The plug-in hybrid seems like the best immediate transportation solution. (Yeah, but we ain’t got enough (a) cars, (b) batteries, or (c) power to recharge them all. /rap) My engineering solution for California is a smarter power meter that rations power to your charging car. (Yeah, but that meter does not yet exist. /rap)
If the power demand is high, your car will charge in proportion to how much stuff you turn off in the household. It is up to each power user to decide whether to charge the car or run the air conditioner. This would bring green reality to each household. (Yeah, but at my house, even if I turned off everything but one LED flashlight, I might not be able to get enough charge to get to work the next day. /rap)
Each home would get an equal ration of power. We could call it the Green Piece of Power. When the grid gets to full capacity, the brownout starts with the highest over-ration users. (That is a very fine concept, but it would need a very sophisticated meter—and I don’t think we know how to make that meter. And if we did, the electric companies and the customers might not agree to it. /rap)
After being the dark, hot house in the neighborhood a few times, increasing home power conservation will become a status symbol. (My “air conditioning” runs off the Pacific Ocean and requires no amperes at all. /rap)
Personally, I have over a foot of insulation in the attic, double-pane windows, and the biggest, most efficient air conditioning condenser in the neighborhood. During air conditioning season, we cook outside and limit inside power dissipation as much as possible. There is a connection between money conservation and being green. (Agreed. But sometimes it takes a lot of money to save money. Not everybody has that money. /rap)
Putting ethanol in gas tanks is a waste. My solution is to drink the ethanol and walk.
Tom Cater
That one, I like. Or, ride a bicycle. Best regards. –RAP
Hi Bob,
As a former electrical engineer from the 1950s and 1960s, I’ve been a long-time admirer. So I was surprised to see your letter in Electronic Design stating “Who is going to build the electrical generating and power transmission capacity for recharging a lot of cars?” California peak load during a normal summer day is about 43 GW. The max load is 50 GW. Nighttime summer load runs around 25 GW. (On a really hot night, the demand for electricity doesn’t taper off much. Here in San Francisco, it gets warm, but not warm enough to bother us. My air conditioning comes straight off the Pacific Ocean. It costs me zero amperes. /rap)
That leaves about 25 GW of off-peak capacity, which would power a maximum of 3.7 million cars in California. (Chargers pull about 6.7 kW.) (They can pull a lot more than that. And, there are a lot more cars than 3.7 million in California. If 10% of those cars were replaced by plug-in hybrids, the grid would go down on the first hot night. I think I will hold on to my Beetle just to be safe. I believe that Tom (above) is right, that we’d need chargers that are smart enough to charge per priorities. An electric car would be screwed if it couldn’t get much charge at night. A plug-in hybrid would just have to buy some gas. As I said in my column on this 12 years ago, the owner of an electric car could buy a gas engine as an accessory! /rap)
It also solves a big problem for the power-generating utilities who have to inefficiently throttle back their generators during off-peak. (A lot of places have pumped storage, such as Northfield Mt. in Massachusetts. Is there none of that in California? We got big hills and high reservoirs. I’ll have to look into this. /rap)
On the plus side, you sure got the hydrogen “boondoggle” right. The production, storage, and transportation of hydrogen is a nightmare under the best of circumstances, but the economics of generating hydrogen is so poor as to be laughable. I think the current cost is about $12 to $15/equivalent energy gallon. (And every time the price of gasoline rises, the price of hydrogen is thus ratcheted up, with that same brutal factor. Maybe we can get George to subsidize the cost of hydrogen. I’d love to, but I can’t afford the taxes. /rap)
All you need to do is look at the electrical energy required to electrolyze water and break the hydrogen bond. It takes four units of electrical energy to produce one unit of equal hydrogen energy. Talk about inefficiency! You may as well use the electrical energy to directly charge batteries. It’s four times as efficient. (Check. But those batteries are heavy to drag around. Maybe since George is so smart, he can figure out how to avoid that. Maybe he can invent the helium battery, even lighter than lithium. /rap)
Ditto for reforming hydrocarbons to make hydrogen. You would be better off using the gas directly. Either way, you’re generating the same pollutants, except you can scrub them easier in large central facilities. And, most people don’t know that oil refineries are the biggest users of electrical power in California. I’m not sure of the exact number, but I think it’s over 20%. That’s more electrical capacity that would be available if there was a reduction in gasoline production.
