The Lemon Fool

odysseus2000 wrote:China developing toads that charge your car as you drive:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... n-the-move

Regards,

Toads?

Bialystock wrote:Toads?

T being next to R on qwerty keyboards but the mention of toads certainly encouraged me to read the first part of the link.

Incidentally (for odysseus2000), it is perfectly acceptable and good practice to include a short extract, such that people know amphibian powered vehicles are not being described:

"China’s Built a Road So Smart It Will Be Able to Charge Your Car"

I think the Chinese idea has more of a future than the recent Swedish idea, with the next step hopefully using the actual road surface, rather than a wide surface beside it.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-first-electrified-road-for-charging-vehicles-opens-in-sweden

And if you're thinking as I did, they do mention the S word towards the end !

Sorry about missing the typo re toads, likely my fault, but the latest Apple typing correction can be too quick to believe it knows what you plan to type.

Yes, good to include bits of extracts.

The Swedish system looks a bit 20 th century, but maybe simplicity has its advantages, but would presumably need heating to keep the roads clear of snow in winter.

An inductive pickup might be better.

Still given the 300 mile range of e.g Tesla cars I am not sure one needs to have dynamic charging especially as if the dynamic charging fails, small batteries could lead to stranded motorists, whereas larger batteries would give more chance of reaching power.

Regards,

Probably an earlier adopter segment of inductive pick up will be electric buses
- defined routes, some of which are bus lane only (easier to dig up?), so less capital investment
- greater value, charge top up helps get bus to full shift without excessive battery load
- simpler model for charging (sorry, mean payment) for electricity
I believe some experimental work has been going on in Cambridge to try out concept

Qualcomm have a system under development:

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new- ... ectric-car

One issue that comes to mind is how will such systems cope with sleeping police men, or debris on the road e.g leaves or snow.

Regards,

Is the hydrogen fuel cell car definitely written off?

There is something appealing about the freedom and relative independence of filling up a tank and not worrying for 600 miles, rather than planning and booking (it may soon be necessary) the next charging stop.

If more cars are electric and booking a charge is essential, the logistics are painful to think about. If a vehicle books a charge, pre-pays, but is 30 minutes late, and the next available slot is 10 hours later .......

Qualcomm have a system under development:

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new- ... ectric-car

One issue that comes to mind is how will such systems cope with sleeping police men, or debris on the road e.g leaves or snow.

And in England, vandalism .....

bruncher wrote:Is the hydrogen fuel cell car definitely written off?

There is something appealing about the freedom and relative independence of filling up a tank and not worrying for 600 miles, rather than planning and booking (it may soon be necessary) the next charging stop.

If more cars are electric and booking a charge is essential, the logistics are painful to think about. If a vehicle books a charge, pre-pays, but is 30 minutes late, and the next available slot is 10 hours later .......

True, but then you're comparing it to charging up a car and not worrying for 300 miles instead. As car range is a big deal now, I'm sure battery technology will come on because they are used so much. In most cases, if you charge it overnight, it'll never have to be filled up at a fuel station ever again, though long-distance travel will be problematic unless you have a tiny petrol engine to charge on the go, and I think that's much more likely to be the best use-case.

True, but then you're comparing it to charging up a car and not worrying for 300 miles instead. As car range is a big deal now, I'm sure battery technology will come on because they are used so much. In most cases, if you charge it overnight, it'll never have to be filled up at a fuel station ever again

But probably well over 50% of the UK population will have difficulty charging overnight, unless you provide massive and very costly infrastructure to create charging points as effectively all parking spaces in public streets and car parks

though long-distance travel will be problematic unless you have a tiny petrol engine to charge on the go, and I think that's much more likely to be the best use-case.

You've just invented the hybrid!

Peter

PeterGray
But probably well over 50% of the UK population will have difficulty charging overnight, unless you provide massive and very costly infrastructure to create charging points as effectively all parking spaces in public streets and car parks

What a business opportunity, very like the roll out of domestic electricity.

Several articles have talked about trip hazard of cables in residential streets, but if the chargers are inductive, there will be no wires to trip over and the charger will be invisible.

However, there are issues regarding water ingress and potential electrocution of pedestrians during e.g. heavy rain storms.

In my opinion such issues can be solved, but until there are proper long term trials we will not know.

