Wireless/induction EV charging revolution

louis · 2021-11-14 09:37:55

Looks like that EV charging issues will soon be a thing of the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3hVLG5iDec

Wireless/induction charging for parked vehicles is coming soon - Korean "Genesis" car manufacturer has teamed with an American company.

Will be important for robot taxis - of the type already operational in Phoenix, Arizona.

Musk is on board and thinks mobile induction charging will work for EVs, in particularly making EV trucks feasible.

My view is that the resultant reduction of battery size in EVs will be the final tipping point as EVs will probably be cheaper than petrol-fuelled cars when it comes to purchase (while also being lower cost on maintenance and fuel as well, and offering you revenue opportunities if you help support the Green grid).

louis · 2021-11-14 09:43:35

Will be very useful for Mars of course as well. You can have wireless induction charging pads located in garages at the base (airlocked garages for non-robot vehicles). You could also place them along roadway routes so, for instance, robot vehicles bringing iron ore from a mine several hundred miles away could recharge en route. The charging pads would be run off stationary batteries/solar power facilities.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-14 17:11:45

The industry for cellphones and the likes which have these for charging are proprietary and are not universal so this is going to be a hard sell for those looking for that key piece to be present. The coil in these are wrapped around a ferrite material that is heated plus pressed to shape to allow for the rf energy to be focused over the coil area. This is a slow charge system as currently designed and there is actual danger in making the energy levels to high as the frequency of the energy can be damaging to humans. A stationary system will work well for unoccupied vehicles.

Mars surface for this device will have issues as caused by the high iron levels, meaning that the locations will need more preparation to make them capable.

louis · 2021-11-14 17:23:06

The video discusses several wireless/induction charging technologies so not sure what "this" means in your post. Also, one of the companies developing this technology has open-sourced it for all car manufacturers to use for free (presumably on the basis that is good for their own business). As with all these technologies it will take time to see what ends up dominating (Betamax or Videodiscs anyone?). The point is that the negative posting about huge energy losses via induction appear to me highly misleading. Looks like efficiency is something like 90-97% depending on context. That's a 3-10% loss is totally acceptable if it means EV ownership can become available to everyone and EVs themselves become hugely more efficient as they don't have to lug around big batteries. That in turn will mean we have to produce less electricity for EVs and there will be less pollution from tyre wear. It's a win all round.

SpaceNut wrote:

The industry for cellphones and the likes which have these for charging are proprietary and are not universal so this is going to be a hard sell for those looking for that key piece to be present. The coil in these are wrapped around a ferrite material that is heated plus pressed to shape to allow for the rf energy to be focused over the coil area. This is a slow charge system as currently designed and there is actual danger in making the energy levels to high as the frequency of the energy can be damaging to humans. A stationary system will work well for unoccupied vehicles.
Mars surface for this device will have issues as caused by the high iron levels, meaning that the locations will need more preparation to make them capable.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-14 17:59:47

3 minutes in comes the how close the coil are for sending the power and receiving it...millimeter.

Which means the coil needs to have a focus system to bring the platform that the coil sets on to the optimal position once charging starts.

sightly further in is magnetic resonance which means the frequency of the sending unit has a receiver that is tuned for that value. So a tuner that sweeps the band of select frequency is need to provide the lock on its value. This is the same for the aiming of a solar panel to get maximum power.

polyphase means that its not a single coil but lots of little ones densely pack into the antenna transmitter.

https://www.ornl.gov/news/high-power-wi … ensed-hevo

DC power sources lose half of the energy since its needed to make AC so the first have of the loses are being ignored.

The standard that is being applied is
https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j2954_202010/

current fast charging systems reach in a 15-20 minute charge time for a 100-kWh battery pack requires a 300-kW charging system. Which means only 1/3 of the energy is getting into the battery..

To couple that much energy means high frequency which means you are in the bands of megahertz with the multi antenna solution.

louis · 2021-11-14 19:18:40

For me the only issue is "Can I believe that we are closely to seeing this technology applied?" All the signals I can see say yes. I've no particular reason to dispute the claims of the developers unless people can give chapter and verse on why they are untrue.

