Wednesday night I took a spin in the Tesla Roadster, the new high-end sportsmobile created by a San Carlos, California-based team in collaboration with the Lotus people in the UK. The Roadster runs on 6,831 lithium-ion laptop batteries, travels 250 miles on a three-hours charge, and looks beautiful -- none of that space-age, self-consciously weird design you see in concept cars, just efficient, fluid lines and functional equipment (like an iPod dock).
While I was waiting in line, Who Killed the Electric Car? director Chris Paine walked up with a committed buyer (whose name I know, but didn't ask to use, so I'll keep it to myself.) Paine was wearing a white t-shirt with black lettering advertising the title of his film, and one of the Tesla guys stopped him:
"You have to change the title of your movie," he said. "It should be, 'Who THOUGHT They Killed The Electric Car?'"
Indeed. I took the opportunity to plug my feature from last week, on Reverend Gadget and "Jolly" Roger Wilson's Left Coast Conversions. Electric cars are popping out all over.
And that's great. But I have a question.
At yesterday's California Air Resources Board meeting, representatives from both the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles reiterated their committments to "cold-ironing," or "Alternative Maritime Power" (AMP), or plugging big ships into electrical outlets while parked in the harbor.
And the temperature in Los Angeles has topped or neared 100 degrees every day for the last week. Every day I've been watching midday power usage soar up close to the state's 50,000 megawatt capactiy (get your own Realtime California Independent System Operator power monitoring widget here). The state has regularly been pushing toward 47,000 megawatt record-breaking consumption.
So, to be completely harsh and realistic about all these changes, I must ask: Where's all that electricity going to come from?
Answers, please.
Also, something a little unusual happened during my test ride, which I'll divulge in the piece that runs in the actual paper next week. All told, though, I liked the car a lot. I mean, who wouldn't? I have been experimenting on city roads to see if I can get my biodiesel Bug to accelerate with any force at all. It's can't, but it's actually kind of thrilling.
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All what electricity?
I've been impressed with the AC Propulsion Li-ion electric drives Tesla Motors is using -- as you say, who wouldn't be? -- but they do cost a lot, so even if they're hugely successful with tens of thousands of sales or leases, it's not going to add much electricity demand. Averaged over the day, maybe 3 kW each; 30 megawatts per 10,000.
Reprising some stuff I said here, battery researchers have had good success in
developing Li-ion batteries that reduce the 1-kWh battery volume to about 5 L. But if they find ways to get it down near 0.6 L, they'll be in a significant neighbourhood, volume-per-unit-energy-wise: trinitrotoluene's.
Batteries, like TNT, contain both fuel and oxidizer. As batteries' weight and bulk is made less and less prohibitive, their similarity to bombs becomes more and more so. I doubt there is a sweet spot on that axis.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion without exhaust gas
Posted on July 25, 2006 7:07 AM by G. R. L. Cowan