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Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 21.7%

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

    Votes: 78 39.4%

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

    Votes: 38 19.2%

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

    Votes: 25 12.6%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.1%
  • Total voters
    198
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It can make sense for governments to attract big employers because it shortens dole lines (reduces government spending) while increases the number of people paying income tax (increases government revenue).

I am not saying it makes sense in all cases, but the government investing in a few tax breaks and incentives here and there when done intelligently can actually provide good returns back to the tax payer.
 
At the moment it’s cheaper to sell them LNG and Coal.

But FMG wants to basically do what you are saying except instead of charging batteries they want to transport the energy by using liquid hydrogen or ammonia.
 
Value Collector said:
At the moment it’s cheaper to sell them LNG and Coal.

But FMG wants to basically do what you are saying except instead of charging batteries they want to transport the energy by using liquid hydrogen or ammonia.
Click to expand...
So you use energy to create the hydrogen or the ammonia, then export those products.
Why not just export the energy, its certainly renewable.
Mick
 

Which battery company has enough reserve capacity to fill a container ship with batteries?
 
mullokintyre said:
So you use energy to create the hydrogen or the ammonia, then export those products.
Why not just export the energy, its certainly renewable.
Mick
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You have to store the energy in some form to transport it, storing it as battery power or hydrogen both have pros and cons, one question would be due to battery power being less dense than liquid hydrogen, how many extra battery ships do you need to carry the amount of energy that can be stored in 1 hydrogen ship.

some people have proposed laying a cable from Australia to Asia to export the electricity but then you have to compare the energy losses of the cable to energy losses of a ship, and you also have to produce power in real time rather than store it.
 
mullokintyre said:
So you use energy to create the hydrogen or the ammonia, then export those products.
Why not just export the energy, its certainly renewable.
Mick
Click to expand...
As VC has pointed out it all goes back to energy density, how much energy you can store in a given space.
Quick google:
hydrogen has an energy density of 35,000 watts per kilogram, while lithium-ion batteries have a density of just 200 watts per kilogram.
 
because a small oil tanker can do the same for much cheaper?
 
mullokintyre said:
Why not just export the energy, its certainly renewable.
Click to expand...
As a means of getting short duration peak power, batteries are very workable and there's plenty of interest in them and $ being spent for that reason.

Case in point, the well known "Tesla Big Battery" in SA is no longer the largest in Australia, because there's a larger one now operating in Victoria, and it won't even be the largest in SA for much longer given that AGL have one under construction right now on the outskirts of Adelaide. That's an AGL project as such, not a government one, being built at an expected cost of $180 million with the expectation that normal operations will recover that with profit.

As a means of storing bulk energy though batteries are still prohibitively expensive. That $180 million gets just 250 MWh of storage* versus Snowy 2.0 presently under construction at 350,000 MWh or the present Hydro Tasmania system which when full stores 14,400,000 MWh.

For peak power batteries stack up but as a means of bulk energy storage they're still several orders of magnitude too expensive. They might be put on a ship to power the ship but they'd be a seriously expensive means of transporting energy as such.

*Full specs of the battery being built are 250 MW peak power with 250 MWh of storage so a run time of 1 hour at full output. It's designed to be expandable up to 1000 MWh whilst retaining the same 250MW peak output, so an increase to 4 hours storage, if future circumstances make it viable to do so but there's no commitment from or obligation on the company to go ahead with that expansion, it's just a case of designing the basics such as site layout etc to be able to easily add that on later if a decision is made to do so.
 
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sptrawler said:
hydrogen has an energy density of 35,000 watts per kilogram
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Why are you using the unit of work (W) when describing energy?

On a mass basis, hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of petrol — 120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for petrol.
On a volume basis, however, the situation is reversed, liquid hydrogen has a density of 8 MJ/L whereas petrol has a density of 32 MJ/L.
Energy density is the amount of energy that can be released by a given mass or volume of fuel.
One of the most efficient energy storage devices, a lithium battery, has one of the lowest energy density.
 
“The price of lithium-ion battery cells declined by 97% in the last three decades. A battery with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour that cost $7500 in 1991, was just $181 in 2018. That’s 41 times less. What’s promising is that prices are still falling steeply: the cost halved between 2014 and 2018. A halving in only four years.”

The price of batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

To transition towards low-carbon energy systems, we need low-cost energy storage. Battery costs have been falling quickly.
ourworldindata.org
 
Because I was trying to keep it simple, he was asking about using batteries as a medium for carrying bulk electricity, therefore I answered in the units he was using.
By the way if you want to discuss energy, Im up for it, that would be fun.
Maybe over in the future of energy and storage thread.
By the way, why did you bring petrol into the conversation, when it was about ship loads of batteries vs ship loads of hydrogen as a means of transferring electrical energy.
Also just for your info, there are several types of lithium batteries and they all have different energy densities, well that's if you want to be accurate and you appear to be pretty pedantic. Lol
 
tantrum thrown.

the electric car has been around since the 80s and hydrogen many decades before hand. nothing is even spoken a out the amount of toxic materials are used to make the Evs and how they are disposed of?
 
