E85 and You

[xrayzebra]

And then you have these folks. If you got the money. But I am impressed with
the 0-60 in three seconds. Range of the car is still a little ify. And recharge time
will be a problem. Although I read the other day, some folks are working on a super
capacitor that will recharge in short order at an ordinary outlet. Now that is a thought.
But talk about a bang if it explodes which sometimes happens with capacitors.



Silicon Valley Start-Ups Want to Resurrect Electric Cars

Thursday , June 29, 2006

SAN CARLOS, Calif. — Like many Silicon Valley engineers, Martin Eberhard loves cars, especially fast ones. But the self-described "closet gearhead" didn't feel comfortable buying a hot rod that guzzled gas from the Middle East or some other troubled region.

So three years ago, Eberhard and friend Marc Tarpenning launched Tesla Motors Inc. Their goal: to design a sports car that would go as fast as a Ferrari or Porsche, but run on electricity.

With about 80 employees, Tesla just raised $40 million from high-profile investors including Google (GOOG) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. It plans to start selling its first model next year.


"I'm not the only person that would like to buy a car that's beautiful and fun to drive but also remain on the moral high ground," said Eberhard, 45, who sold his previous company, electronic book maker NuvoMedia, for $187 million to Gemstar/TV Guide International (GMST) in 2000. "None of the energy that goes into an electric car comes from the Middle East."

Silicon Valley thinks it can do what Detroit could not — create a thriving business selling electric cars. In the 1990s, General Motors (GM) and other automakers spent billions to develop battery-powered vehicles, but they flopped because most couldn't travel more than 100 miles before having to recharge.

By tapping the Bay Area's engineering expertise and culture of innovation, a cluster of entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists here are racing to bring their own electric cars to market. But unlike the Detroit and Japanese automakers, they're working on high-performance sports cars for wealthy car enthusiasts.

At least three Silicon Valley startups — Tesla Motors of San Carlos, Wrightspeed Inc. of Woodside and battery maker Li-on Cells of Menlo Park — are among a small cadre of companies nationwide developing electric cars or components.

As fuel costs rise, technology improves and consumers seek more environmentally friendly vehicles, this new generation of electric car companies sees potential in a market niche largely neglected by the big automakers.

But some industry analysts question whether electric cars could ever become cheap enough, or have the battery life, to compete in the mainstream auto market.

"To attract consumers en masse, the price has to be low enough where they can see the break-even point," said Anthony Pratt, an automotive analyst at J.D. Power & Associates. "The problem with electric vehicles is that they tend to be limited by the battery technology."

Some major automakers are also working on electric-vehicle technology, but most are focused on hybrid cars that run on a combination of gas and electricity, Pratt said.

Backers of electric cars, powered by batteries charged from an electric outlet, say the country could quickly reduce its dependence on foreign oil — as well as emissions of "greenhouse" gases blamed for global warming — if more drivers went electric.

But so far, efforts to bring electric cars to market have stalled.

In the 1990s, the major automakers introduced several thousand electric cars under a California state mandate to develop cars with no tailpipe emissions. While those cars attracted a small but devoted following, they didn't get much traction in the marketplace because of their restricted driving range.

The big automakers lobbied against the mandate until it was overturned in 2003. Most car companies then recalled their electric vehicles and destroyed them, sparking an outcry among loyalists.

While those models were hobbled by limited driving range, advances in battery technology and electronic components can allow electric vehicles to go more than twice as far on a single charge.

Tesla and Wrightspeed are using lithium-ion batteries that are more powerful, lighter and efficient than the lead acid batteries used in early electric cars or the nickel metal hydride batteries used in today's hybrids.

"The battery technology has improved," said Ron Freund, chairman of the Electric Auto Association in Palo Alto. "They keep getting better. They last longer, they're smaller and they charge faster."

The success of Toyota's (TM) Prius and other hybrids have shown there's a market for eco-friendly cars. Page and Brin, Google's billionaire founders, are known to drive Priuses.

But Tesla's Eberhard thinks the Prius is "terrifically ugly" and believes other wealthy car enthusiasts feel the same way.

