I will put you on my ignore list in the interest of my blood pressure and civil conversation on this forum. But one final answer before you go:
Yes, that's exactly what our society today suffers most of:
Believing oneself's thinking is scientificly based, accuse contradicting points as "religious" while oneself acts on opinions, half-truths, and beliefs, and ignoring scientific points, not capable of having any discussion the scientific way.
Anyway I will answer, because this is an open forum, and, as I suggested with the efficiency factors - you completely missed any fact based points about that, because there are none
(I will come to this later, too) - you just use singulary picked points, which are true for themselves alone, while in the whole picture - you do ignore to look at the whole (and alas you're not alone) - then the situation looks different.
Short:
I simply will not stand being "beaten" by some picked partial truths, ignoring the rest.
While I also understand the emotions rise, and some one is pissed when he bought a 100k$ car, and now I come along and say:"This thing sucks."
"My car is close to ten years old with 150k km and has 90% original battery capacity / reach"
Hard to believe, since Elon built the first Tesla's batteries with thousands of 18650 "laptop" cells each, which I, as an experienced battery engineer worked on development on LiIon-batteries for several years, very highly doubt last longer than just a very few recharge cycles. And I stumble over a lot of articles of many customers very unsatisfied with their Tesla's battery life time. All I know is Elon rather sues everybody who says something critizing about his products instead of improve the products quality.
But however I cannot prove this. And by pure statistics alone this might be really possible. And also todays batteries last longer - while they provide less energy density, which lowers efficiency factor.
One cannot have both. You either get a safer, longer lasting battery, or you get more range and power.
Physcial axiom.
800 km range is completely irrelevant to most use cases, I am doing fine with 460 km
Yes, when you live in an urban region, and stay there.
But not for us, and neither for many others.
I once did a rough calculation what amount of electricity is needed when just Germany
(
Where I live, power is 98% hydro.
That's nice. Norway, or Iceland I guess. And, yes, then battery cars look a lot better. Yes.
But that's, what? 1 or 2% of this planet? Most countries like Germany still produce the majority of their electricity from fossil fuels, or nuclear power. Which does also just save app. 60% CO2, and not 100% as often proclaimed, because it's the same trick again: Look only at the power plant, but not see the whole production chain from uranium mining over transportation until the fuel reaches the plant.)
And one of the former german governments (A. Merkel and S. Gabriel) postponed the coal power plant exit, because the need for electricity rises that fast, green energy simply cannot keep up with (It's quite even worse. But this I will explain in my next sentence) among other things because of battery cars.
And we already have this tedious discussion again about nuclear power we thought we are finally left this BS to where it belongs: the 1950s.
)
- if Germany switches only all cars to electric propulsion.
My conclusion was: All potential Germany possesses for to produce renewable energy is by far not enough to just power all the cars we have at the moment (I did this app. ten years ago. Since then the number of cars rose, while the amount of potential green energy possible stays the same, of course.) So, no enough green energy to just only power all cars alone. Which means: No green energy for busses, coaches, motorcycles, trains, ships, airplanes...left, and of course households: refrigerators, dish washers, washing machines, vaccum cleaners, stoves,...and we did not even started talking about commercial, industry, public (hospitals), yet.
Germany like all other "industrial countries" ain't capable to provide its own energy needed completely from renewable sources. And battery cars need to be recharged locally - you cannot drive into the Sahara and back to reload it, nor send the battery down there for recharge.
Actually those are very simple calculations. The point is not to get exact values, respecting details. That's actually a very complicated job done by scientific institutes working with teams of experts on such questions. But anybody can do a rough estimation to not blindly believe in what others tell, which not seldom are half-truths, especially when they wanna sell something. It's like the simple question you can answer yourself:"Does the content of a bathtub fits into a wineglass?" - compare magnitudes; not getting lost into beancounting discussions about the exact sizes of the tub and the glass, or if the bathtub was half empty. Those are the classic distractions to avoid the actual discussions need to be made. We already had way more than enough of those.
All you need to do is being capable to deal with large numbers, get those (from official sites), put them into some spread sheet, and see the result.
I strongly recommend to this for yourself. Don't you just believe in what one guy writes on the internet!
