I want one of these. I would love Taipei to enact a law requiring these to be used here by all non-commercial travelers, as opposed to internal combustion engine vehicles.
Nice! However I’d like to see a push towards electric scooters which would do far more to clean up the air here than cars (such a swap as suggested above is a little less practical)
Which would you say is more fuel efficient?
a. burn fuel to drive an internal combustion engine producing kinetic energy to move a vehicle.
b. burn fuel to drive an internal combustion engine, producing kinetic energy, which drives a compressor, which puts air into a tank, which is then released to produce kinetic energy to move a vehicle.
c. burn fuel to drive a turbine or whatever to produce kinetic energy, which drives a generator making electricity, which is transmitted down cables, then used to drive an electric compressor, which puts air into a tank, which is then released to produce kinetic energy to move a vehicle.
Every step in this process wastes energy, resulting in the burning of more fuels. Your pneumatic car, like electric cars, might not produce pollution out the back end as it drives along. But it sure uses fuel at some point in the process, and it’s not going to be more efficient than an engine which burns fuel and turns the wheels directly. It’s just sending the pollution problem somewhere else.
… Where you can control it better.
Also, the electricity used for the compressor could come from nuclear power, which is cleaner than most people realize, it could come from renewable resources, which don’t pollute, or it could come from a dirty coal fired power plant.
You could drive an air compressor with hydro power, or with wind turbine to create almost free energy without emmissions. Also, electric cars produce about half the pollution of normal internal combustion engines, I don’t think even with the addition of an air compressor in the chain, that fuel usage would be above normal. Also take into consideration the cost of fuel in transporting and refining petrol in the first place, plus the pumping costs etc, the overall pollution output per car would be much higher, plus the addition of war to control oil reserves. Electricity can be produced by coal, which eliminates many of the fore stated problems.
Increasing coal production in order to meet this demand would not be very enviromentally friendly.
The coal plants currently in use worldwide release a few chernobyl’s worth of nuclear radiation - mainly uran and thorium - on an annual basis.
That said, i completely agree with your analysis.
I like the idea of electrical/battery powered cars, but sometimes I feel the discussion is missing some details regarding the pollution created by the different kind of power-plants (not to mention the waste created by the batteries - production and discarding).
Does an electric car powered by coal fired power plant really create less pollution and/or CO2 (so hot these days) than a normally well tuned car powered by gasoline or diesel? -See from a total perspective of course - from the mine (coal)/well (gasoline/diesel) to the car is moving.
I think the energy expelled in finding, extracting, transporting, purifying and distributing oil is much higher than that of coal. Regardless, the OP’s discussion was compared with Taiwan which uses plenty of nuclear fuel which has far less contribution to air pollution.
All I know is what I have learned from experts that say electric vehicles produce about 60% less in CO2 emissions, when fueled by coal power compared to internal combustion engined vehicles. Also, coal power stations would not produce more CO2 than the internal combustion engined vehicles that would be replaced with air powered or electric powered vehicles, so even having more coal powered power stations would damage the environment less than internal combustion engines and the oil industry. Of course the coal industry isn’t Innocent in it’s destruction of the environment either, but simply less than its oil industry counterpart. As a foot note, I would also like to see further development and implementation of plant based plastics, which would help greatly to alleviate much of the reliance on oil even further.
Watch Who Killed The Electric Car?, for some insightful information on some alternative fueled vehicles.
Sources please. Are these like the experts who used to say that lead in petrol wasn’t harmful? The experts who thought ulcers were due to stress? The experts in the 1970s who said we would run out of oil within 30 years?
Electricity has to come from somewhere. If it ALL comes from clean sustainable sources then electrically driven vehicles become attractive - unless you’re one of the poor bastards killed by a car while walking to work, or have your home demolished to make way for yet another road. Even then, batteries are not made from benign materials.
But electricity doesn’t all come from clean sustainable sources. Even if your car is powered by the turbine on your roof, that turbine is not putting its energy into the distribution grid, so someone else is powering their aircon using energy from burning of some fuel. Until ALL your energy comes from sustainable sources, the most polluting technology in use is the the one which could be done away with in favour of some alternative.
