JUL 17

Thanks for posting the reference to the EEStor article. As said there, either it works or it won't and eventually we'll find out. At least it doesn't violate physics or rely on some new state of matter like some other companies touting technology. Even if it works only half as good as claimed it will be a big advance. Also interesting was the specs were set to compare with a Tesla battery. But as we see from the set of CIGS solar companies expected to be in production now, there is a difference from even prototype manufacturing and mass production, let alone a lab experiment.

It wold be absolutely great if this tech comes to life in the years to come, also if other techs can do the same or better. It will be possible to actually make electric cars a good and sound alternative to the stinking and poluting cars we have today.
But, where are we going to get the electricity ( power ) to actually charge these cars from?
If my calculation is anywhere near right, we would need thousands of new powerplants, millions of windmills, and half the globe covered in solar pv cells if we where to charge the carfleet of today in a few minutes. Of course not all cars need charging at the same time, but are we going to have timeslots for carowners to keep the grid alive or what?
This EEstor thingy needs 52Kwh in 2-3 minutes, (or app the same as a household use in a week ) multiply that with the billion cars running today, and it very fast comes very clear that the grid we have now will never be able to charge that, even if you spread out the charging evenly over time.
So what do we do?

We will need thousands of new wind turbines, lots of solar panels, fields of mirrors feeding sunlight to thermal solar turbines, etc. But we won't need to cover half the globe.

In fact, we will need to use a very small amount of the globe. Possibly less than we now screw up with our fossil fuel extraction. (If we include existing roof top area.)

As for powering electric cars right now, a study by Oak Ridge Labs found that if we suddenly converted *all* our ICE cars to electric we could charge about 85% of them from existing electricity sources.

We have lots and lots of extra production at night. We build power plants to service peak hour needs.

The 'smart grid' will take care of charging issues. People who need to charge *right now* probably will pay a premium to do so. Everyone else will plug in at work/home and buy power at the lowest available price as the supply/demand ratio shifts throughout the day/night.

In fact, some people will likely charge up using very cheap power (say 2am) and then sell some of that power back to the grid when demand is high (say 8am when things are cooking but the sun is producing).

I would not get overly excited about EESTOR just yet. As the referenced article explains, there are several well-known technological obstacles in going from promising lab results to real-world, practical use. The fact that EEStor has not explained how they will eventually overcome these problems fills me with doubt. Their technology is great but nothing radically new to the industry, so if it really was this simple I think this approach would have already been done.

Don't mistake my feelings, I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.

EEStore has been a very secretive company. It's really hard to figure out whether they are for real or vaporware.

If they are real then their product will be "radically new" and a total game changer.

(Perhaps there's something equally good in the pipeline, but that isn't apparent at the moment.)

Ultra capacitors are capable of very rapid charging.

Think about highway charging stations which use very large banks of ultra capacitors and great big wires to feed a recharge to your vehicle when you're on a long trip.

Ultra capacitors will tolerate thousands of charge/recharge cycles.

Think buying one set of ultras for the rest of your life. Just buy a new car when the old one wears out and move the caps over.

Remember one of the problems with current battery technology is the somewhat short life of batteries and the cost of replacements.

I sure want a set for my off the grid life. I'd like to never have to service or replace my batteries.

This technology, like hydrogen fuel cell, while exciting, is many years off. Even once it gets to the production stage, we will need all kinds of infrastructure on both ends, to use it. Once the production issues are solved, and the infrastructure tackled, then think about the lobbies that will fight changing to a new, cleaner, safer, better technology. Sound familiar?

If EEStor's ultracapacitors or some comparable method of energy storage becomes available I really don't think power is going to be a problem. What people never seem to consider is the impact of such a technology on HOME power usage.

Think of it as an 'uninterruptable power supply' for the whole house. You install an EEStor unit and it charges up when power plants are generating more power than is being used. Then when power demand is higher than plants are generating instead of a blackout or brownout you draw power from the storage in your house.

So, for a few hundred dollars you've got something that can run everything in your house for several days. You can buy all of your power at night time 'off peak' rates. And you never have a blackout unless it goes on for a week or more.

If almost everyone installs such devices then the ~30% of power which is currently 'wasted' because it is generated at times nobody is using it suddenly becomes useful for charging these. The intermittency of wind and solar power becomes irrelevant because they have charged up these local batteries to cover the times when they aren't producing power. Et cetera.

So, if EEStor is real it will lead to more electric cars and greater electricity requirements... but the same technology will also greatly increase the amount of usable electricity available from EXISTING power plants AND make solar and wind power much more viable.

