Inboard engines and a changing world

[AKA-None]

Originally Posted by newhaul

1) who paid for the highway system to be built? The American taxpayers.

2) research into better paving materials? Private industry trying to save themselves money on installing.

3) who pays to maintain? The people that buy gasoline and diesel fuels ( fuel tax)

4) Port facilities? The taxpayers.

5) paid for airports? Taxpayers.

6) maintain them ? Taxpayers

BTW 80% of taxpayers will not use an airport that they are paying to maintain .



Eventually they will realise the taxpayer is out of money . Then what?



We must all actually look at all aspects and the future of same

Item 2 is a bit misleading based on my short stint in mndot road research as it would appear to have been both private and government money. In particular it was the us state of Minnesota along with the government of Finland

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

I can see diesel use persisting mainly where energy density is most useful... like small boats. It will still be cost-effective even at a multiple of the current price.

But for standby use... I think the electric grid will become more distributed and smarter, and there will be fewer widespread, long-duration outages, which will reduce the need for individual standby gennies. I also expect that there will be distributed storage on the grid, once the battery technology becomes more cost-effective, fuether improving reliability. You will probably see hospitals etc having their own battery bank instead of a standby diesel generator.

Valid points. Except for the last one about hospitals. I was a building systems engineer for over 45 years. The electrical LOADS imposed by hospitals (on mains service voltages), with emergency, important and critical loads, far exceed the ability of battery storage to maintain service for the Code required durations.


Think of it this way: all the guys on this and other boating forums talking about electric engines in sailboats almost ALL have come to the conclusion that the switch is good if you only use it for short periods. If you need or want to go further afield, you simply can't. There is no perpetual motion machine...yet.


I prefer to think of this as an evolving technological shift, in spite of those who may look on it as something that can't be done.

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by GordMay

No, not really.
We’d require about 496,804,500,000 square meters, or 496,805 square kilometers, (191,817 square miles) as the area required to power the world, with solar panels. This is roughly equal to the area of Spain. At first that sounds like a lot, and it is.
But we should put this in perspective.
If divided into 5,000 super-site installations around the world (average of 25 per country), it would measure less than 10km a side for each.
According to the United Nations 170,000 square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be finished in 3 years.
The Saharan Desert is 9,064,958 square kilometers, or 18 times the total required area to fuel the world.
The unpopulated area of the Sahara desert is over 9 million km², which if covered with solar panels would provide 630 terawatts total power. The Earth’s current energy consumption rate is around 13.5 TW at any given moment (including oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric). This measure arrives at a multiplier of 46 times the area needed.
The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world, being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farm,s we would be almost 10% of the way there.
SES technology* would bring down the solar area required to 315,000 square kilometers (based on the 629 kW•h per square meter listed on the site sourced as from Southern California Edison and Sandia National Laboratories). This is a 40% reduction just on efficiency of the capturing device. The technology will continue to get better and better
* SES ➥ Home | SES Stirling Energy Systems


The above doesn't account for any rooftop solar installations.


A 5 MW turbine can be expected to produce 17 GWh per year (they are 40% effective from their peak rated capacity – 5 MW x 365 x 24 = 43.8 GWh). Therefore, it would require 11,748,294 of the 5 MW capacity turbines to create the same yearly output. There are 500 million cars in the world so it’s not like that’s an unattainable goal from a manufacturing standpoint. And each 5 MW turbine is a 30 year lifespan money making machine for whoever buys it. The same can not be said for my car.
But if we can build 90,000 Cape Wind size installations, we would be there on wind alone. Based on that installation, each turbine requires 1/2 square km of area for offshore sites. This would require 5.85 million square kilometers for 2030 world energy needs.
➥ https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/w...edWindOnly.pdf

There's a bit of snake oil within that explanation. For a start, you can't build solar and wind generation systems anywhere you please. Talk of the using the Sahara desert, for example, is pure fantasy. Shifting dunes, sandstorms, dust covering the panels, the high cost of maintenance, the logistics to transport crews and even water to wash the dust off. Who is going to invest in that idea?


