Tragedy of the commons is the term for that.

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

I don't know what you know, Tuckerfan, and I presume you don't know what I know. But I find it helps to be clear to avoid confusion. And most importantly of all, I did not write that post specifically for you. I wrote it for you and everyone else on the discussion board, some of whom I probably only have a casual interest in such matters.

If I buy an efficient car and then drive more than I used to, then that is a clear advantage for me, as if I didn't want to drive more I obviously wouldn't. It's not driving itself that most people are worried about, it's the environmental effects of global warming and this appears to be best tackled by putting a price on carbon.

Fortunately we have real world experience with people's reactions to the changing price of gasoline which has the same wallet effect as increasing or decreasing the efficiency of their cars, and it appears that in the short term at least, a doubling or halving of gasoline prices only cuts or increases its use by a few percent, so as far as cars are concerned, the Jevons paradox (or rebound effect) does not appear to be a large concern.

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if Australia had two or times that many hydrogen cars. But I very much doubt there would be a dozen or more.

At least three times as much generating capacity will still cost at least three times as much money. That isn't affected by the number of boatloads of money that are spent.

I hope the price of hydrogen becomes very low. But it will still require at least three times as much energy to use as running a car off energy stored in a battery. In addition there will also be the costs of the distribution and storage infrastructure and losses to the atmosphere.

I don't understand. If you are saying that a large amount of biofuel production is wasteful, expensive and environmentally damaging, then I'll probably agree with you. But if I have ethanol or biodiesel I can make much more money selling it for transportation fuel than I can burning it to generate electricity.

This thread is now 6 pages, anyone following along has more than a "casual" interest in the matter.



Good luck with that.

Can't really say, seeing as how the largest consumer of petroleum is currently in the midst of the largest economic downturn in 70 years. The economy bounces back and people are going to start driving more.



And how many pure electric cars do you suppose are there?



Actually, it can be. Economies of scale and all that. Besides, if consumers decide that they like fuel cell cars better than battery powered cars, then its all over but the shouting for battery cars.

There's also the damage done to the environment from recycling the batteries (as well as mining the necessary materials) to be considered. The largest sources for lithium are located in Bolivia, which is not exactly a "stable" country.

Wait, which is it now? We should switch to biofuels in cars because its better for the environment? Or because we can make more money off of it? If the concern's the environment, then we shouldn't burn biofuels in vehicles, because even if its used in plug-in hybrids, its still not as efficient as burning it in a power plant and using the generated energy to power electric cars. Of course, to be entirely environmentally friendly, we should ban personal transportation altogether. The odds of that happening, however, are slim to none.

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

Tuckerfan, I'm not clear on what you see as the advantages of hydrogen fuel cell cars over plug in hybrids. If I wanted to buy a car in a few years time, why should I pick a hydrogen fuel cell car over a plug in hybrid?

One thing is for sure: Hydrogen is going to be a lot more exclusive and a heck of a lot more expensive than electricity. And I should think it will be more than difficult to find suppliers.
Electric cars are going to roll over hydrogen like a concrete truck.
No question.

Earlier in the thread it was asked why companies such as Toyota and Honda are developing hydrogen vehicles. I imagine it's because what they develop won't be wasted. A hydrogen fuel cell car can have the hydrogen storage and fuel cell replaced with batteries to become an electric car, or with a liquid fuel powered generator to become a series hybrid, or with a liquid fuel generator and batteries to become a plug in hybrid. I also suspect that Toyota doesn't want want to promote electric cars at the moment as it wants people to purchase its hybrid Prius rather than electric cars from competitors. Building a hydrogen car enables the company to develop an electric car without saying it's developing an electric car.

There is quite an interesting film called " Who killed the electric car ? " .
Much has been revealed about how manufacturers, particulary gm feel about electric cars. I got the impression that electric cars are 'too good' .
Hmmmm.....

Plug ins are fine, but they're a stop-gap solution to whichever technology finally do adopt.

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

That movie is a load of tripe. From a PR standpoint, GM killing the EV-1 was a stupid move (which even GM admits now), but the proof that electric cars are far from for "prime time" can be found in the fact that until recently nobody who has tried to sell an electric car has managed to produce more than a few models before going out of business. Even the much heralded Tesla has seen a sales slump.If there was any credible evidence that the car makers were deliberately trying to quash the technology, I'd be all over it. If electric cars were as good as people like the folks in that film claim, then there would have been start ups pumping out cars by the time GM killed the EV-1. Its only been since Tesla announced that they were going to be building electric cars, have you seen a definite push from a number of companies to design and build them. So far, none of them have gotten much traction (though it looks like Fisker might be Tesla's equal). Could GM have done more after it developed the EV-1? Absolutely. Their hybrid variants of the EV-1 were on par with the Prius and they even had flex fuel versions as well.