In my layman's brain I see the issue as "Previously wireless transmission of energy was too diffuse, leading to unacceptable inefficiencies. Now various technologies allow a much more focussed wireless energy transfer. " I think even if it was only 80% efficient, that would still be good enough. But it is way more than that.

I feel v confident we will see inductive charging take over from cable transfer (which is a pain). Electric roads might take a while to develop but as the video hints someone like Musk might even pay to have roads adapted to it, seeing in it a huge business opportunity. I look into it before and actually if you integrate induction charging with normal road maintenance, the price per mile is probably only something like double normal road maintenance.

I think this technology is definitely the path we are going down and nothing I have read suggests it is untenable.

SpaceNut wrote:

3 minutes in comes the how close the coil are for sending the power and receiving it...millimeter.
Which means the coil needs to have a focus system to bring the platform that the coil sets on to the optimal position once charging starts.
sightly further in is magnetic resonance which means the frequency of the sending unit has a receiver that is tuned for that value. So a tuner that sweeps the band of select frequency is need to provide the lock on its value. This is the same for the aiming of a solar panel to get maximum power.

polyphase means that its not a single coil but lots of little ones densely pack into the antenna transmitter.
https://www.ornl.gov/news/high-power-wi … ensed-hevo
DC power sources lose half of the energy since its needed to make AC so the first have of the loses are being ignored.
The standard that is being applied is
https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j2954_202010/
current fast charging systems reach in a 15-20 minute charge time for a 100-kWh battery pack requires a 300-kW charging system. Which means only 1/3 of the energy is getting into the battery..
To couple that much energy means high frequency which means you are in the bands of megahertz with the multi antenna solution.

Calliban · 2021-11-15 04:24:44

An interesting technology certainly. It does impose additional costs in infrastructure, at a time when we are least able to afford them, and it places large variable loads on the grid. If we end up building gas turbines burning methane to meet those variable loads, then it will undermine the environmental benefits that this technology is expected to provide. We need proper engineering analysis to understand the benefits and drawbacks of this technology.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-11-15 04:25:51)

kbd512 · 2021-11-15 16:02:55

There's never been any real issue with the speed with which a battery or supercapacitor can be recharged, provided sufficient power from the grid is available. The real issues have been recharging at home using grid power and recharging during normal work days. The instructions say never leave the car unattended while it's recharging. Well, that defeats the purpose of recharging at home overnight unless you're doing work in the garage at the same time. If it's outside, then it still needs buffer room around the vehicle during recharging. If the recharging station is capable of recharging the car in a few minutes, then it's damaging the battery to achieve that recharge rate and leading to the conditions that necessitate monitoring of the vehicle. If you can't leave it unattended, and you can't, then fast-charging makes a lot more sense. If the vehicle does accidentally catch fire during recharging, then there's no way to put it out and the entire vehicle is ruined because the battery is an integral part of the vehicle chassis and covers most of the floor of the vehicle.

The questions are:

1. What does fast-charging do to battery life (# of cycles to 80% of original cell capacity) and cell stability (preventing spontaneous arc welding inside the cells)?

If fast-charging diminishes available cell capacity in half as many recharge cycles, then faster charging is not very useful, except during emergencies.

2. Is the quantity of power demanded so high that it requires brand new infrastructure?

Recharging a 100kWh battery in 1 hour means supplying 100kW for 1 hour, or 27.7Watt-hours per second. Recharging that same 100kWh battery in 3 minutes mean 555.5Watt-hours per second for 3 minutes, which equates to delivering power at a rate of about 2MWe. That is a huge amount of power to supply, relative to what nearly all current infrastructure not part of a transformer station can supply. Doable? Yeah, it's doable. Nobody would claim that it wasn't. Practical as well? That's an entirely different story.

