing construction and operation of nuclear generating facilities.
So the concept, as it is put, is that the highways could be powered to recharge the electric cars as they drive along it. In essence, turning the transportation system into a high tech version of a slot car track, with an even lower energy transfer efficiency.
Man, they say the weed these days is way more powerful than in the past, but I had no idea ......
Ok, I understand that newer Teslas require about 15 minutes to charge via Supercharger. I have no idea whether the kind of kW that you get out of a Supercharger can be run through a magnetic field in a road, but say they can. Say also that the magic road can pass power to a car as efficiently as a power lead, which I don't believe has ever been true in practice, or we wouldn't have power lines. So we'd need, what, 12-15 miles of magic road at regular intervals to charge a car and keep it running. And then, do you keep these sections of road charged all the time, or only when an electric car passes over a sensor or something to indicate that an e-car is present?
And then there's the interesting issue of how to get the charge into the car with rubber tires in the way - isn't that a technical barrier?
It seems to me that there are many points on this proposal where there's a lot of wasted energy.
But importantly, I am not an EE!
And back to Heinlein: anybody remember "The Roads Must Roll"?
The technology to charge vehicles on the road has existed for a long time and is in use in places like Vancouver, BC. It makes for ugly roads and expensive to maintain, which is why many cities quit using electric trollies nearly a century ago.
I can't even get my chip card to work when I hold it 1/2" above the reader.
oh! oh! serious Question!
lots (and i mean LOTS!) of people don't/won't live near powerlines, 'cause they can light up a fluorescent tube or some such scare sh*t
are These scaredy cats REALLY going to want to sit in a car on one of this powered roads?
"and it's obvious why: "range anxiety."
Yeah that's the *only* reason (eyeroll)
I can see some possibility in this. However, it would seem also to require making tires out of something that is not a near perfect insulator. You would do similar things to the tires that you're doing in the roads. Technically speaking, that shouldn't be too much of a problem, but what's the extra cost going to be? It already costs me $1,000 for four tires for my SUV. How much more am I going to have to pay.
And that's the real problem with electric cars. We have a thousand technical hurdles, and we either can, or in most cases, already have, overcome the hurdles. But each of these hurdles comes with a cost. And maybe the cost for overcoming one isn't so bad, but it adds up.
Blogger Tim said..."A charging system embedded in the highway would be hideously inefficient. We would have to produce electricity at an order of magnitude higher than we do currently. Does no one think anymore?"
Yeah, I would like to see the coupling efficiency vs plugging the car in with a cable. Got to be a large number.
chickelit: "We can all hank Michael Faraday for discovering electromagnetic induction so early thus giving us two centuries of subsequent R&D."
I have been reliably informed that electromagnetic induction is white supremacy.
Not to mention that Faraday is a Dead White European Male, and thus, a tool of the patriarchy.
chickelit: "We can all hank Michael Faraday for discovering electromagnetic induction so early thus giving us two centuries of subsequent R&D."
I have been reliably informed that electromagnetic induction is white supremacy.
Not to mention that Faraday is a Dead White European Male, and thus, a tool of the patriarchy.
Teslas have the worst reliability record of all cars.
Where does the electricity come from ? Idiots will say "out of the wall." Bill Cosby had a funny routine about his understanding of electricity. The climate hysterics are people who have never made anything and whose knowledge of the world comes from their smart phones.
The difference in price between a normal car and a Tesla will buy a hell of a lot of gas over the lifetime of the car, so it isn't like you are saving money.
The tech is nice but the fit and finish of the cars isn't the best. I test drove a Model 3 pre-pandemic and I compared it to a Dodge Neon with a super cool ipad built in.
As to the electric roads. Are they going to have warning signs every 15 feet for the people with pacemakers? How are they going to handle the viral videos of people sticking coins to their skin and saying they are magnetized now. We can't handle 5G towers or handheld phones without conspiracy theories about brain cancer. You're going to pump enough energy into a road to charge a car that weighs 5,000lbs and needs to go 70mph? Not going to happen.
Conrad said...