Personally I don't think hydrogen has a chance, too expensive and too complicated an infra structure.

Hybrids are in my opinion too complicated to manufacture competitively to pure electric and I expect auto makers to abandon them.

Regards,

Estimate of US demand for electric cars:

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/ele ... yptr=yahoo

Regards,

bruncher wrote:Is the hydrogen fuel cell car definitely written off?

There is something appealing about the freedom and relative independence of filling up a tank and not worrying for 600 miles, rather than planning and booking (it may soon be necessary) the next charging stop.

If more cars are electric and booking a charge is essential, the logistics are painful to think about. If a vehicle books a charge, pre-pays, but is 30 minutes late, and the next available slot is 10 hours later .......

Basically yes, from what I can see. Battery technology has advanced far enough & fast enough to make that technology pathway irrelevant as far as I can see.
- dspp

bruncher wrote:
Is the hydrogen fuel cell car definitely written off?

There is something appealing about the freedom and relative independence of filling up a tank and not worrying for 600 miles, rather than planning and booking (it may soon be necessary) the next charging stop.

If more cars are electric and booking a charge is essential, the logistics are painful to think about. If a vehicle books a charge, pre-pays, but is 30 minutes late, and the next available slot is 10 hours later .......
B

Basically yes, from what I can see. Battery technology has advanced far enough & fast enough to make that technology pathway irrelevant as far as I can see.
- dspp

Second that. There was never a commercial way to get the hydrogen nor one to build a fueling infra structure if somehow one got the hydrogen.

Fuel cells are an old technology, used e.g. On Apollo spacecraft if the 1960's. Not sure if they will see much further space use given battery technology & solar charging great advances in the last 50 years.

Regards,

Thinking about renewable energy, my mind is drawn to producer gas, generated from vegetable matter like wood chips or charcoal. During WW2 buses were to be seen towing producer gas trailers.

I once did a study into the feasibility of using wood to generate producer gas to fire a float glass furnace. My calculations suggested that a 7km square patch of eucalyptus in Brazil, cropped on a 7 year cycle, could sustain the process. Coppicing would be an alternative. I must dig out the original paper.

TJH

tjh290633
Thinking about renewable energy, my mind is drawn to producer gas, generated from vegetable matter like wood chips or charcoal. During WW2 buses were to be seen towing producer gas trailers.

I once did a study into the feasibility of using wood to generate producer gas to fire a float glass furnace. My calculations suggested that a 7km square patch of eucalyptus in Brazil, cropped on a 7 year cycle, could sustain the process. Coppicing would be an alternative. I must dig out the original paper.

Yes, there were lots of this type of technology used when oil was scare. The BBC War Time Farm (ww2) showed how to make a transport fuel from burning coal.

I am not sure whether solar & battery storage trumps all of this now. Clearly in a cloudy winter environment it wouldn't work that well, but in summer it would likely do very well. One could I suppose mix both technologies, but the sticking point might be labour. Could you get folk to crop or harvest fuel at reasonable rates? Suspect in the UK one would struggle but maybe possible in Brazil.

Regards,

bruncher wrote:Is the hydrogen fuel cell car definitely written off?

There is something appealing about the freedom and relative independence of filling up a tank and not worrying for 600 miles, rather than planning and booking (it may soon be necessary) the next charging stop.

If more cars are electric and booking a charge is essential, the logistics are painful to think about. If a vehicle books a charge, pre-pays, but is 30 minutes late, and the next available slot is 10 hours later .......

The Toyota Mirai is still in existence and being trialled by Greem Tomato Taxis in London IIRC........

ap8889
Holy cow, that's a big chunk of productive land tied up to supply one facility providing just one of a myriad industrial products. Just illustrates the enormous scale of energy use and the infeasibility of fossil fuel substitution. Industrial society is necessarily a fossil fuel using society. The paltry energy flows from renewable sources are not able to scale to meet the immense demand from 7 billion people all trying to live like kings.

Interestingly I now believe the opposite, that is industrial society is necessarily going to be renewables powered. Why? Because the cost of renewable power with storage is a lot less than the cost of fossil and nuclear generation.

