I have heard people say that a PV solar panel will last 50+ years when they do the cost return analysis, I typically use a much more conservative 20 year lifespan in my calculations. Just because they can last 50+ years in ideal conditions doesn't mean they will last anywhere near that.
I have no idea how long they will last under ideal conditions, it might be 100 years or it might 1,000 years, it's impossible to really say, but what we can say is that in real world testing PV panels have been in use without fail for 60+ years and that with most PV panels after 20 years you still have 5 years left on the warranty! (25 year warranty is industry standard) and I have personally seen PV panels that are 25+ years old that are still putting out over the rated output and that non of them that were bought at the same time have failed, at the time those panels only had a 15 year warranty and I'm sure I could find some that are older then that, but 25 years ago is when PV panels started to become affordable and easy to get and based off of the inspection of those panels that are 25+ years old, I see no reason that they will not last another 25 or even 50 years or more! they are not degrading and the new panels that are out there are being made with higher quality materials and in factories that have better control over their manufacturing environment.
But this thread is about EV's not PV's of course they are related and when you look at the long term cost you have to ask your self what is the payback on burning gasoline, coal or other fossil fuels, They are a net loss with a cost that keeps going up and you have little choice about where your gasoline comes from but you have a wide range of choices over where your electricity comes from, you can even make your own electricity easier then you can make your own gasoline.
Neil,
Here is my dilemma. As you know I am building an enclosed 2 seater Trike. With a Honda engine and trans, my drivetrain and gas tank are going to be 350 pounds. Rounding up, call it 400 pounds.
I paid 500 bucks for the entire car, but lets say I paid 1000 bucks for the engine/trans. If I have a 5 gallon tank, and can go 75 mpg, that gives me a range of 375 miles. And I can run this 375 miles at 75 mph if I want.
If I go electric, I need an electric motor. lets say the motor is only 500 dollars.
I need a controller. If I solder all the crap together myself, the DIY controller is only about 700 bucks.
And I need some batteries. If I go lead acid, and buy 140 amp hour 12 volt batteries, I'm only 800 dollars, but my weight of the batteries is 400 pounds. Plus the electric motor (only 100 pounds).
I can use the honda trans, or I can build my own from scratch. Lets say the trans is free and weighs 20 pounds.
So far, going electric, I am twice the price, almost twice the weight.
What is my range? my car needs 7 horsepower to travel down the freeway.
140 AH at 48 volts is 7000 watt hours. Rounding tremendously, that is 10 horsepower hours - or I can 1.5 hours, so my range is 100 miles.
Which we both know is just silly too far.
Perhaps you want to price me some lithium batteries???? half the weight, but a bit more costly.
Right, any vehicle that give you higher efficiency that you have right now it great!
I am self financed (so far) on building CarBEN EV5 -- my estimate for building the entire chassis (including the $1350 3-axis CNC machine) is about $4K.
Granted an electric drivetrain is expensive up front. But with the efficiency I am hoping for (<100-150Wh/mile) it will only cost me 0.025 CENTS (or $0.00025) per mile at the most -- and if I can put solar panels on my roof for $0 down -- I'll pay half of that! (We pay ~$0.16 / kWh here.) To drive the 300 miles I think are quite possible, that means no more than $7.20 and maybe as little as $4.80 (at <100Wh/mile).
There are about 3 solar installation companies who right now will put panels on your roof for almost no money down. And you'll pay about half of what you do now for electricity.
On the renewable energy costs, a land based wind turbine can generate $300,000 of electricity per year, and yet it will only use about 1% of a typical small farm. The corridor from the Texas panhandle up through the Dakotas could easily provide more than enough electricity for the entire lower 48 states. About 10% of Nevada could provide about half the power, as well. The potential for solar to scale down to every other rooftop, and for wind to scale up, and for the coasts to have offshore wind, wave power, and tidal power in some areas, and geothermal can be drilled, and biogas can be made from all sewage and farm waste (and this would then provide high quality natural fertilizer, too!) -- we could have SIXTEEN TIMES more power than we need, if we tried to collect the maximum from all of these.
