Inboard engines and a changing world

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Statistical

The AVERAGE car does not need to be charge for 8 to 12 hours at 10 kW. That is 120 kWh or 360 miles assumming an average of 3 miles per kWh. The average driver doesn't drive 360 miles a day (1.3 miillion miles annually).

The flaw in your logic is he said how many cars get filled per day...not how many cars there are.

25million get filled per day but there are 282million registered cars.

Just different ways to skin the cat.

25m full fill ups or 282m partial fillups per day...works out to roughly the same demand on the grid.

Then you have the issue that most new power production is solar or wind. Solar doesn't help at all at night and wind is hit and miss.

If you want to put chargers in commercial parking lots, so people can charge while at work...that's a whole new set of issues because now you may have 100-200cars all pulling power. Even if you assume a level 1 charger pulling 1.5kw a 200car lot will need 300kw attachment to the grid and a large internal grid to distribute it. If the local grid can support it, that's easily a 6-7figure upgrade. If the local grid needs to be upgraded now you are looking at 7-8figure upgrade. This is for one modest sized office building.

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

...

Then you have the issue that most new power production is solar or wind. Solar doesn't help at all at night and wind is hit and miss.

.....

9.7GW of new Gas & Nuke is coming online THIS YEAR.
Also 9.4GW of battery storage. Not sure how many hours that discharge rate can be maintained.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55419

As I indicated previously, the majority of vehicles on the road could magically become EVs overnight and the current system could handle it.

[Corvidae]

The more I look at it, the more I think the hybrid motors are going to be a real thing for sailboats in the medium size range. Where you're just big enough to want a generator, but not so big you need 100hp or more. Mainly because the hybrid lets you use the main engine as a generator, getting rid of an extra diesel engine. Along with the benefits that you can motor on electric, and maybe do a little hydro generation. Catamarans are likely to be the best market, especially since a lot of them look at their existing generators as just dead weight, given the amount of solar they can mount.

[jtsailjt]

Originally Posted by Corvidae

The more I look at it, the more I think the hybrid motors are going to be a real thing for sailboats in the medium size range. Where you're just big enough to want a generator, but not so big you need 100hp or more. Mainly because the hybrid lets you use the main engine as a generator, getting rid of an extra diesel engine. Along with the benefits that you can motor on electric, and maybe do a little hydro generation. Catamarans are likely to be the best market, especially since a lot of them look at their existing generators as just dead weight, given the amount of solar they can mount.

I agree that’s probably more practical and likely than going all electric in any of our lifetimes. But to be able to take advantage of the charging capacity of your main motor acting as a genset and to have enough energy available to make the electric motors able to provide enough extra thrust to be worthwhile to have them, boats will need much larger battery banks than most of us currently have. So this will have to be something designed into a new boat rather than something that would be practical to retrofit onto our existing boats.

It’s fun to think about all the possibilities but I can’t see EVs on land or water becoming the majority until we get real about nuclear power generation. Otherwise, we’re just transferring the burning of fossil fuels from individual vehicles to a centralized location. Big fossil fuel powered electric generation is more efficient than car engines but then you also have to consider all the energy used and pollution caused by mining and producing them and then eventually decommissioning and storing all those batteries so I’m not sure we’re gaining much towards becoming greener by producing EVs that are ultimately being powered by fossil fuels. Nuclear is the only source that’s clean and can produce the needed power 24/7/365 so I think it’s inevitable that we’ll get to it eventually, and happily, I think more people are starting to realize that.

[derfy]

Originally Posted by Statistical

Which is still vastly lower emissions than running 100% of vehicles 100% of the time of low efficiency fossil fuel engines. You began with how it is impossible and now it is possible just less than ideal so at least getting closer to reality.

What I am beginning to see or not see is irrelevant.

Relevant are the facts in debate. There is nothing green about EVs. Nat gas is under attack as a polluting fuel and being banned from use in new homes in CA and NY. But somehow it is plenty good for powering our cars. We only have an abundance of nat gas because a tough-minded bunch of American fracking entrepreneurs pursued and prevailed in developing it in the face of constant attempts to thwart it. We owe them a lot.

It is very correct that nat gas is better than gasoline burned in ICE cars and hybrids. But the whole point of EVs is to be green, and it's a ruse. They are a just moving the exhaust pipe from the car to the power plants and wasting a lot money on inflexible and vulnerable transportation.

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by jtsailjt

I agree that’s probably more practical and likely than going all electric in any of our lifetimes. But to be able to take advantage of the charging capacity of your main motor acting as a genset and to have enough energy available to make the electric motors able to provide enough extra thrust to be worthwhile to have them, boats will need much larger battery banks than most of us currently have. So this will have to be something designed into a new boat rather than something that would be practical to retrofit onto our existing boats.