I suspect the unstated strategy here is to make it SEEM like EVs will be convenient to own and use
Gov: "Just Take the Bus!"
Citizen: "i like my economical gas car!"
Gov: "We've Outlawed them, only EV's now"
Citizen: "this EV is EXPENSIVE! and IMPRACTICAL!!!"
Gov: "Just Take the Bus!"
Citizen: "The Bus doesn't come Anywhere near my house!!"
Gov: "Just Take the Bus!" . . . Or ELSE!!!
A back of the envelope calculation a couple months ago showed that to replace all gasoline cars would require about 300 additional gigawatts of additional electrical generation.
Who's envelope was this?
Michael P said...
I would like to see a technical discussion of the efficiency of this system.
Read (reread) Heinlein's WALDO. Beam Power is SIMPLE, and EFFECTIVE (and debilitating)
Don't think magnetic waves, think Radio Waves (well, Radiation waves). The power stays in the beam, until it's received by the antenna (or your body, which is a pretty good antenna!)
This is just politicians and bureaucrats pretending they are engineers.
Even engineers can be dumb. I once got into an argument with an engineer (admittedly a computer engineer, not mechanical) about how his idea of just putting a propeller on the roof of the car to generate electricity to power the electric car from all the wind over the hood wasn't going to work.
See also the CNBC analyst who thought that Tesla putting solar panels on their roofs would solve the range problem. Nobody seems to understand how much power a solar panel can generate.
Internal combustion engines are there for a reason. They can generate the enormous power required, quickly, with reasonable storage and fueling safety.
The electric push is going to require that we all move back to cities and ride around on bicycles.
EV's are more practical in the fleet market. Cars come back every night and can be charged. Typically don't go to far in a day. And EV's have much fewer parts than ICE...so maintenance is less.
I looked at EVs when I bought my current 2018. I did not get one. I am not convinced that charging the EV is anymore eco friendly than using Gas. Coal or gas powered power plants pollute too and most electricity in the US is from these old plants.
Lomborg and others have been vilified for pointing out that mining all those battery elements is a very carbon intensive process, and when those carbon emissions are added to the carbon impact of an EV many of them are more burdensome than many current ICE vehicles...
A quick back of the envelope calculation by me shows that Americans fill up the gas tank 29 million times/day. This is based on 3.2 trillion miles driven by Americans/year (from Google) and a 300 mile range of an average tank of gas (my estimate). There are about 150,000 gas stations with, on average about 4 pumps/station. Of course, it takes less than 5 minutes to fill up the tank. 500,000 chargers would have to be used 58 times/day to handle this frequency with the same battery range as I estimate for gas above, or charge a car in 25 minutes.
As for the bill in Congress- this says they can build the stations for $15,000/station. That is laughable all by itself.
fun questions no one is asking
Can our electric transmission system deliver enough electricity to power 100% of vehicles?
Can our electric system Generate enough electricity to power 100% of passenger vehicles?
{how is solar going to work at night? just asking}
Can our earth provide enough lithium to make batteries for 100% of passenger vehicles?
They've thought about it. The answer is "No" to all the questions. So, going forward, you won't be allowed to own a car. Sucks to be you.
The EV push is just another artifact of the Climate Alarmist Left throwing a temper tantrum because even their own analyses do not show climate change to be a pressing issue in the next 30 years. Their own official climate consensus pronouncement says that climate change, if nothing is done about it, could reduce GDP in 2050 by 18%. Keep in mind that at a 3% annual growth rate, the 2050 GDP would be over 240% greater. So shaving 18% off that level sure doesn't seem like much of anything if it is felt at all.
In response, the Climate Alarmists have propagandized hard to convince people that the risk is more imminent. This has led to pushing technologies that are not yet developed sufficiently to make a significant difference. And the Left, as always, has shown that they actually DO NOT want to solve the problem. If they do, they would be pushing the new generation of nuclear power plants hard. That technology is real and is the ONLY power source that can provide limitless power without increasing carbon in the atmosphere. The problem for the left is that nuclear energy does not require control by the elites who are trying to push us to the glorious socialist utopia.