The specific technology that Louis referenced can supply a maximum of 1MWe, so it would require 6 minutes to fully charge a 100kWh battery, or 60 minutes to fully charge a 1MWe battery. A Class 8 heavy duty truck with a 1MWe battery would therefore require about 4 times as long to recharge, as compared to a diesel truck with 300 gallons of diesel fuel. Astounding amounts of power would be required to recharge a 1MWh truck battery in 6 minutes, like 20MWe. That's regional airliner engine type power output.

A 1 hour recharge is not a significant problem for a short haul truck that will load / unload on a dock, but it doesn't work for freight yards or port facilities or long haul, unless recharging can be worked into mandatory rest periods. I assert that it can be, but again, the nature of these vehicles will dictate that the driver is not sleeping inside the vehicle while it's recharging. Truckers will either work longer days or fewer driving hours per day will be possible, neither of which are good for the cargo shipping industry.

3. How much more expensive is the new charging technology compared to existing charging technology?

If the recharging solution requires 10X or 20X transfer rates, then it requires 10X to 20X the Copper. This is a more obvious problem when you need millions of recharging stations. It's possible to use Aluminum, which is far more plentiful, at the expense of efficiency, because larger volume coils place limits on charger dimensions and acceptable road vehicle geometry places limits on that.

That 6 minute 1MWh battery recharger (20MWe delivered power) will require a ridiculous amount of Copper and a mere handful of recharging trucks could easily brown-out a local electric grid, so that's wildly impractical. Imagine a yard with a dozen recharging trucks causing a 240MWe power fluctuation for 6 minutes. Gas turbines could not ramp up and down fast enough, so more batteries are required. Overall, I rate it as doable but not practical. It's certainly not easy by any stretch of the imagination, which is why it hasn't already been done. At a national scale, we're talking about TeraWatt-scale demand fluctuations, which is simply not feasible for any reasonable amount of money.

We know from past experience that the moment claims intersect with reality, the end result is nothing like what was promised, because changes well outside the scope of the charging technology itself are mandatory.

Calliban · 2021-11-15 17:47:20

1MWe? Holy cow! I guess I should have done more than just skim that article. Looking at this from a UK perspective (Louis and I are both from there and know the place); there are some 32 million registered cars. If 1% of those cars are charged at the same time, the power level comes to 320GWe. That is about 10x greater than baseload UK power demand. A system like this would be an enormous burden on the grid. But are we seriously saying that we can pump 1MW into a few hundred litres of batteries without heating them to melting point? I would be sceptical of thermal management of batteries under that sort of charging rate.

We would need impressive energy storage systems to meet power spikes like this and a distribution system that can handle it. What is important in this case, is not being able to store a lot of energy for long periods, but to smooth the demands being placed upon the grid. We need systems that can absorb grid power over hours and discharge that power in minutes. Hydrogen stored at atmospheric pressure in gasometer tanks could be burned in gas turbines close to areas of peak load. The problem here is that storage efficiency is only around 50%. That is not good. Flywheels are an option. So is compressed air or local pumped storage.

On a separate thread, TH and I have been discussing an option for storing energy within hydraulic accumulators. These have a relatively low energy density ~1-2Wh per litre. But they have the advantage of being able to discharge very quickly at very high power, through high power density liquid turbines. They also have the advantage of being long-life systems, that should last almost indefinitely if minor items like bearings are replaced. Compression energy is provided by pumping liquid rather than gas, so very little energy is lost to heat. Storage like this could be up to 90% efficient. To meet peak loads as high as those being discussed here, we would need energy storage like this, close to where the demand is being placed. I would propose hydraulic energy storage vessels. Units with 1MWh capacity would have volume around 500m3 and could employ spherical pre-stressed concrete pressure vessels around 10m internal diameter, charged to a pressure of 200bar. These would charge via centrifugal pumps, 24/7, but would be capable of discharging in minutes, generating up to 100MWe each. We would build these at motorway service stations and around our towns, as close to the load as possible.

