How to "charge" an ICE?
The purpose of this thread is to come up with some interesting arguments pro or against EVs. Be as biased as you like, but you need to provide detail, e.g., "electric vehicles are wimpy" is not sufficient.
One is try and think of some ways to charge an ICE. If someone points out that your EV is slow, has limited range, ect., ask them a way they can charge up their car from a renewable source, because gas is running out. Gasoline cannot be replaced. You just can't replace the gasoline that is being used up on the planet. How do you make your ICE renewable in a sense:
Deep fry everything you eat and save the oil. Convert your car to bio desel.
Get a cow/pig/whatever to cut your lawn and convert its waste/fat to burnable fuel
Go to every McDonalds and collect their used oil
Save your sewage and use it for methane production
Eat a lot of beans and you know what :O
Use a steam engine and burn trash or wood
Become a farmer and grow about 100 acres of corn (I don't know exact #s but its a lot) and build a refinery to convert the corn to ethanol
All sounds very convenient right? I'd prefer a solar panel/wind generator that gives you electricity to charge an EV. Can you think of a way to beat that?
Another argument is that horses are a great means of transportation. So are bicycles (human power). I hope you are looking forward to it once gasoline is used up. Of course there are always EVs...
A high miles/gallon lets us extend the time we have to develop alternatives. But unless you change the fuel source it's the same problem, just happening at a slower pace, and giving longer time for denial to run its course.
I do think biofuels in general are a very good direction to take. Liquid fuels have a lot of advantages, it's easy to fill a tank, the fuel is easily transported, there's existing transport infrastructure, there's a large industry of workers who know how to sell, market, repair and recycle vehicles driven with liquid fuels.
Biofuels are a real step towards sustainability and use of renewable resources. Biofueles, while they do emit carbon into the atmosphere, that carbon is already in the ecosphere so as I understand it the overall quantity of carbon is not increasing when you burn a biofuel. When you burn a fossil fuel it increases the carbon in the ecosphere.
I do think collecting and making your own biofuel is a temporary measure until it becomes popular enough and competitive costwise that industry starts delivering. I do keep seeing announcements of new plants being constructed. But ethanol is popular in the U.S. and I think it's related to the corn subsidies and I understand that corn is one of the least efficient ways to get ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is made from a variety of "waste" biological matter and can make ethanol more efficiently than it can from corn.
- David Herron, http://davidherron.com/
I agree with you in that they are worth investigating. There are certain forms of transportation that may always require burnable fuels such as aircraft. And the military may need liquid fuels for tanks and other vehicles for a very long time to come. But the ICE is very inefficient. There is just so much energy in heat being wasted. There is a reason air cooled engines get so darn hot that they will burn you very badly if you even touch them, and most all cars need radiators with water cooling.
I don't think they can compare to the efficiency and large scale potential for wind/solar generation and storing the electricity in batteries or other means for electric vehilces. New lithium chemistries are light years ahead of existing batteries, and nano-tube ultracapacitors may revolutionize electrical energy storage.
I think biofuels may temporarily help slow down fossil fuel consumption. But we just can't make enough to replace the amount of energy we are using now. We have to do things more efficiently. I can charge an e-scooter off of 1 - 2 Meters square of solar panels that will work for over 20 yrs. I don't think bio fuels and an ICE can beat that.
I raced MX for many years and I am used to high powered two wheelers. 3 years ago my father-in-law said he was buying this X-360 electric scooter off of Ebay. I thought it was hilarious and made fun of him, which was until I rode it. That little thing was a blast and still is! I loved the torque of the little 350watt motor! I had always liked EV’s but like most people I had a misconception of them. An electric motor and an inherent advantage over and ICE engine 100% torque at stall! No ice engine not mater what, will ever produce the most torque at stall! The torque is what sold me on EV’s.
I believe that in the MX world a EV bike will have a serious advantage over a ice bike due to the torque and the range can become competitive with the new Nano cells. I am working right now to build a high performance electric dirt bike that will go head to head against an ICE bike and kick the crap out of them. I believe strongly that EV’s are the future and I am getting ready to invest a lot of money to prove it. I have not taken the leap yet but I am just about ready to, so I hope your right Andrew and the future is EV or I am going to be broke with nothing to show for it. :)
The best way I've seen to charge an ICE was with a bolt of lightning.
I had a friend on MySpace who said the main problem is we keep burning things; be it diesel, gasoline, ethanol, propane, or coal, natural gas and nuclear fuel for electricity. Either way we are left with a problem of contaminating the planet. If we could get everything to run on solar electric instead of non/semi-renewable fuels, things could be cleaned up around here. Clean air, clean water, no "dirty-bomb" threats, no rising fuel prices because of the weather...
Imagine it - the sun shines, we get electricity. The wind blows, we get electricity. The waves roll, we get electricity.
What's keeping us from doing all this? High initial solar prices and batteries. So what can we do about it?