I am unconvinced that electric cars with batteries are the future, and have been unconvinced for a very long time. The physics of batteries is pretty uncompromising all by itself. It is likely that lithium ion batteries are the apex of this field- lithium has an atomic mass of about 6.941- it is the smallest ion by mass that carries a charge of +1. Beryllium can carry a +2 charge with an atomic mass of 9, but I have never heard of a beryllium battery, so they probably aren't competitive with lithium ion batteries for some reason, either economic or physical.
An electrified roadway would probably be the best solution if you wanted to get rid of gasoline engines- you would only need a small battery for such purposes- the roadway would power the car's engine. I think, though, this solution is going to be very, very expensive.
Everyone is right: the technical problems in moving to full EV transportation are insuperable.
But the analyses assume that success means developing an adequate substitute for current use.
Instead, along the way, success will be redefined as adjusting use to feasible means, given politically set priorities. In other words, failure by common-sense standards is built into current policy. The actual destination is rationing, combined with an attitude adjustment for consumers.
Tennessee is using the Volkswagen settlement money to build charging stations every 50 miles on major highways.
I sell EV chargers, and this charging idea of using pavement is pie in the sky. EV cars using plug-in chargers isn't. Every major automaker has one of more EV cars in their line up.
Good point, and none of the automakers have an EV vehicle that would charge using this road technology. So if you do believe this technology will work, then the rational decision is to wait on an EV vehicle purchase until the technology works and is available in a vehicle you could purchase. Assuming generation capacity existed and the mag tech worked; it takes 3 years or more of planning to get a road repaved. The “more” definitely applies to repaving highways. It also takes about 5 years to design a new vehicle model. So why would a rational person wanting this technology purchase an EV vehicle before 2027? Why would an automaker bet now on this tech to start designing a car with it now? That pushes the rational new purchase to at least 2030.
Horse and buggy. Problem solved.
Blogger MikeR said...
To quote John Galt/Elon Musk: "Get the hell out of my way!"
**************
Huh?
EV mania is almost entirely a creation of Big Government and the Green Weenies. Tesla has received (and paid back) about $2 billion in government subsidies, which something John Galt would never do.
Moreover, Tesla's sales are mostly at the high-end, costing from $45 to $62K. He's not building a "People's Car". Finally, why does the government have to supply the money for those charging stations??
So, given that John Galt wanted **the government** to get the hell out of his way, and Musk is happy to use the government for his purposes, your faux-quote seems wildly off-point.
I live in an apartment building in Manhattan. I park my car in a garage in the building. There are no chargers in the garage. AFAIK there are no publically available chargers anywhere in Manhattan. I know that if you google chargers in NYC you will get a map with lots of red dots but try using one of those chargers. If you are not renting space in the garage with the charger they are not available.
Think my problem is unique to Manhattan? About a third of the population of the US live in urban core districts as defined by the census bureau, most of them in multifamily housing.
The basic business model for BEVs is that the vast majority of charging will take place at home. That might work for the suburbs but what about the third of the country that lives in multifamily housing in urban districts?
Transportation will be changed by the free market, not by a central committee in Washington DC or anywhere else.
So I guess the Interstate system didn't change anything.
Catenary electric locomotives are powerful, and compared to diesel- which are really diesel-electric - are clean and quiet. And, less maintenance is required on them. But yet, hundreds of miles of catenary have been torn down, and the those rails now have diesel-electric on them.
Why is this? Cheaper? As powerful? Less maintenance? Why would the catenary be torn down?
Taxes. Turns out where the catenary was torn down it was being added to the tax basis for taxing the railroad, and that made it unprofitable to keep the catenary up.
San Francisco has catenary electric busses. Why aren't they more common? Turns out most people find a city strung with overhead wires to be unattractive. And there are now test areas with catenary trucks. Which will cross multiple jurisdictions. Jurisdictions that will be looking for tax revenue if the wires are privately owned. Or will the government build the catenary and then figure out how to charge for the power used?
If the feds were to make rail catenary free from all federal and local real and personal property tax- we would see electrification of many other rail lines. The right of ways already exist. How would we deal with road catenary where right of ways don't exist because the roads are public?
