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      11-18-2017, 11:40 PM   #19
RM7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vinylengraver View Post
I have one basic issue with the whole EV concept.
In terms of simple physics, would you rather burn some fossil fuel in your ICE vehicle to power it and suffer minor energy loss as compared to the situation where you are burning the same fossil fuel to power the turbine to create the electricity to charge the battery to power your EV?
I mean it makes no sense at all if you look at it this way, does it?
How is it better, cheaper, more efficient, cleaner... whatever???
Mainly, it's more efficient/cheaper because the ICE engine is banging into itself constantly through relatively barbaric violent actions, creating heat from friction, lifting heavy cylinders over and over again, valves, crankshafts, etc. All the energy to do that is not free, it a cost of doing business, and only the tip of the iceberg, there are far more losses of this nature.

Thermodynamic efficiency, since you speak of physics, you should look up some of this stuff. The power source of choice for many urban areas now are turbine power generators. They are scaleable and can be added easily when the power demand increases and they are relatively easy to construct and maintain. The most efficient have eclipsed 65% and just a few decades ago, it was thought that 50% efficiency was a barrier. There are of course transmission losses, but this still beats out ICE engines, which are thermodynamically limited, being more around 20%, again with all that stuff banging around and having run fuel pumps and everything else, it's not hard to understand.

Then of course, there's the infrastructure to run all of your ICE, from the huge supertankers that have to ship the crude, the ports that have to service them, to the refineries that have to crack the crude, to the storage bunkers that have to be constructed, to the ships and pipelines that have to be constructed to ship the fuel, to the stations that eventually get it, it's an immense cost and consumes a huge amount of energy, not just to transport it, but to make all this stuff that is required to transport and store it, which is ultimately takes fuel. Although there isn't full electrical infrastructure at this time, it wouldn't require constantly shipping fuel everywhere and many of these costs.

Fossil fuels will be with us for a long time, there's no doubt about that, but already physics and science shows us that it's cheaper and more efficient to burn the fuel at a location that can harness much higher efficiency, then beam it out to remote locations for use in electric engines. I mean, that's almost the point of every single electric engine used anywhere, otherwise we'd have gas engines doing ridiculous simple tasks that make no sense, like a gasoline powered car-wash, or gas-powered shop tools. The problem with electric has always been storing the kind of energy density that makes it practical, to which we are finally seeing some practical and useful progress.
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