Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 9:58:53 AM
I have
recently written about the government grant given to Tesla Motors (supported by Al Gore). The mention of this grant reminded me that, while seeming good on paper, electric cars are an absurd solution.
Now, let us get beyond the hype. You will hear that electric cars can now go 300 or 400 miles on a charge making them "comparable" to gas powered cars. And, if you look at range on one tank in isolation, that is true. There may even one day be some demonstration at a raceway, where batter packs are swapped in and out and the electric car appears to be competitive with gas powered cars.
And maybe, for some users, the electric car will work. If you drive less than half the distance covered by the battery, and don't get caught in traffic to run down the power packs using AC and radio and lights, then you can probably do ok, so long as you charge while at work and overnight. But there are lots of conditions where this just will not work.
For example, suppose you are a New Yorker who wants to drive to Florida. In a gas car, you start heading south. When you begin to run out of fuel, you stop at a gas station for two to three minutes and refuel. With an electric car, you stop at an outlet for 16 hours or so. What is a long day's driving for a gasoline car becomes a multiple day journey with excessively long layovers every 200 to 300 miles with the electric car.
But the real failure comes from the use of gasoline everyone seems to ignore, but the one crucial to our modern society. While people always think in terms of commuters when talking of gasoline usage, the big consumer of gasoline is in hauling, be it long distance trucking or short trip delivery vans, construction equipment, farm equipment, dump trucks, and so on. And most of those vehicles simply cannot be efficiently converted to electric. In terms of long haul, the recharge time alone shows why that is a problem. In other cases, the issue of power to weight, heat, and a host of other problems with electric motors come into play, along with long recharge times.
Now, some of these electrical motor issues are solvable, but others are not. For instance, unless we develop a good zero resistance conductor, the resistance of wires will limit the recharge rate of batteries, as the heat generated will melt wires at some point, sot here is a limit to the speed at which batteries can be charged. Similarly, resistance imposes some size requirements on motors, and limits the maximum power we can expect from a single motor of a specific size. Of course, with time, better materials may be developed, but then the problem of price rears its head. New materials tend to be more expensive, making high tech conductors more costly and pricing it out of the cost-conscious farming and construction sectors, not to mention the low margin cartage industry. And that completely ignores the fact than most known superconductors work at quite low temperatures, requiring extensive cooling.
No, for the present I do not see electric cars being anything more than a curiosity and a toy for short distance commuters who want to feel good about themselves. There are some alternatives to petroleum vehicles, fuel cells, liquified natural gas and a few others offer real alternatives, though even there technology needs to improve somewhat before it becomes viable for certain industrial uses, but I simply doubt that pure electric power will ever be a viable replacement for chemical power stores in most industrial applications.
POSTSCRIPT
One possible alternative does exist, wiring roadways to operate the way rails now do in some regions, with continuous delivery of electricity to vehicles via overhead lines. However this presents immeasurable technical issues, incurs huge costs and is generally unworkable. But it is the one way I can see to make electric power viable. It has worked for railways for a long time, and it could work for personal vehicles, provided everyone was happy having a pantograph sticking out of their car.
Correction: Cars would actually need a pair of pantographs, or at least a divided pantograph, as they do not have the rails that trains use for part of the circuit. They would be more akin to old trolley poles, or the electric buses I recall seeing in Athens in the 1980's (not sure if they still have them or not, as I haven't been back). It is still possible, it would just involve some additional engineering issues we don't see with trains. (See what I meant about "technical issues"?)