Electric car range

mheslep

Neither was I.

I understand. You have been continuing to argue from the beginning that EVs are about the same as gasoline powered vehicles regarding harmful pollution - that switching to EVs wouldn't make much difference. That's wrong.

Versus your assertion, that the grid would 'fry', which is based on no sources at all.

Here's the original PNNL report;
http://energytech.pnl.gov/publicatio...ysis_Part1.pdf
it has the percentage of grid information though it is mainly about emissions. If you are interested, comment directly on it. There's similar findings from the EPRI which google will reveal.

Frame Dragger

You're being very selective in your counterpoints, focusing on nitpicky issues and then wanting me to google ****.

Answer this honestly: What do you know about the age of current coal, NG, and Nuclear power plants, their retrofits, and how truly dated our energy infrastructure is? Do you understand the difference between potential to generate power, and the ability to transmit and transform (locally) that power? If you want to get into a dry and technical discussion about this, I'd really love to see some indication beyond a google search that you're familiar with these issues.

mheslep

A great deal. The startup date and seasonal operating capacity of every power plant in the US is all public information.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electri...gunits2005.xls

I understand the fundamentals of this issue quite well. You seem to be under the impression that through EVs on the grid will increase the peak load. No, if they're charged at night, that need not happen. The US system has more than 100GW(e) of slop in it from when it is running peak load in the day and at night. Running the same loads through the lines at night that they experience during the day will not degrade them noticeably. Finding downtime for maintenance is somewhat of an issue, but many gas peaking plants for instance are only running 20-30% capacity to accommodate.

Frame Dragger

And now... trying to achieve 60% capacity we've an explosion in CT. What a shock.

Edit: http://www.topix.com/forum/city/beck...OHBVTIP1ELIGIL

mheslep

A tragedy, looks like several people may have been killed. The plant had 60% efficiency, not capacity, two completely different things. The plant was new, not yet in active service.

Frame Dragger

A tragedy indeed, and you're right about efficiency vs. capacity. Of course, it's the efficiency that I'm concerned about, and that overheats turbines and requires the pressures that can lead to such a devestating rupture/explosion. Then again, they were purging a line, so it may be that this is unrelated to any point of the plant's operational capacity. I wonder though...

We're going to need a lot of new plants with high efficiency if NG is the way to go. Nuclear may be ugly if done improperly, but it's a LOT safer unless you're Russia. Mining Uranium is also far less detrimental than extracting a similar amount of energy density in fuel to fire a gas plant.

Coal we agree on; dirty and dangerous.

EDIT: At least 5 killed, but the untold tragedy will be the people with concussive injuries at a distance. They may never know why neurological issues appear in a decade or so.

Dolphiney

I'd like to know more about that if you love to shed some light on the neurological issues-past and present

Frame Dragger

I'd be happy to discuss the newest thinking on concussive injuries; a good friend of mine does some work for the US Army and this is his particular speciality alongside psychopharm. That said, I'm sure that such which be outside of the 'range' of this thread. I'll give a couple of links, and be brief, otherwise a new thread or PM would be best.

It would seem that concussive injuries from shockwaves (in air, from explosives) have an effect on basic neurological functions. The issue with the research is that most of the candidates for study have been exposed to multiple psychological traumas, so figuring out which are strictly a result of blast injuries is difficult.

The basics however are simple. A blast wave literally shakes your brain as it does the rest of you, and the brain is ill-equipped to handle impact against the skull from a blast of many hundreds (or in the case of a wartime HE, thousands) of fps. There is a mechanical injury of the brain impacting the skull, but also a poorly understood mechanism by which neurons in effected areas die, and surrounding neurons undergo apoptosis (they die by their own 'hand).

There seems to be damage to some of the cappilaries which supply blood for a time, which doubtless doesn't help. Finally, there is a mechanism by which people in the vicinity (a hundreds of yards for a few hundred lbs of High Explosive, not sure for this blast as no data is out that is reliable yet) seem prone to developing symtoms you'd expect from someone who'd undergone several ('bad', but not 'major') concussions. The people who felt their windows rattle 20 miles away are fine of course, but people who may have narrowly escaped external injury, and even hearing loss could be devestated by that initial blast. Why the delay in appearance of symptoms in some cases? Well, I have my opinions, and others their, but I'm ashamed to say that few credible studies have been done with modern techniques.

Sports industries don't want to inform people of the real risk of boxing, or football. The military doesn't want 30% of its deployed force to realize that even if they come home intact, they may not have the mind they left with. So... people talked of shell-shock, drug abuse, psychological issues...

But not, in our modern army, the cases are too numerous. In the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the widespread use of IEDs has tragically provided us all with many many many examples that can't be ignored.

The influx of air after seems to do some fairly nasty damage as well. :/

If you want to know more, some general research into Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) should do it for you, including the various symptoms which are well documented. If you want it technical and sometimes hypothetical I'll do a little looking through my JAMA archives, and see if I can get in touch with my friend. He's at Fort Drum now, but he's a civilian employee, so he is usually easy to reach.

Dolphiney

Thank you
Yes , I do need to know more

mheslep

Hey guys - maybe move posts (24,25,26) to another thread (copy, delete and paste)?

Frame Dragger

Why?

mheslep

The topic of this thread is Electric Car Range. Those post are discussing TBI, etc. I wander off myself all the time, never the less the rules are

Do not hijack an existing thread with off-topic comments or questions--start a new thread.

rewebster

its too bad they can't make a cheap (<$5k) electric car with a range of about 60 miles-

--I can see a lot of people buying a second or a third car just for local driving as most people's trips are only about 25-30 miles in cars.

mheslep

India's gasoline Tata Nano is $2500
http://jalopnik.com/343003/the-2500-...eiled-in-india
I expect they could get together with some of the neighborhood EV people and do it for $5k ($3k batteries=60 miles)

Frame Dragger

The safety and feasability of producing energy to power electric cars is essential to reasonable discussion of their range. One of the newest high yield plants 'blowing up' seems relevant given that the discussion has ranged (rimshot) to the means of producing power to charge batteries.

I agree that a page or two dedicated to the issue of the plant explosion would be too much, but we're talking about 3 posts. Then also, this thread had been dead for 8 days without your input, so why bring it back to life, JUST to complain about a forum technicality?

This thread will probably be locked now, instead of just dying naturally. So sad.

mheslep

Ok, sure.

Because I hoped to improve things for future threads FD, and give this thread a chance of continuing a pace.