Financial topics

[aedens]

To solve this problem we look at the basics: we find another supply of fuel for internal combustion engines or we can switch to another type of engine.

Pan to the fire issue again. http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2012/02/13/r ... s-harmful/

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/bap

The point is PE ongoing. Business and Politics (BAP) Whole sectors are in alignment as we speak.
I can dilute your earning until it takes over. Sums up what I am seeing for at least a decade.
Longer view was from here. The concept was proposed by Edward Chamberlin in his 1933 Theory of Monopolistic Competition.
Fits into Control mechanisms. People think a market is free. Regulated to design yes, free no.
Some product differentiation approaches raise ethical concerns. These include techniques based on customers' ignorance.
Applesauce anyone.
http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/201 ... event.html
Export technology's
http://www.power-eng.com/articles/print ... ogies.html

[OLD1953]

The electric car/pollution issue comes straight back to the issue of "what do you use to generate your electricity?". In some countries (Norway, Iceland) fueling electric cars would be nearly 100% pollution free, in others they'd be awful. China is the worlds worst untreated nasty coal burner, so of course they show up as horrible. The US burns a lot of coal, but we scrub the gasses until they no longer show smoke. They don't smell much like burning coal, either.

The zone is going down, it's actually an accepted fact of life now. The bets are all on when. You have to wonder just how much exposure the US banks have to the Eurozone. And how much the FED has.

[thomasglee]

The electric car/pollution issue comes straight back to the issue of "what do you use to generate your electricity?". In some countries (Norway, Iceland) fueling electric cars would be nearly 100% pollution free, in others they'd be awful. China is the worlds worst untreated nasty coal burner, so of course they show up as horrible. The US burns a lot of coal, but we scrub the gasses until they no longer show smoke. They don't smell much like burning coal, either.

The zone is going down, it's actually an accepted fact of life now. The bets are all on when. You have to wonder just how much exposure the US banks have to the Eurozone. And how much the FED has.

Have you seen the new "TATA" that India is introducing? It runs on compressed air. Quite interesting.

[OLD1953]

There are a couple of compressed air engines for vehicles out, one from Australia and one designed in the US. It's still electric power, but saves weight on the batteries.

[jcsok]

A vehicle operating from compressed air is further idiocy. Energy continues to be lostin each step in the transfer of power, because no source of power transmition is 100% efficient. Of course the burning of fossil fuels in an internal combustion engine is highly inefficient, but burning of fossil fuel to make electricity to generate power to compress air, to transfer to a tank (which, by the way, has a significant amount of energy spent in the production of the tank to hold a sufficient volume of compressed air), ...... to transfer the energy to create motion of the vehicle..... each step is energy inefficient, therefore in a macro environment, it just doesn't make sense because it takes large volumes of compressed air to move the vehicle.

[vincecate]

A vehicle operating from compressed air is further idiocy.

A Nissan Leaf has 48 battery modules and the replacement cost on each is $662 US. Assuming no discount for buying 48 at once, this comes to $31,753. This is about the list price for a Leaf. Anyway, batteries are expensive and do not last forever. A leaf is about 4 times the price of the air car.

A tank that can hold compressed air costs far less and last longer than batteries. Filling such a tank in a couple minutes at a "gas" station is far easier than filling up a battery pack in a couple minutes. The actual cost of filling up the tank is expected to be like $2 US and go for 300 Km on a tank. This is far lower cost than operating a gas powered car.

As for your efficiency argument, if a battery pack makes a car 40% heavier (weight of batteries and increased frame weight and other components) and compressed air is 20% less efficient, you might actually use less total energy with compressed air. But really, even if the electric was more efficient the cost is so much higher that the interest you could earn on the money you would have spent on a battery pack can more than make up for the extra operating cost of the cheaper compressed air car.

Anyway, "idiocy" does not seem the right word.

http://green.autoblog.com/2011/08/03/ne ... -31-753-u/
http://www.themotorreport.com.au/53641/ ... m-mid-2012

[thomasglee]

A vehicle operating from compressed air is further idiocy.

A Nissan Leaf has 48 battery modules and the replacement cost on each is $662 US. Assuming no discount for buying 48 at once, this comes to $31,753. This is about the list price for a Leaf. Anyway, batteries are expensive and do not last forever. A leaf is about 4 times the price of the air car.

A tank that can hold compressed air costs far less and last longer than batteries. Filling such a tank in a couple minutes at a "gas" station is far easier than filling up a battery pack in a couple minutes. The actual cost of filling up the tank is expected to be like $2 US and go for 300 Km on a tank. This is far lower cost than operating a gas powered car.

As for your efficiency argument, if a battery pack makes a car 40% heavier (weight of batteries and increased frame weight and other components) and compressed air is 20% less efficient, you might actually use less total energy with compressed air. But really, even if the electric was more efficient the cost is so much higher that the interest you could earn on the money you would have spent on a battery pack can more than make up for the extra operating cost of the cheaper compressed air car.