When GM killed the program, they had a car which despite being engineered for "real world production" (i.e. no exotic materials unless absolutely necessary), they couldn't get the cars built profitably, with estimates of how much each car cost coming in at close to $100K (roughly what a Tesla will set you back). They also couldn't have anything approaching a viable range for the cars if they tried to sell them outside of the warmest parts of the US (those batteries require heaters if you want them to keep working in places where white stuff is known to fall from the sky).

Its going to be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years with Tesla and the others. The last person to successfully start up a "full line" car company in the US was Walter P. Chrysler. (And ol' Henry was still in charge of Ford at that point.)

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

Algae biodiesel produced for existing car fleets has a comparative advantage over hydrogen or electricity as a transport fuel, in that algae can supply fuel as part of the emerging market for carbon with minimal change to existing transport sector technology.

Rather than retool to a different fuel, it is better to use algae to produce natural fuel. Algae biofuel can supply existing vehicle infrastructure while also repairing the climate by managing carbon.

Found this link somewhere, perhaps here. Regardless, it sounds like the Russian government has a serious advantage over the way they field their technology than the way we do.

Capitalism is great for many things, but not so good when it comes to infrastructure.

__________________
If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

That's only $4,800 a kilowatt, if they can pull it off at that price. I hope they can, but I'm a pessimistic on this due to a long history of over optimistic price estimates in the nuclear industry. The massively high bid a Russian consortium put on the table for a reactor in Turkey doesn't inspire confidence that Russia has the ability to produce low cost reactors. But even if they go considerably over price, they could still fill a useful niche. (If California could have had one of these parked under the Golden Gate bridge back when utilities were cutting electricity supply to increase profits it would have been quite handy.)

Hi tuckerfan: This thread is one of about 1000 I find interesting. Does that make me casual? I appreciate when people write for all the viewers as that makes it easier to figure out what you are typing about. Please continue to assume we are neither experts nor extremely bright.
There are at least 5 considerations in the hydrogen car verses the plug-in electric car. In order of increasing importance: 1 Carbon dioxide emissions. My guess is this is unfixable in the near term and extremely costly to try and fail. Worse we may soon have a new ice age and wish we had more green house warming. 2 Other kinds of polution are very costly in money and misery, both present and future, so polution type 2 should be a major priority. 3 Fossil fuels will be in short supply, perhaps as soon as we recover from the world wide recession. We need to act now to avoid panic later. 4 Money is important = Continued extravagance may make USA a 3d world country in weeks rather than years. Next year may be too late. 5 The money we give people who want us dead in exchange for oil is very imprudent.
Hydrogen has several problems, all of which likely are not fixable in this decade. We likely do not have enough prosparity left to get hydrogen to even 1% of our energy needs. Fuel cells will remain too costly in my opinion. Hydrogen may not help carbon dioxide emissions in this decade as building the infrastructure will release lots of carbon dioxide.
10% of our vehicles can be plug in electric in less than ten years, sooner if we get a major break though. With rare exceptions , the present electric grid can handle the charging, if we do most of the charging after 10 pm. Batteries are much less costly than fuel cells, which are less likely to respond to ecconomy of scale
I'm not optimistic that our lieing society can build safe nuclear power in the USA before 2019, and it will take even longer and be very costly to get an additional 1% of our energy needs from nuclear.
I like algae in transparent pipes as it depletes our water resources less than most other energy sources. 2% of our energy needs in less than ten years maybe possible and practical.
Big wind turbines and solar farms, are awaiting eminent domain to get the power lines built that will bring the electricity to customers. Geothermal may also be cost effective in the better locations, such as Yellow Stone National Park. We should go for 1% of our energy needs from Geothermal in the next few years. The bottom line is we need pursue every viable alternative faster than seems prudent, including CNG = compressed natural gas. Neil

I'm hoping the price is somewhere close to what's quoted, too, though I think one of the reasons it's so high here in the states is due to the litigation.

The reactors are mass-produced, so there are serious cost-savings in tooling for a hundred, as opposed to custom-building just one.

__________________
If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

They are also pricy in Japan which is not a litigious country.

That should be the case, although at the moment they seem to be planning on building a dozen rather than a hundred. Of course, if they happen to prove to be profitable I'm sure they'll build more.