The initial cost of transition is less than you think. We are currently spending $1.5 BILLION per day on foreign oil alone. We are spending about $100 barrel. If we pay $18 to conserve that barrel (by increasing our MPG, for example) we save the $82 per barrel.
Never mind the lowered health costs, and lowered pollution will help everything from fishing to tourism. We can minimize global climate change. In Germany, they emit 50% less carbon per person than in the USA. Costa Rica wants to be carbon neutral by 2021, and they are already very close to this.
I guess you are planning on the fairies paying for it.
regards
Mech
Nope, planning to pay for my share of it myself.
Leaving the sarcasm aside, you're the one that has made the so-far unsupported claim about the cost of replacing the US (or entire world's) generating system with renewables. How about some numbers, even rough back-of-the-envelope ones?
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Don't know how you figure that, but it seems way off. It's not all that much more expensive to build X MWatts renewable (or nuclear) power than it is to build the same amount of fossil fuel generation, and obviously the human race could afford to build the existing fossil fuel infrastructure, unless you believe it was magically whisked into existence by the fairies :-)
If it seems way off then present your own calculations with linked information to support your facts. The planetary electrical use can be calculated as well as the current cost per KWH of solar collectors. Then you get into land acquisition, labor to construct and maintenance required.
Also understand the present employment in industries you will render obsolete and what your plan is to do for those who would now join the unemployment lines waiting for more handouts.
Looks to me like the original sarcasm is in your last sentence here, so if you want to whine about sarcasm, you planted the seed that brought on the appropriate response.
I'll stick with my original estimate, you are certainly free to add any estimate you wish. The present net worth of the US is in the range of 50-60 trillion, with total obligations close to the same amount, so the US is broke. Financiers are not interested in providing cash to broke borrowers who show insufficient income to support their dreams. Neil claims an individual system would cost 30k. the problem is it wont replace the existing power grid and it would take over 10 years to pay for itself in savings, possibly 20 years. Paying interest on the borrowed money significantly increases the cost, while the benefit remains the same.
In fact the transition will probably take as long as it took for the original infrastructure to evolve into today's power grid. That basically means we will all be long dead before the transition is complete. In the mean time fossil fuel supply will gradually be consumed and diminish, prices will rise, and the solar industry will mature and become more cost effective. I believe that is inevitable, but at 61 I doubt I will see truly significant change in my remaining years. China, a country with no democratic govt to buy the next election can afford to invest in long term payback strategies, sadly in the US we either can't or won't, whichever you choose the results are the same.
Hydro, wave power, generation from the gulf current just off the east coast, combined with solar, wind, and novel means of energy storage are all essential components of grid evolution. The largest issue to date is energy storage, with the only immediate proven storage that is cost effective is hydro reservoirs.
What bothers me is half truths, partial facts, and other claims that just don't pass the litmus test of even minimal research. Legitimate questions that are ignored and unanswered demonstrate to the impartial observer that there is an agenda present and that agenda is not clearly defined for the reader.
When uninformed people make financial decisions that promote and ignore specific fields of development, history has clearly proven that they are seldom capable of correct decisions. Just as Hitlers dreams of super weapons that were going to save Germany from defeat, proved to have the opposite effect, we as people who consider improving efficiency in vehicles have one chance to get it right. We can no longer afford to be wrong. Solutions SHOULD be, short term, what we can fix today. The most glaring of them is engines idling as Neil posted. How stupid can we be to allow engines to do no work and consume 13% of the liquid fuels we pay so dearly for. That should be a law today that no future vehicles allow for engines to idle. Present technology is already mature and ready for implementation, but because the EPA does not test cars in such a way that the benefit is shown, the manufacturers ignore such a simple solution. Just that would provide more benefit than all the ethanol ever produced as a motor fuel.
