Jimmy Cornell goes Electric, with a Cat

[harlem24]

If you look at the development in the cars, as stated before:
Renault Zoe went from 22kWh to 52kWh within 7 years, same footprint 100kg weight increase.
BMW i3 went from 22kWh to 44kWh within 5 years, same footprint 120kg weight increase.
VW eUp went from 18kWh to 32kWh within 6 years, same footprint 110kg weight increase.
Things is, car batteries have different requirments, they not only have to store much energy, they need to be able to release huge ammounts of energy in a short time and they need to be able to fast charge.
In a boat at least the last point is likely irrelevant, because you either charge with solar, regen or shorepower over night.
So, if you don't need to be able to fast charge, it's much easier to get higher density batteries, because heat, that come when you fast charge, is not an issue.
If you look at Uma, you see that they need about 2-3kW propulsion in flat water.
A 50kWh battery, let's say from a Renault Zoe, weights about 300kg. With that you should be able to move a bigger boat for some hours, before the batterie is depleted...
The coming years will be interessting in many ways regarding electrification and decarbonisation.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Yihang

For sure it will never be competitive with diesel, but in 20 years the choice wont be there.

I seriously doubt that electric will be the only choice 20 years from now. I think and I HOPE that we will have stopped burning fossil fuels by then. But diesel fuel can be produced synthetically and need not contain any fossil fuels.

Originally Posted by Yihang

. . . Companies like Torqueedo are using BMW batteries which are not Lifepo4. They are LiNMC I believe, which is between NCA and Lifepo4. So we are certainly not locked into Lifepo4, at least not in the long term. What chemistry does OV use? The propulsion guys will probably be the test beds for new batteries safe for marine use.

Tesla still haven't released their chemistry yet for the new tabless 4680 batteries but it won't be using cobalt. Certainly a lot of money will be poured into this space from now. Fingers crossed.

My fingers are also crossed. Some breakthrough in this space would be so great for the world, let alone for our narrow community.

Originally Posted by Yihang

. . . A typical 40 foot bene now has 45hp engine and 200l tank which is probably around a day worth motoring. The fellow with the ovean volt NEEL51 is getting 7 hours of motoring, so if we 2x the density and 2x the capacity we are almost there. Certainly within reason for 2030. For capacity you just need to shave another ton off the neel 51, the neel 51 sport is already 2 tons lighter by going to carbon mast and other doodads.

Well, 7 hours of slow motoring in ideal conditions. 40 foot Benes are not everyone's use cases so not the touchstone. I carry fuel adequate for a week of slow motoring in ideal conditions, and multiple days in bad conditions. Carrying this amount of energy is needed for long distance/blue water and especially high latitude sailing. Where you also need fuel for electrical power generation and heating.

In my opinion, we are still very far away. We need a significant technological breakthrough to start forgetting about liquid fuels. Hoping to see it in my lifetime.

[Pete7]

Originally Posted by Yihang

Generating your own power for propulsion is a much harder puzzle to crack.

The real problem is heating, propulsion well you could wait for wind on a yacht. Bit tricky if your cold and the boat is damp. Dockhead has already looked up the energy density of diesel which I was wondering about. There is no getting away from the fact, its an ideal heating source or storage of energy for heating.

Pete

[harlem24]

If you are in a cold climate, you most likely have a propane/diesel heater on board.
Both should be able to be replaced by PtG/PtL.
Direct electric heating is much to inefficient to use and to my knowledge there are no heatpumps available for pleasure boats, at least I haven't heard of any...

[Dockhead]

Liquid fuel can be produced from hydrogen and captured CO2:

https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-re...er-in-airports

This fuel, called "electrofuel", can power aircraft, ships, and boats, and is carbon-free.

This looks to me like a much shorter development pathway than a breakthrough in battery storage of electrical power.

What is really cool about this is that, like hydrogen itself, production of this fuel from electrical power can use off peak generated power, enormously increasing the efficiency of use of the power grid. Battery storage of electrical power at the vehicle doesn't do this -- recharging time will be not that flexible.

I think we should be going as hard as we can to develop better batteries, but technologies like electrofuels seem more promising to me in the short to medium term. Won't it be cool to have airliners which are carbon neutral. According to this article, we are only 5 years away from that. In the future, our boats could also be powered by such electrofuel. I consider this much more likely than that we will be all electric with power stored in batteries. We are just too far away from a reasonable power density with present battery technology.