In Tesla's workshop about 20 miles south of San Francisco, Eberhard and Tarpenning offered a glimpse of their first model — a sleek two-seater called the Roadster that resembles a Lotus Elise — but would not allow photographs. They plan to unveil it at an event for prospective buyers next month in Santa Monica.

"We're building a car for people who like to drive," Eberhard said. "This is not a punishment car."

To build the Roadster, Tesla engineers designed a sophisticated battery system with more than 8,000 lithium-ion cells and a network of computers to control them, Eberhard said. They also built an electric motor that is more than twice as powerful as earlier electric vehicles.

The Roadster will be able to drive about 250 miles on a single three-hour charge, drive up to 135 miles per hour and accelerate from zero to 60 in four seconds, Eberhard said. It will cost between $85,000 and $120,000.

Named after the inventor Nikola Tesla, known for his pioneering research in the field of electricity, the company has big ambitions. Tesla executives talk about building a "new kind of car company" and hope to eventually introduce a series of models, starting at the market's high end and bringing down the price as technology improves.

But the company must first undergo rigorous government safety and environmental tests — a process whose complexity the founders admit they didn't anticipate.

"The car business had more challenges than we expected," Tarpenning said.

Ian Wright, who left Tesla to start Wrightspeed last year, is aiming at the same $3 billion market for high-performance sports cars. The New Zealand-born electrical engineer spent nine months retooling an Ariel Atom race car to run on a lithium-ion battery — a prototype of the car he hopes to eventually sell for about $120,000.

Wright frequently takes prospective investors — and reporters — for a spin in the hills near his Woodside home.

With no doors, roof or windshield, a drive in Wrightspeed's X1 feels like a roller coaster ride and can leave passengers wind-beaten and queasy. It accelerates from zero to 60 mph in 3 seconds, making it one of the world's fastest production cars. Last year, Wright's X1 beat a Porsche and Ferrari in separate races.

"I wouldn't describe myself as a radical environmentalist," said Wright, who is still trying to raise his first round of funding. "I think my customers will buy my cars for performance. The energy efficiency is nice to have, but it's not the reason they will buy the car."

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[RandomGuy]

Let's assume:
1. Corn is as efficient as sugar cane in producing ethanol. The reading that I have done is that it is still much less productive at converting mass into fuel, but let's roll with this for simplicity's sake.

2. Ethanol has as much energy in it per volume as gasoline. I seem to remember it is a bit less, but again, simplicity.

From the wikipedia article on ethanol in brazil, we can pull out the following information:

Amount of sugar crop acreage allocated to Ethanol in 2003-2004:
8789 square miles.

45,000 km2, of which half is used for ethanol, and converted into square miles)

This square area produces:
88 Million barrels of ethanol per year

(cubic meters converted to liters at 1000 liters per cubic meter, converted to gallons at .256 liters per gallon, converted to barrels at 42 gallons per barrel of petroleum)

Directly converting this to gasoline would yield 88 million barrels of gasoline per year using our simplified assumptions.

The US uses 3,321,500,000 barrels of gasoline per year per ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ep/ep_frame.html )

3.3Bn divided by 88M= 37.75 (the number of times larger that US gasoline consumption is than Brazil's consumption)

37.75 times 8789 square miles is 331,521 square miles.

Assume we can find 50% of that figure in unused crop land, that leaves us with 160,500 square miles of NEW crop land that would be need to completely replace gasoline with ethanol at current usage rates.

Factor in the fact that Ethanol has less energy per unit of mass, and that square mileage will go up. Subs ute a less efficient crop of corn, and that square mileage will go up.

According to the CIA factbook the united states has only 87,000 square miles of irrigated land now.
Where would we get the water to irrigate the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF SQUARE MILES of crop land that fully replacing gasoline with ethanol will take, ASSUMING we can find the arable land?

Saying "let's just replace our gasoline powered cars with ethanol" doesn't make it viable as a realistic solution.

Rolling forward a bit:

Yes, we will have to start driving less and buying more efficient vehicles. This will reduce the square mileage needed.

