Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) ❤
No. of Recommendations: 0
There was an excellent post here regarding a thought experiment where, if EVs had become prevalent before ICE cars, why it would make no sense for ICE to exist. Digging non-renewable energy source at tremendous cost to burn in a < 36% theoretically efficient engine etc.
I would be grateful if someone recalls it and can post a link. TIA!
No. of Recommendations: 6
There was an excellent post here regarding a thought experiment where, if EVs had become prevalent before ICE cars, why it would make no sense for ICE to exist.
I don't know the post you're asking about, but there is no need for a thought experiment. In 1900 electric cars outsold gasoline cars by a comfortable margin.
Jim
No. of Recommendations: 3
I don't know the post you're asking about, but there is no need for a thought experiment. In 1900 electric cars outsold gasoline cars by a comfortable margin.
The point of departure would have to include an electrical distribution infrastructure matching the places people wanted to use cars, which is a pretty big ask for 1900.
No. of Recommendations: 3
The point of departure would have to include an electrical distribution infrastructure matching the places people wanted to use cars, which is a pretty big ask for 1900.
I'm not sure why--we KNOW what would happen if electric had taken off before gasoline, because it did. Gasoline then pulled ahead.
But in any case, let us know when we get to the point of departure on charging : )
Grid work is a challenge. In the UK, the backlog for power connections to the grid (inputs for generators + outputs for as-yet-unpowered EV charging stations) is about 3/4 of a terawatt, or about 11 kW per capita. I imagine it's not so wildly different on a per-capita basis in the US? Though the market is so large and diverse it's hard to make generalizations beyond that there's a lot of grid work to be done, and some companies have years-long waits for their connections.
Jim
No. of Recommendations: 18
There was an excellent post here regarding a thought experiment where, if EVs had become prevalent before ICE cars, why it would make no sense for ICE to exist. Digging non-renewable energy source at tremendous cost to burn in a < 36% theoretically efficient engine etc.
I would be grateful if someone recalls it and can post a link. TIA!
Maybe this is it?
Imagine if we were driving EVs for 100 years and then someone invented the internal combustion engine.
This device is at best 30% efficient in converting the energy in the fuel to motive power. They are so inefficient that they have to carry 250kWh of fuel to travel 400km.
The engines are very noisy and must rotate at very high speed to develop a decent amount of power, so they have to have a clumsy gearbox.
The fuel it runs on must be extracted from wells deep beneath the earth or the sea, causing a lot of pollution. The amount available in these wells is limited and will expire in a relatively short time. It gets gummy and goes bad quickly once distilled into gasoline, so it must be extracted, refined, transported, and consumed all within a short cycle.
This “crude” oil must be transported on ships, causing more pollution. It must be processed in a refinery, using a lot of energy and causing more pollution. Sulphur must be removed or sulphuric acid will be generated in the combustion system, this is done using Cobalt in a catalytic converter.
It must then be transported to fuel stations for retailing, again more pollution.
When burned in the engine particles are emitted from an exhaust pipe along with NOx and SOx, presenting health hazards and worse still Carbon Dioxide which causes the climate of the planet to change resulting in an existential threat. Carbon Monoxide is also emitted with the danger of suffocation and death if operated in an enclosed space.
These combustion engines would have to have hundreds of moving parts, requiring a lot of maintenance and worse still lubricating oil which becomes contaminated and must be changed regularly, resulting in, you guessed it, even more pollution.
Spillages of oil from fuel tanks and transportation vehicles would cause other road vehicles to skid and crash, causing injuries and death.
When going up a hill these vehicles consume a lot of fuel, however, when descending they cannot put the fuel back in the tank by regeneration but must instead use their brakes, causing more wear, tear and pollution.
And wait! You can’t just fill up in your garage anytime you want? You have to drive to a special place and stand around in the rain or cold just to get more fuel? Seriously?
No. of Recommendations: 0
No. of Recommendations: 0
Yes, that was it. Thank you Goofy!