[barnakiel]

Oh. Yes. Jimmy the money will go wherever there is publicity.


He has just had a Garcia. Now an electric cat.


He rents those boats, or re-sells them and accepts the loss?


b.

[harlem24]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Liquid fuel can be produced from hydrogen and captured CO2:

https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-re...er-in-airports

This fuel, called "electrofuel", can power aircraft, ships, and boats, and is carbon-free.

This looks to me like a much shorter development pathway than a breakthrough in battery storage of electrical power.

What is really cool about this is that, like hydrogen itself, production of this fuel from electrical power can use off peak generated power, enormously increasing the efficiency of use of the power grid. Battery storage of electrical power at the vehicle doesn't do this -- recharging time will be not that flexible.

I think we should be going as hard as we can to develop better batteries, but technologies like electrofuels seem more promising to me in the short to medium term. Won't it be cool to have airliners which are carbon neutral. According to this article, we are only 5 years away from that. In the future, our boats could also be powered by such electrofuel. I consider this much more likely than that we will be all electric with power stored in batteries. We are just too far away from a reasonable power density with present battery technology.

There is no access renewable electricity available atm.
So there is no real way to use it to produce H2, nore PtL/PtG which consumes even more electricity.
We will see advances in battery technology that will not allow H2/PtL/PtG to be feasable from a price perspective for propulsion.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by harlem24

There is no access renewable electricity available atm.
So there is no real way to use it to produce H2, nore PtL/PtG which consumes even more electricity.
We will see advances in battery technology that will not allow H2/PtL/PtG to be feasable from a price perspective for propulsion.

What do you mean? You have not heard that the world has a pretty huge installed base of wind, hydro, solar, and nuclear power? Increasing all the time?

Where I live, more than 90% of the electrical power produced is carbon-free, and after the completion of the huge nuclear plant under construction in Olkiliuoto, will be 100% carbon free. There is a lot of excess production capacity in off peak periods -- this excess capacity can be used to produce electrofuels or hydrogen.

If electrofuels and/or hydrogen becomes widely used, this will accelerate the development of intermittent power sources like solar and wind, which have a big disadvantage for supplying the power grid in that the amount of production varies greatly according to sun or wind conditions. This results in lower capacity utilization so worse economics. So suddenly the wind turbine will be operated at higher capacity utilization and will pay off better. Wind power is really cheap, and since it uses no fuel, the excess power which can be produced in high production times is practically free. It is true that production of electrofuels is fairly inefficient, but this does not matter when the power used is almost free. Battery storage is also quite inefficient by the way. These issues are inherent to any power system which has electrical power in any phase of it.

Liquid fuel today has a two orders of magnitude advantage over batteries in power density, something which is critically important in vehicles which have to carry the stored power with them. I do really hope for big breakthroughs in battery technology, but liquid fuels already have this power density TODAY. Whether batteries will ever catch up -- in 10 years or 50 years or never -- we simply don't know. The technology doesn't exist even in the basic science level yet. Moore's Law applies in electronics, but does not apply to batteries. To increase the power density of batteries is much more challenging than shrinking computer chips.

[Pete7]

Originally Posted by harlem24

There is no access renewable electricity available atm.
So there is no real way to use it to produce H2, nore PtL/PtG which consumes even more electricity.
We will see advances in battery technology that will not allow H2/PtL/PtG to be feasable from a price perspective for propulsion.

Watched an interesting YT video recently saying the Japanese car manufacturers are now in cahoots with the Australians to use solar to make hydrogen which they can then use to power vehicles across Asia. Sounds like a good solution.

Pete

[harlem24]

I live one country south of your of your winter destination and here is about 45% of the electricity made from reneables. 3% of the energy produced they are not able to use due to too much electricity in the local grid or what ever.
This is so little that there will not be a viable business plan for H2 production unless we are building much more renewables. Thing is, we don't only need to switch all electricity but all heating and traffic to renewables. Not sure if I will see that happen within my lifetime and I am mid forties...

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Pete7

Watched an interesting YT video recently saying the Japanese car manufacturers are now in cahoots with the Australians to use solar to make hydrogen which they can then use to power vehicles across Asia. Sounds like a good solution.

