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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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Germany's Bundesrat Calls for End of Internal Combustion Engine Powered Cars by 2030
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45AM
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
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
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
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
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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45PM
Digging out catalysts for Fischer-Tropsch || Sabatier isn't renewable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @07:17AM
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:53AM
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
[...] 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
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
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
You just said it yourself one sentence earler:
The whole point of sponsoring is publicity.