Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 21.8%

  • Yes - preferred over petrol car if price/power/convenience similar

    Votes: 78 39.6%

  • Maybe - preference for neither, only concerned with costs etc

    Votes: 37 18.8%

  • No - prefer petrol car even if electric car has same price, power and convenience

    Votes: 25 12.7%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.1%
  • Total voters
    197
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Ok so if I've understood you correctly - the big thing with EV's is that they have nowhere near the drivetrain loss?

So burning the fossil fuels in a powerplant doesn't actually produce (convert) that much more energy than an ICE but because the ICE has the drivetrain loss, the actual deployment/expenditure of the energy is far more efficient?

Edit: I just remembered that normal car ICE engines are about 33% efficient (2/3rds of the energy being lost to heat) so if a diesel generator is 50% efficient then it would actually be both raw efficiency and deployment efficiency as well.

Thanks dude!
 
over9k said:
Oh trawler. I totally forgot about you. You're definitely the man for that question. I would have tagged you if I'd remembered!
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It's just fun getting the grey matter going again, it has been a long time.
This E.V revolution is great IMO, imagine having a car as fast as a Porsche, that can run the house overnight, it don't get better than that. Bring it on IMO. :xyxthumbs
Just saw your post, yes the big thing with the E.V is it doesn't need a drive train, just a speed controller on the electric motor, if it is A.C that will be a thyristor speed control. So the efficiency really is as high as 99%.
Have you ever watched a really long conveyor belt that is fully loaded with ore start up, it takes about 2 seconds to get up to speed, unbelievable torque,
The diesel cycle from memory is between 50-55% depending on compression ratio and or turbo charging, the carnot cycle(petrol) is up to 40% these days with direct injection and inert exhaust gas injection allowing compression ratios to be higher (approx 14/1 from memory) without pre ignition. That is why these new ICE petrol engines are getting such good fuel economies these days.
The other thing is from the earlier post, heavy fuel oil is banned in most places because of emissions
 
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Yeah I'm a car guy so I know a few things about ICE deployment in normal cars but little about actual generators. I do know that electric motors make instant/full torque at any RPM though (on a dyno it's a perfectly level torque curve), hence your comment about conveyor belts.

Not sure how up to date you are with hybrids but there was a very big deal made a year or so ago when mercedes managed to make their ICE/electric combo "power unit" 50% efficient.
 
over9k said:
Yeah I'm a car guy so I know a few things about ICE deployment in normal cars but little about actual generators. I do know that electric motors make instant/full torque at any RPM though (on a dyno it's a perfectly level torque curve), hence your comment about conveyor belts.

Not sure how up to date you are with hybrids but there was a very big deal made a year or so ago when mercedes managed to make their ICE/electric combo "power unit" 50% efficient.
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The hybrids are interesting, i think if they are priced competitively, there will be a bug take up of them.
I took Toyota C-HR hybrid for a drive, just for interest sake, it was very impressive. The transition from ICE - E.V _ charging, was all seamless, I can see them being a big seller in the near future, the Camry hybrid is making big inroads into the taxi fleets.
I really liked the Nio post you put up about the battery swapping model, I think there will be a big market where a fast turn around might be required, especially if they can make it a quick swap out, VC says there is still some issues with the swap.
But like police work etc, where down time might be non existent, the ability to have plug in charging or battery swap option, would be very attractive.
It is all becoming really interesting.
 
over9k said:
Ok so if I've understood you correctly - the big thing with EV's is that they have nowhere near the drivetrain loss?
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All energy conversions (eg chemical to heat, heat to mechanical, mechanical to electrical, electrical to light, etc) involve losses. Some things are hugely inefficient, others are the opposite.

Electric motor efficiency is around 90%.

Really big diesel engines used for power generation achieve 46 - 48% efficiency in practice depending on operating conditions. That's taking into account losses in the engine (most of it) and alternator (minor).

That's for the largest internal combustion engines in use for fixed (not ships etc) power generation in Australia - they're 17.5 MW each. That's not large compared to steam or hydro turbines but it's as big as it gets for internal combustion.

Now the reason for mentioning great big engines like that is they're as good as it gets. Once you make the engine physically smaller and/or lighter relative to its power output, that comes at the expense of efficiency. Smaller and lighter but less efficient.

Then there's the problem that every time you hit the brakes, that energy is lost and in practical driving that's significant. Versus an EV that can recover not all but the majority of that via regenerative braking. Tricks like that aren't breaking any laws of physics but done well enough and they can create a situation where the real world fuel consumption of the vehicle "seems like" the engine is impossibly efficient (eg the Mercedes 50% efficiency). It's all above board, just akin to treating a saving as though it were income basically.

Idling whilst stopped in traffic is also a dead loss with internal combustion but no such issue with an EV.

