So electric may just be a passing fad again

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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by gruntguru »

Anyone here know how to extrapolate an exponential curve?

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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by John Wallace »

That chart didn't give good enough data, so I used wikipedia.
They had one for China and USA.
Comparison_PEV_sales_US_vs_China_2011_-_2017.png

With those data points, here is 2 equations, one for US trend and other for China trend.
China is way ahead of the US.

USA: x = 21243(e^(0.3511*(y-2010)))

China: x = 2209.2*(e^(0.8065*(y-2010)))

x= next data point (amount of cars)
y= Year input
e= euler's number

Whether the trend continues who knows?

:)
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by gruntguru »

Thanks John :D .
All trends continue - until they break!
Using your formulae I get the following
Year . . . . . Sales US . . . . Sales China
2020 . . . . . 700k . . . . . . . . . 7M
2030 . . . . . 23.8M . . . . . . 2,240,000M

Safe to say the trend will break before 2030 - they won't be buy 2 trillion cars a year in China.

As for electric being a passing fad - you don't need all this analysis of the data - one glance at the graph makes it obvious this "fad" has plenty of momentum in it yet!!
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by John Wallace »

True.
China has a population of 1.5 BILLION people, compared to 300 MILLION Americans.
So just 10% electric vehicles per capita of population in China would be 150 Million vehicles here, half the US population!

:shock:
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

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ZIGGY wrote: Thu Aug 08, 2019 3:03 pm I believe Shell Oil Products U.S. says fuel cells will be the ultimate solution, but being in the fuel business they would say that, wouldn't they.
I used to work on Fuelcells including automotive applications including GM and Honda. That was 2000-2002, they were all the rage until you tried to build one that met the needs for a car then they cost in the $100-$250k range and had about $10k-$20k of platinum alone in them. It just made no sense....maybe for buses or similar but there really wasn't a path to an automotive solution.

All that work stopped around 2004 as the limits became better understood outside the research environment but I read recently they are reviving the program...I'm not sure what's changed but I've not heard of any new technology so I suspect the only change is enough people have forgotten it doesn't make sense so research $$ can be raised again :)
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by enigma57 »

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Agree 100%, Mark. All other considerations aside, I believe the issue of electric (and other alternative means of propelling our personal vehicles) should be left to market factors and the motoring public to decide.

Keep government mandates and subsidies out of it. If electric (or other propulsion sources) prove both viable and affordable, there will be a market for them.

If not...... No biggie. We are sitting on enough fossil fuel to power such things for many hundreds of years, so there is plenty of time to sort this out.

As for humankind causing 'climate change'...... That's straight up globalist politcal BS and shouldn't be a part of the discussion in my view. :wink:

Just my dos centavos,

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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

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mk e wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2019 9:40 am
ZIGGY wrote: Thu Aug 08, 2019 3:03 pm I believe Shell Oil Products U.S. says fuel cells will be the ultimate solution, but being in the fuel business they would say that, wouldn't they.
I used to work on Fuelcells including automotive applications including GM and Honda. That was 2000-2002, they were all the rage until you tried to build one that met the needs for a car then they cost in the $100-$250k range and had about $10k-$20k of platinum alone in them. It just made no sense....maybe for buses or similar but there really wasn't a path to an automotive solution.

All that work stopped around 2004 as the limits became better understood outside the research environment but I read recently they are reviving the program...I'm not sure what's changed but I've not heard of any new technology so I suspect the only change is enough people have forgotten it doesn't make sense so research $$ can be raised again :)
https://www.understandingnano.com/fuel-cells.html
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

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I'm not sure how much of that is actually new or commercially viable, the latter being what we struggled with the most. for sure platinum/palladium and nano particles where in play at that time.

To be reliable the systems got complex, which meant expensive....not an issue on a submarine or space system but a hug big deal for car or our primary focus of home and small commercial applications. Then stuff like membrane life was strongly linked to catalyst density so while we could reduce loading and achieve current density targets we couldn't achieve life targets.

Other things also came into play like CO levels near roads with heavy traffic dramatically reduced cell output....CO is a catalyst poison at normal cell operating temps. The project I worked on was a system that ran at 160C which is the magic temp that platinum begins to desorb CO. We made it work but were struggling with startup and shut down as any liquid water would damage the membrane and dramatically reduce life....and fuel cells make water, and there is also a lot of water in the air so it got complicated fast to try to take it out of the lab where purging with dry gas and capping it was easy.

There was also a dirty little secret that the systems we could build were no more fuel efficient then an IC engine spinning a generator. n paper they looked good but hydrogen doesn't come out the ground natural gas does so you need to made hydrogen. Our systems with onboard reformers (NG>H2) were about 29% efficient overall at peak operating conditions. Systems running bottled H2 were closer to 50%, but bottled H2 was made at about 70% so overall was 35% before you account for shipping the bottled H2. Not sure what you get if you ever you use solar to make the H2 but generally the electric you from the panels is about 3x the value as the chemical energy you'd have after 2 conversions.....so way better to just use the electric as electric than to make H2. A modern NG co-gen plant is usually just above 60% efficient, coal plant maybe 40-45%, diesel gen-set 35%, gasoline gen-set 25% for comparison then you lose 10-30% in the lines depending on distance....last I knew anyway.

