Israel and the alternatives for oil

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IanKennedy
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

Post by IanKennedy »

There are entire regions where geothermal and hyro supply 100%, thus his statement that where he "lives", rather than the whole world.

Take Iceland for example:
Five major geothermal power plants exist in Iceland, which produce approximately 26.2% (2010)[1] of the nation's energy. In addition, geothermal heating meets the heating and hot water requirements of approximately 87% of all buildings in Iceland. Apart from geothermal energy, 73.8% of the nation’s electricity is generated by hydro power, and 0.1% from fossil fuels.[2]
Or Norway:
Electricity generation in Norway is almost entirely from hydroelectric power plants. Of the total production in 2005 of 137.8 TWh, 136 TWh was from hydroelectric plants, 0.86 TWh was from thermal power, and 0.5 TWh was wind generated. In 2005 the total consumption was 125.8 TWh.[1]

Norway was the first country to generate electricity commercially using sea-bed tidal power. A 300 kilowatt prototype underwater turbine started generation in the Kvalsund, south of Hammerfest, on November 13, 2003. [2] [3]
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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I thought Mikey, living in the US (IIRC), meant in the US...
My comment simply meant to show that some parts of the world can, and should indeed, push forward for Electric cars...

In France, Nuclear power is the main Electricity source (78.8%), not fossil fuel...
In Germany, 23% came from Nuclear power before the shutdown of 8 plants in 2011, and 25% comes from renewable sources such as wind, Hydro, Biomass in 2012...
Canada produces 58.7% of its Electricity from Hydro-electric plants, and 15.5% from Nuclear plants...

I agree that world-wide, renewable electric sources are not the norm, but there are many countries where Electric cars would be viable options...
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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We're talking about the practicality of using EV vs Petrol, the ratio of replacement doesn't come into it. If it's to work it's got to work when everyone has one and not when it's a luxury own by a few. If you have a given number of cars on the road and you have to stop more often then with one tech then you will need a lot more charging points because of those extra stops. That could be an issue in a country where space is at a premium. Not everywhere is as spaced out as the USA. Our motorway service stations can get full during busy periods, public holidays and the like. Stopping twice as often for six times as long is going to be a major issue. The other issue is that charging is taking place at more peak times, rather than the middle of the night as you have assumed elsewhere.
75% of commutes are less than 40 miles round trip. People driving less than 150 miles in a day do not need to charge at a station. They can charge at home. You can get electricity almost anywhere. So yes, on the highways you're going to need dedicated stations where people can charge their cars. That is not the majority of trips taken however. You yourself indicate that your Oxford trip is not a normal commute. It's one you have to take, but not that often. While this charging will take place at non-ideal times (really the peak load is between 6 to 10am and 4 to 10pm) it's not going to be the majority of charging. This is only a real concern for those driving long distances on motorways which yes, will need to figure out a way to provide sufficent charging points for those automobiles.

You're focused in on one situation that does not represent the bulk of how people drive. We're going to have to figure out how to make those long distance trips doable, but holding up the deployment of a technology like this because of trips that represent maybe 5 to 10% of driving is begging for a perfect silver bullet and there isn't one. If you want a petrol free world and real reduction of carbon dioxide emissions you're going to have to be inconvienenced some.
That's going to cost a pretty penny.
Anything is. Our entire economy is built around petrol. Anything that is going to replace that, hydrogen, EV's, anything, is going to cost an immense amount of money. Sucks but that's how it is.
Seriously, you are not going to get induction charging and quick at the same time.
Which is why I suggested it for home use and not quick charging. No at home charger is going to be particularly quick, homes are just not wired for the kind of amperage quick charging takes. However, most cars sit at night for upwards of eight hours or more which is sufficent for topping off a battery after normal daily use. They might not be practical where you can't be guaranteed a parking space for yourself but it is doable.
They would have to be unconnected to houses in any way. People cannot always park in their own street, let alone in the same space within their street. If you look closer at the picture you will see that some of those roads are only wide enough to park on one side of the road (otherwise there's no way for cars to actually move up and down the street). Any hope of the sockets relating to houses is out of the window. It has to be a self contained unit in the road surface or kerb, lockable into the car and have auto power cut off when complete. People will not be arsed to go out and disconnect, nor will they move the car afterwards out of fear of not finding anywhere else to park.
In those areas that's not really an issue. Again, as someone who works for a power company I would volunteer, FOR FREE, to go down and put a charging station in front of each house. Lockable so no one can unplug your car. Issue electronic keys, or pass codes, or cards, some method of identification and wherever you park you can plug in your car, lock the connector, swipe your card/put in the code/use your key and start charging. For added benefit you can chose to let the smart charger do it's thing where we choose when to charge your car when our load is depressed and get a lower rate on the electricty or have it charge immediately and pay a premium rate. All your charges show up on your bill at the end of the month. I might even start talking to car manufacturers to put in ID chips on the chargers so you don't even need a code, key, or card, just register your car with the power company and we'll know when you're plugged in and charge you for it.
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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Tyyr wrote:75% of commutes are less than 40 miles round trip. People driving less than 150 miles in a day do not need to charge at a station. They can charge at home. You can get electricity almost anywhere. So yes, on the highways you're going to need dedicated stations where people can charge their cars. That is not the majority of trips taken however. You yourself indicate that your Oxford trip is not a normal commute. It's one you have to take, but not that often. While this charging will take place at non-ideal times (really the peak load is between 6 to 10am and 4 to 10pm) it's not going to be the majority of charging. This is only a real concern for those driving long distances on motorways which yes, will need to figure out a way to provide sufficent charging points for those automobiles.

