VW Still Believes In Diesels; Unveils New 2.0 TDI Mild Hybrid

nwdiver said:

Explain how that's cherry picking. Your concern was over clean electricity generation for EVs. Point is we're ADDING clean energy FASTER than we're adding EVs...
Wind and Solar growth is VASTLY outpacing EV growth and is likely to continue to do that indefinitely since more EVs make it easier to add more wind and solar. It's a virtuous cycle.

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There are more measures that need to be included, including economics, land use stats, and the fact that current acceleration is not going to be a continuous "fact" so yes, cherries ripe for picking with "current, limited stats."

The books written about statistics as they are applied to real life are a good start.

Cheers,

TM

Tin Man said:

There are more measures that need to be included, including economics, land use stats, and the fact that current acceleration is not going to be a continuous "fact" so yes, cherries ripe for picking with "current, limited stats."
The books written about statistics as they are applied to real life are a good start.
Cheers,
TM

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Bottom line is that the energy and displacement potential of bio fuels is extremely limited. Solar and Wind on the other hand is virtually unlimited.

No 'Cherries' just FACTS.

nwdiver said:

Bottom line is that the energy and displacement potential of bio fuels is extremely limited. Solar and Wind on the other hand is virtually unlimited.
No 'Cherries' just FACTS.

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Cool. Good to know. I guess that this shows there is no need for power generation by fossil fuels at night and during lack of wind.

Lets hope it works out.

TM

Tin Man said:

Cool. Good to know. I guess that this shows there is no need for power generation by fossil fuels at night and during lack of wind.

Lets hope it works out.

TM

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.... that's why EVs make this EASIER. EVs have batteries... my car could power my house for a week if the sun and wind stayed away that long...


I can also wait several days to charge my car if needed... Electrifying transportation adds a buffer.

Tin Man said:

I'm all for decreasing our use of crude oil, coal, and natural gas, especially limiting the amount of oil we buy from our "friends" in Russia and the Middle East.

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why not buy up their oil, it's a limited resource, so them selling it cheap is a shortsighted move

Tin Man said:

Cool. Good to know. I guess that this shows there is no need for power generation by fossil fuels at night and during lack of wind.

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got to wonder if transmission losses were figured into that map, too
on some of those lines, they'd be losing many times along the way the amount they got out at the other end

[486] said:

got to wonder if transmission losses were figured into that map, too
on some of those lines, they'd be losing many times along the way the amount they got out at the other end

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Transmission losses average ~12%... rather negligible...

nwdiver said:

Transmission losses average ~12%... rather negligible...

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With those distances, or our current "combined cycle turbines jammed in everywhere right next to the load" idea of a power grid?

[486] said:

With those distances,

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What 'distances'? You realize that map is just informational... right? No one is actually suggesting we put 100% of US solar generation in Arizona. If anything transmission losses would be lower with distributed generation like solar and wind. Because it's... distributed.

12% is a utility average from generation down to residential voltage. It's much lower for primary 'backbone' consumers. Most losses occur with voltage step down, not distance.

[486] said:

why not buy up their oil, it's a limited resource, so them selling it cheap is a shortsighted move

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Uh, well, there are evil regimes that use oil money to kill people etc. Would rather be totally independent energy wise. Bush 1 doctrine was to use "their" oil for the reason you mention.

Don't want to mention that many believe the Iraq war was to acquire oil. Not really, since it would have cost much less just to buy it. The war was to prevent Saddam from controlling the oil market as well as against his ability to bomb Israel, IMO.

TM

nwdiver said:

What 'distances'? You realize that map is just informational... right? No one is actually suggesting we put 100% of US solar generation in Arizona.

