Electric Car Tinkerers And Energy Resilience
100-Mile Diet Having An Effect
July 21, 2008Nugal-warra Elder’s Award Winning Tour Company
July 22, 2008Are grassroots electric car tinkerers doing a better job than the big companies? Andrew – our 4 stroke polluting webmaster – has found an interesting viewpoint in ‘Our Electric Future’ in ‘The American – A Magazine Of Ideas’.
Author Andy Grove – former chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation, the world’s largest producer of microchips – writes that the 1980s goal of energy independence in a global economy was flawed. A more appropriate goal he believes would be energy resilience, ie strengthening our ability to adjust to changes such as the rising oil price. This we can do, Andy maintains, by relying on electricity which can be produced using many different energy sources apart from petroleum and coal – wind, hydroelectric, solar, nuclear etc.
‘Transportation Is The Hardest Nut To Crack’
Getting vehicles to run on electricity is a difficult technical task. Current technology allows cars to run only for about 100 miles.
Dual-fuel Cars…Fast
Andy says the US Government could be requiring a growing percentage of new cars be built with dual-fuel capacity, running on electricity till the batteries run down then switching to a petrol engine. Unfortunately progress towards marketable electric cars is slow as the car industry is waiting for batteries to improve so electric cars can compete with petrol-fuelled cars on driving range.
2006 Grassroots Efforts Converting Private Cars
Two years ago PWF reported on the release of the documentary ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?’ and on what ‘plug-in’ enthusiasts were saying – that the technology is here, ready for mass production and could easily dovetail into an average household.
Details of Californians Scott and Anna Cornell who had converted two of their cars to electricity themselves – a 1979 Volkswagen Rabbit and a 1968 Karmann Ghia – were given. Anna, with no technical background, had taken two years to convert the Rabbit in her ‘spare time’, while she cared for their baby daughter.
From ‘Our Electric Future’ 2008
” Battery developers…have been waiting for demand from the automobile industry to develop before fully committing the resources required to do the job. The generation and transmission infrastructures have not been built up to service the potentially explosive demand from transportation. The wait has gone on for some time…
There are enterprising folks who have experimented with converting existing gasoline cars into electric cars by removing the gasoline engine and replacing it with an electric engine. Some are working to devise ways in which existing gasoline cars could be converted to dual-fuel cars…
Not all vehicles have the space and design that allow this process to happen easily. Luckily it is the most-gasoline hungry cars that do….about 80 million vehicles with a mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting these should be our first priority (though) the instincts of conservationists have been to improve what is already pretty good…
A shift from petroleum-based vehicles to electricity-based ones would move the locus for addressing carbon emissions from millions of individual vehicles to far fewer centralised electricity-generating plants. Controlling emissions thus becomes an industrial task, easier technologically. Estimates indicate a potential reduction of carbon emissions of around 50 per cent through such a shift…
Are government mandates and incentives really necessary to drive these processes? Can’t we rely on market forces?
“The politics of energy is warping diplomacy in certain parts of the world” – Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in a recent Senate testimony.
Automobile manufacturing, battery production, and the generation and transmission of electricity are all represented by different industries—each with its own financial aims. The absence of common interests is a major obstacle to action, requiring the coordinated commitment of several industries.
In his seminal study, the business historian Alfred Chandler found that the growth of new industries is often limited unless appropriate adjustments in their structure take place and the boundaries are redrawn to remove obstacles to growth. Chandler also recognized that the necessary changes are unlikely to happen if we have to count on the incumbent managers to bring them about.
Of course, startups and new ventures, not limited by the economic rules of established industries, can break the gridlock in time. But we don’t have the time.”
Tempted to have a go?
5 Comments
Grove is very confused about energy. Why in the world he thinks we should depend upon inferior power geenration technologies likw unreliable, expensive wind, most wave, or PV is a
complete mystery. Solar thermla and PBMR (about which the media,
as usual is totally ignorant) will dominate in the future. Of that there is no doubt, regardless of the stupidities of this govt’s subsidies to crappy alternative energy technologies.
I laugh everytime I hear the nonsensical notion that “energy diversity” has some value. We want the most efficient energy technologies possible, not the most diverse. Can you imagine some football fan campaigning to force his team to field a
“diverse” set of players – you know, poor blockers as well as go blockers, mediocre runners as well as superior runners, etc.
Do these morons really believe that the sun is going to stop shining and solar power generation will cease? Ha, ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha. This generation is truly the dumb and dumber generation
Hi Kerry – how about some info on PBMR?
PBMR – another nuclear technology – hmmmm . NOt renewable. Surely that is what we need. Generation using nuclear will deplete known uranium reserves within 30 years.
Cheers
This is a moot point, and really quite laughable – “government mandates and incentives”; while the corporate barons are in control of our government (and the means of production of, well almost everything), there is no interest on their part in renewable, clean and especially free energy.
The numbers just do not add up for the economists. We need to burn energy for the world to go around since this supplies economic growth. This is a capitalist society and while 1% of the population control the wealth and means of production there will be no changes aside from those required to keep people elected (provided they’re doing their bit for the corporate sponsors).
To suggest that the government are about to put in place incentives for consumers and small enterprises to move away from oil and coal is naive.
Gail
You can find out about PBMR here:
http://www.pbmr.com/index.asp?Content=129
Kerry
You can lean a lot about energy choices here:
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/AlterntiveToNuclearPower
Earl
You should also read the above link and learn about the work going on in a search for alternatives. Also, you are not correct. We have enough uranium, should we choose to use, it to last forever.
Shayne
You need to get the chip off your shoulder and study some facts about the problem. Try the informative report above. Yes, the world is controlled by the international banker and his criminal fractional reserve money system but even he needs power for his Plasma and oil in his car. He is not the reason we need an alternative to oil or coal. Nor is the government the problem either. Nothing can stop a guy with a brilliant idea that he believes in and can demonstrate. He will always find someone or go somewhere in the world to get his idea into production.
There is huge profit to be made by the inventor/s who come up with cheap and better(non-polluting)alternatives to coal and/or oil. There is massive work going on at the moment all over the world like never before such is the prize for the winner. Obviously wind and solar are helpful in the near term because of their instant results. I mean you can build these in a couple of years. But of course they can never do any more than play with the problem such is the magnitude of it.
How long do you think it is going to take to invent, test, prove, get social approval for (yeah, satisfy the tree huggers too) and commission a new clean power generating system? Now add to that the time it is going to take to build enough of them to replace the system that we have built up over the last 200 years. For an example, take PBMR, just say it turns out as good as they say, that’s 5 years away just to find out if it works.(Never mind the 9 years they have been at it just to get permission to try out the idea.
Unfortunatly the world does not change as fast as you can change your mind.
Say one of the current alternatives really proves successful. To replace all the oil, gas,and coal fired power stations in the world would take at the very least 50 years even building at the Chinese rate of construction.