You may come to the conclusion that I was wrong about cars only. But when you get the correct numbers, and don't get an error in your calculations you will see: This will not work at all.
We have to find other ways.
And one is we
must reduce overall energy consumption. Looking for alternative energy sources alone will not do.
Anyway, while I was getting the numbers I needed for my calculation, I also needed the average distance a average car in Germany travels a year, for to estimate the overall fuel consumption. Those were one of those numbers astonished me. The average amount of kilometers per car and year in Germany is significantly under 1000 km (400 to 600 km - I forgot the exact value) - most people don't even need an own car at all!
And many living in urban areas already realized that, and don't have a car anymore (plus you don't have troubles with finding a parking spot.)
But my wife and I we travel a lot of distances over 600...800 km at a time. It's simply undoable for us to travel two, or three days extra a way for a weekend visit, just because we need to wait for an empty battery charger, and wait until the car is charged.
Because car manufacturers and powersuppliers (in my eyes oil companies missed a big opportunity here) never came up with the idea of what we already have in professional power tools for decades: exchangeable battery packs: having three battery packs at the same time, one is in the machine, two are in the charger, almost continuous work possible, just exchange the battery pack within seconds.
With those in cars you not only could "recharge" your car by just exchanging the battery pack way faster than you could refill a gas tank, and you could doing it fully automated, but you also could have all batteries in charging racks, where they are not only recharged under better conditions (maintenence), but being a real part of the power grid (not just a theoretical option they sell you todays battery cars with; what you gonna do, when your battery car's battery is depleted in the morning, because the power grid short termed needed the energy? Right:"Ahm...when comes the next bus?") But above all you don't need to throw away the whole car, when the battery is EOL.
Batteries are exchanged on the charging racks. But maybe that's the whole point. As I said: this way industry can sell more cars, which are also more expensive, in even shorter times - all stockholders are getting dollar signs in their eyes when they think of replacing all cars by battery cars in some years.
They are not interested in saving the planet - especially and above all not Elon (I didn't need his pro-Trump campaign to know that.) They are interested in doing more money in shorter times, only.
I admit, (small) battery cars are a very neat idea for cities. And that's exactly what they originally were meant for: To reduce the city's smog by outsourcing the power production to power plants outside the city. Plus you can not only burn fossil fuels way more efficient in larger power plants, but you also can better clean the exhaust gases.
Battery cars were meant to improve the environment, not to stop climate change, which needs to be seen differentiated. Like wind turbines save the climate but are a burden to environment. Those contradicting things are used by the dinosaurs to fool the majority which believes "green" is all same, saving the environment also saves the climate at the same time, and vice versa; to sell them their crap, and to convince them they were right by showing them "those green morons" don't know themselves what's right, because they contradict themselves.
But what we actually see are mostly large premium luxury cars meant for long distance travel (or for showing off), Teslas, SUVs, even sportscars battery powered - that's a complete load. That's not for saving the planet. That's letters of indulgence: People keep buying (too) large cars, but they can feel good about it, because it's battery power, and the public agrees, then this is okay, because it's green. No it's not. Those don't save the climate as long as they are not recharged with 100% renewable energy, and last at least as long as conventional cars. Above all nothing about the core issues, the attidude is changed at all. It's just:"We keep on doing what we always did, but now we're doing it green." While both cannot work, the keeping on, nor doing it green - there simply are not enough resources for neither way. The latter one was already known over fifty years ago, and it was the major point of the dinosaurs for decades to prove alternative ways won't work, we must clamp on the conventional ways.
Now the majority, even the dinosaurs see themselves confronted with the fact the conventional ways ate up all resources - we are lacking of resources we always thought we had infinite amounts of: sand, water, air, et al -
and the majority starts to sympathize with the idea "green" wasn't that bad idea. So the same people told for decades that's BS now selling greenwashed junk, while the core principle of infinite growth is not changed at all: We still need even more resources. While we have less renewable resources as conventional, and we already ate up the conventional ones, we still want to increase the usage of resouces. How shall this work? It can't. That's the truth.
You simply cannot have infinite growth in a limited system. On stock exchange this works, because that's only numbers not bound to real physic values. There you can buy or sell a million apples, and next year twice the amount, even when you just have a single apple tree in your garden, or even none at all.
