So now we can put the battery in *front* of the display?

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Steve,

Make magazine ran an article on converting your own car to electricity in Vol 5. It looked doable, even to a non-electrician like myself. You can subscribe to the digital edition now and get the archives for free. http://www.makezine.com (though as I type this, something seems to be not quite right with their server).

yvan, all carbon fuels put CO2 into the atmosphere, but growing plants for biofuels takes it out again. That's how the energy is stored. Remember, plants make sugars as a food source by using the energy in sunlight to break up CO2 and recombine it, ready to be combined again with oxygen to release the energy stored in the sugar. Plant sugars are nature's battery for solar energy. Alcohol fuels (including ethanol) derived from plant sugars harnesses yeast to convert the sugar to a form human machinery can more readily use for energy-- though I still have a problem with converting sugar/food into fuel. However, plants also convert CO2 into cellulose for structural purposes, and that can also be converted to human-usable energy, either by burning, as with wood, or by fermenting to methanol. Biodiesel uses fats created by plants to store energy, which again use CO2 from the atmosphere.

The remaining problems are efficiency (do we design engines to use as much as possible of the solar energy stored in the biofuels?) and clean burn, which are related issues. Alcohol burning at perfect efficiency should produce only water vapor and CO2 - no more CO2 than was removed from the atmosphere to produce the alcohol in the first place. But incomplete/inefficient burn can result in CO (carbon monoxide, a poison), NO (nitrous oxide), O3 (ozone), and soot (carbon particulates). All of these are health hazards to most animal life.

Sorry for the lecture-- I guess I've spent too much time thinking about this lately....

No don't be sorry! I applaude your quest for info on the subjects. It is the second step that a growing consciousness must reach to attain the majority of individuals necessary to start a positive motion.

To maintain the actual vehicle park, the only fuel acceptable is Hydrogen. Unfortunately a full tank will get you only 125miles. There is also a storage problem that is not easily fixed, that of the gas permeating through its confinement. Hydrogen is one of the smallest particles and it's the toughest to keep. You lose about 3% a week in the best cases. But the most awful thing I've heard from manufacturers is that they plan to extract the hydrogen from......petroleum!!!

[yvanleterrible]

I regret having monopolized this thread so far for a subject near to me and totally 'wrongly blogged'. As a last take on this subject I would like to suggest you take further information in three places.

First, as mentioned before, rent the movie documentary "Who Killed The Electric Car" if only for the good music!
http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

Second go to the site http://www.thewatt.com/ where they have an excellent podcast on energy, where every episode is available.

And third, http://www.homepower.com/resources/links.cfm Home Power magazine where they have the best links page I know of.

Thanks for being patient with me.
Especially you NatCh!

[NatCh]

Hey, I just start 'em, after that they take a life of their own!

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

The biggest problem I see is that those fuels will for a long while be harvested with petroleum guzzling machinery. The second is that if all petrofuel was replaced now with biofuel, there wouldn't be anything left to eat in a couple of years. And third all crops dedicated to this type of fueling is drastically depleting agricultural quality of the soils they grow in.

I thought the point of switchgrass and other cellulosic fermentation crops was that they were non-food crops and don't deplete the soil as much as crops like corn? I would definitely oppose using corn to create any kind of fuel, given the environmental damage it does already. (I oppose feeding it to cattle to fatten them before slaughter, as well, but that's even further off topic than we already are. ) But as you pointed out in your second comment, IC engines running on ethanol go "out of tune" worse than petrol burning engines. (Though I wonder if that would also be true for Stirling engines?)

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

To maintain the actual vehicle park, the only fuel acceptable is Hydrogen. Unfortunately a full tank will get you only 125miles. There is also a storage problem that is not easily fixed, that of the gas permeating through its confinement. Hydrogen is one of the smallest particles and it's the toughest to keep. You lose about 3% a week in the best cases. But the most awful thing I've heard from manufacturers is that they plan to extract the hydrogen from......petroleum!!!

Now that's just plain silly... so silly that I believe you.