Anyway, "idiocy" does not seem the right word.

http://green.autoblog.com/2011/08/03/ne ... -31-753-u/
http://www.themotorreport.com.au/53641/ ... m-mid-2012

Good points. I am not an "electric" car fan at all as I realize and consider (as others do I'm sure) the amount of energy and the chemicals used to extract the rare earth metals needed to make the batteries is enormous and costly. Also, the waste disposal matter is an issue as well as the mount of electricity needed (therefore, the burning of coal or other fossil fuels needed) to "charge" the car, really doesn't save energy consumption overall all. But like you, I realize that compressed air is much cheaper to generate overall. Also, right now China controls the bulk of all REMs, so buying electric cars is really just further supporting them. Lastly, I still don't understand why the US keeps resisting natural gas. I spend a lot of time in Korea and all their busses and taxis use LNG as so many privately owned cars. It still costs them a lot since all their LNG is imported, but it's still cheaper than gasoline. We produce so much LNG, that's not a problem for the USA. I've read that LNG in the midwest is very cheap (less than $2.00 per equivalent gallon) and we are starting to see LNG filling stations pop up in many places. Here in Vegas LNG costs around $2.50 per equivalent gallon, but that's still cheaper than the $3.70 one will pay for gas at the pump here.

[Trevor]

Even "Green" energy really isn't anything of the sort. Electric cars get a lot of their energy from coal plants, meaning it's just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to pollution. The Chevy Volt also has the unfortunate tendency to burst into flames at the slightest provocation and some have had to be recalled.

[OLD1953]

The problem with discussions of electric cars and pollution and global warming and so forth is that nobody wants the math or they want to be excessive.

Assuming we had a major (and we don't) program promoting electric vehicles, and a major disincentive program for gasoline powered vehicles, it would take at least 20 years to completely switch. Probably it would take longer than that. And that's under the assumption that half of all cars sold for ten years would be electrics, and then all electrics for the next ten years. That's not going to happen.

So what do you see on every "ecological" site that "analyzes" the electric car? Some figure about how much of XXXX material it would take to replace all the cars in the US and that's more than all proven reserves so that means its all impossible forever, forget it. Which makes about as much sense as the old 1970's claim that the world would be UTTERLY out of oil by 2000, and the US would be totally out by 1990, because that's all the proven reserves there were, fini! Funny thing about that, the US had 39 billion bbls of "proven reserves" in 1970. This is 2012. We have over 20 billion bbl of proven reserves, currently. During a 20 year stretch, 1968 to about 1990, we had daily production of nearly 9 million bbl per day. Now, 20X365X9000000 = 65 billion bbls. So we pumped out nearly twice our proven reserves in 20 years, and now 20 years later we still have half left! Of course, what that means is we simply found more.

YES, if we had to depend on short term current supplies of anything to do any large project, that project would always fail. We never do large projects on a short term time scale. The Panama Canal took over 30 years. Hoover Dam took five years. To change the prime motivator of transportation in the USA will not take less than 20 years, and I'll be totally shocked if it happens that rapidly, regeneracy or not. It's a much bigger project than the Panama Canal. Just for a raw comparison, the Panama Canal required moving 268 million cubic yards of earth. At about 140 lbs per cubic foot, that's 506 million tons. There are over 254 million passenger cars in the USA. If they weigh two tons each on average, then they weigh about as much or a bit more than the total weight of the earth moved to make the canal. And we are talking about a weight of manufactured steel and aluminum and glass and rubber! And that is not even discussing haulage vehicles or trains or mass transit such as busses. This is one of the biggest jobs imaginable, and it has to be thought of in appropriate time scales, in terms of multiple decades. Twenty years is really short term, thirty to forty would be more realistic, twenty five would be my guess for how long it would take to convert even 1/3 of total vehicles - that's 80 odd million, which means averaging 2 million per year, but this would start slow and ramp up over time, the starting point would be low and by the end of the 25 years you'd be moving about 4 million a year, probably. Then, at that rate, you'd take over the market completely in five more years and 10 years later the gasoline car would be a memory except for collectors. Forty years is ample time to dig new mines and learn new techniques and create improved batteries and build 10,000 new power plants, likely with energy technologies we can't even imagine today.

Many years ago, Arthur Clarke said that we totally overestimate what we can do in the short term, and utterly underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term. He was perfectly correct.

[Trevor]

They're making that claim again, that the United States will be out of oil by the end of this decade. Of course, they said that 10 years ago and 10 years before that and 10 years before that. You'd think they would learn, but obviously not.

"Strategic reserves" are not our total supply of oil. It's how much we've found that's economic to drill and what we're willing to drill. They said the same thing about natural gas and now we're the top producer in the world.