The reality is that these installations can only be built in very specific locations. You can also bet that the estimated amount of panels and turbines is the absolute minimum and the real number required would be considerably higher. Even at 20 year service lives, an extra 5% is required straight off the bat.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by AKA-None

Item 2 is a bit misleading based on my short stint in mndot road research as it would appear to have been both private and government money. In particular it was the us state of Minnesota along with the government of Finland

I stand corrected private and taxpayer directly

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by GordMay

No, not really.
We’d require about 496,804,500,000 square meters, or 496,805 square kilometers, (191,817 square miles) as the area required to power the world, with solar panels. This is roughly equal to the area of Spain. At first that sounds like a lot, and it is.
But we should put this in perspective.
If divided into 5,000 super-site installations around the world (average of 25 per country), it would measure less than 10km a side for each.
According to the United Nations 170,000 square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be finished in 3 years.
The Saharan Desert is 9,064,958 square kilometers, or 18 times the total required area to fuel the world.
The unpopulated area of the Sahara desert is over 9 million km², which if covered with solar panels would provide 630 terawatts total power. The Earth’s current energy consumption rate is around 13.5 TW at any given moment (including oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric). This measure arrives at a multiplier of 46 times the area needed.
The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world, being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farm,s we would be almost 10% of the way there.
SES technology* would bring down the solar area required to 315,000 square kilometers (based on the 629 kW•h per square meter listed on the site sourced as from Southern California Edison and Sandia National Laboratories). This is a 40% reduction just on efficiency of the capturing device. The technology will continue to get better and better
* SES ➥ Home | SES Stirling Energy Systems


The above doesn't account for any rooftop solar installations.


A 5 MW turbine can be expected to produce 17 GWh per year (they are 40% effective from their peak rated capacity – 5 MW x 365 x 24 = 43.8 GWh). Therefore, it would require 11,748,294 of the 5 MW capacity turbines to create the same yearly output. There are 500 million cars in the world so it’s not like that’s an unattainable goal from a manufacturing standpoint. And each 5 MW turbine is a 30 year lifespan money making machine for whoever buys it. The same can not be said for my car.
But if we can build 90,000 Cape Wind size installations, we would be there on wind alone. Based on that installation, each turbine requires 1/2 square km of area for offshore sites. This would require 5.85 million square kilometers for 2030 world energy needs.
➥ https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/w...edWindOnly.pdf

Putting wind and solar in the Sahara is really a bad idea . Then man would actually be responsible for global warming and creating a negative feedback loop .

https://www.latimes.com/science/scie...html?_amp=true

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by newhaul

... BTW that was private company that had the genetic sequencing code before even starting afterall it is just a varient of the sars covid 03 so was not difficult to modify an already existing " vaccine"

Indeed.
Moderna designed its vaccine in just two days in January, before some people had even heard of the coronavirus.
Utilizing mRNA technology meant that both Pfizer and Moderna only needed the coronavirus' genetic sequence to make a vaccine — no virus had to be cultivated in labs. That's why the companies were able to progress in record time. By contrast, the development of more traditional vaccines can take years.
On January 11, researchers from China published the genetic sequence of the coronavirus. Two days later, Moderna's team and NIH scientists had finalized the targeted genetic sequence they would use in the vaccine.
By February 24, Moderna had shipped its first vaccine batches to NIH scientists in Bethesda, Maryland. Researchers administered the first dose on March 16 in Seattle, Washington. That launched the first clinical trial of any coronavirus
➥ https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3330315

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by newhaul

Putting wind and solar in the Sahara is really a bad idea . Then man would actually be responsible for global warming and creating a negative feedback loop .
https://www.latimes.com/science/scie...html?_amp=true

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

There's a bit of snake oil within that explanation. For a start, you can't build solar and wind generation systems anywhere you please. Talk of the using the Sahara desert, for example, is pure fantasy. Shifting dunes, sandstorms, dust covering the panels, the high cost of maintenance, the logistics to transport crews and even water to wash the dust off. Who is going to invest in that idea?
The reality is that these installations can only be built in very specific locations. You can also bet that the estimated amount of panels and turbines is the absolute minimum and the real number required would be considerably higher. Even at 20 year service lives, an extra 5% is required straight off the bat.

Reefmagnet alluded (imprecisely) to the problem of the geographic space, required for solar/wind farms.

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

We're well past the deadline for the invention of the "Mr Fusion". Have to wonder, therefore, where all the extra electricity is going to come from that's going to be needed for this brave new internal combustion free world. I mean, if we start planting solar and wind farms all over land and sea, aren't we just shifting the core problems to a different stage?