Hybrid cars and synthetic fuel made sense.
We need to produce synthetic fuel in large amounts anyway, because there will never be a battery powered airliner - physically impossible.
Here may now come "We have drones already flying battery powered!" Yes. But what you have as a toy has almost no transport capacity, and is very short ranged. And the military ones are also meant for short range, or are not battery powered. Or this "But, if one day in the future..." again. Besides there ain't no enough future left we can rely on anymore, we have to deal with what we have
now. We have solutions at our hands. We simply just need to do it. By physics, or to be more precisely, electrochemical reality it's simply impossible to ever build a battery that provides the needed energy density for flying (longer distances; hobby sports planes ["toys"], and some NASA experiments already fly. But nothing usable for commercial passenger travel or cargo flights will ever come only battery powered, ever.)
So why to refuse synthetic fuel for cars?
We could keep on driving many of our existing cars "electrically", exhausting nothing but pure water, and CO2, which is taken from the atmosphere to produce the fuel, so neutral, no CO, no soot, no small particulates, no NOx,... clean like a battery car without the need to buy a new, more expensive car.
But that's the point exactly. The industry doesn't want us to keep our cars as long as possible. They want us to buy more and more new cars in even shorter times - but they are selling us "green" ones!
With a hybrid you can combine best of both worlds: Faster refilling, and longer ranges because of the energy density liquid fuels provide, plus energy saved back and reused by breaking - the main benefit of a battery car.
Even with fossil fuels a hybrid looks way better than a battery car not recharged 100% renewable, since it also saves and reuse the same amount of breaking energy as a battery car.
And it's less expensive, and more environmental friendly, because the batteries can be designed a lot smaller. Do you have any idea what the resource mining for our "green" battery cars does to the environment? There are large areas of pastures turned into salt deserts.
Well, that's far away in other countries. We don't care, as long as those people don't leave their destroyed homelands and come here, right? It's their country so their concern, right? Really? What happens if they say:"No. We don't want your mining companies destroying our environment! Go, look for yourselves for other places or ways how you deal with your own issues!"
"Just learn about efficiency factors" - Buddy, look into a mirror and be ashamed of yourself.
Let's don't take a look at me, nor in some mirror but in physics books, okay?
The efficiency factor is defined as the quotient between energy received and energy spent, the ratio of how much you get out of something where you put the energy in. Mostly in formulas it's named with the small greek letter "eta."
The efficiency factor can never be >=1, while 1 would mean you don't have any losses at all, and >1 means you get more energy out as you put in - was nice to have, but it's simply impossible. Physical axiom. So all real etas are always <1.
When you have something like e.g. an electric motor driven, you get a chain of modules each transforming energy from one of its forms to another, or transform electric energy from one voltage to another, etc.
All those modules have an efficiency factor of their own, and it's always <1.
In such a chain all etas are multiplied, thus producing the overall efficiency factor of the whole chain.
You already see: keep chains as short as possible - each extra module, no matter how good its eta is, lowers overall efficiency.
Example:
A modern gasoline engine may have an efficiency factor of say, app. ~60% (The exact value depends on the car, the engine, and also depends on certain situations; everybody looked at this "Dieselgate" we had ten years ago knows that very well.) Let's simplify and just say 60% is what it gets out of the chemical energy stored in fossil fuels, and brings via the wheels on the road. Not so very good indeed.
A modern top of the art coal power plant may have 98%. Not just very good, but outstanding exemplary!
A good electric motor may also provide >85...98%. Also extremely good.
Plus because of the motors can be used reversed to transform breaking energy into electricity again to recharge the battery, a battery car saves app. 30...40% energy extra in comparison to a fossil driven car which breaking energy is transformed into heat, and simply completely lost.
Those are the numbers marketing, and pro-battery-car believers see, and show you.
Now the numbers you don't see (for which
I shall be ashamed for telling them.)
The electric power from your coal plant needs to be transported to your charging station. That is done with electric power transmission, mostly run at high voltages. For those the voltage of the plant's generator needs to be transformed up, then go over the power lines, and then being transformed down again to usable sizes (240V or 120V) While real etas are something around >90% for the power line, and something between 85..95% for the transformers we simplify again and say 1 - doesn't matter.