Cost, size, and distance all play into my refusal to go electric.
1. Electric cars are expensive, my electricity at home isn';t cheap. When I've done the math before, the cost of a new car + charging + battery replacement is higher than "Getting a reliable, reasonably fuel efficient used car and driving it into the ground.
2/ Size: I have 8 kids and drive a 12 passenger van as my "non commuter" car. There's nothing on the market at that size.
3. Distance. We drive 60 miles each way every week for my son's therapies, and 45 miles each way for homeschool co-ops and reasonably-priced shopping. Right now, I can get by with refilling the 2000 Camry every 10-14 days. I don't see electric working as well for "I don't want to spend the time to get gas, I'm in a rush"
I completely agree with Ritlb. Gas powered vehicles continue to get more efficient and cleaner each year. Why not invest more in improving that? These unrealistic goals to have zero emissions just shifts emissions from vehicles to power plants, and at a higher cost. A real difference could be made by improving our existing gas engines.
Unless charging stations are AS FAST and NUMEROUS as gas stations, EVs remain among those with garages - another blight on our iniquitous society.
If this ever comes to pass, there will be needed a huge amount of electricity to be generated just for this. With current technology, there is no way in hell to do this. The Dems are hellbent in shutting down fossil fuel generation plants and have been against nuclear power for decades. California itself can’t provide enough electricity for its current needs during the summer due to high demand and the need to shut down part of their grid to hopefully prevent fires from starting due to overburdened power lines that fail. Then there is the question of who pays for the construction of these roadways that can electrically recharge cars as they travel down them as well as maintenance / repairs / reconstruction of the roads that will inevitably happen. Since these roads are not going to be free and there is a much reduced gas tax from legacy fossil fuel powered vehicles to pay for construction and maintenance, there will somehow need a way to tax the drivers / owners of the vehicle and / or a toll to be assessed while driving. The “green” geniuses currently in charge of our government’s executive and legislative branches haven’t thought that far ahead while rushing headlong into getting rid of internal combustion engined vehicles.
Freder Frederson said...
Transportation will be changed by the free market, not by a central committee in Washington DC or anywhere else.
So I guess the Interstate system didn't change anything.
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After WWII our government woke up to the fact that Germany's well-developed autobahn system gave them an edge when defending their country, an edge we had to overcome with extra weapons and manpower.
So, in the name of providing "for the common defense", we built the interstate system.
Kinda different....
Gospace,
I have never heard the term "catenary" applied to transportation; to me a catenary is the shape formed by a drooping cable. (Fun fact: a suspension bridge forms a parabola, if you consider the cable weight negligible, but if you take out the weight of the roadway and the cable itself is all you have, you get a catenary.) I suppose it refers to the electrification from above?
I'm familiar with SF MUNI buses, and, yes, their electrification system is really ugly. Also prone to all manner of mechanical failures. The first time I was in SF I couldn't believe that such a jerry-rigged system could conceivably work.
As I've said before, my husband has a Tesla, a Model S. We installed a charger in the garage, and normally the furthest it has to go is to Portland and back (we're in Salem), so range doesn't matter in the ordinary course of events. We've done a few road trips, though -- mostly back to the Bay Area. They are really not super-inconvenient for us; all down the West Coast there are chargers, helpfully 50 miles or so apart, and when you need a charge you hop out, stretch, eat lunch, whatever. And per our original agreement with Tesla, charging is free. (Not anymore, predictably, but that lasts for us as long as the car -- or rather, the battery array -- does.)
Yes, the car is expensive, and if we hadn't had an inheritance windfall we probably would've stuck to the used RAV-4 we were driving then. And the proprietary dealership thing is a pain. A few years back a kid on a bike, wearing headphones and ignoring stop signs, plowed into the side of it near our home. The kid was fine, though his bike was not. Neither was the side of the car. Bodywork still needs to be done. Tesla is rather stingy with giving people loaners for a month.
Rejahm,
It was my envelope. Or more precisely my excel spreadsheet.
I looked up how much gasoline was used as motor fuel in 2018 converted the energy to kwh.