Okay, I am aware of the studies made around how much power we have in surplus at night and all that.
But still, lets look at the numbers.
First of all, if we convert a substantial part of our fleet of cars, busses, trucks and so on to electric, there will be no cheap nighttime power, and we still need the amount of power we use today for households, shops, offices's and industry.
The grid we have now is built to make sure we do not run out of power for the ordinary use, but we are talking about moving millions of cars from fossile fuel to electric, so the grid will have to be expanded many times over before we can move that amount of power.
Lets take an example :
Lets say we have a gasstation outside london, near a freeway going north, lets for example say it has 200.000 cars fueling a day, lets then say each car needs 52kwh to recharge fully in 2-3 minutes, that gives us a power need of 10400 Mwh, or 10,4 Gwh ON TOP OF THE NORMAL USE OF POWER in that area. Lets for the fun of it say we have 20 million cars in GB, that is a daily need ( if we charge every car once each day ) of 1040 Gwh ON TOP OF THE NORMAL NEEDS NOW.
So again I ask, where is this power going to come from, because we need a LOT more windmills, than the proposed sea parks at the moment, If I remember correctly they will only provide 2 - 10 Gwh, if the wind is blowing enough.
Next issue is how do we move this amount of power around, the wires we have today is far from able to move this around.
What I want to say is, we need to plan this, now, or live with brownouts and breakdowns in the years to come, when the electric cars hit mainstream sales.
I am not saying it is impossible in any way, I am simply stating that we need to plan for this, ahead, and not in a frenzy when things start to go wrong.
Lets make a simple calculation to round it off with : every single person in GB uses around 5Kwh a day now, add in an electric car for each person, and that number goes to app. 55Kwh pr person, that is to multiply by 11, I do not believe the grid is built for that. Do you?

Looks like something that will take off

Tom - Good comments/Good questions...

Let me approach the issue in a slightly different way.

US drivers average 12,000 miles per year or a bit under 33 miles per day.

Current electric cars use between 0.21 and 0.31 kWh per miles. Let's use the plug-in conversion Prius which uses 0.26 rather than the Tesla which uses 0.21 as a more "practical" transportation solution. On average the Plug-in Prius driver is going to require about 9 kWh per day.

If I add in the 5 kWh per day for non-transportation usage that you give I get nowhere close to 55 kWh.

Now, even if my numbers are closer to 'what will be' is our grid up to the job?

Probably not, but maybe.

We'd have to look at the amount of power various grids can supply during maximum peak and then spread that 9 kWh over all the off peak hours and see if the grid is strained. If there are, just for argument, 9 off-peak hours then we would be adding only one extra kWh per person, which must be less than the current peak/off-peak difference.

This has all been done before, ad nausium. See the NY ISO study at http://www.nyiso.com/public/we...062909.pdf to find a few details.

They estimate a PHEV (basically a battery powered car with shortened range that charges each day) to use 9.9 kWh/day and that with 74% of them charging during off-peak times (pg. 10 para 1), the increased load on the grid would be 2% higher (pg. 9, para 5). Among many other tidbits of info, they also say, "The increases in electric load predicted in the ORNL and EPRI/NRDC studies are well within the range of variability usually provided for in the NYISO planning process." (Pg. 10, para 6)

Installing a really smart grid (with instantly variable prices) would result in the biggest savings, though. This empowers not only the customer to save but the appliance companies and car charging companies to create very intelligent price prediction algorithms for timing their power use for the most profit. After all, if you sync the grid's instant load with it's cost, people will find a way to profit from that.

To be even more accurate, however, we really should be looking at this from a global viewpoint. How would the transportation needs change if we didn't have to truck oil and gasoline around each day? What if we implimented some truly smart transportation system like www.skytran.net which gets about 200 mpg equivalent and could avoid most of our "round trips"? What about the battery cars lasting multiple times as long? How about less oil changes? Less car maintenance? Less trips to the filling station because we're charging these cars mostly at home?

The time for debate is long gone. It's time we got this on the fast track.

New forms of mass transportation, they certainly have their place.

But lots of us won't be served by mass transportation. Ever.

Additionally, give us cars that use 9kWh per day at $0.10 or less per kWh, that's less expensive to maintain, and there will be less incentive to travel in groups.

Think less than $20 per month to fuel the average American driver's car.

Public transportation in large cities is great. I spend part of each year in Bangkok and I much prefer to hop on the SkyTrain or the newly installed subway, blast past the traffic jams, and not worry about parking.

