The future of electric Vehicles.

[BruceM]

The problem with the NIFE (Edison) batteries is price and performance.   The charge and discharge efficiency is quite poor relative to even wet lead, atrocious compared to AGM lead. If you try to pump too much current into them, all you do is end up lots of water loss.  They have much bigger swings of voltage than lead acid batteries for both charging and discharging.  All that would be livable, even with the very high water use that Mike reports on his 48V set, if only the price wasn't so steep. Iron Edison in the US makes them, but their smallest (100ah) cells for my 120V system would be $9500 plus freight. (vs $1000 for local wet lead with a well proven service life of 4.5 years).

I read about a tech breakthrough for improved NIFE batteries about 5-6 years ago but as usual, nothing has come of it.  According to this article in Forbes,  lithium isn't the big problem, but cobalt might be.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-future/

[mikenash]

I prefer to think of myself as a Elon Fanboy.  What an amazing person.  What an amazing life - so far.  I stopped by a Tesla showroom in a large shopping center East of Seattle.  Even the Model 3 is way big for me and the prices are closer to the land deals I still dream about.  There are more vehicles coming down the marketing road that make much more sense to me but they would not be here this or probably next decade without the Elon.

Kodak might be an illuminating lesson:

Remember when those little yellow boxes of film were everywhere and their logo was as recognisable as Coca-Cola?

But they missed the boat when digital came along.  I used to make a chunk of my living back then selling words to magazines - and words weren't worth much without pictures.  That Kodak 400 was a mainstay.  I owned a couple of Kodak's early digital efforts; but they were always a few months too late, always trying to play catchup . . .

And now they're gone.  Their billions and their grasp on the industry couldn't save them from becoming dinosaurs and ending up extinct

It would be a wonderful irony if the oil companies went the same way

And, I too applaud Mr Musk, Casey.  All visionaries are so focussed as to be flawed at best and self-imploding at worst.  It doesn't matter how he, personally, ends up; his legacy is already established IMHO

[BruceM]

Bob, Your comment hits the nail on the head, and explains why used EVs don't hold value for resale:

How many fast/slow charging cycles will the battery in a Telsa be able to handle? What will be the cost for replacements and what will this do to the resale value? Do they come with a meter so that someone buying a used Tesla can tell how long the batteries will last before they need replacement?

As I noted earlier, with present service life of the lithium batteries, using the optimistic figures provided by Tesla, the ongoing battery replacement cost per mile is greater than present US fuel prices for a gas ignition vehicle, not even including the cost of the charging.  Thus Tesla did the smart thing in selling them as luxury cars.

[ajaffa1]

Hi BruceM, you are right about charging a premium price for a luxury product. The problem is that Tesla are trying to ramp up production to make EVs mainstream. You can`t charge premium prices for a mainstream product. At the same time Ford, GM and others are also trying to get into the EV market. This competition may be good for the consumer but could be catastrophic for Tesla.

If I were Mr Musk I would be trying to corner the market on Lithium, Cobalt and Nickel production but I suspect that the big mining companies are streets ahead of him knowing that Ford, GM and etc. have very deep pockets.

Hi Glort, we come back again to the issue of storage, it`s cost, longevity and reliability. Being a bit of a hillbilly, I live on a hill. I could easily build two mega litre dams with a head of more than 150m between them. I could use solar to pump water up during the day and use hydro generation to recover the energy at night. The cost of such a system is astronomical. The pump would need to be three phase so a three phase invertor is required and so on. Way cheaper to pay the power companies.

I agree that the cheapest is to use a deep cycles forklift battery pack with a Lister/Listeroid back up generator. Especially with the availability and your knowledge of WVO. I don`t know what it would cost to buy a forklift charger but there must be a few floating about, just a case of finding them.

Bob

[BruceM]

Hydrogen would be a handy way of storing excess PV, despite the inefficiency (60% is optimistic) of electrolysis of water.  At modest pressures it can be stored in LOTS of propane tanks without embrittlement problems, but it costs a fortune in tanks since it stays a gas and energy density by volume is pathetic.  That sucks because larger capacity storage is what you'd really like or a battery would be much simpler.  There are hydride storage systems for hydrogen in the development stage but no big bucks behind that.  The hydride storage schemes I've read about would be suited to a vehicle storage (which would also be a nice size for a home); the hydride granules absorb hydrogen at low pressure and when heated, release it. 

Some serious advanced development in hydrogen storage and electrolysis efficiency would be very helpful.  I'd love to store up hydrogen gas for backup home heating, cooking and running my ammonia refrigerator with my excess PV capacity, as well as for a vehicle.  Alas, no big investments here that I can see, only very small scale, long term academic type research.  Until the hydride media or better yet a complete hydride tank with integrated heaters are available at decent prices, it's a bust.