It’s fun to think about all the possibilities but I can’t see EVs on land or water becoming the majority until we get real about nuclear power generation. Otherwise, we’re just transferring the burning of fossil fuels from individual vehicles to a centralized location. Big fossil fuel powered electric generation is more efficient than car engines but then you also have to consider all the energy used and pollution caused by mining and producing them and then eventually decommissioning and storing all those batteries so I’m not sure we’re gaining much towards becoming greener by producing EVs that are ultimately being powered by fossil fuels. Nuclear is the only source that’s clean and can produce the needed power 24/7/365 so I think it’s inevitable that we’ll get to it eventually, and happily, I think more people are starting to realize that.

Ah.... Nuclear. My dream.

I'd love a small scale reactor on my boat (size of a basketball?) to power the boat and some electric propulsion motors

[derfy]

Originally Posted by Statistical

Your off by a factor of 7x because you keep assumming every vehicle recharged in full every day. Average American drive 13,500 miles, average BEV gets around 3 miles per kWh. So average vehicle needs 4,500 kWh annually to go 13,500 miles or 12.4 kWh per day.

So 100 GW of capacity would provide in 8 hours off overnight off peak charging 800 GWh or 800,000,000 kWh which at 12.4 kWh per vehicle is enough to charge 65 million BEVs. Some individuals will drive more and require more some less but when we are talking about 65M people all that matters is averages. Even with optimistic growth it will be 15+ years before we have 65 million BEVs on the road.

Of course you also ignore that we could do that without building a single new power plants because we have 300 GW+ of idle capacity every day. That is enough for almost 200 million BEVs. Every day a huge number of powerplants spend 8 to 16 hours a day doing absolutely nothing waiting for demand because the grid is built to support peak demand and thus every hour that isn't the peak demand there is excess capacity. More overnight demand evens the grid out it makes utilities more efficient. Still even if we had to build that it would be a non-issue.

You can't say "the timescale doesn't matter" and also say "the grid has never had to expand this fast before". The timescale determine how fast the grid will have to expand to meet that demand.

Yes eventually when 100% of all ground transportation is 100% electrical demand will have increased by about 50%. If timeframe from <1% electric (today) to 100% electric (last ICEV off the road) is 40 years we are looking at electrical demand growth of around 1% a year.

It isn't going to be a problem. If it is a problem then BEV sales will slow and phase out will be pushed back a couple years. As it relates to boating well boating is a whole different ballgame. Electrifying ground transportation is downright trivial compared to boats. Today the only thing which can kinda be electrified would be sailboats (due to most power coming from wind) and short range ferries (due to short predictable range). My guess is marine diesels will exist at least in some capacity 50+ years from now. Maybe in small numbers, maybe no new sales, maybe paying $10/gallon but still around in some niche.

Why insist on a point I have never made? I have made none of the assumptions you suggest.

I simply claim the filling 10 million empty EVs to 300 miles over night requires 100 Gigawatts for 8-10 hrs. 10^6 EVs x 100 kw-hr per EV / 10 hrs.

If you want to nit pick about whether an EV has a 100 kw-h battery or 3 miles to the kw-h or not, well, okay. It won't change the outcome by much.

I have not asserted how many EVs have have to be sold and on the road to create this 10 million EV tank per night demand. I will do so now.

You say 65 million. Maybe. If everyone charges up just enough for one additional AVERAGE day of use. If this were the case, than yes, your calculation is correct it will be a long time before we see demand for filling 10 million EV tanks in a night.

But, silly me, I reckon that the demand will be bursty and Sunday nights in August will see a very large percentage of EVs being charged all night at Level 2 and Level 3 (unless the utilities throttle the demand - which they will). Why do I think this? Most us can't know how many miles we will need the next day or day after. We need a full tank or close to it. Our lives and business are not that predictable. Peak demand is always the issue with designing public utilities, and it drives the capex (hardware/facilities) cost. The utilities' opex (fuel, etc) are driven by the averages in usage.

My thinking is guided by the fact that we currently fill 25 million ICE car tanks every day - on average. I don't have visibility on how bursty this demand is, but I can plainly see the traffic in gas stations, and having designed public utilities, can say that peaks in networks are at least 2x the average.

So, on some days, I am sure we currently fill 50 million ICE tanks was gas. When EVs are 20% of the fleet, I claim and predict we will see demand to fill 10 million EV tanks every Sunday in August. It's not a wild leap.

But if I am even close to right, we are talking about a lot of fossil fuel be used to power the grid. Only nukes can do this job, and that's where we will end up, and spending a lot of money.

[derfy]

Originally Posted by Adelie

9.7GW of new Gas & Nuke is coming online THIS YEAR.
Also 9.4GW of battery storage. Not sure how many hours that discharge rate can be maintained.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55419

As I indicated previously, the majority of vehicles on the road could magically become EVs overnight and the current system could handle it.

An annoying problem is the random and careless use (by EIA) of the units "Gigawatts" vs "Gigawatt-hours". Generating hardware like nukes and solar are correctly rated in Gigawatts.

But battery storage needs to specify both its rated watts and watt-hours. This article talks about 9.6 "Gigawatts" of battery capacity being added to the existing 8.8 "Gigawatts". If it is really is "Gigawatts", this would be 2.5% of our national peak load (~750 Gigawatts), but for some unspecified period of time (like 1 second or 1 hour or 1 day - we can't know).

