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posted by martyb on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:42AM   Printer-friendly

In Germany, the Bundestrat, or Upper House, has passed a resolution to ban the internal combustion engine (ICE) [Note] powered car by 2030. It’s a nice gesture from a body that is pretty much powerless and composed of non-elected delegates (compare it to the Canadian Senate or British House of Lords), but it’s influential. The Dutch and Norwegian governments are making similar plans, and the EU could follow.

A graphic from the article shows Germany gets one-third of its electricity from renewables now. Will weaning its energy and transportation sectors off fossil fuels confer an economic advantage?

[Note: story is in German. --Ed.]


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:16AM

    by tftp (806) on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:16AM (#413797) Homepage

    Will weaning its energy and transportation sectors off fossil fuels confer an economic advantage?

    It all depends on the damage that those sectors (and many other) will incur during the conversion, compared to the gains from it.

    At this point in time humans do not have sufficiently good batteries for vehicles. I believe that conversion of all vehicles to batteries is terribly premature. If anything, those batteries cost way too much. In some applications nothing, short of a nuclear reactor, can compete with gasoline. Sometimes you really need the immense horsepower in a small package. Even such a common thing as a fire truck cannot yet run on electrical power alone - it would be all batteries and no space for the water and ladders and pumps and hoses... Loaded, today they climb steep hills at very decent speed, driven by a diesel engine. And what about airplanes? They burn *a lot* of kerosene...

    On the other hand, technology of storing off-peak energy is well developed, and stationary installations of renewable energy may become good competitors to coal, oil and gas. Maybe. But in the end we are waiting for controlled nuclear fusion. Once that happens, most of the complex, expensive solar panels will become obsolete in an instant. They will remain only in deserts, on mountaintops, emergency telephones, where power is not available...

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45AM (#413800) Journal

    A battery-powered aircraft has flown around the world. Granted, it had solar cells to charge th batteries, and the batteries had to be replaced during the trip, and it took more than 16 months to complete, but still...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Thursday October 13 2016, @08:07AM

      by tftp (806) on Thursday October 13 2016, @08:07AM (#413803) Homepage

      A modern airliner can circle the Earth in about 4-5 days if you stick to proper ground service and don't rush things. That would be 100 times as fast. Do we have a technological breakthrough on the horizon that promises to increase battery performance a hundredfold? No. (Forget about solar - if your trip lasts only hours, you won't get enough power to even pay for carrying the cells. They worked only because of enormous trip time.)

      A few Egyptians could cross the Atlantic ocean in a reed boat. Does it mean that conquest of Americas was coming? No. Two thousand years passed before the ships were manufactured that could make the trip in a reasonable time, at reasonable cost, and nearly guarantee your survival. Only then the American continent became practically accessible.

      Chances are that the required performance (and weight!) is beyond the abilities of chemical batteries. We may need a small fusion reactor, or something else that utilizes nuclear energy. Burning of kerosene is the ultimate discharge process, if you think of it as a battery. Kerosene burns fully with oxygen from external air, and the exhaust is cast away. Those are tough opponents. Li-Ion batteries do worse because you keep carrying them, and they don't burn out (usually), and they do not depend on external, freely available chemicals. And kerosene is just the bare minimum that can power modern airplanes.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:15AM

        by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:15AM (#413812) Homepage Journal

        It's really not clear at all that an electrical infrastructure is the right solution, when you need mobile energy in large quantities. Carrying that energy around in the form of hydrocarbons may well be the better solution.

        There's nothing particular wrong with burning hydrocarbons! The objections people have are (1) pollution from impurities, and (2) re-introducing CO2 from fossil fuels into the atmosphere. However, if we manufacture hydrocarbons, both of those problems disappear. Manufactured hydrocarbons will generally be pure, and they will be carbon neutral (assuming the carbon comes from CO2).