I remember reading a number of years ago that there was some hope of using interstitial hydrides as a relatively stable means of storing hydrogen, but I just checked and apparently the best found still only accept up to 2% of their mass in hydrogen, apparently not enough (even though hydrogen is so light).

I found a link of my own to share: http://grist.org/news/maindish/2006/12/04/montenegro/ The comments are also worth reading.

But this whole discussion about replacements for petrol is because so far it's the most portable high-density fuel source we know of. So, back to batteries. Yes, let's hope they can produce lots and lots of extremely thin film organic polymer batteries (transparent or not) and cram them into all the nooks and crannies of cars and other energy hungry devices we humans seem to depend on.

See, we're back on topic again!

[NatCh]

Yup, they want to distill the hydrogen out of natural gas, propane, etc. Which is just plain silly, as you'd probably end up with at least as much 'emission' as just burning the stuff, and lose energy in the transformation. (sigh)

I pointed this out a number of places (had charts and everything) when they started putting ethanol in the gasoline, but everyone was too caught up in Doing Something to be bothered with the piddlin' detail that the Something they were Doing was in fact counter-productive: until the reduction in emissions exceeds the decrease in efficiency, you get more pollution per mile even though it's less pollution per gallon. Last time I checked, work didn't move closer to home just 'cause it took more fuel to get there. It's the same sort of short-sightedness a lot of the more vocal (and less thoughtful) 'environmental activists' fall into.

[yvanleterrible]

Say! what's the best type of battery these days?

What are they working on in the forefront?

@neko The site you proposed is not so bad, considering the partisanry!

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Say! what's the best type of battery these days?

Ulp! Now there's a question I wouldn't presume to get within ten feet of answering. I can only say that I, myself, avoid NiCd batteries like the plague they are, and try to go with NiMh for 'standard' sizes (like AA), or LIon for 'built in' stuff -- and those are base on other folks (perceived) expertise/advice as to what's going to give the best performance and last longest before wearing out. Beyond that I claim no expertise at all.

[sea2stars]

Hrmm.. Nissan, and possibly another automaker, plan on releasing a luxury hybrid with lithium-ion batteries around the end of 2011. Although with the spate of issues inherent with the technology (production difficulties, contamination, heat) I wonder how they plan to address them; problems with laptops are one thing. Who know what issues could develop with these transparent batteries once you start to layer them, or increase their mass, etc.

Better off to stick with more natural power sources.

[yvanleterrible]

Make it rice paper with flavored oil inks and everything could be composted too.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

As it is with so many other things, the key to efficiency is combining the right technologies in the right ways. Existing vehicle engines aren't purely petroleum-based, remember, they combine IC engines with batteries, manually-manipulated pieces and electric motors for some functions (like starting the IC engine).

A future car should encompass more efficient less polluting drive engines... those should be electric. It needs to store cleaner fuel... that should be batteries, not fuel tanks. It needs to replenish that energy... there are charging stations, wide-spectrum solar cells embedded in the vehicle's body, regenerative braking, even SMALL fuel-burning engines that only run in their most efficient mode to charge the drive engine's batteries.

A combination of these technologies could make for much more efficient and cleaner-running vehicles. Much of this technology is available today, and the rest is already well under development.

[yvanleterrible]

Most frustrating part Steve is that all this has been available for 30+years!!!

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Agreed. More than once I've wished to live in southern California, where a lot of the US-based auto hacking and electric car experimentation goes on, to see whether I might someday take advantage of it.

[slayda]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Say! what's the best type of battery these days?

What are they working on in the forefront?

@neko The site you proposed is not so bad, considering the partisanry!

What ever happened to the Super Flywheel car from Popular Science, August 1970.

[yvanleterrible]

There was a nice bitty about solar on PBS' Nova yesterday. Anyone see it?
My favorite was solar paint.

[sea2stars]

Yeah. Titanium dioxide nano paint. Multi junction solar panels seem to be the most promising; smaller and allowing a wider spectrum of light to be be converted into energy versus heat.