Why Electric Motors Are 3X - 4X More Efficient Than Internal

[RLDeboni]

Eeyore wrote:

RLDeboni wrote:

Eeyore wrote:

A very large marine diesel can and does EXCEED 50% thermal efficiency. Only
now are combined cycle gas turbine generators coming on line that can beat
that but you still have transmission losses.
On one side:
- an oil terminal
- at 1 km from the oil terminal, a 50MWe marine diesel, fueled with that
oil at 50% efficiency

An interesting concept.


- an electric network that takes the electricity to 10'000 homes
- in each home an electric car that makes 100 km daily, no warming need,
no motor testing,

testing ?

Ehm, ... engine "tuning"...
How many time, in a car life time, the engine is powered before and
after repair work ? And the do-it-your-self tuning? You can't do it
without starting the engine
I am wondering how it will sum up on the end.

All this is not necessary with an electric motor.

only start and go

On the other side:
- an oil terminal
- at 1 km from the oil terminal, a refinery
- a dozen of gas stations
- a couple of gas trucks to refill the gas stations
- 10'000 cars, that at least weekley make a stop at the gas station
- 10'000 cars, that in winter need a warming phase before actual drive

That is not the correct way to drive a car from cold AIUI.

Old times. Anyway, what is the efficiency of a cold ICE ?
How much time/fuel it takes to peak ?

And how many owners keep their engines in perfect order ?
Talking about 10'000 cars, how many ? And for what percent of their life?
Sum it all up ... it's all nibbling energy every where.

- 10'000 cars, that at every traffic light, burn fuel waiting green

Build roundabouts like in Europe. You see relatively few lights here.

Mainly in suburbs.
I can't build roundabouts in the city center and European citys are
mostly old, with narrow streets ...

Surely. Oil and fuel have to travel. A gas truck takes 8'000-12'000
gallons. If that trucks does 100 km, what are the transmission losses ?

Pretty minimal I expect.

How about remote locations ?

And the refinery efficiency ? Some how it as to go in the ICE motor
calculations.

Refining petroleum is ~ 75% efficient IIRC but you also get other saleable and
very useful by-products.

Hmmm, we could split the total efficiency on all products, on quantity
or economic value.

R.L.Deboni

 

[Eeyore]

"rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com" wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Publius wrote:
BretCah...@peoplepc.com wrote

When it comes to converting one form of energy one way to mechanical
work only a Pelton wheel can approach an electric motor's 95+%
efficiency.

Yup. But the gas/oil/coal-fired power plants needed to generate the
electricty do not. Then you have the line losses transmitting it to point-
of-use.

Overall typical thermal efficiency is in the 30-40% region. No free lunch.

Graham

Transmission losses can be between 1 and 2 percent. Even a really bad
grid should be able to keep the transmission losses to under 5% .

Total rubbish. Unless you live on the doorstep of the power plant.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

"rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com" wrote:

GE will sell you a 60% thermally efficient combined cycle unit (H1).
It definitely will run on natural gas. It may run on oil.

I know, I just posted about it in this very thread.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

"rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com" wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Do you warm up your car? It's not good for it.

Does your car need "motor testing" every day?


If you are afflicted with that horrid bugbear from ancient times named
'the carburator', there are instances where warming up is a necessary
evil. I had a '76 T-bird that would flood with the least provocation
in cold weather and losing the power assist to the steering of that
nose-heavy land yacht, in a turn, threatened to break your thumbs as
the steering wheel spins along with the castering front wheels. I let
the car warm up, after that.

How mnay cars with carburettors still exist other than in museums ?

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

Rob Dekker wrote:

"Eeyore" wrote
"Daniel T." wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Sure, but where does the electricity come from?

Power plants that run at much higher efficiency

Not that great actually.

Not that bad either.
On the low end there are the older single-cycle (coal fired) steam plants
which get some 35% efficiency.
But modern combined cycle gas rankine turbine plants get close to 60%
efficiency.
Many such plants have been built and are in operation today.