My reply was intended to put the issue into perspective, and my use of deserts and golf courses was only meant to illustrate the scale of the issue. It was not a proposed technical solution.
I think I illustrated that, while size/space is an issue, it may not be an insurmountable problem - nor, even, the major problem with solar/wind power (base load, transmission & storage).

I am not suggesting that wind/solar will supply (anywhere near) 100% of our energy needs, soon, or in the future.

While I applaud your use of references, supporting your statement, I'd also suggest that prime scientific sources of information, are usually better than secondary reports, in the popular press.
The main value of the linked LA Times article was to provide a link to the original research, which does not support newhaul's citicism.

“Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation” ~ Yan Li et al
Which concludes:
“... Our results obtained from experiments performed with a climate model suggest that, for installations of wind and solar farms with current conversion efficiency in the desert at a scale large enough to power the entire world, the impacts on regional climate would be beneficialrather than detrimental, and the impacts on global mean temperature are still small compared with those induced by CO2 emission from fossil fuels (3, 10). If carefully planned, these farms could also trigger more precipitation, largely because of a previously overlooked vegetation feedback. This highlights that, in addition to avoiding anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and the resulting warming, wind and solar energy could have other unexpected beneficial climate impacts when deployed at a large scale in the Sahara, where conditions are especially favorable for these impacts. Efforts to build such large-scale wind and solar farms for electricity generation may still face many technological (e.g., transmission, efficiency), socioeconomic (e.g., cost, politics), and environmental challenges, but this goal has become increasingly achievable and cost-effective (36) (supplementary text). These results indicate that renewable energy can have multiple benefits for climate and sustainable development and thus could be widely adopted as a primary solution to the challenges of global energy, climate change, and environmental and societal sustainability (4)...”
The Study ➥ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6406/1019

[malbert73]

Nicely done Gord. Many of those I consider “science averse” (like climate change or COVID doubters) do a nice job scanning for belief congruent headlines on websites but rarely dive into the data and scientific publications that actually speak the truth

[wmcunninghamii]

I have a 30 foot Freedom (Mull). A colleague with the same boat has converted his to electric. We have discussed pros and cons at great length. I had had such a run of diesel leaks and general engine crap that I was ready to trash the Yanmar.

I love the concept. Quiet, clean, low maintenance, tons of immediate torque, etc. However it really does come down to range, time and patience. He is very range limited, the boat it too small to carry the battery load out or panels it would need to operate a stove, heater, and any other high current draw devices on a "whenever I need it" basis. Note: when I say heater I mean a diesel heater. He really has to plan his adventures. Not necessarily a bad thing but it is just another "thing" on top of all the other sailing things. I leased an EV for three years and it was pretty much a similar experience albeit I had a Chevy Spark with only 90 miles of range.

If someone smart can figure out a way to make a keel out of lipo batteries and ensure maintainability, now that would be the bomb! My keel runs near 3K lbs, can you imagine what kind of power you could get out of a battery that big? Tell you one thing, you would get value for your marine transient dock fee. Plug in asap and start sucking down as much power as the marina can deliver. Yeeha!

He is docked adjacent to open sailing territory so he is golden...but I often need to motor twenty or thirty miles.. sometimes more, and it just would not work for me. I had an opportunity to do a couple of singlehanded transpacs, had to deal with the Pac High and was really glad I had a long range. Lack of fuel cost one of my colleagues 5 days bobbing around waiting for wind 1000 miles offshore on the way back to the mainland.

Despite many comments here regarding fossil fuels availability in future, my guess is there are many years ahead of us. For example, Russia/Germany are currently building a multibillion dollar pipeline called Nord Stream II. This will move (more) nat gas from Russia to Germany (and the rest of Europe I presume), this issue has been a major thorn in the side of the US as we try to pressure Putin to shut the hell up and behave. Despite all this and the environmental movement in Germany, that pipeline just keeps getting built, why? Because, surprisingly, Europeans like to live in heated homes. Anyway, its going to be a long long time before that pipeline, and the thousands of others like it around the world, run dry. The same applies to refined crude.

https://www.gazprom.com/projects/nord-stream2/

[malbert73]

Like the idea of electric. Have solar on home and put power back into grid 8 months of the year. Would gladly buy electric cars for next ones. But the ability to motor at hull speed for hours is essential for our weekend/part time cruising with jobs/kids/school/ light air Chesapeake and east coast US summers. Honestly sailboat auxiliary engines are way down in fossil fuel consumption priority. I use less than 50-80 gallons per year. Cars, trucks, trains, more universal solar on homes are all much closer to matching current use case and are much higher yield in terms of environmental impact. Even all of the “day use” powerboats that make a 1 hour run over and back would be more easily converted than cruising sailboats. All of what I have mentioned can plug into grid overnight much more readily for regeneration

[Pete7]

Originally Posted by Stu Jackson

Think of it this way: all the guys on this and other boating forums talking about electric engines in sailboats almost ALL have come to the conclusion that the switch is good if you only use it for short periods. If you need or want to go further afield, you simply can't. There is no perpetual motion machine...yet.