This way I also spare this tedious discussion about "Some battery cars are recharged be reneable energy. My farm's barn has a big PV power plant on its roof, so no CO2." Yes. I said above: That makes a battery looks a lot better.
"But if had reneabale energy..." Yes, IF, but we don't. That's the whole point: We are acting like we already are on green electricty, but we are not. Thus
increasing CO2 emission even more, baucse of the lower eta battery cars provide.
Still there are two important modules in our chain that cannot be neglected:
The charger, and of course the battery.
Very good so expensive high-tech chargers come to an eta of ~80...<90%, while real world series products mostly provide 60%, not seldom even <40% (especially when you charge contactless that's even worse.)
And I also give you the needed AC/DC converter as included in the charger, which is also not always the case.
The battery also has 40...60, maybe 70%, when it's brandnew. Yes, this means you need to put more current into the battery as you get out. You may have recognized two things with rechargeable batteries: They get warm when charged (losses), and the older the battery the longer it needs to be charged, and the quicker it's depleted. A battery ages means its efficiency factor drops over time. A new LiIon battery may provide 60...70%, but EOL it's way below 40%. So let's say 60%.
Now we do the math:
(electric motor * powerplant * charger * battery)
0.98 * 0.98 * 0.6 * 0.6 = 0.35
To that we add the 40% we save by recharging the breaking energy:
0.35 + (0.4 * 0.35) = 0.49
Even this whitewashed result is below a fossil's driven car's eta.
This doesn't matter,
IF we already were on 100% green energy, and had way more than plenty of it.
But that's not the case.
Bottom line:
Don't get me wrong!
I am NOT pro fossil energy.
We MUST get rid of fossil fuels quicker ASAP. No question.
But as I explained what we need to succeed in our mission is to reduce overall energy consumption, looking for other ways to realize certain things - Do you really need a car of your own, or can you not better rent one for the five or six times a year you go where no bus or train brings you in acceptable time? And many, many other things. As technical people we - I include myself - tend to see solutions on the technical side: "We need to invent/improve this or that, and then our problems are solved." That's a dangerous trap. First because those problems cannot be solved with technical innovations alone. We have to reconsider about our life styles at all, and do a lot more other transformations about our lives, like social, economic, and political changes. And second, technical innovations are the gate for producing even more gadgets that can be sold. And that's exactly what we don't need, because it's the reason what brought us in this mess we are in in the first place: Producing, selling, and buying even more crap in even shorter times.
So use hybrid cars for long range travel, and battery cars for city hopping.
But above all: Reduce energy consumption first - our cars are getting even bigger with more, and even more energy consuming BS features.
THEN switch to green energy.
It's right to do those things parallel. But we are not doing them parallel. We don't even talk about energy consumption. We only talk about more new "greener" products, maybe eneryg sources, but not about any reduction at all.
What we actually do now is:
We grow on renewable energy way too late, way too slow, even sometimes outbraked by certain politics again and again. And because of we have some percent green energy established, we squander energy like we had 100% CO2 neutral energy production, and had plenty of it. We increase energy consumption even more, even faster - faster as the expansion of renewable energy can keep up.
All together our planet provides more renewable energy as we need. But the situation is similar to what we have with fossil fuels: The countries using most of the energy don't have it. So, as long as our planet does not become one great nation living in peace (Utopia. I don't see it), we have to realize what people in the 70s already faced with the oil crisis, but never consequently did: Reduce energy consumption - increase efficiency factors!
And no, nuclear power - also fusion - will not help us on this task at all, and if it's just only because of we simply cannot build those power plants fast enough to keep up with our rise of energy hunger.
The only energy source that can keep up with that is fossil fuels. And we run out on them either.
So, we also run out of options.
Since battery cars even increase our energy demands even more - not only because of the efficiency factors I sketched, but because a battery car is always heavier than a similar conventional car; we're heading a complete wrong course - or to be more correct: Doing the third step before the first.
This cannot work.
Buying some green-washed products because we still believe in the capitalistic system we still have, which brought us into this situation we are in in the first place, and start witch hunts on those who point out this will not work, may help to clamp on the system a bit longer, for the price turning back becomes even harder, but will not solve anything at all whatsoever.
We have to reconsider what we are actually doing.
"
(more songs)