Our population is also growing, as is the economy. This will increase demand for fuel. This will offset gains from efficiency somewhat, if not a lot.

Yes, agricultural production will become more efficient, again reducing the square mileage issue. But not by enough of a conceivable factor to replace gasoline as it stands.

Biodiesel will face the same problems of water and arable land. Keep in mind that the figure given was just for gasoline, and not for diesel. Replacing oil-diesel with biodeisel will require a similar ramp up in devoted area to crops.

One good factor that the wikipedia article pointed out is that a good chunk of the waste mass from producing ethanol can be used to produce electricity beyond what the refining process uses.

I am not saying that ethanol is stupid.
Ethanol is certainly part of what I consider part of an energy solution that takes a longer term view. I am all for ramping up usage of this renewable source of energy.

I simply wanted to point out the scale of the problem we are trying to address

[boutons_]

July 4, 2006

Tapping the Latent Power in What's Left Around the Barnyard

By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH

In a sense, it is the ultimate renewable source of fuel. Weather anomalies can kill off corn crops, calm the winds, obscure the sun — but through rain or shine, gusts or stillness, cows and hogs and turkeys spew forth a steady stream of manure, one of nature's richest sources of methane, a principal component of natural gas.

And now, farmers and entrepreneurs are recognizing that this immutable fact can yield a steady stream of revenue and profit, too. Slowly, but steadily, they are replacing the malodorous lagoons used to treat the waste with machines that can wrest energy from excrement.

According to AgStar, a federal program that promotes the conversion of manure to energy, there are more than 100 anaerobic digesters — devices that create an oxygen-free atmosphere in which bacteria digest manure and release gas — operating in the United States today, with another 80 on the drawing boards.

"These are the only kinds of waste management systems that can actually put money in farmers' pockets," said Kurt Roos, program manager of AgStar.

There are a number of reasons for the new spotlight on what is called brown energy. Oil and gas prices have soared, even as environmentalists have sounded alarms about climate change. In the last two years, various state and federal agencies have subsidized purchases of digesters, since they capture methane — a potent greenhouse gas — before it escapes into the atmosphere. Many utilities operate in states that require them to include environmentally aware energy sources in their portfolios. They will often accept manure gas, since many farms have installed equipment to clean it.

In fact, more utilities are thinking of buying the gas outright. Pacific Gas and Electric has agreed to transport gas from a big digester that Microgy, a digester manufacturer, is building in California. Right now Microgy plans to sell the gas on the open market, but Robert Howard, vice president for gas transmission and distribution, said P.G.& E. may buy some gas itself. "This technology provides pipeline-quality gas and reduces carbon emissions, so of course we're in favor it," he said.

The environmental boons are many. According to Agstar, digesters are already keeping 66,000 tons of methane from escaping each year into the atmosphere, while generating enough energy to power more than 20,000 homes.

And technologies, some of which have been around for decades, have finally grown more reliable. "There's been a lot of time and energy spent on making these as effective and efficient as possible, so anaerobic digestion will be a growing business," said Daniel J. Mannes, vice president of Avondale Partners, a securities research firm that recently initiated coverage of the Environmental Power Corporation, the company in Portsmouth, N.H., that owns Microgy.

The potential market is huge. Agstar officials say that at least 70,000 dairy and swine farms are big enough to support a commercial digester and could collectively provide enough energy to power more than 560,000 homes, while keeping more than 1.4 million tons of methane out of the atmosphere.

"The business model of producing energy along with food will transform the economics of rural America," said Michael T. Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, based in Washington.

Indeed, anaerobic digestion yields not just methane, but leftover liquids that farmers can use or sell as fertilizer, waste heat that can heat their homes and barns, and fibrous solids that make excellent bedding for cows. Farmers also save the costs of controlling odors and treating waste. "Two years ago I couldn't even convince farmers that digesters work," said Melissa Dvorak, marketing manager for GHD, a company based in Chilton, Wis., that sells digesters. "Now, all they ask is what the payback will be."