But away from large densely populated cities the freedom of personal transportation is going to be a strong pull. Look at how many people choose to drive while paying about $200 per month at $3 per gallon.

Bob,
It appears you're missing the whole point of the Skytran (not skytrain) system. It's a personal transit system that connects your local 1-2 block area with most of the places you'd want to visit. In other words, it covers the long distance AND the last mile. It also connects to other cities via high speed link. The point being that it is designed for the single/double passenger traffic that is so wasteful today. There are no stops between start and destination so it's faster than any other form of travel between about 7 miles and 350 miles. It's private, autonomous, clean, efficient and 1/10th the cost of light rails and 1/19th the cost of high speed trains. You can send products, kids, the elderly and your drunk brother home in one for about a nickle per mile, even in a different town. You could hop in one and get transported INSIDE the lobby of your work or department store.

The biggest benefit is the cost. Since each car only holds about 500-800 lbs, the maglev rail it rides on is small enough to be placed on regular steel telephone poles. The only thing that needs a ground footprint is the steps leading up to a landing every block or so. The reduced load on our roads would cut that cost in half and more than pay for this sytem. And with each rail carrying the same capacity as a 3-lane highway, we won't even need as many lanes of foot thick concrete running for miles all across the country.

A system like this that's interconnected to other cities at 150 mph is about the only thing that's going to put a dent in our interstate air travel.

To show how this is the only real choice we have for the long term, for simply cutting a majority of our oil dependency, try comparing costs. At 9 kWh/day and $0.10/kWh, for 30 days, that totals $0.027 per mile. That's roughly half of the Skytran system, but that doesn't include the hidden costs of cars. Payments, interest, storage, parking, maintenance, insurance, accidents, licenses, tags, tickets, driving record and a whole host of time related expenses like stoplights and traffic are all personal expenses we overlook. The one I like is trading frustration for private nap/surf time during my commute. A frequently overlooked one is the endless round trips of delivery vehicles that would be unnecessary if you could send each package/pallet on it's own direct route. Road budgets, paving over our landscape, road work pollution, urban heat and many others are examples of societal expenses we overlook as well. When it's all said and done, any vehicle's cost is around $0.50/mile.

Coupling this system with actual electric vehicles could practically eliminate our transportation oil use.

Todd, I know what Skytran is. And it's a wonderful idea for urban dwellers. But lots of us don't live urban.

Let's look at my "1-2 block area"....

I start with a 4.5 mile drive down an unpaved road until I get to a narrow, windy two lane paved road. 33.2 miles of some of the most beautiful driving in the world on that "highway" brings me to what you would recognize as a highway. A road with enough traffic that someday it might be part of a Skytran system.

You think they'll build Skytran to my house?

Heck, they won't even run a telephone line to my house.

Then, do people really want to ride Skytran rather than drive their own personal vehicle? Other than routine back and forth, home to workplace, I'll bet not.

When I get in my car the radio presets are tuned to my stations, my cloth grocery sacks are behind the seat, there's a bag with some spare clothes and a jacket, just in case, and if I see something interesting along the way I can turn or pull over....

When I get to the burbs where friends live I don't have to figure out how to get from the Skytran to their house. While carrying several containers of stuff for the potluck dinner or the firewood that I am gifting them.

And then let's take it past me.

I'm willing to bet that in the back of most people's minds lingers the thought that any day now they're going to sling a bag into the back of their car and take off on a road trip to someplace great. They may never take that trip, probably 9 out of 10 cruising sailboats never leave the dock for any significant period of time, but they value the dream.

People now pay for and drive personal cars when they could use public transportation. Making the public transportation more private might help move some out of their cars, but lots are likely to keep on driving. IMO.

Personal cars are likely to get less expensive. Electric motors are considerably less expensive than complex ICEs. And electric motors most likely will outlast the car bodies (at least the style). Motors and ultra capacitors (if we get them) might well move to your brand new shell(s).

Fifty cents per mile won't hold. Fuel cost will drop by 75% or more. Maintenance/repair costs will tumble. As we add more 'smarts' to our cars with things such as collision avoidance radar insurance costs will drop.

The Skytran would be a major infrastructure build-out. Simple though it is, it still will take a lot of site engineering, permits, fights with disgruntled people. Electric cars work just fine with the infrastructure that is in place right now.

(Sure, for those who don't have a garage with an electrical outlet, we'll need some additional hardware. Think parking meters with plugs on their side and enough RDIF smarts to talk with your car.)