        The infrastructure for distributing hydrocarbons (gasoline, methane, etc.) is already in place. We have a lot of technology that is designed to use this stuff. We can use renewable energy (solar, wind, etc.) to manufacture hydrocarbons - they become the energy storage media. If we do this, we don't need batteries full of exotic materials, we don't need a new infrastructure of charging stations, people can fill up their energy-storage tanks in seconds rather than hours, etc..

        --
        Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
        • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:45AM

          by RamiK (1813) on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:45AM (#413829)

          Too many conversion loses when going from renewable to liquid fuels. Heat pollution by itself is a problem. Just not the one you can make money off.

          --
          compiling...
          • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:01PM

            by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:01PM (#413848) Journal

            Combined cycle plants, district heating/cooling, etc. There is always a way to recycle. The problem is like you said, cost.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:47PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:47PM (#413865)
            Apparently Germany is already has an industrial-scale plant that uses the Sabatier reaction to produce methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and it is fairly easy to convert any motorcar running on ordinary petrol to run on methane, but if you don't want to do that it's easy enough to use the Fischer-Tropsch process or some other catalytic reforming process to produce high-octane petrol, though there are more losses involved in doing that. I believe they did the maths and found that it made sense to do. You'll have heat pollution regardless of what you do, and I think that such heat pollution is a drop in the bucket compared to the reduction in greenhouse gases. You can't have everything, but what they're doing to make carbon-neutral fuel is a fair sight better than business as usual!
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45PM (#414053)

              Digging out catalysts for Fischer-Tropsch || Sabatier isn't renewable.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @07:17AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @07:17AM (#414187)
                Hint, they're catalysts: they aren't consumed by the chemical process they facilitate! They will eventually get fouled up over time so you'll someday need to replace them but before then they'll produce plenty of the stuff you need. The Sabatier process uses a nickel catalyst, which is not a rare metal by any stretch. Fischer–Tropsch can use iron as its catalyst, and I don't need to tell you how terribly abundant that metal is on the planet. You can clean up fouled catalysts easily enough if you have a source of energy to do so, so you don't need to keep digging them out of the ground.
        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:53AM

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:53AM (#413831) Journal

          There are all kinds of advances being made in battery storage. There was another story about it yesterday but I didn't submit it because I couldn't get it to fit between the stories about graphene and Teslas. ;-)

          A key advantage to advances in battery technology over any ICE technology is that if you come up with a better battery you can plug it into the old device without any other changes. Electric motors in the rest of the apparatus, whatever it is, last a really long time.

          Twisting the energy economy around to accommodate fossil fuels is weird. It's like fitting the team of horses with bionic skeletons so they can run faster, instead of switching to cars.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:17PM

          by butthurt (6141) on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:17PM (#413852) Journal

          [...] pollution from impurities [...]

          That can happen, notably with sulphur. However, incomplete combustion (and it's always incomplete to some degree) of hydrocarbons themselves results in pollution. If they're burned in air rather than in pure oxygen, oxides of nitrogen are formed as well.

          This proclamation is just symbolic, but actual electrification of cars would lessen pollution in German cities. It would also be good public relations for the German auto industry after the scandal over the Bosch firmware [bbc.com]:

          [...] German carmakers agreed to recall 630,000 diesel vehicles to tweak engine software.
          [...]
          German transport minister Alexander Dobrindt said Mercedes Benz, Opel and Porsche as well as Volkswagen and Audi would adjust settings that increased levels of emissions such as nitrogen dioxide in some diesel cars.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:03AM

      by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:03AM (#413811) Homepage Journal

      Solar Impulse was a joke. The beast was barely capable of flying, because of all the weird compromises required. It required ideal weather conditions. At every stop, it required massive servicing en-route (including at least one total battery replacement). Really, it was just another Piccard publicity gig. I don't understand why sponsors are willing to fund these stunts.

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:56AM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:56AM (#413832) Journal

        Sure. But they did it. Now nobody can say, "Well, electricity might be all well and good for a passenger car, but it will NEVER work for an airplane."