For trucks, you really would need the truck to be parked as close to the generator as possible, such that transmission distances are no more than a few metres. A hydraulic storage plant charging a truck at 20MWe for 6 minutes, would need at least two of these 10m diameter accumulators and would need to draw 2MWe from the grid for 1 hour afterwards to recharge its capacity. I think this sort of thing only works if traffic can be staggered throughout the day, ensuring that peak demand is kept within realistically achievable limitations. Increasing charging time from 6 minutes to 1 hour, would help a great deal. A 100KWh battery would give a car about 400 miles of range, which is a driving time of at least 6 hours. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for a driver to stop for 1 hour for refreshments amidst a drive like that. Reducing charging rate to 100kWe does not seem like a major imposition and it makes the whole scenario a lot more achievable.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-11-15 18:40:06)

SpaceNut · 2021-11-15 17:53:34

The higher the wattage demand also goes the loses in the conductors to meet this demand and not just in the power delivery system.

tahanson43206 · 2021-11-15 19:01:09

For SpaceNut re #10

The product that started this new topic apparently uses cooling to permit greater power flow.

However, by definition, that means heat is being carried off by the cooling fluid.

What is ** not ** clear (since we have no data to go on) is how the losses with cooling compare to the losses at ambient temperatures.

The cost (in terms of energy required) of the cooling system needs to be added to the loss side of the ledger.

It may well be that from a customer satisfaction point of view, a less efficient delivery system that is fast may be worth the expense.

In addition, if the electricity comes from solar or wind it ** might ** (no guarantees of course) cost less than electricity supplied by traditional sources.

***
There is a detail that this entire topic has NOT addressed (as far as I could see) is whether there are electric vehicles that can accept high speed charging.

Even if conductors to the EV are cooled so then can deliver more power, the EV itself may have been designed to charge at a slower rate.

The high speed charging system may be ahead of it's time.

(th)

Calliban · 2021-11-15 19:24:32

The cooling problem is surmountable. Pump oil through the battery and then through a water heat exchanger.

The biggest problem is the power requirements of charging, if multiple vehicles charge simultaneously. A power of 1MWe is a huge amount of power - equivalent to around 200 UK houses, or half as many US houses. Even if total energy requirements are more modest, that power is expensive. It means more generating capacity is needed and it may be poorly utilised in off-peak hours. It means that a decent size carpark at a motorway service station would need a large chunk of the power output of a nuclear power station. And power demand for charging would swing wildly throughout the day, as traffic levels rise and fall. It is why I suggest that we need energy storage infrastructure that can smoothen demand on the grid. Obviously, the longer the charging time, the easier the demand on the grid. Power (the rate at which energy is delivered) is just as important a cost driver as the amount of energy needed.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-11-15 19:30:51)

louis · 2021-11-15 19:26:59

Re Spacenut's claim that the new technology can only operate at millimetre distances - that's wrong I think from the video. The new technology allows efficient charging at much bigger distances. The mm reference was to basic wireless charging.

re TA Hanson - Where are you getting the claim that "The product that started this new topic apparently uses cooling to permit greater power flow." It's not in the video. Links always help!

SpaceNut · 2021-11-15 19:45:11

Take a dammed cellphone and hold it over the plate and then tell me how much charge you get the further away you are with the single phase antenna. Its not until you use poly phased antenna's that you can get a larger field to be produced and even that is not until you up the frequency.

tahanson43206 · 2021-11-15 20:38:29

For Louis...

You're right of course ... the similarity of the topic title is what through me off ...

I was thinking of a new high speed fast charging cable, which was recently opened for discussion in another topic.

(th)

louis · 2021-11-16 08:43:49

The companies are claiming 90-97% efficiency - ie 3-10% loss. Not sure what your problem with that is...they might be misleading us I suppose but you haven't presented any evidence they are putting out misleading data.

SpaceNut wrote:

Take a dammed cellphone and hold it over the plate and then tell me how much charge you get the further away you are with the single phase antenna. Its not until you use poly phased antenna's that you can get a larger field to be produced and even that is not until you up the frequency.