Is a petrol-powered car more or less polluting than a coal-fired power station? Measure the air quality in Shanghai, or the UK a hundred years ago, before answering that.
[quote=“Wikipedia”]Production and conversion BEVs using NiMH battery chemistry typically use 0.3 to 0.5 kilowatt-hours per mile (0.2–0.3 kWh/km). Nearly half of this power consumption is due to inefficiencies in charging the batteries. The US fleet average of 23 miles per gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 1.58 kWh per mile and the 70 MPG Honda Insight gets 0.52 kWh per mile (assuming 36.4 kWh per US gallon of gasoline), so battery electric vehicles are relatively energy efficient.
When comparisons of the total, well-to-wheel energy cycle are made, the relative efficiency of BEVs drops. Generating electricity and providing liquid fuels for vehicles are thus almost entirely separate wings of the energy economy, with different inefficiencies and environmental harms. When considering only the driving cycle (ie, not the charging and elecricity production, a 55 % to 99.9 % improvement in CO2 emissions takes place when driving an EV over an ICE (gasoline, diesel) vehicle.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are useful for comparison of electricity and gasoline consumption. Such comparisons include energy production, transmission, charging, and vehicle losses. CO2 emissions improve in BEVs with sustainable electricity production but are fixed for gasoline vehicles.[/quote]
I’ve tried to look into all this before, to get an idea of the inefficiencies along the way, but couldn’t come up with any reliable figures. Can anyone help?
Let’s say you have two identical vehicles, one with a standard engine, and one with a battery/electric motor of similar power output. They’re driven in the same way on the same routes, so a comparison between them is fair. To make it simpler, say the fuel is the same in both cases.
One burns fuel and transmits the energy directly to the wheels, which should be more efficient, but also dissipates a lot of energy whenever the brakes are used.
The other burns fuel presumably at a more efficient rate, as the engine/turbine is running at its best speed all the time. The electricity is piped to the batteries, stored, and then released to power an electric motor. Instead of braking, the electric car reverses the process, and recharges itself to slow the car down. The amount of waste should be less, so it may be more efficient, I guess.
Does anyone know?
How more efficient is a large motor running at a constant speed in a power station?
What percentage of the kinetic energy produced is lost when converting to electrical energy?
What percentage is lost transmitting electricity down cables? (I saw a figure of 2%/1000km somewhere.)
What percentage of the energy put into a battery is recoverable? (I believe it’s 99% for modern batteries, but batteries ‘self-discharge’ over time.)
How much kinetic energy do you get back from your electric motor, compared to connecting the fuel-burning engine directly to the wheels?
How much energy is wasted in braking? Or, what’s the value of the energy recovered in an electric car?
And, for fun, how efficient is the compressed air variant? Air heats up when compressed, so energy is being lost. Would clockwork be more efficient?
I’m fairly sure that the petrol driven car (for the same Kilowatt output) is quite substantially more efficient than the electric car.
All of your questions I’m sure can be answered, however you’re not looking at the big picture. The vast majority of energy consumed isn’t done in the scenario you described above. You are missing:
- The energy required to build automated machines that build other machines
- The energy required to construct ships (for the transportation of oil) and railways (for the transportation of coal)…since in many cases these are dedicated lines and ships, these certainly count and a comparison between the two is fair
- The energy expended during exploration (including the drilling of dry wells) of both oil and coal. (I’m fairly sure that oil exploration is more expensive)
- The energy required to extract the oil and coal out of the ground, including all worksite construction, operation, support vehicles etc
- The energy expended in moving the raw product to the processing plant. (in the case of crude oil, large ships are used to transport the crude, or in some cases pipelines (what was the energy cost of laying the pipeline / maintenance etc), in some cases its a short distance and processed locally. In Australia 6km long dedicated trains are used to transport the coal to port where it is then shipped.