The deals are struck in different ways. In most cases, farmers buy digesters and either use the gas themselves, sell it to a utility, or use it to power a generator that feeds electricity to the utility's grid. In another model, the manufacturer owns the digester and sells the gas. In those cases the farmers provide the manure and the land, and get the fertilizer, bedding and a cut of revenues from sales of gas. Last year, for example, Hunter Haven Farms in Pearl City, Ill., paid $960,000 — half of it subsidized by state and federal grants — for a GHD digester that processes waste from 600 dairy cows. Hunter Haven then pipes its methane into a generator, and sells the resulting electricity to Commonwealth Edison for 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour.

Douglas R. Block, Hunter Haven's president, said the farm was saving $60,000 annually by using fibrous solids from the digester as bedding, and sells $12,000 worth of bedding to other farmers. And he anticipates at least $16,000 in added revenue from carbon credits, the tradeable units for reducing methane emissions.

Five Star Dairy, a 900-cow dairy farm in Elk Mound, Wis., anticipates a similar profit stream from the $1.2 million Microgy digester it installed in 2004. Lee Jensen, Five Star's general manager, said the Dairyland Power Cooperative pays him about 5 cents per kilowatt hour for energy, and that he is saving money on bedding and fertilizer.

"We're not taking any risk, the reduction in odors is huge, and we're powering 600 homes with 900 cows," he said. "You've got to admit, that's pretty efficient."

The digester companies are betting their futures that more farmers will agree with him. Environmental Power is phasing out an older business in burning waste coal to focus on its Microgy subsidiary, which uses a technology that it licensed from Xergi, a Danish company. Microgy, whose digesters can accept used cooking grease as well as manure, has already sold three of its machines in Wisconsin, and is building one in Huckabay, Tex., that will process waste from 10,000 cows. It will own that one itself, and hopes to sell the resulting gas on the open market.

GHD is cutting back on its business of cleaning up pollution from underground gas tanks to concentrate on the anaerobic digestion patents it has held since the late 1990's. It has sold 15 small manure digesters and is building 6 more.

Intrepid Technology and Resources, based in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is discontinuing its engineering services business to concentrate on its digester processes. Dennis D. Keiser, Intrepid's chief executive, said that in five or six years, he expects Intrepid will be collecting manure from 100,000 cows on 50 farms, and generating enough gas to serve 40,000 homes. "We're not profitable yet, but in the next 12 months we will be," he predicted. That may yet depend on the utilities that accept the processed gas, particularly since Agstar and some states have cut back on subsidies.

"Digesters need to get at least 6 cents a kilowatt hour to break even, and too many utilities want to pay 2 cents," said George Sterzinger, executive director of the Renewable Energy Policy Project, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

But utilities are coming around. Dairyland is taking enough manure-generated electricity from Microgy projects in Wisconsin to power 1,800 homes, and John M. McWilliams, the utility's resource planner, said he hoped to have 30 digesters linked to his grid soon. Mr. McWilliams called manure-to-energy systems one of the few environmental technologies that can offer guaranteed supply and stable prices.

"Wind blows intermittently, people don't want more rivers and streams dammed up, there aren't many new landfills to tap, and we're captive to railroads to transport coal," he said. "Manure digestion is probably the only way we can expand."

Central Vermont Public Service is letting its customers choose. In October 2004 it gave its 151,000 customers an option to pay a few cents more for "cow power," so that the utility could pay for the more expensive electricity generated from manure. More than 3,000 customers have agreed to do so, and David J. Dunn, a senior energy consultant at the utility, said more keep signing up.

The utility is buying gas from one farm now, but Mr. Dunn said two others are installing digesters, and two more plan to do so soon.

"We've already got more customers signed up than cow power to sell them," Mr. Dunn said. "Cow power is really a market-driven program."

=========================

I read once where 90% of USA corn goes to animal feed. Animals now as corn convertors and pre-digestors producing for sh!t digestors.

[scott]

Methane = CH4

Carbohydrates = Cn(H20)n

People = Full of carbohydrates.

You connect the dots.