Calliban · 2021-11-16 10:21:50

louis wrote:

The companies are claiming 90-97% efficiency - ie 3-10% loss. Not sure what your problem with that is...they might be misleading us I suppose but you haven't presented any evidence they are putting out misleading data.
SpaceNut wrote:
Take a dammed cellphone and hold it over the plate and then tell me how much charge you get the further away you are with the single phase antenna. Its not until you use poly phased antenna's that you can get a larger field to be produced and even that is not until you up the frequency.

I can believe a 90-97% efficiency is achievable, for two coils, aligned statically, with an air gap of maybe 10cm. A transformer is 99% efficient and works by the same principle as this, without the air gap. The air gap will reduce efficiency somewhat, by introducing edge effects in the magnetic flux, some loss in flux density due to the poorer permeability of the air and eddy current losses in surrounding conductors. However, even a ten-fold increase in losses over a transformer, would still give a 90-95% power transfer efficiency. You could almost completely eliminate these losses, by lowering the coil on the car such that it is in physical contact with the charger coil. You could even do away with the inductance device altogether and simply have two metal studs in the parking space, one serving as live, the other a return phase. The car would lower metal contacts onto the studs and would switch on the charger via a magnetic switch, which would close the solenoid for that particular loop within a switchboard covering the entire carpark. That would be close to 100% efficient and cheaper than an inductance coil.

The problem is not so much the idea of inductive or conductive charging, it is the power that rapid charging requires. The baseload generation of the UK is about 30GWe. This varies by + or - 15% throughout the day. If 30,000 cars were to charge simultaneously, in the same 6 minutes, the required power generation in the UK grid would double. And 30,000 cars is only 0.1% of the registered number on UK roads. You begin to see the problem? To meet rapidly growing but occasional power spikes like that, the most common generating option is open-exhaust gas turbines, burning storable liquid fuels. This is done, because capital and operating cost of these units is extremely low and they can respond very rapidly. They are therefore the minimum cost option for power spikes like this.

Either we find a way of smoothing the peak power demands of charging, or we end up shifting fossil fuel consumption from vehicles to powerplants and building a lot more transmission infrastructure to handle the high peak power. That would make the whole exercise of shifting to electric vehicles rather pointless. An obvious option would be to charge more slowly. If it takes several hours of continuous motorway driving to deplete a 100kWh battery, why does it need to recharge in 6 minutes? 1 hour would appear to be fine, as the driver stops and fetches some lunch or supper. A 2-hour recharge would only add 30% to the length of the journey.

The opportunity that in road recharging offers is to reduce the required range of a vehicle. This is extremely important, because smaller batteries are cheaper and lighter and reducing range also allows a much greater choice in energy storage technology. It raises the option of using things like metal hydride batteries, flywheels, compressed air, heat-batteries, etc, all options that would be much cheaper per kWh than Li-ion batteries.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-11-16 10:36:54)

SpaceNut · 2021-11-16 12:02:35

If you are accounting for the coil to coil that efficiency is achievable but not when you take into account the total system as this is basically a power signal amplifier that is connected to the coils.

louis · 2021-11-16 12:16:09

Can you give a timestamp for where they say that in the video (so I don't have to watch it all again!).

SpaceNut wrote:

If you are accounting for the coil to coil that efficiency is achievable but not when you take into account the total system as this is basically a power signal amplifier that is connected to the coils.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-16 18:19:35

Read the links from the video's page of information and then total up all of the part losses for each of the given circuits. The total is from the plug in the wall to what is saved in the battery for use.

louis · 2021-11-16 18:57:50

Well assuming you are right (not entirely sure), the vast majority of those losses exist today when people "Plug in" their EV. But when they do plug in, electricity is already far cheaper than gasoline or diesel. Not sure what it is currently but it's often been 25% of the cost of gasoline for a given mileage. So if we have some additional loss now in the region of 3-10% then it is only (on the worst case scenario) going to raise the cost to 27.5% (based on the 25% example). But of course you have huge gains in terms of convenience (which does reflect economic cost of time spent fuelling up), reduced battery size (less energy required to move the vehicle), lower EV cost (die to reduced battery size) and less tyre wear pollution.