Stuff may have changed but I'm pretty sure the fundamental issues with full cells have not been solved.
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

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mk e wrote: Fri Oct 18, 2019 3:16 am
I'm not sure how much of that is actually new or commercially viable, the latter being what we struggled with the most. for sure platinum/palladium and nano particles where in play at that time.

To be reliable the systems got complex, which meant expensive....not an issue on a submarine or space system but a hug big deal for car or our primary focus of home and small commercial applications. Then stuff like membrane life was strongly linked to catalyst density so while we could reduce loading and achieve current density targets we couldn't achieve life targets.

Other things also came into play like CO levels near roads with heavy traffic dramatically reduced cell output....CO is a catalyst poison at normal cell operating temps. The project I worked on was a system that ran at 160C which is the magic temp that platinum begins to desorb CO. We made it work but were struggling with startup and shut down as any liquid water would damage the membrane and dramatically reduce life....and fuel cells make water, and there is also a lot of water in the air so it got complicated fast to try to take it out of the lab where purging with dry gas and capping it was easy.

There was also a dirty little secret that the systems we could build were no more fuel efficient then an IC engine spinning a generator. n paper they looked good but hydrogen doesn't come out the ground natural gas does so you need to made hydrogen. Our systems with onboard reformers (NG>H2) were about 29% efficient overall at peak operating conditions. Systems running bottled H2 were closer to 50%, but bottled H2 was made at about 70% so overall was 35% before you account for shipping the bottled H2. Not sure what you get if you ever you use solar to make the H2 but generally the electric you from the panels is about 3x the value as the chemical energy you'd have after 2 conversions.....so way better to just use the electric as electric than to make H2. A modern NG co-gen plant is usually just above 60% efficient, coal plant maybe 40-45%, diesel gen-set 35%, gasoline gen-set 25% for comparison then you lose 10-30% in the lines depending on distance....last I knew anyway.

Stuff may have changed but I'm pretty sure the fundamental issues with full cells have not been solved.
Yes, I see there is a large literature on the problems you mention which are conveniently left unaddressed in the link that I previously provided. The glass is half-full, I suppose. :wink:

https://www.plugpower.com/products/progen/ But the principals are still hoping to crack the passenger vehicle market.
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by Rick! »

If you don't try to extract hydrogen on the vehicle, it's probably easier to make it marketable. Pretty sure a Class 8 tractor could be feasible at that point.

https://nikolamotor.com/hydrogen
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by gruntguru »

enigma57 wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2019 9:39 pmAgree 100%, Mark. All other considerations aside, I believe the issue of electric (and other alternative means of propelling our personal vehicles) should be left to market factors and the motoring public to decide.

Keep government mandates and subsidies out of it. If electric (or other propulsion sources) prove both viable and affordable, there will be a market for them.
Good idea. Lets can all the mandates and subsidies . . . . and start taxing fossil fuels in a way that reflects their true cost to society.

If not...... No biggie. We are sitting on enough fossil fuel to power such things for many hundreds of years, so there is plenty of time to sort this out.

As for humankind causing 'climate change'...... That's straight up globalist politcal BS and shouldn't be a part of the discussion in my view. :wink:
Absolutely. Political and fiscal convenience are not part of the scientific method. We should all just accept the weight of scientific evidence (currently sitting at 95% probability that humans are causing climate change) and offer only opinions that are evidence based.

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by enigma57 »

Not here to change anyone's opinions. Simply stating what I know to be true. If you choose to believe that humankind are causing 'climate change'...... Go for it. :D

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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by mk e »

I'm pretty sure if you feel the need to say "I know it to be true" then the post belong in P&R.

For sure oil and gas production and distribution are heavily subsidized which distorts there costs. Same for electric generation and distribution.

Years ago I did a womb to tomb cost analysis on a then pretty new prius and it produced about 50% more carbon emissions than a a conventional car of similar size. The very simple way to get a good idea for what it will shake out is just look at the price or weight and you'll know how much energy went into producing it, on commodity type goods. With luxury good like say a Rolls Royce there is a lot of labor....which is also energy to provide for the workers but the product weight in no longer telling of energy consumed, just the price.So a Prius say is very good at moving pollution from a US city to a poor Country but the price to more total global pollution.

Its really very much the same with electric cars energy consumption and pollution wise. Right now electric cars do not pay road use tax which is collected at fuel pumps and many place have other tax breaks to make them more affordable. I'd have to go back through all the numbers to be certain, but I'm more than a little suspicious that they don't actually reduce anything....just a guess though I certainly don't know it to be true ;)
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Re: So electric may just be a passing fad again

Post by BILL-C »

I'm wondering if the recent large scale power outages and predicted future outages in california will have any effect on the EV market.
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