--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Rick Archer" <r...@...> wrote:
>
> From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:fairfieldl...@yahoogroups.com]
> On Behalf Of bob_brigante
> Sent: Sunday, March 22, 2009 8:42 PM
> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Electric Cars for All (Interesting New
> Approach)
>
>
>
> Electric Automobiles
> Electric automobiles sound like a good idea. The news is full of hyperbole
> about the great new Tesla Roadster and plug-in hybrids. Charge your car by
> plugging into the wall, and drive around with zero emissions. The Toyota
> Prius is half-electric, and that's been a big success, right? Moreover,
> wall-plug power is cheap. A kilowatt-hour costs only 10 cents. At $3 per
> gallon, the cost of energy from gasoline is about 36¢ per kilowatt-hour.
> That means that recharging a car by plugging it into the wall socket is
> equivalent to buying gasoline at under a dollar per gallon!
> Alas, electric automobiles have very serious problems. The fundamental one
> is that batteries store very little energy, compared to gasoline.
> High-quality, expensive batteriesthe kind used in cell phones and portable
> computersstore only 1% as much energy as gasoline, pound for pound. That's
> a big factor. It is offset somewhat by the fact that electric energy can be
> used more efficiently than gasoline, so the disadvantage for batteries is
> actually more like a factor of 30. For the same range, you can carry 62
> pounds of gasoline, or 1860 pounds of batteriesalmost a ton. Because
> batteries have more pounds per cubic foot than gasoline, they won't take up
> 30 times the spacebut only 10 times as much. That's why cars like the Tesla
> Roadster are possible.
> The cost savings are illusory. High-performance batteries are very expensive
> and need to be replaced after typically 700 charges. Here is a simple way to
> calculate the numbers. The computer battery for my laptop (on which I am
> writing this) stores 60 watt-hours of electric energy. It can be recharged
> about 700 times. That means it will deliver a total of 42,000 watt-hours, or
> 42 kilowatt-hours, before it has to be replaced for $130. Put those numbers
> together to get the battery replacement cost: $130/42 = approximately $3 per
> kilowatt-hour. That's 30 times more expensive than the 10¢ per
> kilowatt-hour to charge it. The real expense for fancy batteries is not the
> cost to recharge them, but the cost to replace them. The same factor will be
> true for the Tesla Roadster. Driving it will seem very cheap, until the time
> comes to get new batteries. They are by far the most expensive component of
> that car.
>
> Here's what the article I posted said about batteries:
>
> SA: Yeah, so let's demystify batteries for a second. As a consumable, the
> batteries we're getting today are roughly in the range of about $.06 to $.08
> a mile.
>
>
> If you try and find gasoline, in the U.S. you're roughly at about $.10 to
> $.12 a mile. So the first thing is it's cheap. Second thing is, the
> batteries we're using are not lead-acid batteries. They're lithium iron
> phosphate. All within the 35 most common elements in nature. So they're not
> dangerous to the environment.
>
>
> Three: They're consumed for a very, very long time. These batteries will
> last multiple generations. 20, 25 years.
>
>
> The fourth element is that there's always a better battery around the
> corner. Now in the past, that was a negative thing. Because you were afraid
> to buy a car and get stuck with a car that has a battery that's an older
> generation. And then not be able to sell it. It was a very, very negative
> thing.
>
>
> What we've done by decoupling the car and the battery is, we took away that
> fear. You may buy a car with generation 1 battery today, and then three
> years, five years, ten years from now, you may get a different battery
> that's designed with backwards compatibility into your car, but gives you
> longer range.
>
Didn't Mr. Tesla's electric powered car operate without a battery powering
it? It looks like he had the problem pretty well figured out.