Skytran, the basic idea, sounds great for lots of our transportation needs. I can see it working really well as a less expensive adjunct to bullet trains.

California is in the process of setting up rapid rail to connect SF/Sacramento to LA/San Diego. There will never be enough customers to pay for an extension to those of us here on the North Coast or people living in small town Sierras. I can see something like this system feeding us to larger, faster rail. I'm ready to quit flying (except across oceans).

I don't think there is any one correct answer. Solving our climate/energy problem will take a death of a thousand cuts. But I am betting that EVs deliver the first major transportation cut and other modes of transport will play secondary roles.

"Fifty cents per mile won't hold. Fuel cost will drop by 75% or more. Maintenance/repair costs will tumble. As we add more 'smarts' to our cars with things such as collision avoidance radar insurance costs will drop."

I seriously doubt that. Dropping fuel by 75% when it's only 6% of the total cost will only drop the cost by 5%. Maintenance costs will drop to be sure, but insurance costs will skyrocket. The 'average' car that's not decked out with the latest OnStar equipment, which translates to the majority of people, will be required to carry the extra insurance load. That's far from fair to them. Medical liability alone will rise much faster than inflation. One only needs to look at the world to see that.

But we're not talking about the isolated individual or taking the sporadic trip here or there.

"Other than routine back and forth, home to workplace..."

We're talking about displacing the massive percentage of commuting and spontaneous errand trips that are wasting energy, time and money. I understand the living out in the boon-docks lifestyle choice because it's my choice as well. But that doesn't mean this can't be cost effective for even small towns. The cost of this system per passenger mile is 1/10th that of running busses, and even less than maintaining a local residential street. It also has an attraction factor in that more people will use this than taking their cars or a bus for many trips. This means it can turn a budget tight small town street department into a profit potential. One estimate by the maker touted that installing it was faster and cheaper than installing a fully permitted bike path when all was said and done.

I do agree with your EV comments and I'm in full support of them. I just see them as the 'enjoyment' and utility mode of transportation.

Oh, and "favorite radio station"...? The media center that comes with these vehicles can remember your chatting login (from your card) if you choose. I would think radio stations would be fairly passe compared to that.

"insurance costs will skyrocket"

You offer no argument why this should happen. I stated that collision avoidance radar will drastically decrease the frequency of accidents, which obviously will bring down premiums.

Collision avoidance radar is real, it's already being installed in some up market vehicles, and it's cheap.

"Oh, and "favorite radio station"...? The media center that comes with these vehicles can remember your chatting login...."

I suspect you understand the broad meaning of my argument. Ones personal car is personal. It holds the stuff that each individual wants to haul around. Shared pods are not going to do that.

And personal pods are not going to be door to door transportation. That's going to make them far less than popular once gets away from the track.

Personal pods seem to be a good bus substitute. They give you privacy, take you above the traffic thus moving you faster, give you more options than the typical bus route, and don't force you onto route schedules.

But they are as impersonal and non-customizing as motel rooms.

Thanks Bob Wallace,
Yes, those numbers look much better than the ones I came up with, and I have been looking around the net for more information and it seems the US uses more like 15Kwh pr person for normal comsumption, so spreading the extra 9Kwh out over off peak times will be a lot easier than I thought, and the grid will probably be up to the job with few or minor expansions.
The picture in europe still looks grim though, as the average eu citizen uses around the 5Kwh pr day, and adding 9 Kwh on top of that is still multiply by app 3.
So EU is going to need planning and expansion of the grid and production of the power needed to get ready for the new way of fueling cars. I will start writing to the politicians to see if any of them will at least start the talk about this )

Bob,

You make very well rationed arguments. I still maintain, however, that the day-in, day-out, hum-drum commuting will easily switch over to a mass transit system if it is cheaper, faster, safer, just as convenient (overall) and frees the passenger from the task of actually driving it. If one had the choice to trade the normal commute adventure (been there, hated that!) for one where you stroll to your corner, climb a few steps, swipe a card, hop in, select a destination, pop open the o'le laptop for 22 min (33 mile average trip), and end up in the second story lobby of the high-rise building you work in (or your company's loading dock as applicable), I would think they'd go for it a majority of the time. After all, that's what we're going for - "most of the time".

