[ExI] gas prices

Wed Mar 30 01:41:25 UTC 2022

> On Behalf Of Henry Rivera via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] gas prices

Your ideas in this area, Spike, remind me of this image which was circulating around Facebook:

Hi Henry, OK that is obviously not going to charge the battery.

…

>…Pic below of a fossil fuel-powered generator. 110v plugs at maybe 12 amps take forever to charge my Tesla battery relatively speaking: around 3 miles gained for every hour of charging vs about 220 mi/hr at a Supercharger. A 220v diesel generator at 30 amps would give me about 18 mi/hr I think. 

-Henry

When I ran the numbers on this, I was getting similar results.  If someone drove around town with one of these running full blast, the battery would still discharge but at a slightly lower rate perhaps.  If one ran on the freeway with this rig running, the difference in discharge rate would scarcely be noticeable.  It would run down nearly as quickly with or without the generator back there.

People don’t really need to rig up something like this.  Get someone who knows how to do the calculations beforehand, make sure you know what you will get if you go to the effort to build it.

There was a former colleague who was a car hobbyist back in the 90s.  He built an all-electric using a bunch of lead acid golf cart deep cycle batteries.  He started with an old quarter ton pickup with a used-up engine, replaced it with an electric motor which he interfaced to a standard transmission (itself quite a trick (but he did it.))  He had a 5 MW generator back there which he would run during the day in the parking lot.

In those days, the number of employees had dropped dramatically, so he parked it way out in the back corner of the lot where the racket wouldn’t bother anyone.  He drove it down from Santa Cruz with the generator off, started the generator when he got to work, ten hours later, drove it home with the generator off.  It was experimental.  His findings: starting with a full charge in the morning, he wouldn’t use up all that much charge coming down here the 50 miles (it is a lot of downhill) but the generator couldn’t recharge the batteries enough to get back to a full charge.  He estimated it did about a quarter of a charge in about 9 hours.

With that, he had enough charge to climb back up to Santa Cruz and plug in.  The batteries would then have about 12 to 13 hours with his high current charger which would charge it back up (mostly.)  He commented it wasn’t as good a performer as he had hoped.  The rig was way overweight (well imagine that) and the overall fuel economy was no better than, well worse than, the gasoline motor it replaced.  Take away: lead acid batteries are not practical for that application, which is why we never saw a successful series hybrid before lithium batteries became affordable.  Note that the nickel hydride was also too heavy for a series hybrid.  From what I am calculating, even lithium batteries are not likely to give us a successful series hybrid car.

All is not lost.  The parallel hybrids are good cars, better in my opinion than the all-electrics in cost/performance ratio.  I am going against the grain and making the claim that the notion of coal to liquid fuel driven by solar power is practical, if… we get a suitable (big) piece of ground near the equator, very dry air, useless as hell for anything else, with access to the sea.  I can find only one place like that on the planet: West Sahara.

spike

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