Malcolm Field
I doubt if we are going to worry about that very soon. Thanks for the comments and advice and good technical points. –RAP
P.S. I have heard that water pumps are the biggest users of electricity in California—pumping for farmers and pumping water to Los Angeles. That might be true. —RAP
I recently heard a discussion with an official in Denmark who mentioned plans to use plug-in hybrids in conjunction with Solar and Wind to help level loads. Basically electric rates would vary depending on demand and generating capacity. Sunny and breezy days would have lower rates than calm cloudy days. When the rates are low your car would buy power to charge its batteries, and when the rates are high the car can sell power back to the grid. The goal is to use the rate difference to offset the cost of buying batteries. Another idea is to have the power utility pay for the batteries as long as the car owner agreed to plugging the car into the grid when it wasn't driving. This would be instead of paying to build some other power storage system.
The main point is that it's time to start thinking outside the box. We have to plan for time when we use up all that buried ancient sunlight and are forced to use only current sunlight to power our cars and homes.
Zinker -July 17, 2008
Central air conditioning strikes me as a wasteful luxury. We started with one air conditioned room (the bedroom) of the 10 or so rooms in our Wash. DC house. Later we splurged and added a second room (dining room). Generally only one room at a time gets cooled. When the heat and humidity are near unbearable and we have to be in the other rooms we periodically go to one of the chilled rooms to cool off. Neighbors all around us are spending big $$ to add central air to their 100 year old row houses. This kind of lifestyle can't go on. The era of cheap energy is over.
circuitsmith -July 06, 2008
If I follow Tom Cater's rather punitive line of reasoning, I should feel very superior for choosing a location for my home (Oxnard, CA) that requires NO air conditioning at all and very little heat in the winter. I also tele-commute and combine errands for minimum trips and miles on my automobile. In my humble opinion, cities in climatic extremes (Las Vegas, for example) are comparable to the Hummer in terms of wasteful, "conspicuous consumption" of energy! If Tom wants to punish those less efficient than himself, perhaps he should start there.
Bill Whitlock -July 03, 2008
The ultimate solution to the energy crisis is to get away from burning stuff (oil, hydrogen or whatever) to create energy. Einstein's E=MC squared shows that energy and mass are equivilant. When something is burned, heat energy is created because the mass of the final product is very slightly less than the initial product. If a way could be found to fuse hydrogen into helium (short of a hydrogen bomb) the energy created would be far greater than burning it, and would not create radioactive waste as in a nuclear plant. I believe that pursuing cold fusion should be a priority on the order of the Manhattan Project of WW-II.
Anonymous -July 03, 2008
Bob, I read an EPRI report sometime in the last year but can't find the reference (might have been quoted in Road and Track). This report showed that PlugIn Hybrids can be supported on the existing grid, and that the grid peaking loads could actually be supported using the car batteries, and inverters. Car owners that were willing to contract with the utility could receive reduced rates for allowing reverse flow.
Bill's idea for a hybrid is exactly what I'm sure several of us have come up with over a beer or cappuccino. Run that little displacement engine at peak efficiency, and let the batteries supply the hugely varying power demands to motors that are part of the wheels. I've ridden bikes that use power assisted motors that are integral to the wheel. Very cool.
Bruce Allen -July 03, 2008
I'm very pleased to see some factual de-bunking of the plug-in hybrid, hydrogen, and methanol "solutions". What we need to do is take a lesson from railroad locomotives in the form of a "full-serial" hybrid. It has major advantages over anything being mass-produced today. I described this solution 28 years ago in Machine Design magazine. Start with a small internal combustion engine that runs at constant speed on a fuel that already has a distribution infrastructure, like gasoline or diesel fuel. Such an engine can be designed to be vastly more efficient than ones required to run smoothly over wide speed ranges. This engine can use tuned intake and exhaust systems to boost efficiency and reduce noise, too. Couple this to an alternator, battery, and electric motors. Using a brushless motor in each wheel hub allows for sophisticated traction controls. Regenerative braking, of course, is a significant advantage for hybrids in city and urban driving. The efficient engine is sized for cruising. One approach would be an opposed 2-cylinder engine with no crankshaft where a magnet is attached to the connecting rod, thus forming an integrated engine-alternator. I understand that such an engine has been prototyped at a Carolina university. I believe simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Bill Whitlock -July 02, 2008
For the pie-in-the-sky people, unfortunately, there is is no free lunch!
Anonymous -July 02, 2008
Total water pumping and treatment electricity usage is about 6.5% of the total. The State Water project is about 2-3%, the largest single user. Crude oil extraction uses 1.5%. Oil refineries are the largest industrial users of electricity in CA, but not the largest in total usage.
Hank Walker -July 02, 2008
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