Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mindmetoo]

This yahoo article is about a bunch of Californians who want electric cars. Now that sounds great, but a vast amount of electricity in North America is generated from coal. Coal is cheap and plentiful in North America. When energy hits peak, we fire up the coal plants. So driving an electric car means you're just driving (partially) a coal burning car. It's just that you're not burning the coal in your own backyard, but someone else's.

It's really, really time to go nuclear like France (80% nuclear) if we want electric cars and hydrogen powered cars. (Hydrogen needs large amounts of electricity to separate from water.)

[pastis]

Interesting. Any idea if such electric cars using coal-derived energy would be more efficient or produce more/less CO2 overall than the combustion engines we use now?

[mnhnhyouh]

I think that in some situations they produce less CO2 per km. Electric cars are not running when stopped, unlike a petrol engine. They are generally fitted with a system that turns braking into stored energy, often by attaching a generator to the wheels during braking, which then adds charge to the battery. So for lots of start and stop driving they might be better.

However, I think, that the extra steps in the supply chain reduce the effieiceny greatly. Each step reduces efficiency and you are going,

Burning coal -> boiling water -> turbine -> generator -> transformers -> powerline -> transformers -> charge battery -> turn electric engine

I think that as little as 5 % of the original energy in the coal reaches the wheels.

h

[pastis]

Yeah, I think nuclear is by far the best way overall. Just hate the whole idea of anything going wrong again (i.e Chernobyl)...

[mithridates]

The electricity should eventually be produced through hydro or other means, but there are also health benefits to using electrical cars even if the pollution produced is the same - the pollution in that case would be produced at a factory far away instead of right in the city where the largest amounts of people congregate, and that reduces costs in health care somewhat.

[ED209]

Still waiting for fusion power, damn when will the Chinese get of their arses.

[mindmetoo]

[cbclark4]

The obvious problem of the electric (or electricity in general) car is that the energy is trasmitted from it's source to the Appliance, in this case a vehicle. There is a substantial amount of energy lost in the transmission.

The next obstical is the energy storage unit witin the vehicle, the battery array.

The solution then is to produce the energy at the place of use.

The hybrid is close to a solution. However plugging a car into you home outlet does not solve the overall pollution energy prolem.

Hydrogen fuel cells, solar energy and geothermal energy.

I think bio fuel is as much of a distraction as nuclear energy is.

cbc

[Juregen]

[ernie]

NEWS FLASH!!!
scientists have just discovered 4 revolutionary ways to reduce emissions from transportation (and save $$$!)

1. car pool
2. take public transit
3. walk or ride a bike
4. live near your work (duh!)

like you said: electric and hydrogen-fueled cars are a sham because it requires electricity to produce the energy, which uses either coal (extremely dirty) or nuclear (dangerous AND dirty) or solar/wind/tidal (which won't be developed for at least another 30 years because government and industry are resisting 100%)... using corn oil is bad because it actually takes more energy to grow the corn than you get when you burn it...

[mindmetoo]

[djsmnc]

I think we should ride mules, donkeys, and horses

[Hollywoodaction]

[Xerxes]

Hemp is "grass clippings" and it is dirt cheap to grow, and is basically a weed which requires no maintenance to grow to eliminate the weeds that choke the weed. Although I could see the human element in the fuel supply using it for non-energy purposes, as it were. Oh, well.

So, the next best thing would be to invest a whole helluva lotta money to blast an array of solar panels into space to orbit earth so that it is always facing the sun (like the moon does), eliminating the whether element from the weakness of existing solar energy technology.

We would reduce the need to lather up with SPF 50 lotion in non-polluted areas (no such sun-exposure problem in Seoul) to avoid UV exposure. The solar energy would be beamed to earth so that we are constantly bathed in electromagnetic energy to power our cars and our walkie talkies, among other things.

The electromagnetic energy, however, would probably cause sterility, massive mutations, the rise of the X-men, Magneto, Phoenix, and the end of human-kind as we know it from all of THEM taking over US. Oh, well to that too.

I kinda like the nuke idea.

[mnhnhyouh]