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| Science & Technology |
| The War on Terror: The Energy Front |
| 2006-05-02 |
| By James Woolsey The following speech was given as part of Restoration Weekend 2006, at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Feb. 23-26, 2006 -- The Editors. Key points at end of speech: Now, what might one do? The President has, over the course of the last week or two, been mentioning two alternatives time and again and I think he’s right on those. The only thing I would say is that I think he is focused entirely on research and development and these are fields in which the Wright Brothers have already flown. What we really need is not so much invention, but some type of encouragement one way or another to have things move into the market quickly. One possibility is cellulosic ethanol. The word “cellulosic” is important because it means making ethanol not from corn, which has to be cultivated and fertilized and is expensive to grow and so forth. But rather, as the President mentioned, from things such as switch grass, which is a variety of prairie grass. Or, for that matter, kudzu or corn cobs or any other waste agricultural products. What’s new is that people have now succeeded in inventing genetically modified microorganisms that can take the place of the enzymes that break cellulose down in cow’s stomachs every day and turn it into sugar that the cows live on. It’s doing that with genetically modified biocatalysts and fermenting the different types of sugar there with genetically modified yeast. That is now being done commercially by a company called Iogen in Canada with Shell Oil backing it. It does not need to be invented. It needs help to be moved promptly into the marketplace into E85—85% ethanol. But it does not need to be invented. The same is true of the other way to use inexpensive fuels that the President’s been talking about, which is plug-in hybrids. A plug-in hybrid is a hybrid electric vehicle which, of course, goes back and forth between electric power and gasoline, while the battery’s being charged by the deceleration and by the use of the gasoline motor. My Prius gets about 50 miles to the gallon: a little worse on the road, a little better in town. It likes start/stop driving. Hybrid gasoline electrics are fine, but what is really interesting is if you can increase the capacity of the battery by about a factor of 6, and today that’s about a $6-7,000 cost, but it ought to be less as time goes on and batteries get cheaper. But if you increase the capacity of the battery, let’s say, in a Prius by a factor of 6, plug it in overnight, top it up fully and then drive for 20-25 miles as an electric car on your overnight power before the hybrid back-and-forth feature cuts in, you turn that 50-mile-a-gallon Prius into about a 125-mile gallon of petroleum-based fuel Prius. By the way, in most of the country, the average cost of off-peak nighttime electric power is 2-4 cents a kilowatt hour which is the rough equivalent of 25-50 cent a gallon gasoline. So if you have two cars, one kind of stays around the neighborhood and drives less than 25 miles a day, while the other maybe goes on long commutes. The one that goes on long commutes will be getting about a 125 miles per gallon of petroleum as it goes. The one that goes around the neighborhood and around town may go to the gasoline station once every six months or so because it’s running on off-peak overnight power the rest of the time. Again, the Wright Brothers have already flown. This has been invented. It’s being assembled in kits to modify cars in California beginning next month. People will lose some of their warranties and different car companies are wringing their hands and there’s much Sturm und Drang. But it is not something that needs to be invented. If you have 125-mile-per-gallon, because it’s a plug-in hybrid car and it is running on 85 percent ethanol and only 15 percent gasoline, you have something in the ballpark of a 500-mile-per-gallon car with existing technology. You want to get the Wahhabi’s attention, that’s the way to do it. Thank you. |
| Posted by:ed |
| #15 Phil, there is quite a lot of unused base load available for night use. In addition, as night usage increases, the economic incentive is to increase the base load capacity. For each 1 MW of base load increase, that decreases by 1 MW the need for peak load capacity (e.g. nat gas and oil) and older, highly polluting coal fired plants. By using each lowest plant closer to full time, the total economic effiency of the electic infrastructure goes up, lowering the peak load and total electric costs. A win-win in my book. |
| Posted by: ed 2006-05-03 00:33 |
| #14 Cars are more like 25-30% efficient. Battery charging efficiency is over 70% or higher for lead acid and over 95% for lithium-ion. Efficiency is lost in battery resistance (function of power curve), power electonics and electric motors, but motors are 90% efficient. Power are about 45% efficient and 10% is typically lost in electric distribution. In the US, charging cars at night uses cheap coal and nuclear energy, not oil. It is not about energy efficiency, but the amount of usable energy per dollar. In addition, domestically sorced energy also adds to security. |
| Posted by: ed 2006-05-03 00:23 |
| #13 Ed, I'm aware there is some unused base load at night. But then that concedes my point, because using up that unused capacity will only charge a relatively small number of vehicles, i.e. its not a solution to imported energy. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-05-02 23:50 |