[BruceM]

Alas, it takes a LOT of manure to make a useful amount of methane.  I did the calculations once for household septic system and found it produced a useless amount of gas. 

[buickanddeere]

Best way to store energy is to add a little carbon to the hydrogen and make natural gas/methane . Or use surplus off peak nuclear steam and natural gas in the presence of a catalyst.  Various easy to store, easy to transport and clean burning light hydro carbon fuels can be manufactured .

[dieselspanner]

If anyone wants to try a home made digester there's plenty of sheep shite up here in the Pyrenees, at the moment the local farmers are digging out the deep litter barns after the winter.

Cheers Stef

[BruceM]

Interesting videos, Glort, thanks.  500KW 24/7 from the first farm and it's recapture of the NG fired generator heat for farm and home use was impressive.  Wish they had more details on the digester and handling of municipal trash.  I wonder how the project was funded; the up front capital costs seem way beyond most north country dairy farms, though the one shown was a pretty big operation.

[mikenash]

One of the farms I work on had a system quoted for them:

They milk maybe 800 cows and their effluent pond is the size of a swimming pool

Depending on the season their power bill is maybe $10-25K a month

The system quoted would generate enough power from "digesting" their dairy effluent to run the farm all year round - or so it was claimed

Cost estimate was $NZ 1 million

Those are just rough numbers, but that was the scale of it

Cheers

[BruceM]

Very interesting, Mike. At 5% interest that system would be about 6.5 years payback just on the power offset. I guess the company selling the system probably has a financing deal as well. A win all around. 

Where I grew up dairy farmers worked damn hard and many were going under.  A decade or so later most had switched to just raising beef.  Pasteurizing (heating) all that milk would probably account for much of that power bill.

[ajaffa1]

Hydrogen production and storage has been done successfully. The trouble is that the catalyst is a precursor to a nuclear bomb and is therefore banned. The guy that built the prototype was a particle physicist and had access to a particle accelerator to make his own isotopes.

Bob

[BruceM]

What is the name of the physicist who came up with more efficient electrolysis, Bob?  I'd like to find out more about his work.  I know hydride storage has been very well lab-proven, just not yet developed commercially. 

[buickanddeere]

What is the name of the physicist who came up with more efficient electrolysis, Bob?  I'd like to find out more about his work.  I know hydride storage has been very well lab-proven, just not yet developed commercially.

    First I have ever heard of that . There is only going to be 1/6000 of the hydrogen gas being Deuterium which isn’t a big deal on it’s own. If deuterium is mixed with Tritium , this stuff goes Ka-Boom. Tritium is made from deuterium bombarded with neutrons in a PHWR reactor core .  Lithium-6-Deuteride is now used as a neutron source in the secondary instead of deuterium/Tritium mix.
   

[BruceM]

Plenty of decent DIY electrolysis setups using stainless steel screens; the only bugger is the storage.  It is a pity to not be able to use the oxygen, since as you noted, it's a hell of a fuel booster, but like you, I found Brown's gas something to be be very careful around. It's shockingly explosive.  Isolation of oxygen at the plates seems to be the preferred method, as you noted, Glort.  You need a buck converter to dial down PV voltage or your efficiency will be poor and you'll boil off your electrolyte. If you need more gas production with reasonable efficiency it must be done by adding a lot more cathode and anode area. 

I did some experimenting with hydrogen when I was considering my off grid homestead plans. You can make it quite cheaply if you have access to scrap aluminum, just add lye-water solution but be prepared to deal with the substantial heat generated. It is a fabulous co-generator of heat plus hydrogen with relatively little aluminum consumed.  It can generate gas at moderate pressure without the need for a pump if your vessel can handle it as well as the lye water.

To use it in a conventional gas burner at 10" of water pressure, you must plug up roughly 2/3 of the holes and surround the propane burner element with stainless steel wool to act as a catalyst to lower the burn temperature.  With the stainless steel wool you can see the flame as bluish. You don't want air mixed in so stock gas-air mixers must be sealed well with foil tape and silicone caulk or lighting the burner will be dangerously explosive.  It did work, but for myself I found that the higher burning temperatures caused more oxides from air gasses, and I didn't find open hydrogen burning the odorless healthy panacea I was hoping for. (I did that testing with lab grade hydrogen.)  There will be similar issues to work out with it's use in IC engines, I expect.

I did find that the modifications for burning hydrogen instead of LP or Methane were manageable, though sadly, it could not be a single burner- dual fuel setup.