- Crude oil is then processed into the various ‘layers’ including from pentane up to heavier hydrocarbons used for road bitumen. This is a fairly energy intensive process itself as heat is used to separate the layers.
- Coal sometimes requires cleaning and breaking up, and in the case of high quality black coal, needs to be kept wet at all times as ‘dusty’ coal which is basically pure carbon can spontaneously ignite. This all requires energy input
- Petrol which I recall is Octane (8 carbon atoms in the hydrocarbon chain) which is just a fraction of the total crude oil that was previously transported and extracted must now be delivered by a combination of railway and trucks (all requiring energy of course) to individual distribution stations.
- Coal on the otherhand is all delivered to one location (the power station) for burning to generate steam which powers generators to produce electricity. Much of this electricity is then lost on grid inefficiencies before it reaches your home and can be used to power up your electric car (also rather inefficient).
So as you can see, the big picture is even more complicated than the scenario pictured above and estimates of the energy requirements for each stage are required before any kind of meaningful answer can be given.
As they stand, average internal combustion engined vehicles are about 25% to 40% efficient in terms of energy burned to energy transmitted to the wheels. A great deal of energy lost is through heat to the exhaust and friction through the drive train and wheels, although some engines have been successfully adapted with thermal recovery generators. These can be complex or crude in design, I have seen pictures for example of a home built truck in India with an old boiler in the back which is heated from the exhaust to drive a small steam engine that assists the rear wheels. A more complex system would be that of a Prius which converts locomotive force into electricity and then uses motor assist to power the front wheels. This type of system is expensive and is only marginally more efficient overall, although saves fuel when in idle mode or during free running down hill as the engine is shut down.
It may be more difficult to calculate the efficiency of electric vehicles due to many factors such as battery design, but they estimated to be about 90% efficient in power delivery to the wheels. The great advantages of some electric cars would be their minimum drag due to lack of a conventional power train (gearbox, drive shafts, clutch etc), virtual unlimited drive speed as electric motors are so much easier to balance than conventional engines and are easier to cool and fuel delivery which is theoretically instantaneous.
The major disadvantage of course is battery design which, when compared to advancements in vehicle design makes us look like we are still in the dark ages.
There may be another type of vehicle soon to be released and that is a small horse power internal combustion engine which only generates electricity to power batteries and the electric motor drive train. According to sources, the car will be the most efficient, yet practical car yet. I forget who is producing it, but it could be French.
Yes, things are more complicated when explored, for example during an average lifetime expectancy a Toyota Prius is supposedly less environmentally friendly than a Jeep Cherokee, due to the fuel costs of production, materials, costs of recycling, design etc…
There is no simple fix for these problems, but the greatest hope and possibility is for advancements in electricity production and storage. Electricity is free, although we don’t all harness it this way. The use of oil and coal will always come at a cost. Even though the systematic production of electricity at this time may produce much pollution through production of power lines, the use of coal power stations, nuclear power etc, it is not the case that it must be this way. Free energy is available, but is either stifled, or too expensive to set up in structure and supply. This is the simple reason that we are not using it at this time. The future is indeed in wind, solar, hydro power and hydrogen. There seems to be little argument that these fuels are the least expensive in terms of environment and production in the long term.
See: The Whispering Wheel
What kind of comparison just looks at power conversion to the wheels for an electric car and then compares that to a standard car? A biased comparison…thats what.
In order to generate a real world view on efficiency, see my previous post.
But you didn’t mention different types of electricity production, as some are more efficient and require less of a process than others that use coal or nuclear fuel. It’s true that not all processes in delivering electricity are efficient, but some are, and some can be almost completely free. It is possible to produce an almost completely free vehicle, that will run on electricity, but for a fractional number of components , which is very much more difficult to do with an internal combustion engine vehicle. Though ironically the production of a free vehicle is very expensive indeed.