We have already seen Apple power it's entire business from renewables & storage & there is no obvious reason that I can find from my extensive studies of the field to suggest there is any practical limit to generating all the energy we are ever likely to need from renewables with storage. By contrast there are limits to both fossil fuel supplies & fears about global warming that have politicians pushing renewables all over the planet, save for places like Iran & Trump's coal lobby.

Added to this are the economics of production with renewables having no fuel costs producing the lowest cost electricity. This is generally being sold at the same price, often higher, than the more expensive to produce fossil & nuclear power electricity. In this regime, even with out carbon taxes, it becomes impossible to get finance for new fossil or new nuclear plant.

Regards,

ap8889 wrote:Really? World total primary energy is approaching 1.7 petawatt-hours.

Approx 1.7 petawatt-hours from renewables?

I just can't get there myself: there are insufficient collectors of the diffuse forms of renewable energy, and manufacturing sufficient solar PV panels and wind turbines will require such massive non-renewable resource use that we must struggle to supply. We might prefer to burn the fossil fuels anyway as being at least achievable.

With all due respect I think you are wrong.

Global electrical generation capacity replacements & newbuilds are now predominantly renewables (61%). Add in the nuclear newbuild, and you can see that newbuild fossil generation capacity is now very much the minority. Globally.

(see my 13 April 2018 post on viewtopic.php?f=16&t=11176 for data)

With every year that passes the newbuild fraction of fossil : non-fossil is shrinking looking globally. This is now largely an unsubsidised investment decision, or at least a parity subsidy decision between fossil & non-fossil, again globally. See Lazards data for levelised costs if you want to understand why.

Actual real world capacity factors of the major renewables sources (ie wind & hydro) are approximately equal to fossil capacity factors. I've posted the numbers before & don't have time to look them out again but they tend to be in the 30-40% range. Solar PV is the obvious exception.

Given that major generating capacity tends to have an economic lifespan of 20-40 years then it seems to me that we are approximately 20-40 years from a nearly full conversion to renewable generation. This is an accelerating trend.

Similarly the adoption cycle for EVs has started and is now unstoppable. Approximately 1/3 of fossil fuel use is vehicles, 1/3 is generation, and 1/3 is thermal. So within 20-40 years we will probably have substituted 2/3. As I say the adoption trends are accelerating. For thermal it is less obvious as the float glass example shows, but I think we will see excess renewables generation (electric) largely substituting for thermal in due course. That particular thermal example used biomass from eucalyptus in Brazil which is about the fastest growing wood crop on the planet - my opposite number in the region once ran the largest eucalyptus plantations in the southern cone: so I do not expect that to get much better and so (new) biomass will be a niche producer for my lifetime (hence Shell selling out of timber when it did ...).

Storage for intermittency is not a concern pre 40% renewables penetration. Globally we are now at 12%, but individual countries have now reached 100% for extended periods (e.g. Portugal in the 17/18 winter just gone where they did not run either of their two coal plants during the winter). My studies show that intermittency can be dealt with economically with current technology at current prices through from 40% to 80% penetration. By the time we reach 80% I am sure that we will have improved cost/capacity to get to 90%, ditto to 95%, at least that is what the trends suggest.

My long distance deep sea cargo studies indicate that we can substitute trans-oceanic freight with intercontinental rail, albeit at slightly increased costs but with reduced journey times over many routes. I am seeing this effect already showing up in the data I am looking at. In my lifetime I expect a Bering Strait link and a Darien Gap rail link to go in, breaking those two rail markets open. I continue to study this as it is a game-changer for defence. Short sea can be done with batteries.

I am not a tree hugging green. I have run oil & gas fields, wind & hydro companies, and now specialise in HV grid (and more wind, and biomass for a significant thermal load). I am a hard-nosed engineer. Follow the data and the world really is changing, with - say it again - accelerating trends.

Investing in high carbon and/or long duration fossil producers is a very risky position.

That's why although I have a very substantial portfolio position in upstream oil & gas it is all in short duration / low carbon production.

regards, good luck,
dspp

dspp wrote:Investing in high carbon and/or long duration fossil producers is a very risky position.

That's why although I have a very substantial portfolio position in upstream oil & gas it is all in short duration / low carbon production.

regards, good luck,
dspp

dspp,
please can you help me interpret what duration/carbon content means. What is your perspective of BP & RDS?
I know the latter have made big investments in LNG, but I don't understand if this fits your 'low carbon' metric
tuk020