PS: the Hitler reference was just an analogy to demonstrate the fallacy of dreaming of solutions instead of focusing like a laser on those solutions that exist already.
Germany, Costa Rica, Monaco, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Iceland all seem to be able to afford the transition to renewable energy. If the USA stopped spending the 4 billion a year on oil company subsidies, then we could afford to make the transition, too. We spend ~1.5 billion A DAY on foreign oil, so if we conserve, we can save plenty of money, and spend some of that on renewables. As Amory Lovins says (Rocky Mountain Institute) we can spend $100 per barrel to buy oil, or we can spend $18 to *save* a barrel of oil.
That adds up very quickly.
Neil in this post you gave the best reason to provide immediate solutions for vehicular inefficiency. My design has that potential and I am not the only one working on that type of system.
Meanwhile we debate long term solutions, when the real solution is the ones that can be implemented virtually immediately to bridge the gap between what will be the transportation infrastructure in the next decade and what it MIGHT be in then next century.
In WW2 the US had the foresight, to develop weapons that could be used in a very short time period. Victory was the priority. We are in the same situation right now and without immediate solutions that are practical and affordable, we risk defeat in the global economic war in which we are now engaged.
Sending money to OPEC is in my opinion very little different than watching our ships sunk by German Uboats, visible right off the east coast, was just 70 years ago.
Right, and electricity is the nexus of many renewable energy resources. Renewable energy sources are all over the place, and no one can monopolize them. These are quite democratizing -- energy is available virtually anywhere and everywhere.
Sure geothermal on the surface is only in a few places (Iceland, parts of the USA, New Zealand, etc.) but wind is in many places, including the corridor from Texas up to the Dakotas, and basically all around the midwest, California, and offshore from our coasts. Wind scales up well, getting more efficient as the turbines get bigger. We now have direct drive turbines that eliminate the weakest piece of the previous generation -- the transmission, and so they generate more power, break less often, cost less to build and maintain, and they save about 17 tons of weight, to boot.
Solar can be virtually anywhere -- Germany even! Germany is about as sunny as Washington state, which is the least sunny place in the lower 49 states. Solar is great for the highest load which is for air conditioning -- and there are no grid losses when it is right in the same building. Solar scales down nicely.
Combining solar and wind along with a few gas turbines (methane from sewage or farm wastes) for peak load, and a hydro power station with an elevated reservoir works very well. Here's how this works in Germany:
Here's a Scientific American article on powering the USA with renewable energy 100% by 2030:
Most of the world's people live close to the coast, so wave power and tidal power are close by.
We need to transition to renewable energy NO MATTER WHAT. Eventually, the finite resources we are using now -- oil, coal, gas and uranium will run out, by definition. The earth is just one planet; and it is the only one we have. The other more likely scenario is that we will cause too much climate change by burning up the carbon fossil fuels dumping all the carbon that has been packed away over million and millions and millions of years back into the atmosphere in less than 200 hundred years, and we will have more chaos in our climate than we can adapt to.
So, hopefully oil and coal gets too expensive so that we will switch to renewable energy -- which will last another billion years -- until the sun explodes! And it will not pollute in ways that we cannot deal with.
We need to stop subsidizing oil and coal. We need to be able to stop requiring a huge military to defend oil supplies.
We need to stop using up all of the finite resources -- our factory agriculture is totally dependent on oil and gas and phosphorus and chemical pesticides. It kills the natural life cycle within the soil -- the dirt that we are utterly dependent on for our lives. Dead unproductive soil that erodes into the sea won't grow anything. It won't hold water and it won't let it filter down into the aquifers that we are pumping dry as fast as we can.
Life itself created all the soil, and we are made of the exact same materials that are in the soil.
Oil is the primary reason that we have accelerated so quickly from living within that cycle of life to living beyond what the earth can sustain. We need to use our intelligence and our scientific knowledge, and our adaptability to change what we now know needs to be changed; before we lose too much of the life support here on this earth that we cannot live without.