But the bulk still comes from those old coal fired plants. And have you noticed
that natural gas for those GE turbines is getting in short supply these days ?

(and much cleaner per kilowatt of energy produced) than any automobile
engine

How do you reckon they're cleaner ?

The general idea is that it is easier to control emissions from a few large
power plants running at optimal efficiency than it is to control it from
thousands of vehicle ICEs.

Never heard of catalysts ? Saab's 9000 claimed to actually CLEAN city air as it
drove through it and they did a crazy demo to prove it too. It's on youtube or
Google video or somewhere.

These plants have amazing filter systems. Better than what would be
affordable for automobiles.

But they produce very different pollutants. Not directly comparable.

Besides that, they run at optimal RPMs, reducing pollutions to a minimum.
That cannot said about automobile ICEs in city traffic.

Series hybrids can.

Graham

 

[Stephen J. Rush]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:54:47 -0700, rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com wrote:

On Aug 15, 3:05 pm, Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@hotmail.com
wrote:
Publius wrote:
BretCah...@peoplepc.com wrote

When it comes to converting one form of energy one way to
mechanical work only a Pelton wheel can approach an electric
motor's 95+% efficiency.

Yup. But the gas/oil/coal-fired power plants needed to generate the
electricty do not. Then you have the line losses transmitting it to
point- of-use.

Overall typical thermal efficiency is in the 30-40% region. No free
lunch.

Graham


Transmission losses can be between 1 and 2 percent. Even a really bad
grid should be able to keep the transmission losses to under 5% .

GE will sell you a 60% thermally efficient combined cycle unit (H1). It
definitely will run on natural gas. It may run on oil. Using it to
burn pulverised coal will drastically shorten its service life.

Nuclear plants should be able to achieve gobsmacking efficiencies if we
can conquer the psychological and engineering barriers of designing the
reactor pile to be a thoroughly contained, ball of radioactive,
incandescent gas. The reactor is based on the gaseous cored, nuclear
thermal rocket engine (check out The Atomic Rockets Homepage
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html), driving a magneto-
hydrodynamic generator (which has a theoretically high efficiency, but
only at obscene temperatures), with the gas circulated (and energy
recovered) by a closed-cycle gas turbine. Before passing through the
compressor and returning to the reactor, the working fluid exhausted by
the turbine is used to raise steam. I consider this to be a rather
harebrained scheme I concocted after looking up MHD's and remembering
the NTR-gas, but stranger things have happened.

Then there's the pebble-bed reactor, whose fuel is uranium carbamide, a
refractory ceramic that stays solid well above the melting point of
metallic uranium. The PBR further encapsulates its fuel in silicon
carbide "pebbles", allowing operation at much higher temperatures than
water-cooled reactors, though not as terrifyingly high as a gas-core
reactor. Some of these have been built in South Africa, and there is an
American company called Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. (Don't you love the
Golden Age SF resonance?) that has designs for small (10-50 MW) package
systems that could replace big diesel generator sets. Unfortunately,
their Web site, www.atomicengines.com, has bee up for years without
reporting any actual machines built. It's a nice-looking idea, but it's
a chicken-and-egg problem: to be practical, the PBR needs the support of
a fuel-pebble manufacturing and recycling industry, which can't exist
without an installed base of PBRs. The only real hope is that one of the
world's major navies will adopt this technology. Once the fuel-handling
cycle was in place, civilian shipbuilders and power companies might find
these systems attractive.

 

[default]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:53:45 -0700 (PDT), BretCahill@peoplepc.com
wrote:

arne't you smart!

You haven't done much in law or politics have you?


Bret Cahill

Just out of curiosity, what have law or politics got to do with
relative energy conversion efficiencies?
--


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[ZerkonX]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:43:32 -0400, Daniel T. wrote:

efforts at storing it more efficiently have been systematically shut
down.

There is nothing more important about this issue.