I assumed relative efficiencies of converting solar energy to the road about equal to gas. (we could discuss why I assumed that if you like)
That gave me a total number of megawatt hours for 100 percent conversion. That divided by hours in the year gives the average mw capacity required. About 300,000mw or300gw or 300 large nukes.
Hoover dam is about 2gw,iirc. That may help visualization.
It takes about 5 acres of solar panels to generate 1mw nominal. Ife comparing to non solar, you need about 20 acres per effective mw.
Multiply it out and you get around 40,000 square miles just the panels.
How close am I? Dunno. Plus or minus 10-15 percent I'd bet.
So 350-250 mw as a ballpark.
If you've got better/different numbers I love to hear them. I don't think I'm wrong but I well could be and would be happy to see some better estimates by people wh spentore than 30 minutes on them, as I did
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Jamie said....
And back to Heinlein: anybody remember "The Roads Must Roll"?
YES!!! Where Is My Slidewalk???@@?@? I WANT my SLIDEWALK!!!
Re efficient gasoline cars, I bought a new Hyundai Elantra in June.
Nice midsized sedan. A bit more than 4,000 miles so far and my average mpg is a bit more than 41 which includes a lot of city driving.
A few months ago I drove Fajardo to yauco and back. About 3/on expressway and including a 3000' mountain. About 250 miles total.
Over 50mpg for the trip.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Almost 70,000 people in Southern California were without power on Thanksgiving. Power companies shut down power to areas at risk of wild fires because of weather conditions. Would energized roads be shut down in such situations? Since the energized portion wouldn’t be buried underground would they increase the risk of wildfire (similar to power lines on poles). In California electric companies have been on the hook to compensate for wildfire damage, I think they may be uncomfortable with increasing their risk profile.
"The basic business model for BEVs is that the vast majority of charging will take place at home. That might work for the suburbs but what about the third of the country that lives in multifamily housing in urban districts?"
They want you to take the bus. Or even better, a really expensive choo-choo train that doesn't go where you want.
Imagine a software salesman pushing back on your requirements as foolish "uptime anxiety."
It's not some irrational fear, like fear of snakes, it's a real thing. People sometimes have a critical need for their car outside of the normal parameters of daily use (which to be honest, for *most* people, EVs would probably be fine with a range of 300 miles and overnight charging) but then there is that other use, and people don't want to be forced to rent a car to drive from Skunk Hollow, PA to Fiddler's Ridge, Maine, because there is no mass transportation of any kind that services those locations
We never should have deregulated Greyhound and Trailways, for one thing. They used to serve every community, practically, but now you have bus services cherry picking the most profitable routes, leaving umpteen thousands of small communities utterly reliant on automobiles, where EVs are impractical.
Another honest comment, is that I could probably use the F-150 Lightening for as much as I use my pickup truck, to haul my boat in and out of the water for service and storage, maybe take the tractor to the dealer for service, pick up firewood, run to Home Depot. But $60,000???? I can buy a beat up old F-250 that will be reliable enough for all of those jobs for maybe under $10K. And if I felt like taking my boat to Lake Ontario, for some reason, the F-250 could manage it. The EV right now, with the current battery situation, and no serious breakthroughs on the horizon, and they may never come, only works inside its envelope.
The dangling temptation for EVs is reliability and simplicity, and all we have to do is solve the possibly insolvable range problem. Just like the dangling temptation for nuclear fusion is all of that power. But as we all know, the communist motto is "To each according to what we think he *really* needs, and from each according to how hard we can get him to work without actually paying him."
These stories are kind of funny:
Apparently this is the case. A farmer in Idaho had a barn located near high power lines and noticed that baling wire he kept in his barn was conducting small amounts of electricity. After some investigation he built induction coils and began to run his house off of it. Power company equipment detected the drain of energy and went to investigate. The farmer was arrested for using electricity from the power company without a meter.
In another case, an engineer living at a military base in England lived in a house near a radar installation. He installed induction coils in his attic that generated electricity from the radar beam. Controllers in the radar facility noticed a strange shadow on their screens and he was caught.