SpaceNut wrote:

Read the links from the video's page of information and then total up all of the part losses for each of the given circuits. The total is from the plug in the wall to what is saved in the battery for use.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-16 19:38:34

Well comparing just a gas only vehicle to just Electric is what you want while both suffer from speed to going faster will cause a mileage drop for both
How far can an electric car go on one charge?

https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/range-electric-car
Overview of EV range
Shortest
135 km (84 miles) Smart Fortwo EQ, a two-seater city car
Average 313 km (194 miles) Renault Zoe ZE50 R135
Longest 637 km (396 miles) Tesla—with the Model S Long Range Plus
Recent statistics from Bloomberg pointed out that battery costs have dropped from $1,200 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to around $125/kWh today.

https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/electric/ … c-cars-ev/

To know your battery is to get a feel for how you drive will dictate how far you can go between charges.

https://newmotion.com/en/knowledge-cent … e-of-an-ev
1000-x-193-xbevcompareen-1500-png-pagespeed-ic-q-19-om-z-7-tcm-1-2lqu.webp

louis · 2021-11-16 20:14:46

This is irrelevant to the thread. We already know the issues and challenges. This thread is about technologies that directly respond to the issues and challenges, not a description of the issues and challenges.

SpaceNut wrote:

Well comparing just a gas only vehicle to just Electric is what you want while both suffer from speed to going faster will cause a mileage drop for both
How far can an electric car go on one charge?
https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/range-electric-car
Overview of EV range
Shortest
135 km (84 miles) Smart Fortwo EQ, a two-seater city car
Average 313 km (194 miles) Renault Zoe ZE50 R135
Longest 637 km (396 miles) Tesla—with the Model S Long Range Plus
Recent statistics from Bloomberg pointed out that battery costs have dropped from $1,200 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to around $125/kWh today.
https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/electric/ … c-cars-ev/
To know your battery is to get a feel for how you drive will dictate how far you can go between charges.
https://newmotion.com/en/knowledge-cent … e-of-an-ev
https://img2.storyblok.com/802x0/filter … -2lqu.webp

SpaceNut · 2021-11-16 20:27:37

To know the charge costs response to #21 you must know the battery being charged for value of the dollar spent in charging it and how many miles you get are related to how you drive....and that is vehicle specific.

I have watched those powering back up at those charging stations either sitting doing nothing for hours or wondering around to find something to do near by.

Since the RF energy is AC you need to convert that into a regulated power source for charging, You do know how a charging circuit works as its got to have the power which is made up of the voltage that is higher than the one you are charging and then the current being provided in the charge. At the very smallest of amount is a diode drop (0.7v) to several volts DC to be able to force current into the battery.

How does the RF charging system know when the battery is full when a variety of sizes come in all vehicles.

You have a circuit on the vehicle as a battery monitor that sends a signal to turn off the charger....

kbd512 · 2021-11-17 12:14:00

Louis,

This technology does not solve any problems. It creates entirely new problems and drastically exacerbates the existing problem of insufficient grid power to quickly recharge a growing fleet of battery electric vehicles that still represents a tiny fraction of the existing fleet of gasoline and diesel powered vehicles.

There was an actual engineering reason that we started with battery electric vehicles, but then moved on to combustion engine powered vehicles. The battery electric vehicles of the time were mechanically simpler, but the numerous engineering problems they posed, if we attempted widespread implementation of them, is why nearly all engineers opted to pursue combustion engines instead of batteries. More than a century later, the batteries are still woefully inadequate when compared to combustion engines, despite the fact that both technologies have been in continuous development during that time and the battery vehicles had a head-start over combustion engines.

We never stopped using and developing batteries and electric motors since they were invented, but more than a century after the industrial revolution that refined electric motors and combustion engines to what they are today, no battery has come remotely close to matching the capabilities of combustion engines burning liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

The only thing stopping wireless recharging technology is what the technology itself mandates. There's never been a question of whether or not a battery can be recharged faster. If you supply more current at the correct voltage, then you can recharge a battery faster, period. There's obviously a limit, but present fast chargers are nowhere near that limit.