Locking in anything, particularly power generation, to what is known at
any one time, like the present, is a mistake, at best.

Electricity specifically being something wide open to new discovery as it
itself is new in terms of human ability to know enough to manipulate it.
Solar is in the wings. They both should have been coming center stage 30
years ago.

From what you have described correctly, "systematically shut down", I
fear the country I live in, the US, is going to be watching the rest of
the world pass bye-bye on this front which relates to many others.

 

[Eeyore]

RLDeboni wrote:

Eeyore wrote:

testing ?

Ehm, ... engine "tuning"...
How many time, in a car life time, the engine is powered before and
after repair work ? And the do-it-your-self tuning? You can't do it
without starting the engine
I am wondering how it will sum up on the end.

I have never had to tune an engine in about 20 years. The ECU does it every second..

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

"Daniel T." wrote:

Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:
"Daniel T." wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Sure, but where does the electricity come from?

Power plants that run at much higher efficiency

Not that great actually.

(and much cleaner per kilowatt of energy produced) than any automobile
engine

How do you reckon they're cleaner ?

"""
...Although half the [USA] uses coal-fired plants, EVs recharging from
these facilities are predicted to produce less CO2 than ICE vehicles

Who said CO2's the problem or do you just believe everything the news media
says ?

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

default wrote:

BretCahill@peoplepc.com wrote:

arne't you smart!

You haven't done much in law or politics have you?

Just out of curiosity, what have law or politics got to do with
relative energy conversion efficiencies?

Subsidies I expect.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

ZerkonX wrote:

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:43:32 -0400, Daniel T. wrote:

efforts at storing it more efficiently have been systematically shut
down.

There is nothing more important about this issue.

Locking in anything, particularly power generation, to what is known at
any one time, like the present, is a mistake, at best.

Electricity specifically being something wide open to new discovery as it
itself is new in terms of human ability to know enough to manipulate it.
Solar is in the wings. They both should have been coming center stage 30
years ago.

From what you have described correctly, "systematically shut down", I
fear the country I live in, the US, is going to be watching the rest of
the world pass bye-bye on this front which relates to many others.

You're new at this obviously. Listen and learn.

Graham

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 01:04:17 -0700 (PDT), "rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com"
<rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com> wrote:

On Aug 15, 6:42 pm, John Larkin
jjSNIPlar...@highTHISlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:33:51 +0200, RLDeboni



robertodeb...@deboni.name> wrote:
Eeyore wrote:

A very large marine diesel can and does EXCEED 50% thermal efficiency. Only
now are combined cycle gas turbine generators coming on line that can beat
that but you still have transmission losses.

On one side:
- an oil terminal
- at 1 km from the oil terminal, a 50MWe marine diesel, fueled with that
oil at 50% efficiency
- an electric network that takes the electricity to 10'000 homes
- in each home an electric car that makes 100 km daily, no warming need,
no motor testing, only start and go

On the other side:
- an oil terminal
- at 1 km from the oil terminal, a refinery
- a dozen of gas stations
- a couple of gas trucks to refill the gas stations
- 10'000 cars, that at least weekley make a stop at the gas station
- 10'000 cars, that in winter need a warming phase before actual drive
- 10'000 cars, that at every traffic light, burn fuel waiting green

Transmission losses ?
Surely. Oil and fuel have to travel. A gas truck takes 8'000-12'000
gallons. If that trucks does 100 km, what are the transmission losses ?
And the refinery efficiency ? Some how it as to go in the ICE motor
calculations.

R.L.Deboni

5PM, I'm in a hotel in Santa Barbara. We had a late breakfast in San
Francisco. We stopped for gas once, for about 5 minutes, and ran 75-80
MPH most of the way. And we climbed some serious hills towards the
end.

There weren't many traffic lights.

Do you warm up your car? It's not good for it.

Does your car need "motor testing" every day?