I'll just comment on my earlier comment and mention that this is very cheap for new nuclear power, but still expensive compared to other low emission options. Wind and biomass are currently producing electricity at a lower cost than this and projected costs for dryrock geothermal in Australia are lower. Also, solar thermal could now be competitive with this, depending on the operating, disposal and decomissioning costs of the floating reactor. This does not mean that the floating reactors might not be useful in some places and situations, but they aren't the cheapest way to supply low emission energy.

One must consider the "total costs" with nukes. That means burying the damned thing after 35 years of operation and the disposition of spent fuel.
Proponents never consider this cost which is paid buy your children after you enjoyed the energy. Once you factor THAT into the equation, nuclear
power, in it's entirety stinks on ice.
Clearly, it is obvious to the most casual observer that we can do better.

Dan

Let's not forget to factor in the environmental damages provably caused by coal and oil use. So, in this case, it will include the loss of several trillions of dollars of real estate (check what a 50cm rise in sea level will do to coastal areas), possibly the collapse of the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic, and similar rather expensive inconveniences.

Also, at least in the US, much of the health costs associated with black lung disease are paid by the US taxpayer, not by the coal mining companies.

The cost evaluation of coal and oil should be put on the same footing as that for nuclear; neither coal nor oil includes many of the downstream environmental costs in its costing model. After all, the mercury emitted by coal plants is dangerous forever, and few people even mention their radium emissions.

Coal miners are/were also highly susceptible to TB because of the damage caused by coal dust. At one time, their death rate for TB was higher than for black lung, simply because the TB killed them first.

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

[QUOTE=Tuckerfan;1617299]That movie is a load of tripe. From a PR standpoint, GM killing the EV-1 was a stupid move (which even GM admits now), but the proof that electric cars are far from for "prime time" can be found in the fact that until recently nobody who has tried to sell an electric car has managed to produce more than a few models before going out of business. Even the much heralded Tesla has seen a sales slump.
******************
Hi, This doesn't explain why GM refused to let those people keep their EV-1
for ready cash. They preferred to crush them... at the point of a lawyer's sword!! No, sir. GM made the EV-1 a little bit too good. There was an evil hand at work there.

And the better battery does exist.
Like you said, the hybrid may be better suited to the snow belt..
(where I live)..extracting heat from the motor to heat the car. I have absolute faith that engineering will find the sweet spot with the electric car.
And there are going to be many jobs involved,.. something we can use
right now.
The tesla sports car is more of a PR design to impress the public with the fact that electric cars have high instantaeous performance. But in the real world, we simply want to get there at 65 MPH every day. We have state troopers to arrest those who defy our traffic laws. Those criminals ride the bus. This is not racing. It's transportation. Clean, reliable transportation.
And that is a worthy goal .
What people don't want is for a careless corporation to orphan the vehicle they payed $25,000 for because they feel like it. Like a graphics board you can't get drivers for.
There is plenty of room for a solid, honest auto manufacturer who treats their customers with respect.
GM???? huh....if you look in the illustrated dictionary under arrogance, you see the logo.
That's how many see it.....now.

Best regards,
Dan

Two words: Legal liability. Had GM sold those cars to the drivers after the program was killed, GM would still have been on the hook for a number of issues. For one thing, there's the whole end of life issue of the cars. You can't simply just dump one of those cars in a field and let it rust away. The bodies were plastic and some of the electronics had rather nasty compounds in them, so they would have to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. GM built less than 2,000 cars, and there's only a handful of places which can properly dispose of them Until those cars were all crushed, GM would have to maintain their network for dealing with the cars. Not something that's terribly cost effective for so few cars. Additionally, you can bet if one of those cars was involved in some kind of accident, at least one of the parties involved would sue GM over the matter, even if GM was totally blameless. Once GM killed the program, they had no choice but to crush those cars. The cost of allowing them to be in private hands from that point on would have been nearly as high, if not higher, than if they had continued with the program. There was no "evil hand" at work, other than the paranoia of dealing with dozens of lawsuits over the cars. Too few of them were produced to interest aftermarket companies in building spare parts for them, so any spares would have to come either from wrecked cars (assuming there were any, and this can sometimes be an iffy proposition because the parts might fail due to unseen damage) or the owner would have to come up with an alternative solution. This could include jerry rigging something (which could fail at an inopportune time, leading to an accident and lawsuits for GM) or reverse engineering GM's design (expensive and not necessarily possible).

