The way to make people who can use EVs buy them is not to subsidize the car itself, it is to provide free charging electricity from some nice new "green" nuclear plants.
The way to make EVs useable by more people is to standardize the battery packs and implement automated pack swapping "fuel" stations so you can drive into the "fuel" station with a low "tank" and drive out with a full tank" in
If there were such an energy source, it would be used for all of our other energy needs long before it was used to split water. IOW, it's just a wet dream. Wake up.
Tidal and "energy density" in the same sentence? You are dreaming. As for conventional hydroelectric, forget it. Not nearly enough water falling and the tree huggers will string you from their favorite perch; more dreams.
High pressure isn't an insolvable problem. Cracking water "cleanly" is, for many reasons.
There most certainly is such an energy source, several in fact. As for splitting water, it's a good battery since once you have it separated if you store it properly it does not loose "charge" sitting there like chemical batteries. It does have "charging losses" like chemical batteries in the form of the heat of compression (or refrigeration), but doesn't have losses on the use end.
Nope, you're the one dreaming if you don't think there is high energy density available for harnessing in the tides. It's been sadly overlooked for some time but in the last decade or so it's picked up a lot. It's certainly far more practical than the intermittent and very low energy density solar and wind power.
The tree huggers need to be strung up and get a basic science education to replace their mindless emotional whining. There is plenty of conventional hydroelectric potential left untapped, and combined with tidal and nuclear we could readily have 100% green energy within a decade or two if we would wake up, remove the mindless obstructionists and git 'er done.
It's certainly not unsolvable, however there has been little action in the direction needed to solve it.
I seem to recall coming across a plan for H2 filling stations that would take NG and extract and store hydrogen on site for fueling vehicles. I'm not sure if the station would also produce electrical power to send back into the grid but that would make it a viable and practical solution.
Sure, but if we could easily, and inexpensively produce hydrogen the distribution part could be addressed since there would be a strong financial incentive to do so.
Ah, but the question a logical person would ask is: "What then?"
Unless the homemade electrolysis machine is being used to fill a balloon, the produced gas now has to be compressed. The compressor will use more energy than the captured Hydrogen will ever produce.
Please explain how this would be done and how and why it would make it "viable and practical"
Wouldn't it be much simpler to just fuel the vehicles directly on the NG at these stations? There would be no losses from inneficiences in conversion, and the technology for using NG in vehicles already exists and is used in many areas of the country.
Give the people what they want, I prefer a fuel with more energy per unit but some people want hydrogen! I believe CNG would be simpler because it is already widely available.
You can purchase a CNG filling station for your home.
The concept has been well proven in other area. LP tank exchange is one most people are familiar with, you never have to deal with an out of date tank, testing, etc. you just swap an empty for a full and the supply company takes care of the rest. The same has been in place much longer for high pressure industrial gas cylinders like Oxygen, Acetylene, Argon, CO2, etc. and again it saves you dealing with cylinder hydrotesting and other headaches.
The EV battery only has to be good enough to take you to your next battery swap in the 100-200 miles or so they will max out at anyway. The "fuel stations" will have sophisticated charger / testers to requalify and charge the pack each time and reject ones going out of spec. The end user will never have to deal with an expiring pack directly, the recycling value of the pack and the assumption that each user provided a new pack into the pool is sufficient and the residial cost of the expiring batteries will be actored into the "fueling" cost just like the costs of cylinder hydrotesting and occasional rejection is factored into the industrial gas costs.
IMO, that is the only way to make an EV sensible for anything but trips around town. It is not practical to stop every 200 miles for a 6 hour recharge. Right now, in 200 miles I can fill my has tank for $20 to $25. I have to be able to swap the battery for
Pete, you and I both know that an empty gas cylinder is not the same as a balky battery pack. Anyone who has owned more than one cordless tool already knows from their own experience how different the two concepts are. An LP gas cylinder really has no internals to go bad. When you recharge it, you are recharging a total empty container. A battery pack contains a lot of very expensive batteries. Even at wholesale they will perhaps cost $1000. There is no comparison to LP in that vector. Returned, it's empty and contents worth zero. Once you let a say $3000 retail battery pack out of your site, new off the dealer's floor, do you *really* believe, just by rough statistical inference, you'll get an almost battery pack in exchange?
I'm not knocking you, I think that eventually that will be the way things are done and it will happen quickly when and if battery sizes can be standardized enough. And when gasoline companies decide to institute the system in most of their stations. And when the carmaker puts a coop deal in place with one or more gas retailers. And when people would be willing to join essentially a hi-tech battery rental club like Blockbuster because you would need to prevent the fraud that's likely to occur with items worth $1K or over. The scammers will eventually figure out a way to game the system and collect expired packs to swap into the system for good ones. I just don't see people willing to take the chance.
The only way this works is if the company doing the fueling actually owns the batteries, has a wide enough chain of stations to guarantee its* usefulness to the people. Customers will probably have to join a club and submit to vetting because even empty, a discharged battery pack has tremendously more value than a dead LP cylinder. The opportunity for hanky-panky is enormous. Why do you think most stores won't accept returned battery packs for most nearly anything? No way to tell how much value has been sucked out of it. If people are ripping off copper pipes, they figure out how to go for tasty, fresh lithium ion cells in a new swapped battery.
There's one even worse scenario. You've forgotten to recharge at home and now you're forced to go to the Stop'n'Swap. That nice new 200 mile per charge battery of yours gets swapped out for one at the end of its life cycle that provides maybe only 150 miles. If what you mostly do is charge your own car at home that translates into a significant, perceptible loss of value in one swap.
There are lots and lots and lots of obstacles to getting this one right, but I think it is the right way to go and we'll get there eventually.
I hear you, and want to believe that's going to work, but in a world where I've seen people actually cut out the original tape from a rental VHS tape and replace it with a poorly made copy during my two month stint as a video clerk, I think swapped $1 to 3K battery packs represent great temptation. Hell, I saw a notice at the pizzeria from the Feds warning that the bleach and upgrade people were back making $5's into $50's, a laborious process, to be sure. People are just no damn good and I ain't swapping them the battery in my electric car until I know it's dying! (-:
I've got more than a fear what will evolve are superchargers that plug into a special 408V 50A circuits you get installed in your garage and they'll flash charge your batteries in 5 minutes. Sure, there will be some meltdowns, maybe a few explosions but Americans are NOT big swappers of really expensive stuff. There's no time sharer owner I know of that doesn't have "The Timeshare From Hell" story.
But seriously, I've seen battery current capacity rise constantly over the last 20 years. Every new rechargeable NiMH cell has a little more MaH's capacity than the last and there are (were?) AA cells that charged in 15 minutes or less.
I think "fast charge" stations will be the future, and not "swap charge" ones.
-- Bobby G.
*"its/it's" have got to be the worst words in the world. Why? Because IT'S very illogical in ITS usage. The way we say things like "This is Pete's message" implies possession, but it's ITS meaning is clear" even though. How fair is that? It's almost as bad as those treacherous twos. Too many, too different to be useful. And if three twos aren't enough, there are tutus.
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