Regarding insurance: I fully understand that technology will make some cars safer, but that will not decrease the insurance rates the average car owner will pay by much. Those companies have a monopoly (actually an oligopoly) and will get their money either way. The safer the top 33% of cars are, the more the insurance 'risk' from the legacy cars. So who pays for that premium? You and most people would say the legacy owners, but then there's liability, uninsured driver, etc. Those companies have had hundreds of 'safety' advancements to save money, starting with the seatbelt, and they've only found ways to up the price. Why does it cost more to insure a new "safe" Cadillac than a 1960 Chevy? I would think it your responsibility to prove that insurance rates will break their long tradition of raising rates.

Personalization: I'll give you all points on this when considering things like having your golf clubs always available or that emergency umbrella. I'm just trying to show that we really only need about 4 forms of transportation. We need some cargo/shipment. Some high-speed, long distance personal travel, some form of highly personalized but less used entertainment travel and then there's the bulk of commuting left over. If one region, like a college campus or similar apartment complex has only commuting style members, they could save quite a penny by only installing bike paths and overhead mag-rails. Then the occasional delivery truck could use the bike path if that did become viable. If so, this would be a situation where you would get door-to-door service.

One guy I was discussing this with did a little figuring on it and determined that if this system was installed in NYC, he could eliminate 84% of the driving, over 60% of the cars, the entire subway and 91% of the transportation fuel that they currently have. He also calculated that people would get to their destination in 70% of the time they do now. He also said that it would be higher for DFW/Houston, LA, Orlando and almost as good in Chicago.

Just think of what could be done if we coupled that with rentable 40-mile-range electric cars and electric delivery vehicles around town? For a system that could be placed in harmony with the existing sidewalks, faster than a fleet of busses could be purchased and for less money, I just don't see the point of waiting.

In your article about EEStor you mention the name of JoulesBurn. Who is JoulesBurn?

Converting cars to electric (which I am in favor of) will greatly increase the grid load - despite any calculations shown above which have various flaws.

The idea of storing power at low night time rates and selling it to the power at high peak rates is silly! Do you think the power companies aren't on to that?

The skytran is a neat toy and nothing more. Makes greens get all wet but that is the best feature I suppose. Larger modules between fixed points (as exists today in urban transport) of course is useful.

I really love the talk about pumped water storage - the same crowd will whine and cry about destruction of habitat if anyone tries to implement it. Also, in North Europe? Try a little farther South to get the terrain - North Europe is rather flat.

Wow, what brilliant discussions on local and global energy use.

russ- presently the US wastes alot of power due to low demand at nite-no one seems to dispute that (except you?)
As for the power companies buying back power- why not? If they can make a buck at it they will. Especially when its the cheaper alternative to expansion. Granted as more and more people charge at nite- the cost difference will close,but in the end the power companies are selling something they were previously discarding(sounds profitable to me)
You have to remember that any switch to electric cars/smart grid isnt happening overnite- it will take decades before it represents the majority of vehicles. Its taken 10 years for hybrids (a much smaller step) to gain acceptance,full-on EV's will most likely take longer.

"It appears you're missing the whole point of the Skytran (not skytrain) system."

Skytrain is part of the public transit system in Bangkok. Skytran is a concept for a transit system that hasn't been implemented anywhere.

I don't think it will be in a large-scale either. It sounds great on paper, but real world implementation is another story.

The infrastructure would need to be built. Massive numbers of "pod cars" manufactured. Maintenance of the lines and pods. Huge demand for available pods at peak travel times in urban areas...

It's a long way off for the SkyTran to implemented on a large scale anywhere, if ever. Probably more suitable for a Disney World kind of application...

I have read your article, I think very popular with this article.

Everything, so far, that has been written about the electrical grid, and the overload to it that might take place by a technological shift to electric driven vehicles, seems to overlook one possibility. And that is the influence of electric utilities, and what they will demand of the political power structure so that they can continue to meet electrical power demands.

An example, in another area, is what is being done in drought area by driving up the cost of water usage based on a formula, meaning that if base water usage is exceeded, the consumer can expect dramatically higher water bills.

Given today's intrusive liberal governmental regulations it is not out of the realm of possibilities that those who buy electric vehicles will be required to also install their own electric generating capabilities, whether that be solar, wind, biofuels, etc., in order to lessen grid load. You can expect that liberal government policies will require that proof of such generating capabilities will need to be submitted in combination with electric vehicle registration in order to be “street legal”.

This is a deplorable, but likely expectation, since it will delay the move to an electrically driven transportation economy. It also will delay indefinitely a return to economic prosperity, which currently is showing NO signs of improvement, despite mainstream media claims to the contrary.

If the government were to keep its hands off, this market segment would thrive and surge based on its own merits.