Investoradam said:
tantrum thrown.

the electric car has been around since the 80s and hydrogen many decades before hand. nothing is even spoken a out the amount of toxic materials are used to make the Evs and how they are disposed of?
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Not a tantrum, just a statement of facts mate, by the way electric cars have been around for a 100 years, just to get you up to speed.
They have been around as long as ICE cars.
If you read on the stock section of the forum, a company called neometals NMT has developed a method of stripping lithiom ion batteries for recycling, some of us are up 400% on them.
Maybe read a few threads, rather than looking for an argument, you might make some money.
Try the search function on the home page.
 
Investoradam said:
nothing is even spoken a out the amount of toxic materials are used to make the Evs and how they are disposed of?
Click to expand...
Whilst true that also applies to most things.

It's only from 2004 that we finally banned the use of asbestos brakes in cars for example and leaded petrol wasn't banned until 2002, indeed the phase out of it didn't even begin until 1985 prior to which all petrol sold to the public in Australia contained lead.

2004, 2002 or even 1985 isn't that long ago really. The latter's well within the lifetime of the bulk of the present population and even 1985 is within living memory for many. There'd still be a few low mileage vehicles around today with asbestos brakes on them, leaving behind a cloud of death dust every time they stop.

Those old enough will probably remember that James Hardie used to sponsor motor racing indeed they had the naming rights to Bathurst. The James Hardie Bathurst 1000 as it was always referred to in the media.

Then there's other forms of transport. Diesel trains still ran through the underground network in Sydney in the 1990's for example. Diesels underground yes - and that was high sulphur diesel, 5000ppm, back then leaving behind a cloud of black smoke.

The entire concept of concern about toxics in association with transport is a recent thing really and still by no means fully resolved today. Even as a child I knew that inhaling car exhaust was a way to commit suicide and that there was a good reason why car drivers avoided following buses too closely - the fumes they put out in the past was really quite something and not in a good way.

At least with an electric vehicle the toxic materials are contained within the car or at the factory, they're not being spewed out into the air in urban environments and so on.

In any event they're coming and trying to stop them is akin to someone in 1985 trying to stop the adoption of CD's or someone 15 years ago trying to stop the rise of smartphones. It's happening, the tipping point has been passed, so the smart thing to do is position yourself to take advantage of it, invest in companies that can benefit from this change, rather than being left behind.
 
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Mr @sptrawler seems like your premier's lockdowns might not stop viruses but definitively worked to keep people on edge and put on nerves.
Today is a new day
 
Investoradam said:
tantrum thrown.

the electric car has been around since the 80s and hydrogen many decades before hand. nothing is even spoken a out the amount of toxic materials are used to make the Evs and how they are disposed of?
Click to expand...
Actually we have discussed that many times on this thread, in short over their life EV’s will pollute far less that petrol cars, and the battery materials will be recycled into new batteries at the end of their life.
 
The demise of the ICE car is being accelerated by stricter and stricter emission standards, Nissan is the latest company to annoubce no further development work on ICE engines.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/nissa...m.au&utm_content=article_2&utm_medium=partner
New Euro 7 emissions regulations will come into force as early as 2025 in Europe – which Nissan has reportedly determined will "raise the cost of developing internal combustion engines to unsustainable levels", according to Nikkei Asia.
Nissan will redirect its budget for petrol car and engine development – a significant portion of an annual 500 billion Japanese yen ($AU6.1 billion) sum – towards electric vehicles, Nikkei Asia reports, with employees currently working on new petrol engines to be diverted to electric car-related projects over time.
 
According to Todays Australian
Pity we couldn't get such a factory built in OZ, but I guess Tritum is a US public company, even if its engineering hub is in Brisbane.
Mick
 
The EV production is ramping up.

Nickel price buoyed by strong demand, dwindling stocks

Nickel prices held near their highest in more than two months on Monday, boosted by demand from the electric vehicle battery sector lowering stocks held in London Metal Exchange (LME) approved warehouses.
www.reuters.com
From the article:
Benchmark nickel on the LME was up 0.3% at $20,790 a tonne at 1707 GMT having last week touched $21,165 a tonne, the highest since November 24.

"Nickel stocks in LME warehouses are being drawn because they can be used to make nickel sulphate for the batteries used in electric vehicles," said ING analyst Wenyu Yao.
Electric vehicle demand has been particularly strong in China, where Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), General Motors (GM.N), Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) and Tesla (TSLA.O) are ramping up production. read more

INVENTORIES: Nickel stocks in LME warehouses at 99,954 tonnes have fallen by around 62% since April 2021.

About 75% of the total is bagged briquette, easily crushed into small particles and dissolved in sulphuric acid to make nickel sulphate.
Cancelled warrants -- metal earmarked for delivery -- at 49% of total stocks indicate more metal is due to be delivered out over the coming days and weeks.

SPREADS: Worries about nickel supplies on the LME market have created a premium of $125 a tonne for the cash over the three-month contract , a one-month high.
 
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