Tesla Model S Electric Car


I really cannot wait for Tesla to announce their third generation mass production model in 2015... Nickname is the blue-star.

also, by then.. hopefully we will have the supercap batteries :D
 
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IIRC they dont... atleast not in the same way as batteries do... like there is ions in a liquid to allow the liquid to conduct electricity, but AFAIK that is it.
 
Hydrogen and Natural gas are also clean burning alternatives. Like with electric, there is no current path for market forces to provide a refueling network.


If and when gasoline gets significantly more expensive, then there will be sufficient profit opportunities to provide private investors with the incentive to develop refueling networks.


Some people seem to think this won't happen soon enough and are pushing for government intervention to push past the infrastructure hurdle, but such political processes are bad at choosing the most cost-effective solutions.
 
^

Don't forget that people can recharge an EV at home which is a benefit they have over pretty much ever other alternative fuel source.  Most people who own EVs never even visit a charge station.

Secondly, since electricity is provided everywhere already, adding charge stations to different spots (doesn't have to be fuel stations) is the cheapest option to install over all the other fuelling alternatives - especially NG which is very expensive to implement
 
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Most people who own EVs never even visit a charge station.
And it is easy to see why. There is no way to do a quick fill up. You would need swappable batteries.
Why would you fill anywhere else than the most convenient place ie your home.  No queue etc that you get at a petrol station , just convenience

The only reason you would charge a Model S anywhere other than your home, would be if you were going on a long trip. Then it would take 1 hr at a supercharger. Having traveled 300 miles to deplete the battery , a 1 hr stop would have been on the cards anyway.
 
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Hydrogen and Natural gas are also clean burning alternatives.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooope. Nope to clean. and nope to alternatives.
 
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Hydrogen and Natural gas are also clean burning alternatives.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooope. Nope to clean. and nope to alternatives.
If your school offers debate as an extracurricular activity, you should take it up.
Hydrogen buns in oxygen to produce steam (harmless)

Methane burns in oxygen to give steam and carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas)

Hydrogen can be produced by electrolysing water.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel.

I can't really see natural gas as 'eco'.
 
And it isn't, very recent studies have shown that it also produces cancer inducing particles. Guessing that is LNG burnt crudely.

Hydrogen is an alternative just as much as alcohol isnt, sadly. But they are both technically clean sources of power.
 
The nice thing about hydrogen and electric is you can produce as much as you want using next gen nuclear tech that doesn't produce long lived waste. "David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, recently said British (waste) plutonium contains enough energy to run the country's electricity grid for 500 years."


Fast reactors have huge benefits...


* Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia


* 100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel


* The ability to consume existing nuclear waste in the production of electricity


* Improved operating safety


Some of these new reactor designs can also produce hydrogen without hydrolysis. Hello hydrogen trucking.


Our energy future is as exciting and clean as we want it to be.
 
My car runs on methane - that is, natural gas or what here in Sweden is called Biogas. The biogas is manufactured by letting garbage putrify, more or less. This is good in several ways: The methane is in itself a very powerful greenhouse gas, and with a "normal" garbage dump, it would just leak into the atmosphere. Now, it is collected and used for energy, and while it does burn into CO2, it is a lot less than the equivalent for the methane itself. So the biogas is more or less climate emission negative (the net effect is less of an effect on the climate than if it hadn't been used). Burning natural gas in the engine is only slightly better than using ordinary gasoline/petroleum/whatever it is called in english (Here, it is "Bensin").

We don't do the liquefied thing (LNG), though. The refill network here in Sweden (and parts of the rest of at least northwestern europe) uses high pressure compression instead.  Apparentlym it sometimes confuses people who drive on LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas, I think), who try to cobble together adapters to refill their cars from the CNG pumps. That is usually a bad idea. The LPG is stored in a tank under 20 atmospheres pressure. The CNG is compressed to about 230-240 atmospheres. There has been a few incidents of people actually managing to connect a LPG car to a CNG pump. That is usually followed by a big bang, a rain of metal, and the slight job of collecting the car in parts from around the nearest block or so...
 
Hydrogen and Natural gas are also clean burning alternatives.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooope. Nope to clean. and nope to alternatives.
If your school offers debate as an extracurricular activity, you should take it up.
Hydrogen buns in oxygen to produce steam (harmless)

Methane burns in oxygen to give steam and carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas)

Hydrogen can be produced by electrolysing water.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel.

I can't really see natural gas as 'eco'.
Something about hydrogen. It takes more electrical power to do the electrolysis of water than what you get from burning the hydrogen. Ironically enough, the most economical way we currently have of producing hydrogen is to make it from natural gas.
 
Of course it does. Otherwise, it'd be a perpetuum mobile :)  

The thing with hydrogen (as with a lot of other things) is that it lets us convert electricity into a form of energy that can be stored, transported and refilled. Of course you get energy losses in the process :)
 
But hydrogen is relatively hard (high pressure tanks needed) to store with high energy density (but yes can do better than batteries...). And batteries have less losses in the full process (compare: split water, transport H2, compress H2 into tank, turn H2 back into electricity with a fuel cell... to just running the electricity along the cables to the charger and charging the battery in the car). Lots of people in the industry want to have hydrogen systems because then the current transport & delivery system would have something to do. Compared to people mostly just charging their cars at home overnight like we do with our phones. (One could split water and compress hydrogen at home, but it sounds a bit... not for everyone :p )
 
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There are actually two hydrogen cars running in the nearby city, and a refueling station across the bridge in Copenhagen :)
 
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