        What remains is to devise a battery with enough energy density to replace jet fuel. In the meantime, they've already successfully flown jets on biofuel. Personally I'd prefer to fly everywhere in zeppelins, but then I'm steampunk that way.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @04:39PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @04:39PM (#413964)

        I don't understand why sponsors are willing to fund these stunts.

        You just said it yourself one sentence earler:

        Really, it was just another Piccard publicity gig.

        The whole point of sponsoring is publicity.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:48AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:48AM (#413830) Journal

    I'm not a spring chicken, but man, you sound like an old dude. There are electric cars on the roads now. Many more are coming, because all the other major car companies are getting in on the act. A real mass market EV is just around the corner with the Chevy Bolt and the Tesla Model 3.

    As far as the capabilities of EVs, I can't speak to higher loads that semis carry, but I can speak to the experience in passenger cars. They are better at climbing hills because they don't have to muck around with gearing changes. Set the cruise control on the EV to 65, and it holds that speed no matter what's going on on the road, with no delays for downshifting.

    And for solar energy, current panels have reached grid parity in many states. If you look at a chart of installed costs (that is, the panels plus the labor to install them), the prices have fallen off a cliff in the last 10 years. Soon pure economics will mean homeowners and facilities owners would be crazy if they don't go solar.

    In short, nuclear power is not required. The energy revolution is upon us, but you haven't heard about it because the fossil fuel companies have been paying a great deal of money to make sure you don't.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 1) by ewk on Thursday October 13 2016, @02:00PM

      by ewk (5923) on Thursday October 13 2016, @02:00PM (#413894)

      Neither the Bolt or the Testla 3 seems to promise a reach of 400 miles at 75 mph (for 2-4 people inclusing vacation luggage) and a recharge time of 15 minutes or less (to start with the reminder of the 750 mile trip).
      Unless that is reached, an EV is no option to replace my current ICE.

      --
      I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 13 2016, @03:30PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 13 2016, @03:30PM (#413933) Journal

        That kind of road trip is by far the exception to the rule. Most people drive to commute, and do so 50mi/day or less.

        However, Teslas have the supercharger network for the road trips you're talking about, and you're probably going to stop along the way to eat or go to the bathroom and refuel anyway. The Tesla 30 minute recharge time is about right to cover those activities.

        I can't wait to do my next road trip in an EV. Quiet, blessed quiet, cruise control that's utterly precise and constant. Excellent acceleration to facilitate smooth merges. They drive so much better than ICEs.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 1) by ewk on Friday October 14 2016, @09:41AM

          by ewk (5923) on Friday October 14 2016, @09:41AM (#414210)

          That 'kind of road trip' is about 50% of my distance covered yearly.

          So, in my use case (and frankly, that's the only really important one :-) ) it is not the exception.
          Commuting (25 km roundtrip) is generally done by e-bike or e-scooter/mo-ped (depending on weather & mood).
          And in Europe, where I live (sorry for any confusion by using miles & mph in the initial response), this supercharger network isn't really happening (yet).

          As for quietness: above 75 mph/120 kmh most of the nose is tire and wind related anyway. In an decent ICE (non-sports type :-) ) you do hardly notice the engine anymore.

          Don't get me wrong, eventually EV's will get where I want them :-) Then it is the time to switch.

          --
          I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday October 13 2016, @04:23PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 13 2016, @04:23PM (#413950)

    You're probably not a first adopter. If we waited until the technology was perfect then we would never get to switch. Some people have to dive in early, whether it's practical or not. Early adoption has already happened with electric cars. There are so many electric cars coming out in the next couple years that are far more polished and practical.

    If you notice they specially said cars. Not trucks or airplanes. I would agree that ending all ICE cars by 2030 is really pushing it though. But having recently been to Germany i noticed there aren't many older cars on the road anyways.

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