A simple power cable doesn't suffer the efficiency losses of wireless charging. Wires will always be more efficient than wireless charging by virtue of the fact that it uses far less Copper to achieve the same end result. Less power is lost to electrical resistance with wire-based charging, so less Copper is required, thus less electric generating capacity is required to contend with the losses of wireless technology. We have had the ability to transfer the same amount of power via both methods, for at least a century. The "whiz-bang factor" is the ultimate reason behind wireless charging. Tesla wanted to eliminate wire-based electric power grids using wireless charging, but even his genius ran into the limits imposed by that technology. The losses can be minimized, but they're always there and not insignificant. This new technology does not do what Tesla wanted to do at all, though it also never claimed to, so it's not an "advancement" over current technology. It's merely a way to spend more money to deliver less power output, per unit of power input.

It's not feasible to operate current fast chargers, never mind this new type of fast charger, at any scale that matters using the current electric generating grid. To operate this type of fast charger to recharge a fleet of 50% electric vehicles, your own power grid's capacity in the UK would have to be increased by at least a factor of 100. That means electricity would become at least 100 times more expensive, no matter what supplies the input power.

UK residents are currently paying more than $0.30/kWh. Scale that up by a factor of 100X and then you're paying $30/kWh. At $3.50 per gallon, gasoline provides 3,771Watt-hours of usable energy per dollar spent, or $1/kWh. At $30/kWh, you're receiving 30 times less energy per dollar spent, but the battery electronic vehicles are certainly not 30X more efficient than combustion engines. As I've shown in the Prometheus Fuels thread, a Tesla Model 3 consumes half as many Watt-hours per mile driven as a Mazda 3. For all of the Model 3's much-vaunted "efficiency", even when no other losses are taken into account, the Tesla's "big improvement", at triple the purchase price of the Mazda 3 before the $10K government subsidy ($60K Tesla Model 3 vs $20K Mazda 3), is a 350Watt-hours per mile vehicle and the combustion engine is a 700Watt-hours per mile vehicle.

Suppose wind / solar / batteries all become 3X cheaper than they currently are. You're then paying $10/kWh to satisfy this fast charging nonsense, which is roughly double the current price for a gallon of gasoline. Suppose gasoline also rises to $10/gallon. For the $10 spent on electricity, you can drive your battery car 2.85 miles. For the $10 spent on gasoline, you can drive 50 miles with Mazda's existing Skyactiv-X engine technology already on the market in Europe. Prometheus Fuels is already beating the spot price on Jet-A fuel by 1 penny using their prototype technology, and it doesn't require increasing grid power availability by a factor of 100X to 1,000X.

It really doesn't matter if you don't accept that and it never will. Your acceptance of basic math is not required, however regrettable.

Intellectually honest people will recognize no-win situations for what they are, and then look for more practical alternatives.

Solutions that actually work look something like the following:

1. Reducing vehicle weight without drastically increasing the cost, because no matter the power source, it takes power to move weight around. This is a major part of the ultimate answer. Moving several billion multi-ton personal transport machines around every single day is not sustainable. If we can reduce the weight to around 1/3rd of what we currently haul around every day, then we can feasibly have a motor vehicle for every 3 to 4 people living on Earth, while holding the line on current energy consumption rates. Battery vehicles don't help to achieve that goal, because the current ones that perform somewhat like combustion engine powered vehicles, are also at least 1/3rd heavier than the existing gasoline and diesel powered vehicles. In terms of the embodied energy, each battery powered vehicle is 3X that of gasoline powered vehicles, and that is why they cost 3X more for similar but not equivalent range capability.

2. Increasing the efficiency of existing technology without drastically increasing cost. These solutions are much more challenging to achieve, and none of them have ever reduced energy usage. That last part really needs to "sink in". No energy efficiency increase has ever resulted in a net decrease in energy consumption for the affected sector. LED lights caused people to leave them on 24/7/365 and to buy more of them, so we're still consuming more total power for lighting than ever before, even though it's now a much lower total percentage of the electricity consumption. Energy efficient AC caused everyone with the money to install central AC systems and to leave them running 24/7/365. The same will be true of battery electric vehicles, because it was also true of combustion powered vehicles.