To put some figures on it, take 1 litre of diesel fuel, run that through a great big engine in a power station and use the electricity to charge an EV. It'll move you about 25 km so about 4 litres / 100 km.

Of itself that's not hugely impressive but:

1. Very little electricity is actually generated from diesel or other oil-based fuels. For Australia as a whole it's about 2%. Non-oil sources have advantages in terms of supply security and so on quite separate from any environmental considerations.

2. Even if the source of electricity does involve burning fuel, exhaust emissions aren't normally discharged at ground level into a densely populated area in the way that conventional cars do. Rather, the power station's a considerable distance away and has a great big tall stack. Some impact on urban air quality possibly but far less.

3. To the extent the world's going to use renewable or nuclear energy sources, they produce electricity they don't produce petrol. Whilst not impossible, it's also a lot harder to get petrol out of coal than it is to turn it into electricity.

End result is an EV doesn't use zero oil but it uses stuff all compared to any petrol or diesel car. :2twocents
 
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over9k said:
Ah yep, here I thought you were talking about still burning refined fuels like they're currently doing with all the on-site generators.

Do you know much about the big crude burning power plants? I'd be interested to hear if they need to be designed differently for different grades of crude, light/heavy, sweet/sour etc etc?

To my mind it would be very silly to have a plant that could run on light/sweet but not heavy/sour but I'm not a powerplant engineer so I have no idea if such a thing is actually possible.

I ask because shale crude (which I suspect you know) is a very different grade to conventional crude and shale crude, whilst it might be expensive if the conventional stuff is no longer available, may soon be the only stuff the asians can actually get their hands on, so if a powerplant can't actually use it then they'd be in quite the jam.

If powerplants can't run on all grades of crude then that would only give them even more impetus to get off oil entirely.
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As trawler said in a simple boiler type power plant grade wouldn’t matter, you can burn anything provided your equipment that injects the fuel can handle the consistency.

however the most efficient power plants are “combined cycle”, where the fuels in burned in a similar way to a jet engine and it turns a turbine, and the heat blown out also heats a boiler, for this type I would imagine grade is important.
 
Value Collector said:
however the most efficient power plants are “combined cycle”, where the fuels in burned in a similar way to a jet engine and it turns a turbine, and the heat blown out also heats a boiler, for this type I would imagine grade is important.
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Steam turbine (boiler) = if it burns then it'll do. So far as oil is concerned, raw crude oil most certainly is burned for power generation and has been so for decades either with elaborate emissions controls (eg Japan does that) or with the whole lot just going straight up the stack in certain other places.

#6 fuel oil, which is heavier than the crude it came from, is the most common fuel used for that purpose though since it's cheap, being a left over after the petrol etc is distilled out. These days sulfur is pretty tightly regulated but that wasn't the case in the past, 4 - 5% wasn't uncommon as a limit internationally, in Tasmania it was 3% (different rules in each state....), some communist and Third World countries were burning ~8% sulfur oil and needless to say that wasn't kind to the environment around the plant not in the slightest.

Photo: Bell Bay Power Station (Tasmania) operating one x 120 MW unit on #6 heavy fuel oil. Old photo scanned from film - this facility is now permanently closed and partly demolished. For scale, the chimney height is 120m. Not really visible but there's a jetty out the front - the tankers just used to sail up and offload straight to the power station. Fuel consumption for each boiler (there were two complete sets of boiler, turbine, alternator etc - apart from sharing the same chimney and in the same building they were otherwise independent of each other) was about 435 litres a minute at full load so 1.25 million litres a day for both if run flat out.

1610463885596.png

FWIW during the 1970's oil crises emissions laws, to the extent they existed at the time, were commonly relaxed or simply overlooked when companies couldn't get compliant fuel. One very well known Australian company at one point during that era ended up burning tar in lieu of fuel oil - government decided that the plant had to stay running no matter what, there was no alternative couldn't get fuel oil and even crude was running dangerously low, and they were given the go ahead to do it.

The sulfur can be mostly removed from heavy fuel oil by the way, just wasn't done historically since it costs $ to do it but it can be done, it's not impossible and there are certainly oil refineries doing it and selling it as compliant (with emissions laws) fuel for ships.

Gas turbines either open or combined cycle = fuel needs to be free of ash. Heavy fuel oil and crude oil contain solids (ash) so that leaves distilled (refined) products - diesel, heating oil (#1 fuel oil), kerosene, anything like that. I've never heard of anyone using petrol due to economic and safety (flammability in storage) reasons of existing setups but with the right steps taken it could be done if the economics pushed it that way.

There's at least one plant in Australia that often takes off-spec aviation fuel for example - doesn't meet standards to go in a plane given the potential consequences of failure but in practice it's good enough, it burns and runs a power station sitting safely on the ground.