You're focused in on one situation that does not represent the bulk of how people drive. We're going to have to figure out how to make those long distance trips doable, but holding up the deployment of a technology like this because of trips that represent maybe 5 to 10% of driving is begging for a perfect silver bullet and there isn't one. If you want a petrol free world and real reduction of carbon dioxide emissions you're going to have to be inconvienenced some.
Just a few things wrong with what you have said. I put forward two different scenarios Long distance trips and Overnight charging of commuter type usage. I could hardly be accused of concentrating on a single type of journey.

For long distance trips:
Just about every public holiday our motorways fill with cars, starting at 4pm and extending until around midnight. Exactly the period you have identified as peak times. You've got to understand a few things:

1) In this country nobody flies home to visit relatives (well almost nobody), they drive.
2) There is hardly enough room in the country for the cars people have now. It is not practical for families to have one car for commuting and another for long distance travel.

For the parking issue:
I would say that almost 90% of the cars in the UK are parked on public roads overnight. Very flew people have a garage or even a driveway. In the last 25 years of living in Oxford I have lived at 5 different places. In 4 of those places I was parked either in a public road, or in a parking bay which was separated by a public footpath from the property. In our current property we have a "private" driveway in the front garden. I've put "" around private because there is no public right away into the area, but, there is also no gate or other device to separate it from the road.
Tyyr wrote:In those areas that's not really an issue. Again, as someone who works for a power company I would volunteer, FOR FREE, to go down and put a charging station in front of each house. Lockable so no one can unplug your car. Issue electronic keys, or pass codes, or cards, some method of identification and wherever you park you can plug in your car, lock the connector, swipe your card/put in the code/use your key and start charging. For added benefit you can chose to let the smart charger do it's thing where we choose when to charge your car when our load is depressed and get a lower rate on the electricty or have it charge immediately and pay a premium rate. All your charges show up on your bill at the end of the month. I might even start talking to car manufacturers to put in ID chips on the chargers so you don't even need a code, key, or card, just register your car with the power company and we'll know when you're plugged in and charge you for it.
Which is what I have said repeatedly would have to happen. The issue is that there are about 100,000 homes in Oxford that would require these charging stations. Oxford is also a very small city London is more in the region of 6 million. I think you are going to die of old age and starvation due to lack of money if people where to take up your offer. Seriously no power company is going to put these things in for free, they would go bankrupt while waiting for money to come in from their use. The shear amount of work that would be required to dig up all the roads and provide the power grid for these chargers is stupefying. I just can't see it being a practical proposition.

Building some hydrogen cracking stations and installing "pumps" in existing "gas" stations seems a lot more practical, especially as it can be done incrementally over time as demand grows.
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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Okay I'm jumping in this debate late.

But from everything I have read for years hydrogen is a joke.

It is an energy storage medium not a source of energy. You need energy to form pure hydrogen and store it, that energy is better of being used to straight up powrr what ever it is your running on the hydorgen with no middle man waste.
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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In the largest scale, everything is a storage medium for energy rather than a true source. Burning gasoline doesn't create energy, it just changes it. Further, doesn't cracking oil require energy? Doesn't building and operating a reactor? Doesn't creating a wind farm?
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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To build a wind farm takes X amount of energy but you get 4X out if it. A net gain.

To frack and refine oil takes X energy but you get 6X out of it. A net gain.

To make commercial hydrogen takes X energy and you get 0.8X out of it. A net loss.
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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That's fie, but it's a different point than the naievete of saying that hydrogen is different because it's a conversion rather than a source.
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Re: Israel and the alternatives for oil

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Which is what I have said repeatedly would have to happen. The issue is that there are about 100,000 homes in Oxford that would require these charging stations. Oxford is also a very small city London is more in the region of 6 million. I think you are going to die of old age and starvation due to lack of money if people where to take up your offer. Seriously no power company is going to put these things in for free, they would go bankrupt while waiting for money to come in from their use. The shear amount of work that would be required to dig up all the roads and provide the power grid for these chargers is stupefying. I just can't see it being a practical proposition.
It's more practical than completely rebuilding a new infrastructure for hydrogen. As for bankrupting? Hardly. Power plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. I know, we just built a 300MW gas turbine/combined cycle power plant with a street value of between $250 and $300 million dollars. What do you think the payback on that is? Capital improvements in powerplants are capitalized over thirty years. No one expects things like this to payback overnight. People in the power sector know this. We know it would cost A LOT of money. We also know that it's a lot of power that we'd be selling.