3. Using synergistic technologies to eliminate needless costs and energy sinks. A hand-crank window eliminates electric motors, sensors, control electronics, wiring, and the power supplied to operate it, for example. Parts that don't exist can never break or wear out, so they require no energy to make and maintain them. Parts that are repairable without complete replacement can be maintained into perpetuity. Energy / labor / capital that would otherwise be expended to produce new parts or recycle the materials used in existing parts is reduced or eliminated by production of more durable parts. The steel gearing used in 1940s era hand-crank windows was a bit heavier and more costly to produce than plastic, but it would never crack and break during normal usage. Now the opposite is true.

The plastic is horridly expensive when compared to steel, because the embodied energy is so high, and also every bit as heavy as the steel to boot. A stamped steel engine valve cover runs $25 to $50 each. The Aluminum alloy valve covers are $75 to $150 each. The plastic ones are $100 to $200 each. The literal handful of composite ones are even more expensive, ranging into the hundreds of dollars. Only the metal ones will last the life of the engine. The plastic will inevitably warp or crack, though it will never corrode. If the valve covers were stainless steel, then they'd certainly cost more money, but then they wouldn't corrode, either, and they won't warp or crack. Plastic was cheaper when oil was much cheaper. Now that it's produced from natural gas, it's very cheap to make plastic in the US, but only as a result of the present natural gas abundance.

4. Solutions that don't mandate wholesale changes to existing major infrastructure pieces benefit from all the embodied energy presently baked into the power grid and oil / gas production industry. That's why I say that combustion engines, solar thermal, and nuclear thermal are the best choices for a sustainable but expanding electric power grid. They benefit from a century of improvements and manufacturing know-how, as it relates to heat engines, as well as all the existing infrastructure supporting their pervasive use. Any new power generation technology that requires a rebuild from scratch, is never going to be cheap and it's going to consume materials and therefore energy at unsustainable rates.

5. Recognizing the "sunk cost fallacy" for what it is, and not continuing to throw good money after bad, will be necessary for continued advancement. We've dumped absurd amounts of materials, energy, and brain power into this faddish idea of "green energy" (code talk for photovoltaics and wind turbines and Lithium-ion batteries, along with burning waste), for very little total benefit. The underlying idea was great. The execution, on the other hand, could most charitably be described as mediocre. While I fancy the idea of "energy for free", I also know that nothing is truly free. It all comes from cheap and readily available energy supplies, almost exclusively from fossil fuels. For longer than I've been alive, we've been continuously "throwing stuff at the wall", because we have no idea what "right actually looks like". For the longest time, I didn't know either. After observing "progress" (or the total lack thereof, in my opinion) for a couple of decades, I have a basic concept of what ultimate sustainability requires.

The "ideas that stick" must last a long time, have low embodied energy, and be repairable for some reasonable cost. That feature set does not describe any commercial photovoltaic panels or wind turbines or Lithium-ion batteries. If you crack a PV panel or de-laminate a wind turbine blade, you can't repair a few electrical connections or throw a coat of sealant on it, then slap it back together again, the way you can with a heat engine- only a complete replacement will actually work. We simply can't sustain total replacement of a vastly expanded electric power grid and most of the powered devices on it, every 5 to 25 years.

Planned obsolescence started as a design concept for certain types of cheaply made products intended to increase profit margins, mostly American made cars and appliances, until our bad idea spread around the world. Our "bad idea" is now a structural part of every part of the new "green energy" technology set. It's all predicated on complete replacement of existing power grid infrastructure over time spans so short that in some cases the embodied energy baked into the technology will never be re-extracted in the form of power output or useful mechanical work. We don't need to mindlessly carry on with that bad idea, to its ultimate conclusion, to know that it was and is a serious error.

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#1 2021-11-14 09:37:55

Wireless/induction EV charging revolution

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