Internal combustion engines = can be designed to run just about anything but the key there is proper setup. Outside my area of knowledge with the details though beyond saying "it's possible to do it" but needs to be set up properly, it's not just a case of putting whatever you like in the tank and it works. Barker Inlet power station (SA) is set up for diesel and natural gas. The engines are technically able to run heavy fuel oil, they're low speed, but not set up that way in practice.
 
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Alright so now we've all had a crash course on energy production, who out there knows about battery tech?
 
over9k said:
Alright so now we've all had a crash course on energy production, who out there knows about battery tech?
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My oldest son is heavy into studying it, he wants to go off grid, is a sparky and really interested. The perfect combination. ?
 
Another cross-post:




Part 1 of post:


"Carmakers’ predicament is exacerbated by the fact that chips are crucial for the latest features they are touting, be it assisted driving, large displays or connectivity. Semiconductor-based components are set to account for more than 50% of a car’s manufacturing cost by 2030, up from about 35% now, and in semiconductors, China has only one company in the top 20, and less than 5% of automotive chips are made in the country. For some key components, carmakers rely 90% on imports".

So yeah. They're VERY exposed to foreign sources of chips.

The USA is as well as a lot of chips are produced in south korea & taiwan but at least the americans have some production onshore. I know this is a bit outdated but I've managed to find at least SOME numbers:

1. U.S. semiconductor companies lead in global semiconductor market share, accounting for 51 percent of total global semiconductor sales in 2014.

2. U.S. semiconductor companies do most of their manufacturing (52 percent) in the United States.


So about 25% of america's chip production is onshore, vs 5% of china's. Or 1/4 vs 1/20th. Quite the difference.




Part 2:

Here's some updated info about just how much car production has ground to a halt:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...s-snarl-car-production-at-factories-worldwide

So it looks like things are now on backorder until Q3, but a lot of vaccines will be deployed/the economy will well & truly be back on the increase by then so that might actually add to car demand even more.





Part 3:

What all this means is that due to the tech now in cars, not least of all because electric cars are getting more & more & more marketshare, we now have a situation in which an increase in car demand thus also means a commensurate increase in chip demand at the same time as cars becoming ever more technical/chip reliant by the day. In other words, we have a double-whammy increase in chip demand from both an increase in car demand in and of itself combined with a chip-per-car saturation increase at the same time. Either of these factors alone would be increasing chip demand significantly but when you put them together at the same time you end up with a multiplier effect in demand increase.

I'm actually seriously considering selling my UDOW position off and pumping it all into SOXL in light of this. If an increase in demand for industrials gives a commensurate/follow-on increase in demand for microchips at the same time as chip saturation in said industrials is increasing, you have a singular demand increase for industrials vs an amplified or multiplied increase in demand for microchips, making microchips the much better place to be.

The only question from here is whether the rest of the market has already figured this out and thus already priced it in. SOXL is already very high.


Hmm. Looks like a busy day ahead.
 
Great post 9K, good info and probably why China is spending a lot on R&D obviously the chip manufacturers had a bit more foresight then the general produce manufacturers.
 
Hmm dunno. I mean I want to say yes but I feel like we might need someone that's been trading microchips etc perhaps exclusively (or a specialist chip/tech trader) to get a surer answer.

You'd like to think that the chip companies have all kinds of internal data, trend analysts etc etc but it wouldn't be the first thing that the whole world missed but was obvious in hindsight so who knows.
 
over9k said:
Hmm dunno. I mean I want to say yes but I feel like we might need someone that's been trading microchips etc perhaps exclusively (or a specialist chip/tech trader) to get a surer answer.

You'd like to think that the chip companies have all kinds of internal data, trend analysts etc etc but it wouldn't be the first thing that the whole world missed but was obvious in hindsight so who knows.
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I don’t know if it is relevant, but Tesla designs their own computer chip and has it made under contract by Samsung in Texas.
 
Well that would solve the logistical issue but there's still the question of the actual supply contracts. They'd probably have ordered X chips over Y period but if there's clauses which allow samsung to prioritise another customer that'll pay more then they're in a bit of a jam, same as if they want more chips than they've ordered but there's already a contract to supply someone else, that kind of thing.

Short of buying some manufacturing capacity off the other company or something I suspect they're in a bit of a jam.
 
There's also this problem now:

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Meanwhile:

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USA manufactures far more chips on shore but taiwan & south korea are obviously a lot closer to china (easier to get supply from) than the 'states.

A classic case of needing to build where you sell.
 
Ehhh they don't need musk to be operating/selling there to reverse engineer stuff though
 
over9k said:
Ehhh they don't need musk to be operating/selling there to reverse engineer stuff though
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No, but you do get to see exactly how he is doing everything, if you build and fit out the factory for him.
Well worth the pocket change it would have cost the Chinese Government, also you keep abreast of any developments that come about.
All you haven't got a handle on is the chip, which is where you spend your R&D, not on the whole article.
Only my thoughts.
 
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