what if petrol hits 2 dollars, page-49

PJ77,

re: your estimates of electric car power use:

Note that though your big V6 may have the capacity to generate 140KW of power at 6000RPM at full throttle, an amount of power that would see your holden cruising at 300Km/h IF it could stay on the road, if the high gear was high enough, and if the engine and transmission could take it without overheating, while using around 50mL of petrol PER SECOND (3L per minute), or emptying the whole tank in about just 20 minutes (about 100KM - economy falls off at about the square of speed).

In reality your are using only 10% of that power when cruising at 100Km/h on the freeway, and a mere 3% (4KW) when cruising at 60Km/h.

Electric cars operate at about four times the efficiency of an internal combustion engine and storage and transmission costs of electricity lose about 15%, So an electric car is about 3.5 times the efficiency of petrol. Coal-fired generation is about 80% efficient (they take the Carnot cycle to close to it's theoretical efficiency limit in modern power stations).

Thus from HC energy to electric car power at the wheels you get about 2.8 times the energy efficiency with an electric car, and in addition the motor is used for braking in current vehicles (inc the prius), generating power to be used when taking off again, making the overall figure about 3 times, and coal is about 30% of the cost of crude oil, or about 10% of the pump price cost of Petrol an energy equivalent basis (much of the drop between oil and petrol due to refining cost and huge taxes). Allowing for Coal plant generation costs and distribution electricity is still 20% of the pump price of petrol.

So you have energy costing about 5 times less being used in a vehicle that is about 2-3 times more efficient - giving a real energy cost of an electric car of over 10 times.

If the average motorist consumes about $70/week in petrol at the moment then they would use about $7 to power their car with electricity - these are about the levels that have been published. It is estimated that the average family driving in total 30000KM per year will add about 30% to current electricity usage (I suggest you google this to prove it to yourself - figures are easy to find on the net with a bit of reading). See the ARU thread a few months back when I spent a few days researching all this and posted much of it with some links.

Basically the entire country could go to electric transport tomorrow with little impact on the need for power infrastructure as domestic use accounts for about 40% of all power usage - so 30% on that adds a massive 12% - that would certainly cripple the grid - NOT. The long-term impact would be much less as solar cells are getting dramatically cheaper and estimated cost to install a bank of cells and storage batteries to maintain the energy needs of one car (about 7kW per day) is only a few thousand dollars - and when the car is not being used much this power can be fed back into the grid and pay back the owner about $10 per week.

I think that once the technology for fast-charging at "electric pumps" and good battery storage is perfected in the next couple of years that the change-over of the majority of new vehicle production first to plug-in hybrids (petrol motor for longer trips beyond battery range) - and then to fully electric vehicles will come over a few short years, likely getting massive stimulus in the next few years as petrol rises to crazy prices. I have already decided that my next vehicle will be an electric one in about 2011, as and petrol vehicle bought around that time will be difficult to sell in another few years time - who wants to pay 35c/Km in Petrol when they can pay 1-2c/Km to drive there electric car, or much less with their own solar collector.

Oil has about 7-10 years to run before prices drop dramatically due to the rapid replacement of petrol with gas, hybrid, and electric cars starting within the next few years - seems hard to imagine at the moment as most of you will think of electric cars as the geek-mobiles they were a few years ago - the next generation will be only distinguishable from current petrol cars (including luxury and sports cars) by the lack of exhaust pipes, fumes, and high running costs. In term of performance - the latest sports concept electric car (can't remember who made it - not a current manufacturer of petrol cars) goes from 0 to 100Km/h in just over three seconds - beating most current $300K elite sports cars!