Better than what? The batteries in the EV-1? Sure, but assuming you had an EV-1, putting those batteries in the car might not be practical. It certainly wouldn't be cheap. Even the Tesla, with all its carbon fiber to save weight is still mostly batteries. What's needed is an electric car where the batteries don't weigh as much as a conventional drivetrain does. Those seem to be a long time coming, however.
The problem is, however, that building cars is expensive. A simple model change (say from one year to the next) can cost as much as $1 billion to tool up for. When you factor in the costs of switching to a new technology, it gets even more expensive. If your potential market for a vehicle is less than 30% of the US population, its difficult to sell the vehicle at a low cost and still turn a profit on it.
Actually, going high market with the Tesla is a smart move. Since the vehicle is a "performance" vehicle, people will pay a premium to own one, the profits made off of this can be used to fund building less expensive models (which may have to be sold at a loss to find a buyer). The question is, however, are there enough people willing to buy Teslas so that they can start producing lower priced cars. We don't have a firm answer on that yet.
And that, right there, is why GM crushed the EV-1s, because no matter what, so long as those cars were in private hands GM would still be on the hook for them.
Its rare corporation in any industry that does that, however.
George Romney was complaining about that in the 60s, but the general public didn't want to listen.

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

I disagree.

I think those cars would have lasted 20 years. How long have the Deloreans lasted? Yes... another good car that was uhumpf....quashed.
Don't tell us gm got religion after making the vega or the corvair.
Let's be real.
I see elctric cars in your future... in a big way. If Americans won't make them, Japan and Europe will. No question.

To give a really contrary opinion to the debate about what kind of cars will be best in the Future, I'd say that the car simply has no future.

The idea that everyone in a world of 10 Billion people can have their own personal vehicle is not only crazy, but destructive.

What is the future of the Car? The Train and the Bus!


Edit: BTW this stuff about cars should probably be split off into another thread, this was supposed to be about future power systems, not future transport.

__________________
The Sky is no longer the Limit

Spoken like someone who's never owned a Delorean. Every one I've met who's owned a Delorean has said the same thing, "It was fun to drive, but you needed two of them, one to drive, one to keep in the shop." The cars have numerous problems and are not comparable to the EV-1 in any way. First of all, the Deloreans used a Volvo engine in them, which means that you can buy spare parts for the engines. The EV-1s motor and batteries were used by only the EV-1. There were over 9,000 Deloreans made before the company imploded (John Z. ran the company into the ground), compare that with less than 2,000 EV-1s.
Emission laws had more to do with killing the Corvair than Nader ever did. He was just the final nail in the coffin. (Corvairs were great cars, once you replaced the factory gaskets with aftermarket ones, because the factory gaskets tended to leak rather profusely.) I've yet to meet anyone who thinks that the stock Vega was a good car. Rust was a big problem with them, as were the engines.
The Europeans and Japanese are also working on fuel cell cars, so the race is far from over.

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

I don't doubt that 100 years from now things will be different, but for the foreseeable future, cars will be with us.

Many people would say that the idea of giving up one's personal freedom to be the slave of train and bus schedules is equally destructive.

No doubt mass transit will play a much larger role in our future, but there's still going to be times when you need a vehicle. Not to mention in developing nations, owning your own car is seen as a sign of significant prestige. The developed world will no doubt give up on large numbers of people owning cars first, but the developing world won't be so keen to give up on them for quite some time. (BTW, a recent survey revealed that if people had to choose between the environment and giving up their gadgets, the environment could go pound sand.)

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

Actually, it doesn't "stink on ice." Rather, it's glassified then storied in additional containers to avoid leaching.

The French perfected it as their needs, given their 80+ percentage reliance on nuclear power far exceeds our own.

How long does glassification last? 1,000 years? 1 Billion years? I propose with variances like that, it really doesn't matter! By that time, either transmutation will be cheap or humans will have devolved into microbes.

__________________
If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

And I'm sure there was another thread somewhere else where a similar car discussion was going on. Take it outside fellas!

__________________
The left hand knows full well what the right hand is doing, but quietly ignores it.

Actually, all plans for new nuclear plants do include the cost of decom and waste storage in their estimates. It is a very small cost relative to the construction and finance costs, because it is not particularly difficult to do. All existing plants also pay into a fund that covers decom and waste disposal. The nuclear waste "problem" is completely political.

__________________
Do try not to take me too seriously.

__________________
We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

Switchgrass and woody waste don't compete as much with crops:
http://www.dtnethanolcenter.com/inde...show=47&mid=48
http://www.timberbuysell.com/Communi...Ad.asp?id=2740

Still, you are getting energy from 2 dimentions with maximal surface impact--as opposed to ANWR with mininal surface impact with energy reserves in 3 dimentions with minimal impact.

Sadly, the greatest threat is not the drill--but the plow.