Miles Per Gallon Equivalent by Four Different Methods

[Patrick]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Bet you it does :-)

Containment building - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Have you seen a reactor in the Pantheon lately?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Laurentiu

are you referring to fly ash ?

Nope. All rock is radioactive*. Matter of fact, so's everything else. So get over the "Omigawd it's radioactive, we're all gonna DIE!" hysteria, and figure out if the amount & type of radiation is harmful.

So here you've built - at great expense - a big concrete containment (note the root there: contain) in which you put a nuclear reactor. You run the reactor for 40 years or so, then tear everything down and ship it to a nuclear waste dump? Why not refurbish the current reactor, or put a next-gen one in the existing structure?

*It's said that Britain's nuclear power plant workers couldn't vacation in Cornwall, because the natural radioactivity from the rock there would exceed their permitted dose.

[user removed]

What would the US do if we were in the same situation as we were in WW2?

Now add to that scenario one additional issue hypothetically. We did not have enough oil to drive our wartime economy or our military.

My purpose is presenting this scenario is to try to get people to think beyond their individual agendas.

We are at war, but this time it is much more subtle, and its primarily economically driven.

What we need to do, is to spend research funding to assist EVERY potential technological pathway to increased efficiency.

I see the support for all electric as potentially beneficial, but I also see ignorance of other alternative pathways as very shortsighted.

Hypermilers do more with less, and the tactics of driving for economy are available to every drive on the planet. The incentive is greater in other countries because the energy cost is significantly higher.

My Patent demonstrates a method of improving fuel economy in ANY vehicle with wheels.
It cares not how you create the power to drive the vehicle, only about your tank to wheel efficiency. The Patent was conceived on one basic assumption, that you can incorporate hypermiling techniques into the vehicle itself, and remove operator involvement from the equation.

I don't know about the rest of you, as to how successful you have been in converting others to efficient driving techniques, but personally I find the ignorance astounding and the attitude that I am some kind of obsessed, semi nutcase, because I focus on efficiency.

One of my acquaintances has driven 100 miles a day to work and back, averaging 20 MPG in a truck. Had he driven a very economical car for the last 28 years he has made that commute, he could have well over $250,000 in the bank today if the savings had been wisely invested, regardless of market fluctuations.

It is a shame that something like the X-prize contest and the media even propagate the fantasy that you can get 300 MPG in an electric vehicle. I find the dis ingenuity to be about on par with the water for gas snake oil pitch.

The problem is when you bombard people with so much misinformation, they would not know the truth when it was staring them in the face.

I use the analogy of Cassandra, the priestess of Troy who warned the Trojans about Greeks bearing gifts. Although blessed by the Gods with the gift of prophecy, she was cursed by the same Gods with the disbelief of her countrymen.

While that scenario may be fictional, the consequences are very similar to what we are facing today.

Like the Canary in the submarine that showed the crew when the oxygen content was approaching the terminal point, we must succeed in our objective. Otherwise we may not see our children suffer the consequences of our inaction.

It's not one or the other, electric or renew ables. It's not about fossil fuels or whatever alternative you feel is the future energy source we should employ.

Like the early pioneers who first extracted energy from what was available, where factories grew in areas where water power was available, we must adopt the same, conscientious effort to make everything more efficient as well as cleaner.

Politicising that priority will ensure our heirs will not even visit our graves.

regards
Mech

[NeilBlanchard]

Radioactivity exists in nature, but that doesn't mean that is okay. Asbestos is natural, too.

If reusing a nuclear power plant was possible/economical, then I think they would be doing it? The risk of reusing things is that you cannot be as sure about how they will work -- and the risk is too great to be be making assumptions.

[Allch Chcar]

I believe that a KW-h based system on total energy used from wall or fuel pump is much more practical as it allows liquid fuels to be on a more comparable basis with EVs and allows for more accurate FE comparisons. From calculating Kw-h per mile you can calculate cost per mile easier as well. It allows more practical comparisons between the liquid fuels like Diesel, Gasoline, and Ethanol. Diesel doesn't get placed on a shelf while Ethanol looks like a pig. They can be compared and the KW-h per mile will show more accurate results.

Using CO2 to calculate energy consumption is not going to get anywhere, it's just not rational.

Calculating KW-h efficiency is just as important as finding the cost per gallon. If you are paying less per Kw-h but using more Kw-h per mile it isn't paying off. This works for Premium fuel comparisons too, some people have gotten results from using higher octane gasoline. Comparing them by KW-h is just simpler.

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by RobertSmalls

@Clev: The W2W anaylsis I was referring to is this one. The beauty of a top-level analysis is it accounts for all the steps in between.

If you use renewable energy to power your EV, then there is no generation loss; making EV's 92+% efficient, and if you have solar PV on your roof, then it is better still. The only carbon is used to manufacture and transport the panels. And as we transition to more and more renewables (as we must!), that amount of carbon used to make and transport the panels continues to be reduced, eventually to almost zero.