Pete

Indeed -- that's exactly what I'm talking about. Unlimited land area in Oz for giant solar farms. Make hydrogen to be used as a gaseous fuel or turned into electrofuels. It's the future, at least the medium term future. Good for Oz -- maybe help them wean themselves off their awful coal industry.

[harlem24]

Originally Posted by Pete7

Watched an interesting YT video recently saying the Japanese car manufacturers are now in cahoots with the Australians to use solar to make hydrogen which they can then use to power vehicles across Asia. Sounds like a good solution.

Pete

If they would use solar it would be great, to my knowledge the australians produce the H2 from cole and they want to capture the CO2.
We'll see if that will work...
If they'd switch to solar they should start with there own energy mix, instead of producing H2 for someone else...
ATM Queenslan has no renewables at all...
https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/AUS-QLD
Only South Australia is better with 63%.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by harlem24

I live one country south of your of your winter destination and here is about 45% of the electricity made from reneables. 3% of the energy produced they are not able to use due to too much electricity in the local grid or what ever.
This is so little that there will not be a viable business plan for H2 production unless we are building much more renewables. Thing is, we don't only need to switch all electricity but all heating and traffic to renewables. Not sure if I will see that happen within my lifetime and I am mid forties...

OK, I see what you mean.

Well, just build more of it. One of several giant advantages of wind power is that it can be built out extremely rapidly -- less than 3 years for the average wind farm compared to 5-6 years for a gas power plant and 20 years for nuclear. Cheap and fast and ideal for this purpose.

Once you have a viable hydrogen/electrofuels distribution chain, the economic case for wind is even better, so you just build more of it.

A big nuclear plant wouldn't hurt, either. Get started now and you can build a Generation III European High Pressure Water plant benefitting from all the experience gained in building Olkiluouto.

There is no inherent limitation on your electrical power production capacity, so long as the economics stack up.

Also, you don't even have to necessarily build the capacity. Your neighbor Denmark has a gigantic wind power capacity, which has large excess capacity. Just buy the off hours from the Danes. In fact, most electrical power grids have excess capacity at different hours -- you could probably just buy it.

As to heating -- ground source heat pumps ought to work great where you live, which I believe is mostly under sea level . I installed a ground source heat pump at my lake house, 15 years ago. It is an absolutely fantastic system. If you build a big nuclear plant, you can also use waste heat from that for space heating. I'm not sure if you have district heating in your cities however.

[jmh2002]

Here is a another article discussing synthetic fuel and why Porsche has an interest in developing it:

https://advrider.com/will-porsche-sa...ic-motorcycle/

(it's from a motorcycle website, but the points remain the same)

Michael Steiner, who is in charge of R&D at Porsche, says that Porsche wants to power up the development of synthetic fuels, known as eFuels. “This technology is particularly important because the combustion engine will continue to dominate the automotive world for many years to come,” he says. “If you want to operate the existing fleet in a sustainable manner, eFuels are a fundamental component.”

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by Pete7

The real problem is heating, propulsion well you could wait for wind on a yacht. Bit tricky if your cold and the boat is damp. Dockhead has already looked up the energy density of diesel which I was wondering about. There is no getting away from the fact, its an ideal heating source or storage of energy for heating.

Pete

It's absurd that I cannot have a small nuclear reactor on my boat.



Looking at the energy density vs diesel it would take a technological breakthrough for diesel to ever be viable. It's just not a workable solution with the fumes and constant need to refuel.


With a nuke I can use a 5% efficiency thermocouple, but who cares it powers the boat for 30 years at hull speed.



Since most cruisers seem to have little consideration for anyone else or the environment why should I? Sure, sail power alone is already viable, but it requires effort and planning. Using electric requires limited planning and ensuring optimal efficiency which means radically different propulsion and generation systems from industry standard, and like most cruisers I don't want to read any papers on this subject or try to learn about it much less apply any of these theories.

It's too much hassle for me I want to push button and go full speed for years without having to visit fuel dock or re-engineer anything. I need to keep existing cruising boat and overload it with toys and also push it above hull speed all the time under power on long passages.

diesel isn't good enough give me nuke power. if you are against nuke you are against progress, you are against allowing rich like me to enjoy whatever is theoretically possible, and who cares if most people can't do it. who cares about environment i'm old and I want to have one last run, and the real problems start after i die anyway.