In 2006 when I was in Detroit meeting with Next Energy and Ricardo, the representative from Next Energy was Ryan Waddington. He went with us to Ricardo where I presented my design that had not been Patented at that time but was covered by the provisional application.
Ryan confided with me that the concept and proposal was the best he had ever seen. I needed no notes or cue cards. it was straight from memory which had been honed and polished for years.
Every vehicle in motion contains a certain amount of energy in it's own inertia. Hypermilers hybridize their vehicles with pulse and glide by increasing the inertial state then extracting that energy in the glide. My two guiding principles were effectiveness and cost. It became apparent that another two principles became relevant as the system evolved. Those were simplicity and emissions. When the EPA published their Hydraulic Hybrid research documents in 2006, one of their conclusions was that a new design was necessary for the system to reach the levels of efficiency that were necessary to allow Pulse and glide power application to be separated from vehicle motion.
In an electric powered vehicle the principles are the same. While peak demands for energy in acceleration are very high above the 0 line, the other side of the equation is where peak deceleration demands are even lower on the negative side of the equation.
This demands a capacitive method of storing energy. The INNAS HYDRID link shows this clearly in a graph of instantaneous versus average demands.
Capacitive storage of potential regeneration scenarios will improve overall energy consumption, but even more significant is the ability to cover the highest and lowest demands, both positive and negative, with short term high capacity energy storage.
With the EPA documents that clearly showed accumulator efficiencies at as high as 99%storage potential for an accumulator is unsurpassed. The missing link in 2006 was the drive. They used a bent axis hydraulic pump in their 80MPG 3800 pound prototype. The worst part of their design was they ran the pump at prop shaft speed, over 3 times wheel speed. At that RPM the pump efficiencies plummeted to 75% from their 95% range at 750 RPM. The whole design was screaming for a drive that ran at wheel speed instead of prop shaft speed.
No one here will argue that electrical regeneration is efficient. It's better than nothing but not much better. Few would also argue that pulse and glide does not provide much of an improvement with electric drives, and it also is not a great idea to vary vehicle speed in traffic on highways, much easier on roads where you do not have to deal with a lot of other traffic and people who do not understand what you are doing, or appreciate their perceived inconvenience due to your activities and speed variations.
All of this was well known and has been for quite a few decades. Hypermiling dates back to before WW2 but gas rationing brought it into a focus when the fuel allotment was 2 gallons a week. In 1955 a Chrysler could get 45 MPG using pulse and glide, when it normally got maybe 15 MPG. The potential for improvement was huge.
Even an electric motor has an ideal state of power conversion as Neil claims at 94% for his examples he presents. If that efficiency could be maintained over all states of vehicle operation it would be more efficient, but how do you do that?
Capacitive storage and release at very high efficiencies is the answer. Not long term storage, but a capacitive "shock absorber" for the huge variances in demand. A load leveler that provides acceptable acceleration, lower energy cost constant speeds, and high efficiency recovery of energy when deceleration can not be avoided.
After a year of investigation, the conclusion of the students and Professor at Va Tech was that my design provided that. It did this regardless of the vehicles energy reservoir or the means of converting that energy into motion, by applying the exact amount of energy necessary while separating the application of power from the motor or engine whether it was powered by electricity or liquid fuel.
The EPA claimed 80% improvement for vehicles with IC engines, without any engine or aero improvement. Even if the improvement was only 30% for electric drive vehicles the range increase would be substantial. Since most of the new BEVs on the road today are used in urban areas, where the stop and go traffic is predominant, the improvement would be more significant. At higher speeds with improved aerodynamics the system would compensate for the lower overall energy drain and higher range would be the result of that automatic compensation.
As Frank pointed out why not just go further with less. It means lower emissions, less energy consumed, and longer vehicle life, with lower maintenance.
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