Your 250Wh/mile "battery-to-wheel" and 324Wh/Mile plug-to-wheel is off a bit: state of the art BEV (like say the TW4XP) are 85% efficient plug-to-wheel, so the 324 number becomes 288Wh/mile.

By the way, almost nobody uses a "battery-to-wheel" number, because it is virtually impossible to measure. The plug-to-wheel is what is typically used, because that is what is most easily measured. The Illuminati '7' can use just 155Wh/mile plug-to-wheel: Illuminati Motor Works: Blog

So, by putting solar PV panels on your roof, you have "magically" made the carbon equivalency about 89kWh/gallon (92% efficiency because the generation losses are zero, and only the grid loss is applied), and with your example EV (324Wh/mile), that would be 274MPGe carbon equivalency. If it was similar to the TW4XP plug-to-wheel efficiency, it would be 309MPGe carbon equivalency. And the 4 seat Illuminati '7' would get 574MPGe.

So coal can be improved up to ~45% efficiency, and natural gas plants are already ~60% efficiency; and renewables that use zero fuel to generate power, only the carbon used to construct the system is used -- which gets amortized out over the lifespan of the system. It also takes carbon to build coal, natural gas, nuclear -- all types of power plants, so in fairness, renewable energy has about 99% generation efficiency.

[NeilBlanchard]

Here's a synopsis of more than 40 studies on source-to-wheels carbon use:

http://www.pluginamerica.org/images/...onsSummary.pdf

Page 5 in particular shows ICE's producing ~500g/mile, and EV's ~220g/mile on today's US grid.

Another source for carbon emissions:

http://www.plugincars.com/doublechec...rs-104202.html

For San Francisco, near where I live, I used a CO2 average of three different grids (from eGrid)—listed in kg/CO2 per kWh of 0.1 to 0.183 as .36, .45 and .66 (this is right now)—to indicate emissions for 15,000 miles of driving as follows:

* 4,345 pounds of CO2 for the EV
* That’s tremendously cleaner than the 30-mpg car’s 11,850 pounds of CO2
* It’s also way better than the 50-mpg hybrid’s 7,110 pounds of CO2

So, the first link puts the carbon output of EV's at 44% as much as ICE's and the second has EV's at 37% as much carbon output as ICE's -- on today's US grid.

Edit: Another interesting link about using solar panels to offset the electricity used for an EV:

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/elec...ic-solar-cells

Also, note that the Tesla Roadster uses about 200Wh/mile; which is lower than the numbers used in the original post of this thread.

[dcb]

My tdi runs on renewable energy too, it is besides the point here. The question is how do you do a fair comparison of vehicle efficiency when multiple power sources are being compared. Electricity has already gone through the major conversion from it's source, be it sun or coal or whatever, so a straight btu-energy equivalence may over simplify it. In fact I'm not convinced that there IS a good way to compare the two, might as well keep them separate, not letter grades or mpge dumbing down.

[solarguy]

renewable nuclear...

Most published analyses of the energy costs of the nuclear fuel cycle end up using a lot of hand waving. The biggest problem is the storage of the high level wastes.

Best imaginable scenario for waste storage is a relatively short 300 years by avoiding storing the uranium and plutonium waste streams. Then we burn the uranium waste and plutonium waste in Mixed Oxide reactors built for the purpose. The biggest problems are, fuel reprocessing itself is quite energy intensive, quite dirty, quite expensive, and unavoidably produces bomb grade plutonium, which is a terrorist's dream.

How many countries can 100% reliably keep that out of terrorist's hands? For hundreds of years? Really!?! And even the 300 years worth of storage, what is the energy cost for that, considering that industry proponents paint this as the best case scenario.

If you don't go down the fuel-reprocessing path, then the uranium and plutonium high level waste must be securely stored for, ummmmm, 300,000 years. That has an exquisitely expensive price tag in terms of energy and money, and the whole thing becomes a net energy loser. Further, just burning the uranium once, we will run out in a relatively short time. Unworkable really.

And how many breeder reactors and reprocessing plants are planned or being built right now? Just because it is theoretically possible doesn't do us much actual good in the real world. And how many would we need to drive the new electric transportation sector?

I am not opposed to nuclear energy, just show me the positive EROEI for the whole fuel cycle, including long term storage. That also has to include the energy costs associated with a few clean ups, like Cherynoble, Three Mile Island, and a couple future events.


Finest regards,

troy

[04_Sentra]

Personally, I don't like any of the methods of calculating mpge.

Life Cycle Energy Equivalence - Unfairly compared Well to Wheels for EV to Tank to Wheels for ICE.
CO2 Equivalence - Makes an assumption on where I get my electricity and it's CO2 content.
Cost Equivalence - Makes an assumption on how much I pay for electricity.
Direct BTU Equivalence - Gives unrealistic expectations on the range and cost of operation for EVs.

What I need to know is capacity of battery pack in kWh, and "fuel economy" in wh/mi, and I can figure the rest out.