Bob brought it up!!!

Sarah put up a guest post today from one of her ‘interesting’ commenters.

And yeah, the majority of the text is about the Ottawa stand-off between Useful Truckers and useless idiots on thrones: but there was one thing that was needle’d at a couple of times that I keep seeing in other places as well.  
Electric Vehicles.

This is something I have some knowledge in, seeing how my house has many aspects of an electric vehicle: Namely, STORAGE.

That’s the Achilles heel of ANY EV technology: Where to store the power.   Erg to Pound, dead dinosaurs win, talons down.   Even in, maybe especially in Aircraft, which seems to be the new Kick from those that think this is THE best idea EVAH!!!.    Let’s look at fuels for a moment.   One gallon of vaporized gasoline, Standard Octane rating, is the equivalent of 28 sticks of Dynamite.  Granted, Octanes don’t “explode”, they deflagrate, but under the right conditions, they can release a lot of energy in a short enough span of time, that most people “see” an explosion.   By definition, an explosion is. release of sudden energy by chemical breakdown, where a deflagration is an exothermic combining process.    In an internal combustion engine, the ideal chemical state is 14.7 parts air to 1 part of fuel vapor.   That is the “Stoichiometric Ratio”.   In a jet engine, that ratio gets a whole lot leaner and more efficient, typically around 45:1    

And to be as simple as possible, the more fuel that gets used up, the less the engines have to work to haul that fuel around and efficiency rises even more.   UNLIKE in an EV where the dead weight of the battery is a constant even when the torque curve is dropping off from low voltage levels.    When an IC tank is ‘low’, it take moments to fill it back up.  When an EV’s ‘tanks’ are empty, it takes TIME and quite a bit more than you get in use.   

Currently, our EV structure is just moving the exhaust emissions to a remote location, but they are still fossil-fueled vehicles with shorter range and fewer abilities.   Until we have Reactors in every location capable of producing power for the infrastructure of an EV world, we aren’t changing anything.  NO matter HOW loud the Green Weenies howl about ‘saving the planet’.  

But, and this should be obvious from the power to weight ratios of fuel versus batteries, we will never replace IC engines until we have RELIABLE and convenient power replacement.   (and that is listing a Turbine as IC since most of the combustion does take place inside the unit.).  We won’t be there for some time yet, short of some sudden breakthrough tech.   There are people experimenting with Super Capacitors that ‘could’ replace the batteries in an EV and make recharging as easy as a fill up at a gas station is now, but the amount of power that could be ‘explosively’ released,,,,    ever seen an Arc-furnace?   yeah, instead of a burned-out shell on the side of the road that we have now when a car goes critical, we would have a slag heap of molten metals and burning plastics in the blink of an eye, not the drawn-out burn, time to get clear of the problem of current designs.   So, yeah, there is still a ways to go on that aspect yet.  Many safety considerations 

I mention it here quite often, that the weak link in any ‘renewable power’ scenario is the BATTERY bank: Storage.  And that is going to be an ongoing thing no matter how many Politicians you throw at it hoping for that ‘greener tomorrow’.  

You can’t Legislate away the laws of thermodynamics.