John

If you are afflicted with that horrid bugbear from ancient times named
'the carburator', there are instances where warming up is a necessary
evil. I had a '76 T-bird that would flood with the least provocation
in cold weather and losing the power assist to the steering of that
nose-heavy land yacht, in a turn, threatened to break your thumbs as
the steering wheel spins along with the castering front wheels. I let
the car warm up, after that.

Ancient history. In those days, an electric car was even less
feasible, and a hybrid was esentially impossible.

A decent modern car will run 100K miles with nothing but a few oil
changes. For a very complex, very constrained mechanism, new cars are
amazing, stunning works of art and engineering.

But why would anybody want a 76 Thunderbird, even in 1976?

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:05:38 +0200, RLDeboni
<robertodeboni@deboni.name> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

5PM, I'm in a hotel in Santa Barbara. We had a late breakfast in San
Francisco.

It's a long trip for an electric car ...
I am thinking about commuting, about 50 km range.

A smallish plug-in hybrid is a sensible vehicle. One could use it as
an electric for short trips, and run a small, efficient, fixed-speed
gasoline engine when you do need to drive all day, or when the local
electric grid is collapsing from a few million of your neighbors
trying to charge their cars overnight, too.

There are tons of Smart Cars here lately. They make a lot of sense as
a city car, with range for occasional trips. They don't suffer from
the weight and size penalty of batteries and electric motors. A small
car with a small gas engine is fine.

We stopped for gas once, for about 5 minutes, and ran 75-80
MPH most of the way. And we climbed some serious hills towards the
end.

NiMh or Li-ion batteries and new electronics for energy recovering, will
take all "serious" hills with a breeze.

But not for long. In addition to depleting the batteries, a lot of
electric motors can sustain peak output for a very short time before
they overheat. That's great as an acceleration booster, not so good
for cresting the Sierras.


We have a friend who has a new Toyota hybrid. Her gas mileage is
horrible in San Francisco, from hauling a thousand pounds or so of
batteries up and down hills.

There weren't many traffic lights.

The USA, especially the west, isn't like Europe or the east coast.
It's big and full of mountains and stuff.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 01:28:07 -0700, "Rob Dekker" <rob@verific.com>
wrote:

"Eeyore" <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:48A5F095.A82E88D0@hotmail.com...


"Daniel T." wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Sure, but where does the electricity come from?

Power plants that run at much higher efficiency

Not that great actually.

Not that bad either.
On the low end there are the older single-cycle (coal fired) steam plants
which get some 35% efficiency.
But modern combined cycle gas rankine turbine plants get close to 60%
efficiency.
Many such plants have been built and are in operation today.



(and much cleaner per kilowatt of energy produced) than any automobile
engine

How do you reckon they're cleaner ?


The general idea is that it is easier to control emissions from a few large
power plants running at optimal efficiency than it is to control it from
thousands of vehicle ICEs.

These plants have amazing filter systems. Better than what would be
affordable for automobiles.
Besides that, they run at optimal RPMs, reducing pollutions to a minimum.
That cannot said about automobile ICEs in city traffic.

Rob

A modern gasoline-powered car creates very little pollutants...
essentially zero particulates and low ppm levels of hydrocarbons and
nitrous stuff, probably cleaner watt-for-watt than the average coal
plant. Plus, the power is *THERE* where it's needed, right under the
hood.

John

 

[Eeyore]

"rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com" wrote:

John Larkin wrote

But why would anybody want a 76 Thunderbird, even in 1976?

I am really tall, but with a short torso, so I really needed the leg
room. It was $250 to purchase, another $350 to make roadworthy, and
less than $700 a year for liability coverage.

In other words, a beater.

You do not understand ride-comfort; until you have driven a pug heavy
vehicle with cushy suspension and a high ratio of sprung to unsprung
weight-- the T-bird's wheels followed every imperfection in the road
surface.

Lovely. It probably also didn't go round corners very well. Euro cars fixed
all these things decades ago.

(Sorry, had to be said).

