Re: Electric vehicles, was Re: hey

Catja Pafort wrote:
Sea Wasp wrote:


Well, the generation of power through fossil fuels like gas in a good
combined-cycle plant can hit around 60% efficiency. Transmission losses are roughly 7%. If the batteries you use to store the energy are lithium, you could get 99% efficiency in energy storage and extraction; with a good brushless motor at 90% efficiency, this gives
you 100%*.6*.93*.99*.9 = almost 50% (49.7%) efficiency at the motor end. If the batteries are NMH or something similar, you have an efficiency of only 66% for the battery and thus an at-the-motor efficiency of 33%.

20% overall is a good figure for typical IC engines today, so on that
front I think it's clear that the electric power wins out.

There are a lot of other issues, of course.



But if we're going into full accounting,

We're not. Or I'd have had to use the SAME "wastage" issues for batteries, since the electric power would have to include the same stuff. Electricity is mostly generated by fossil fuels -- currently, coal for over 50% -- so I'd need the mining overhead, etc.

I figure that mostly balances out for both IC and electric; when you get that far from the primary energy source it's going to get fuzzy.


As I said, there's a lot of other issues. I left out the really big one for electric, which is the expense, energy cost, and environmental cost of the batteries themselves.


--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com

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