Lemme try to explain how load demand works. From about midnight until 6am power consumption is at it's lowest, maybe 50% of maximum demand. Starting about 6 am and continuing until 10am demand increases bell curve style to about 80 to 85% of maximum demand as everyone wakes up, adjusts the thermostat up or down, brews their coffee, turns on the television, etc. Then consumption drops to about 60 to 65% of maximum during the day as people congretate in offices and warehouses and other places where more efficent heating and cooling take place. Then about 4pm until 10 pm power consumption rises to it's maximum level of the day before petering off till midnight. In order to ensure a reliable powergrid with no dinnertime rolling blackouts the grid is set up to accomodate that evening spike. Most of the rest of the time units are running off their peaks and not at their most efficent because the load demand isn't there. 20 hours of the day we run at a less efficent point below our peaks that causes more wear and tear on the units than if we had them parked at the top (max output). So you give me a way to increase the load during those low periods so that I can be making and selling more power then I'm all over it. Yeah, there's going to be trenching and materials, labor, and it's going to get bloody expensive, but if it means that I can use my existing, already constructed assets, more and make even more money without having to build another power plant then that's something we'd be all over. We could use existing assets, reduce maintenance costs (units running off their best efficency point take more wear and tear than others. My units take a lot more TLC to keep running if they sit down at 200 megawatts than if we ran them wide open at 450 megawatts), and sell 40% more power than we already do without ever building another unit.
Building some hydrogen cracking stations and installing "pumps" in existing "gas" stations seems a lot more practical, especially as it can be done incrementally over time as demand grows.
You're so wrong it's not even funny. First of all, the incremental implementation works as well for electric as it does for hydrogen. Secondly, you cannot reuse the petrol infrastructure for hydrogen, at all. The only thing that would remain the same are petrol stations. Everything behind that petrol station has to be rebuilt. New refineries, new transportation network, new everything. Hell, you can't even transport hydrogen the same way. Hydrogen is a lower energy density fuel, and then you either need new trailers made to withstand phenomenal pressure (a 10,000 psi 2,000+ cubic foot cylinder) and put them in traffic or you take a big hit to capacity so you can insulate them and chill them to the point where it's a liquid so now you need twice the number to trucks to transport the fuel and you're running 7,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen down the road all day long. Especially in a place like Britain you'd be better off putting transport pipelines in the ground but you're still dealing with very high pressure pipes all over the damn place. Then of course there's the power requirements for cracking all that hydrogen. Where as much of the load for EV's could be handled off peak hours for regular charging and you'd only need a marginal increase in the electric grid to handle peak increases. Hydrogen would require you to at least double the number of power plants to generate enough electricity for it all. Double the number of power plants.

You cannot get away from the fact that hydrogen at it's most efficent (fuel cells) is only about 25% efficent. EV's are 85% efficent. That's not just engineer numbers. That matters. That's cost.* In terms of energy input it would take more than three times as much electricty to do hydrogen as it would electric. You're going to spend at least triple as much on beefing up the electrical grid for HYDROGEN as you would EV's. That's before you even get into the cost associated with building the conversion facilities that turn that electricity into hydrgen and we'll just call distribution a wash. Last year I found numbers for put the UK's energy production at ~40GW average, ~60GW peak. At a rough estimate of about $1 million per megawatt (about average for high efficency gas turbine set ups) doubling the UK's power production to support hydrogen would cost about $40 billion dollars just in power plants. Mind you that's using relatively cheap natural gas generation. It goes higher with the actual pollution saving nukes or REALLY off the charts if you want to completely lose your mind and try for solar or wind to power it all. And THEN you have to build the hydrogen cracking stations. Mind you, I'm low balling this. Not considering hundreds of miles of new power lines to move power from the new stations to the cracking facilities, assuming the cheapest form of power you're going to get right now, and using six year old numbers and an average not peak power load. $40 Billion is about the lowest end estimate for just making the electricity for hydrogen.

You have to build all this, doubling your power output, lines from those plants to the cracking stations, the cracking stations themselves, all of that, just to get to the point where the difficulty of charging an EV even becomes an issue. Probably upwards of $100 Billion plus dollars in infrastructure just so you can discuss how hydrogen at the pump beats figuring out how to charge an EV.

Hydrogen lost before the game even started.

*What do I mean it's real dollars? Best estimate for charging my family's two potential EV's is about $200 a month. What would hydrogen cost me? Well, EV's are 85% efficent, hydrogen fuel cells are 25%. So without even taking into account the cost of cracking the hydrogen it would cost $680 to fuel my cars with hydrogen. Before the cost of turning that electricity into hydrogen. Admittedly the cracking station will get a better deal on the electricty than I as a home consumer will so we'll call the cost of craking a wash and even just say it'll cost $600 for hydrogen. That's another $100 a week for hydrogen.
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