I think that is a fair comment. Currently we can motor for 300 miles if we needed to, but we never have and I can't see a time when we would, so could give that up.

What range do we need? ideally 60 miles but could live with 50 miles before stopping and topping up. That range is likely to need 15kw so charging will need to be shore power.

Originally Posted by malbert73

I use less than 50-80 gallons per year. Cars, trucks, trains, more universal solar on homes are all much closer to matching current use case and are much higher yield in terms of environmental impact.

Yes, but unfortunately Governments are going to sweep up leisure uses all in one go, because its easy to legislate that way. Commercial users like trains, ferries or fishing boats might get a break but it will be via tax returns to stop the great unwashed having access to cheap fuel.

Apart from the odd market glitch, fuel prices have pretty much always gone in one direction in my life time. Can't see that changing much and if a green government wants to look good to the voter, well taxing the polluters is always a winner.

Will I be able to afford my 90 litres of fuel for the boat in a decades time? I hope so but could probably manage with a big battery instead if pushed.

[malbert73]

Originally Posted by Pete7

I think that is a fair comment. Currently we can motor for 300 miles if we needed to, but we never have and I can't see a time when we would, so could give that up.

What range do we need? ideally 60 miles but could live with 50 miles before stopping and topping up. That range is likely to need 15kw so charging will need to be shore power.



Yes, but unfortunately Governments are going to sweep up leisure uses all in one go, because its easy to legislate that way. Commercial users like trains, ferries or fishing boats might get a break but it will be via tax returns to stop the great unwashed having access to cheap fuel.

Apart from the odd market glitch, fuel prices have pretty much always gone in one direction in my life time. Can't see that changing much and if a green government wants to look good to the voter, well taxing the polluters is always a winner.

Will I be able to afford my 90 litres of fuel for the boat in a decades time? I hope so but could probably manage with a big battery instead if pushed.

how exactly can the government (at least in US) sweep up leisure boat use with so many existing engines? They can’t.
But they can make fuel more expensive (which is fine, 3-4 extra per gallon is only another couple hundred dollars per season)

[wmcunninghamii]

if electric takes off as financial markets are predicting, then the world will be awash in crude and nat gas. If one includes all fossil fuel vehicles (planes, ships, trains, autos, boats, scooters, etc) we have literally several billion ice engines out there. Those will not go away for many years, esp. if fuels are plentiful and cheap. Govts. can certainly attempt to tax but I suspect this will be politically unacceptable in many cases.

The path to success is steep decline in batt cost and steep increase in batt energy density. Both are very possible, the former is already happening. If this were to progress sooner rather than later then all bets are off.

I am keeping my fuel clean and changing the oil regularly. Perfect world I can keep the Yan running for another ten years. Maybe that will be long enough to reach battery nirvana. Who knows, maybe some other disruptive technology comes along to knock both electric and fossil off the podium.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by malbert73

how exactly can the government (at least in US) sweep up leisure boat use with so many existing engines? They can’t.
But they can make fuel more expensive (which is fine, 3-4 extra per gallon is only another couple hundred dollars per season)

That is basicly doubling the price of diesel here. Last week i paid $2.15 usd for off road marine diesel. And road diesel is right at the $3 point so doubling truck diesel is not even close to acceptable via taxes.
So just on my boat it will double my heating costs via taxation That is unacceptable.

[malbert73]

Originally Posted by newhaul

That is basicly doubling the price of diesel here. Last week i paid $2.15 usd for off road marine diesel. And road diesel is right at the $3 point so doubling truck diesel is not even close to acceptable via taxes.

So just on my boat it will double my heating costs via taxation That is unacceptable.

Right. Reckless speculation on my part and what I was trying to illustrate with that drastic example is that governments won’t be changing recreational engines to electric via law. It will happen via free market forces