"Even engineers can be dumb. I once got into an argument with an engineer (admittedly a computer engineer, not mechanical) about how his idea of just putting a propeller on the roof of the car to generate electricity to power the electric car from all the wind over the hood wasn't going to work."
Ooh, ooh, ooh! Pump the power from the propeller INTO the road! Perpetual motion, baby!
Rare earth disparities, environmental carnage, and shared/shifted responsibility. While electrics have some mechanical, and local, advantages, they have progressive value without CO2 forced greening and risk without the prophecy of warming per chance [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate change. Buy it if you want it, but it presents a poor value proposition.
Where does the electricity come from ?
Whitewashed, Green intermittents/unreliables, of course.
Transportation will be changed by the free market, not by a central committee in Washington DC or anywhere else.
Field Marshall Freder: "So I guess the Interstate system didn't change anything."
The move to create the Interstate system was driven by the explosion of personal and commercial vehicles on the road, the transition from trains to the more efficient trucks within regions and, later, via long haul trucking, as well as Ike's desire to create a more efficient road system for National Defense purposes.
Ike participated in an Army exercise in 1919 to move military equipment across the country via road and it was a disaster, taking over 60 days to complete the trip. In a war where weeks matter, transporting equipment in such an inefficient way from one coast to the more direct coast for resupply was not acceptable. Ike probably never forgot that.
So, the creation was driven by a combination of perceived National Defense requirements as well as the evolution of long distance over the road capabilities/efficiencies and overall vehicle ownership expansion.
Market forces most definitely played a role, particularly since the States would be required to maintain the highways in their own states and if there was not enough commercial activity to help offset the cost, it would have been an abject financial disaster for those states.
Range anxiety will continue be a problem. Particularly if we don't come up with a radically new battery technology. Resources to build batteries are increasingly scarce and not real way to recycle them at scale exists. As a result, there will be a move to range-limit EVs, ie, "Who really needs to travel more than 100 miles in a day?" as away to spread out supply, and justify expansion of public transportation.
Freder brings up the interstate system as an example of something that arose outside the free market and changed society (analogous to EVs, I guess).
Chicken and egg argument. Yes, the interstate system was federally planned and funded. But did it arise because the federal government decided purely on its own that it was needful? Or because organic changes in society - notably the explosion in the number of cars and trucks on roads - made it "an idea whose time had come"?
This is a microcosm of conservatism versus progressivism. Conservatism is not stasis; it's embracing change only when society is already moving meaningfully in the direction of the change. (As such, yes, it can be too slow to change when, for instance, citizens' rights are clearly being infringed.) Otherwise it's, well, conservative, sticking with that which works.
Progressivism, on the other hand, wants to leapfrog over the mechanism of society's organic motion and impose change in a direction progressives believe (or wish) would happen eventually, whether or not there's any significant current sentiment for the change. (It also tends to use "compassion," in the form of "things that make you feel good about doing something" rather than "things that demonstrably solve people's problems," as a primary decision-making tool.) This approach leads to division and lessened societal cohesion, since changes are being forced on (often) a majority of people who haven't reached the desired conclusion on their own (sometimes "yet" and sometimes "ever"), and often big policy mistakes, like welfare.
We're talking about how fast new technology becomes dominant technology so lets look at the now-ubiquitous personal computer ...
By 1976, there were several firms racing to introduce the first truly successful commercial personal computers. Three machines, the Apple II, PET 2001 and TRS-80 were all released in 1977.
Byte in January 1980 announced in an editorial that "the era of off-the-shelf personal computers has arrived".
IBM responded to the success of the Apple II with the IBM PC, released in August 1981.
Drawing upon its experience with the Lisa, Apple launched the Macintosh in 1984.
By the mid-1990s, Amiga, Commodore and Atari systems were no longer on the market, pushed out by strong IBM PC clone competition and low prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers
So that's a technology that took about 20 years just to get started -- and no highways were torn up and no high-power wires were buried. I will not be holding my breath for this one.
The power of magical thinking is strong amongst progressives.
