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September 2008 Posts
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Venturi will unveil a new vehicle that's not an NEV in Paris.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/09/13/paris-preview-venturi-and-michelin-to-unveil-electric-vehicle-c/
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Chrysler versus Chrystler
Regarding the listener feedback regarding the solar. I think the original podcast said 4 GW of thin film in 2010 and double to 8 GW in 2012. As soon as the price drops below that of coal. PV should have the capacity to double every couple years. So maybe 100 GW by 2020.
I did a quick estimate. If Los Angeles county used 1/10 of its area for PV panels at 20% efficiency. I came out Los Angeles County would generate power for 113 million people. To me I think if every home installed 1000 square feet of solar panels the entire country could be fed by PV. Coal, oil, nuclear, and wind would be obsolete. That would change Houston from being the oil capital of the world to Houston being the home of the largest toxic deposits of oil in the world.
As for California, I think we only produce like 10-15% of our power from alternative sources.
Found interesting note by written meme at autobloggreen regarding lithium supply. I found there is 2.6 x 10^11 tons of lithium in seawater.
Lithium carbonate (the common raw material form) costs $22-32/kg when extracted from seawater (i.e., a virtually limitless resource) using a first-generation method. While that's notably more expensive than traditional extraction, which just costs a few dollars per kilogram, it's still dirt cheap. If your batteries were made entirely up of it, going with a typical automotive li-ion energy density of 100Wh/kg, that'd be ~$0.22-$0.32/Wh. However, they're not made entirely of lithium; lithium is actually one of the smaller fractions in li-ion batteries. Furthermore, there's absolutely no reason why we'd have to go to seawater anytime soon. I did the math once on just a single lithium mine that's being developed in the Kings Valley in Nevada -- one that's generally not considered in world "reserves" calculations, since the lithium cost from there is slightly more expensive than what it currently goes for -- and they expect to produce enough lithium carbonate there to make enough batteries for about 700 million Apteras. That's the thing about reserves: the more you're willing to pay, the more comes online -- and not just a little more, but orders of magnitude more. The best deposits of any resource are far rarer than the next best, and so on down the line. And, at the same time, advancing technology serves to reduce costs. So, in short, prices are constantly a battle between technology and ease of access, with the "game" biased way in favor of technology due to the exponential resource scaling. Which, ultimately, is why Simon won.As Kert notes, cobalt is actually the expensive element of traditional li-ion -- it makes up about 60% of the total costs -- more than even capital costs. The phosphates and spinels ditch the cobalt. $0.20/Wh in 10 years is a perfectly achievable price point. They may even be able to achieve it in 5.
The link to the Enertia bike is: http://www.enertiabike.com/index.php?Itemid=4
I think they were going for sporty, but honestly, it's design does not do much for me. I am also suprised that its performance is not better, especially given it's design and battery choice- a Lithium Phosphate battery from Valence Technologies here in Austin.
Wow- we sure have a lot of battery development going on here in Austin- Valence, Actacel, EEStor- we are not only the Green Capital of the US, we are fast becoming the Battery Capital as well;-) (okay, so only one of them is actually making batteries, but any day now...)
Hmm. Joshua from AC Propulsion was about as much fun as falling down a set of stairs.
So Chrysler's big announcement is today. I wonder what it will be.
Last night I was looking at my son's Scouting magazine and found this.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/automotive_news/4244409.html
A Jeep concept vehicle that has a 40 mile electric range with a range extending diesel engine. Very cute, but just a concept.
Chrysler EV's
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=864784364&play=1