| #12 gromgoru, this UK study says its 28%, although introduce a battery into the system and you will more than half that. Batteries are less than 40% efficient. So using electricity generated from oil in a battery car is not much more than 10% efficient. From memory modern cars are aboyt 40% efficient. So it takes four times as much oil to power a battery car than a gasoline car, and that ignores mechanical inefficiencies in the electric car, which will take the ratio even higher. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-05-02 23:45 |
| #11 assuming big friggin capacitor stations?Or....? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-05-02 23:40 |
| #10 Coal or nuclear (and even hydro) is used for base load. Nuclear power is 3.5-4 cents/kwh, coal still cheaper. Gas and oil plants are used for peak power load. Charging batteries at night soaks up unused (up to a point) base load capacity. In addition, communication tech exists to stagger or limit charging rates to most effciently use the base load capacity. |
| Posted by: ed 2006-05-02 23:39 |
| #9 TW2412, you seem to have missed my point. Not really. I do get it. But still hope for more thinking outside the box - electricity or otherwise - is way to start. just consider is a start. |
| Posted by: Thinemp Whimble2412 2006-05-02 22:50 |
| #8 Phil_b: ever looked up efficiency of burning oil products in electricity generation vs. efficiency of burning it in IC engine? |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2006-05-02 22:06 |
| #7 TW2412, you seem to have missed my point. Until the last oil/gas power station is shutdown, all electric cars will do is replace one means of consuming imported energy with a less efficient means of consuming imported energy. I.e. they will substantially increase energy imports (oil/gas). And before someone says nuclear only costs two cents a whatever. Generators run their cheapest source of electricity to the max, then their next cheapest, etc. Therefore increased demand is **always** satisified from the most expensive source. In reality, what electric cars do is free load a subsidy from all electricity consumers to give the illusion they are cheaper. In a rational world they would be banned. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-05-02 21:55 |
| #6 Miscellaneous comments: --- I'm currently paying 10+ cents a kilowatt-hour to my local municipal entity. If I could pay the 2-3 cents an hour cited in the article, I'd have enough money left over to buy a lot of $3 a gallon gasoline. --- An obviously custom-modified Ford pickup passed me on I-70 in IN last week during the midnight hour. Its bed had been raised about a foot to accommodate a large bank of what appeared to be 12-Volt auto batteries, in an array whose size was equal to the area of the bed. The tires were unusually large, probably to hold the extra weight. The motor was high-pitched and loud. The truck was doing 80 mph to my 70. I wondered if this were a home-brew job, or a Ford research project being tested or moved surreptitiously. |
| Posted by: Snuns Thromp1484 2006-05-02 20:50 |
| #5 When the last oil/gas fired generating plant is shutdown, I'll take electric cars as a way to get off imported energy seriously. Until then it's just more pie in the sky, wishful thinking. And I'll continue to smoke until they pry the cigarettes out of my cold, dead hands. Change. Change your priorities and don't insist on being the last. Lead. Do not follow. |
| Posted by: Thinemp Whimble2412 2006-05-02 20:49 |
| #4 OIl Import Fee. That's all it takes. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-05-02 18:36 |
| #3 The US still generates electricty from guess what? Oil. And Natural Gas which existing cars can be easily and cheaply adapted to run on, not too mention a whole lot more efficiently than electricity and batteries. The US generates more electricity from oil and gas combined than nuclear. Almost all spare generating capacity is oil or gas. When the last oil/gas fired generating plant is shutdown, I'll take electric cars as a way to get off imported energy seriously. Until then it's just more pie in the sky, wishful thinking. Link |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-05-02 18:10 |
| #2 Spend just 1% of the money wasted on the wide range of grant idiocy such as Tokamaks (an especially pernicious money drain) and put it into electrical storage systems (not necessarily conventional batteries) and we can lower our transportation uses of oil very dramatically. Not hybrids - and I truly respect Woolsey, he's just following the incremental approach - but I mean all-electric vehicles with simple but smart add-ons such as flywheels or other secondary storage capabilities. Due to my job, I've been lucky enough to try out 2 electric test vehicles and they rocked in every way except getting tire smoke - only the storage issue remained. I loved my 1968 California Special Mustang with a teenager's passion, but reality has relegated that thrill to long-term memory. Now I want grown-up golf carts (Yes, they can have backseats, too, LOL) that won't send my money to Wahhabist or Hezbollah assholes. Everything is there except (long-range) storage capacity. It's not as "sexy", but it beats the hell out of wasting our tax dollars on exotic pie-in-the-sky grants which have ZERO ROI records or funding the killer morons of the planet. Let's get it done and quit fooling around. K.I.S.S. |
| Posted by: Sheating Clerens4146 2006-05-02 14:17 |
| #1 That is now being done commercially by a company called Iogen in Canada with Shell Oil backing it. A tip for you day traders out there, not that I know anything about it. The goose that laid the golden eggs is being slowly suffocated to death by its keepers. Oil was the energy of the 20th Century. It's now the 21st. Time to move forward. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-05-02 11:11 |