No. of Recommendations: 5
Here's another one I enjoyed:
https://geoff.greer.fm/2023/02/08/gasoline-car-rev...I recently purchased a Mazda Miata. This car is interesting because instead of running on electricity, it is powered by a combustible liquid called gasoline. The vehicle has an engine that mixes the gasoline with oxygen from the air, ignites the mixture, and uses the resulting combustion to push the car forward. I don’t fully understand the details of how it works, but this difference in propulsion technology totally changes the experience of owning and operating a vehicle...
No. of Recommendations: 0
Pretty funny.
I wonder how it could have happened that Electric Cars came out before Gasoline Cars, yet people soon ditched EV card for Gas cars.
What were they thinking? How could people have been so stupid?
Or, maybe -- and I am just spitballing here -- maybe we are not seeing something that they saw. Maybe they had what they thought were good reasons and we just are not aware of their reasoning.
No. of Recommendations: 10
The OG electric cars around 1900 relied on lead-acid batteries. These batteries have a number of problems in this application and really are no well-suited for many full charge-discharge cycles.
On top of that, they are extremely heavy. And TPTW decided to tax cars by weight at the time.
Modern batteries are a different story.
"Maybe they had what they thought were good reasons and we just are not aware of their reasoning." is ... questionable, given that there are more than 100 years of technological progress here.
No. of Recommendations: 26
I wonder how it could have happened that Electric Cars came out before Gasoline Cars, yet people soon ditched EV card for Gas cars.
What were they thinking? How could people have been so stupid?
A battery 1910 could store a little over 200 amp-hours. A modern car battery will store between 50,000 and 100,000 amp-hours, usually expressed as 100 kWh.
So the choice was: limit your driving to 10 miles, or have a car the size of a diesel locomotive that was nothing but batteries, and still limit your driving to about 10 miles.
Gasoline, by contrast, stores the same amount of energy now that it did in 1910, plus or minus a little for adding lead, then deciding that wasn’t a good idea and taking it back out.
To paraphrase the bumper sticker: Technology happens.
No. of Recommendations: 3
Good information GoofyHoofy! There’re some touchstones I utilize when contemplating energy production, storage and usage. A partial set of those information areas are shown below together with links for folks who like technical stuff.
The Carnot Cycle:
The Carnot Cycle goes back 200 years and is useful for determining efficiency within energy systems utilizing heat to produce energy and is also useful for systems operating in reverse such as heat pumps and refrigeration systems. One of the short takes I remember from college is the greater the difference between the input temperature (the burning flame, the combustion event, and other thermal releases) and the final output (exhaust) temperature, the greater the Carnot Cycle efficiency. A mental example of a whole system where optimization of energy is sought is a co-generation site where the lowest output heat is utilized to warm greenhouses or is recovered by heat pumps to garner efficiencies in the high 90s percentiles. For my home, we utilize a dual fuel heating system comprised of heat pumps down to a 1 degree C outside temperature and then switching to natural gas combustion having an energy efficiency in the 95% range. This 95% efficiency is accomplished by a contraflow process whereby the exhaust gases are routed out through a heat exchanger that pre-heats the incoming combustion air. The colder the outside air, the greater the heat transfer and thus the higher the Carnot Cycle efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycleTypes of energy storage (found in Section 2 of the link below):
Energy storage technologies can be categorized based on the stored energy form (as shown in Fig. 10) to Ref. [9].
1.Electric energy storage systems EESS
2.Electrochemical energy storage systems ECESS
3.Mechanical energy storage systems MESS
4.Thermal energy storage systems TESS
5.Chemical energy storage systems CESS
I agree with Charlie Munger's comments from about ten years ago why he felt the world was headed into a good place because of technical developments in electrical generation. It appears there will be plenty of electricity generated predominantly by solar panels of in the years ahead. The big issues to solve are transporting the electricity (the grid having adequate capacity) and in having available stores of energy during low production periods (wintertime, cloudy days, and other periods of high demand, low energy production or both situations happening concurrently). Section 2 of the article link below delves into storage system choices. The one getting increasing attention is the use of ammonia as a physical storage product for a means of producing green hydrogen for combustion systems. Ammonia can be produced using electricity during peak energy output times and because it is a liquid at temperatures below 33 degrees C, can be a dense form of available energy for powering ships, large on-peak generators and possibly trains, trucks and agricultural tractors/harvesters.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/...Uwharrie