Graham

 

[rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com]

On Aug 16, 10:27 am, John Larkin
<jjSNIPlar...@highTHISlandtechnology.com> wrote:

Ancient history. In those days, an electric car was even less
feasible, and a hybrid was esentially impossible.

A decent modern car will run 100K miles with nothing but a few oil
changes. For a very complex, very constrained mechanism, new cars are
amazing, stunning works of art and engineering.

But why would anybody want a 76 Thunderbird, even in 1976?

John

I am really tall, but with a short torso, so I really needed the leg
room. It was $250 to purchase, another $350 to make roadworthy, and
less than $700 a year for liability coverage.

As recently as 2000, when I had to dump it for something with four
doors that my wife was willing to drive (and one of the rear coil
springs was broken), the low cost of keeping it in good repair more
than offset its profligate fuel consumption.

You do not understand ride-comfort; until you have driven a pug heavy
vehicle with cushy suspension and a high ratio of sprung to unsprung
weight-- the T-bird's wheels followed every imperfection in the road
surface.

They are not for everyone, but anything that Montreal drivers will
yield to is worth pots of gold to a non-montrealer driving in that
city (mine was all black and chrome, so it looked like Darth Vader's
car).

If I had more money than brains, I would buy another one in a
heartbeat and either make a series hybrid out of it (the electric
motor and small diesel using the space freed up by removing the 2
gallon V8), or put in an engine with a variable compression ratio.
With a variable compression ratio and a variable boost (with
turbocompounding), you can control power by controlling the
displacement and run it at WOT, all of the time.

 

[Sevenhundred Elves]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:30:11 +1000, "Rod Speed"
<rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote:

Sevenhundred Elves <sevenhundred@elves.invalid> wrote
Rod Speed <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote
John <nohj@droffats.ten> wrote

(and much cleaner per kilowatt of energy produced) than any automobile engine

How do you reckon they're cleaner ?

How can a water turbine generator pollute more than a coal fired turbine of the same output?

Trouble is that only a tiny percentage of electricity is generated that way.

World-wide, it's 16% hydro

Like hell it is.

and 15% nuclear.

That neither.

Together, they constitute almost a third of the world's electricity generation.

Nope.

Coal is 40%,
gas 20%,
oil 7%,
and "other" is 2%.

You've plucked those numbers out of your arse. We can tell from the smell.

If I provide a better source for those numbers than someones arse,
will you apologize for your rudeness and general stupidity?

S.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:34:34 +0100, Eeyore
<rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:

"rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com" wrote:

John Larkin wrote

But why would anybody want a 76 Thunderbird, even in 1976?

I am really tall, but with a short torso, so I really needed the leg
room. It was $250 to purchase, another $350 to make roadworthy, and
less than $700 a year for liability coverage.

In other words, a beater.


You do not understand ride-comfort; until you have driven a pug heavy
vehicle with cushy suspension and a high ratio of sprung to unsprung
weight-- the T-bird's wheels followed every imperfection in the road
surface.

Lovely. It probably also didn't go round corners very well. Euro cars fixed
all these things decades ago.

(Sorry, had to be said).

Graham

By 1976, the Thunderbird was a bloated parody of the original
roadster.

I occasionally rent an American car = never owned one = and I'm
impressed by their feel and handling, even in radical situations like
power sliding in the rain. Japanese cars used to have sloppy, mushy
American handling, and they're much better now too.

I taught The Brat how to spin a (rented) SUV in the snow when she was
10. We shut down the road below the parking lot where we were
practising; nobody could figure where the snow flurries and fog were
coming from. It was a blast, and the Explorer did OK.

Wasn't the Austin Allegro the worst car of all time?


John

 

[Eeyore]

Rod Speed wrote:

Sevenhundred Elves wrote

will you apologize for your rudeness and general stupidity?

Never ever could bullshit its way out of a wet paper bag.

I LOVE that phrase.

Graham