Also power output between internal combustion engines and electric motors cannot be compaired by crude power output alone. Electricity is far more powerful than an engine burning fuel as electric motors have little resistance and are more balanced, providing much faster propulsion, which can in turn provide much greater torque for motor size than any conventional engine. This is why we use electric winches instead of engines, and this is why an electric powered concept Formular 1 car is much faster than a conventional type. Electricity is only limited by provision and that is the only reason why we are stuck with 200 year old internal combustion engines, it is little to do with power, but convenience. If we all had tons of money, then we would all be driving virtually free vehicles. Invest to gain I say.
A few points:
-
Taiwan gets about 10% of its power from nuclear fuel, and another or so 35% from hydro, which is 45%, pretty good going for any nation, and it could be increased so that oil based power (which is what, 50% or something?), is used far less
-
It’s not just sending the pollution problem somewhere else, it’s actually wiping out one pollution problem (that sickening air/noise pollution from Taipei car/scooter traffic), which improves the quality of inner city life dramatically
-
Refining oil for automobile fuel is a process producing far more pollution than converting nuclear fuel to electricity, and definitely more pollution than hydro (it may even produce more pollution than converting oil to electricity, and I suspect it does)
-
Current oil and nuclear power plants are already producing pollution, so increasing the electricity demand isn’t going to introduce any new problems, and does running an electric powered air compressor for 2-3 minutes take more electricity than running current petrol pumps? Is there really going to be a significant demand for electricity and a significant increase in pollution from existing power plants if these cars replace internal combustion vehicles?
I am pretty pro nuclear power and see it as part of a good solution to global warming. I would call it pollution neutral over the long term.
Note that there’s technology able to deal with acthnicides, so long term storage of nuclear waste is much less of a concern than people used to think.
I am ready to claim that coal power plants are much worse nuclear polluters than nuclear power has even been.
I’m with you Mr He.
In that case, you will find this link interesting:
ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev … lmain.html
An air-powered car using coal generated power will most likely be a fair bit dirtier than any petrol driven car.
I would be interested in a realistic comparison between coal pollution produced in the provision of electricity on human health when compaired to the pollution from vehicle exhausts. I believe the direct effect of exhaust fumes and benzene gas have more of a direct effect on public health than any distant coal burning electricity power station has immediately, and so far have not been convinced otherwise.
Let’s remind ourselves again however, that we are of course striving to improve our future, and they key in this acheivement is to give up on our great reliance on oil and coal. At present there are a few sollutions to the problem at hand, but most come down to the production of electricity or hydrogen; as this is the case, then future cars should either be electric driven or hydrogen. As the production of clean hydrogen relies on electricity again, then clean electricity is our goal, leading us back to the question is a vacume powered car cleaner than an internal combustion engine? The answer is most deffinately Yes. The next question is, is the production of electricity cleaner than producing exhaust from a motor vehicle? The answer is perhaps, but not certainly. Seeing as there is the possibility and the aparatus to produce free electricity however, an electric powered vehicle is certainly much cleaner than any gas/petrol, diesel, biofuel car has ever been, and an electric vehicle is far more sustainable and reusable than any previous car has ever been. The conclusion to me and many others is fairly apparant. We must improve on the production of clean electricity, and indeed this is the case at hand. Improvments have been made and are being made. Electricity is only ever becoming cleaner, and perhaps not too far into the near future, hopefully within the next fifty years of so, electricity and hydrogen power may be almost free of pollutants completely. It’s not like it’s rocket science anyway, as we have had the technology at hand for a long time already. Many homes indeed have already been built to produce almost no carbon emissions, whils using solar energy and electricity for power, not to mention places like Iceland which have vowed to produce almost no carbon exhaust by the middle of this century [Read This]. This is all possible and in deed all places in the world are capable of the same thing. It may be a case of chicken and the egg at present with electric cars and non polluting power stations, but one technology must go forward first, and in this case, it is the demand from consumers and the public that oil must go and electric must come cleanly. There is may be one great way to fuel this demand further and that is to purchase more energy efficient vehicles. If one wants to make a statement, then purchasing a car like this air powered car is the perfect way to make it.