Electric cars will/do destroy gas cars re performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7YqdGt19tw
Since Covid started I’ve added eight cars to my already large collection. One is electric. All the others are old, from 1968 to 1988.
My own electric cars have taught me that the speed war is over and electric cars won. But my electric cars have also taught me that there is more to fun driving than the speed war. So I’m filling my garages (and I built two new garages) such that I can further lock-in that olden days fun. I’ll always be able to buy killer EVs. But they ain’t making more slow-car-fast cars from the past.
Today I was loving living in my slow (on paper) ‘68 Porsche.
IMHO.
BTW, my new new-car recommendation for Meadehouse is that they buy whatever it is that they think they need, and then they also get a convertible E30 325i. Ten grand will buy a nice-ish one, fifteen buys a driver quality car that boarders on show car. That’s throw away money for a manager at 7-11. So Meadehouse doesn’t need to fuss about the dough. Not to mention that there’s no giant depreciation hit waiting for you around the first corner.
Yur welcome.
BTW, WA state charges a big licensing fee for my electric cars so I’m not fully getting out of paying the taxes associated with buying gas at the pump.
I used to brag about being a freeloading dirtbag grifter until I noticed I was getting hit with this fee (hundreds of dollars per car).
Doh!
"so range doesn't matter in the ordinary course of events."
Aye, there's the rub. Which is why you need an ICE, even if it is a hybrid, to supplement your Tesla.
"I once got into an argument with an engineer (admittedly a computer engineer, not mechanical) about how his idea of just putting a propeller on the roof of the car to generate electricity to power the electric car from all the wind over the hood wasn't going to work."
You have to think of software engineers like railroad engineers, it's an accident of the language that they are called the same thing, although I worked with a couple of trained engineers who got into software, and they were first rate. I was an English major myself, so I didn't judge. But when I first read about magnetizing the concrete, I had this vision that they were proposing to put coils in the car to pass through the magnetic field and generate electricity as they drove down the highway powered by their electric car. But of course this would create drag and there would be loss, but maybe if you put a sail on the roof of the cars...
John Henry said...
If you've got better/different numbers I love to hear them. I don't think I'm wrong but I well could be and would be happy to see some better estimates by people wh spentore than 30 minutes on them, as I did
I'm not sure we could agree on a starting point to begin a calculation. I think you've made some erroneous assumptions about the need for additional capacity and haven't considered the excess capacity that already exits in the system, both on a seasonal and daily basis...
"so range doesn't matter in the ordinary course of events."
Why would I want a car that can't be used for the infrequent events, too?
Recently, Tesla owners were unable to use their cars because a software glitch wouldn't let them unlock them with their phone. I know this isn't an EV issue per se, but it does speak to the vulnerability of all this tech they load cars up with now. When we bought a new car two years ago we bought the base model to avoid all the crap. One thing we wanted was a physical key. Not vulnerable to bad software. Also harder to steal. (It's also a manual).
So, who's going to pay for the electricity to charge those cars?
I'm really looking forward to the political ads on this one, about how the Democrats want to subsidize the rich while making the poor pay for it. Or, for that matter, the GOP primary ads pitting car owners against EV owners.
You know, something showing the ever Biden rising gas prices, next to free energy for rich people in nice homes with expensive electric cars
Perhaps the 4% figure is based more on available supply, instead of demand?
You know since Tesla is already completely sold out until 2023 and no one else is making significant numbers of electric cars?
"Perhaps the 4% figure is based more on available supply, instead of demand?"
Or perhaps people don't want their house burned down.
Michelle Dulak Thomson ,
I was a railfan at an early age. I knew catenary as an overhead wire system for rail and busses long before I found it described the shape of an unladen wire supported by two posts. IIRC I learned that in calculus, not geometry where you’d think it would be. Unless I learned it in statics…
English is a great language allowing many words to mean different things depending on the context they’re used in.
Forgot to say- rail catenary is one overhead wire which is the line side. The return side is the rails which are also ground. Bus catenary is two wire, one supply, one return. I would guess the return is grounded, but it wouldn’t have to be.
Catenary for trucks would require a two wire system.
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