Most likely the bureaucrat who wrote this should have said 9.6 "Gigawatt-hours" of new battery capacity. But can we run our grid batteries at [9.6+8.8=] 18.4 Gigawatts for one hour? Not very likely. Very hard on the cathodes, inverters, etc. But maybe? We are left to wonder. In Energy terms, 18.4 Gw-h of grid batteries is about 0.15% of the US daily energy load.

We don't know which they mean. Gigawatts or Gigawatt-hours

[derfy]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

The flaw in your logic is he said how many cars get filled per day...not how many cars there are.

25million get filled per day but there are 282million registered cars.

Just different ways to skin the cat.

25m full fill ups or 282m partial fillups per day...works out to roughly the same demand on the grid.

Then you have the issue that most new power production is solar or wind. Solar doesn't help at all at night and wind is hit and miss.

If you want to put chargers in commercial parking lots, so people can charge while at work...that's a whole new set of issues because now you may have 100-200cars all pulling power. Even if you assume a level 1 charger pulling 1.5kw a 200car lot will need 300kw attachment to the grid and a large internal grid to distribute it. If the local grid can support it, that's easily a 6-7figure upgrade. If the local grid needs to be upgraded now you are looking at 7-8figure upgrade. This is for one modest sized office building.

What makes this unpredictable and disagreeable is that we all have a different use case in mind for our EVs.

Some people predictably drive to work in the morning, return home at night, and live in a single-family house in the suburbs. City dwellers might want a compact urban mobility vehicle, or a long range road car for their weekends in the hinterland or on at the coast. People with real jobs work in the field all day every day, constantly using a car, but just as likely a van or truck. And the work-at-home people are out there, wondering how long til they have to start coming into the office. The battery EV works well for a couple of these cases, but not very well at all for some other ones. Hence, disagreements and conflict abound.

You'll all be relieved to know I am signing off this thread. I will continue to read it, but it's time to go sailing. Ciao ..._/)...

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Chotu

Ah.... Nuclear. My dream.

I'd love a small scale reactor on my boat (size of a basketball?) to power the boat and some electric propulsion motors

Done and done

[SY Harmony]

This is better than an oil thread!

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by newhaul

Done and done

Perfect!

Are you taking advance orders? Do you have a Kickstarter? Ha ha


I hate to sound like too much of a hippie here, but as an idiotic species, if we weren't wasting a large portion of our resources fighting each other, we might actually have things like this.

It's so readily apparent in recent space endeavors. Duplicate satellites, duplicate rocket launches, duplicate GPS/Glonass/whatever.

Everything is being done several times over instead of moving onto the next revision or project. All based on lines tribes drew on the planet.

We'd get so much more done and have easier lives if we weren't still idiodic cave beasts

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Chotu

Perfect!

Are you taking advance orders? Do you have a Kickstarter? Ha ha


I hate to sound like too much of a hippie here, but as an idiotic species, if we weren't wasting a large portion of our resources fighting each other, we might actually have things like this.

It's so readily apparent in recent space endeavors. Duplicate satellites, duplicate rocket launches, duplicate GPS/Glonass/whatever.

Everything is being done several times over instead of moving onto the next revision or project.

We'd get so much more done and have easier lives ifbee weren't still idiot cave beasts

https://www.mercari.com/us/item/m614...BoC_qwQAvD_BwE
Already available .

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by derfy

An annoying problem is the random and careless use (by EIA) of the units "Gigawatts" vs "Gigawatt-hours". Generating hardware like nukes and solar are correctly rated in Gigawatts.

But battery storage needs to specify both its rated watts and watt-hours. This article talks about 9.6 "Gigawatts" of battery capacity being added to the existing 8.8 "Gigawatts". If it is really is "Gigawatts", this would be 2.5% of our national peak load (~750 Gigawatts), but for some unspecified period of time (like 1 second or 1 hour or 1 day - we can't know).

Most likely the bureaucrat who wrote this should have said 9.6 "Gigawatt-hours" of new battery capacity. But can we run our grid batteries at [9.6+8.8=] 18.4 Gigawatts for one hour? Not very likely. Very hard on the cathodes, inverters, etc. But maybe? We are left to wonder. In Energy terms, 18.4 Gw-h of grid batteries is about 0.15% of the US daily energy load.

We don't know which they mean. Gigawatts or Gigawatt-hours

Given the source, I don't think they were careless with the units, I think they chose to match the rest of the data and the GW listed is the nameplate max output same as for other forms of production. I would like to know the energy capacity, not just the power capacity but I don't always get what I want.

If you were writing about folks posting here, I would agree that they were probably being careless with the units.

[mako]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

Not going to read the 269 previous posts to see whether someone has already made the suggestion, but:

We're all going to have to get boats that sail better and become more patient.

Were boats more impatient back in 2019 when this thread was started?

Anyway, it is interesting to see a 3-1/2 year of thread about technology revived, and to compare to today's world.