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the pink bit says distributed relative to use and sunlight, and then to the right it says the one in the sahara is powering europe

so, yeah it's suggesting near zero line loss

[486] said:

the pink bit says distributed relative to use and sunlight, and then to the right it says the one in the sahara is powering europe
so, yeah it's suggesting near zero line loss

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damn... you're right... and making each tiny square ~12% bigger is WAY too much area

nwdiver said:

damn... you're right... and making each tiny square ~12% bigger is WAY too much area

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but is it really 12% on a distance such as illustrated, or would it actually be something like 2-300% of what is consumed?
you say your given 12% is the current idea on line loss, where most users are within a couple miles of a peaking plant, not a thousand kilometers across a continent

there have been some strides made on superconductors, but they're all very short runs at the moment, with very high maintenence costs associated with keeping them extremely cold

[486] said:

but is it really 12% on a distance such as illustrated, or would it actually be something like 2-300% of what is consumed?
you say your given 12% is the current idea on line loss, where most users are within a couple miles of a peaking plant, not a thousand kilometers across a continent
there have been some strides made on superconductors, but they're all very short runs at the moment, with very high maintenence costs associated with keeping them extremely cold

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Where on earth did you get the idea that transmission losses are ~70+%????

.... no.... it's ~12%. Most users are not 'within a couple miles of a peaking plant.' Most losses occur per transformer NOT per mile. Line loses are ~1%/100 miles.

Distributed generation is distributed... it's in the name. Most solar and wind will be produced and consumed locally.

And now I just spent two hours bumbling around wikipedia
great

Says 1% at 700KV but 5% at 250kv, which would be pretty dang significant from africa to northern finland (where it's night for all of winter)
no info on what the major distribution voltages are in europe, though I'd imagine they're as bad about standardization as every other human being is.

[486] said:

And now I just spent two hours bumbling around wikipedia
great

Says 1% at 700KV but 5% at 250kv, which would be pretty dang significant from africa to northern finland (where it's night for all of winter)
no info on what the major distribution voltages are in europe, though I'd imagine they're as bad about standardization as every other human being is.

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Glad I was able to kill a little misinformation

For transcontinental transmission... if that ever makes sense. HVDC can be used. It has losses of ~3% per 1000km. But we have a LONG way to go before local generation exceeds local demand to the point that electricity travels >500km before being consumed...

Like I said. Most losses occur in conversion HV => LV or AC => DC; NOT distance.

Yeah, China is using 1100 kV HVDC transmission lines on some massive hydro electric projects far away from major population centers. Lots of advantages to hvdc for long distance and underground/water power transmission.

I had a Tesla Model S for awhile. Didn't like the intrusion Tesla has with the car. Felt like it never was *my* car; I was only borrowing it from daddy.

Sold it to a friend, he got in a wreck--not his fault--and Tesla bricked it. Turned it off. The drama surrounding getting 'made whole again' by the at fault's insurance company was 11 months. 11 months and no way to even buy it back and fix it himself. Tesla refused to allow access to technical data and refused to sell the parts.

Makes VW kinda look like Santa Claus, really.

Not to mention the elephant in the room--how do we build and discard all these batteries?

Dan C. said:

Not to mention the elephant in the room--how do we build and discard all these batteries?

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... not much of an 'elephant' really... and orders of magnitude easier than the problems posed by our petrol addiction...

Where Batteries are born

How Batteries are reborn .... eventually... since... Tesla Batteries Last Forever (Basically)

nwdiver said:

'Our long-term North American agreements with waste services companies ensure us a consistent supply of MSW feedstock, which eliminates the pricing volatility in our feedstock.'

That's the asterisk in this plan. Globally we use 80M barrels of oil. That's 3.2B. BILLION with a B gallons of hydrocarbons... EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Diverting Municipal waste to fuel won't even scratch the surface of that addiction. It's a distraction... not a solution....

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MSW is just one example of non-fossil feedstock.

One study took a look at costs for FT diesel fuel from biomass. According to that study, production costs would be roughly equivalent to current production costs for fossil diesel fuel (~$2.10/gallon, pre-tax) at sufficient scale. The cost of feedstock was assumed to be $61.20/dry ton of biomass.

According to NREL, there is the potential of nearly 500M tons of waste biomass by 2022 at <$60/dry ton (agriculture wastes and forest wastes ("logging residues and other removals, unused primary mill residues, secondary mill residues, and urban wood waste"), Tables 2&3).

Based on the yield of the Red Rock Biofuels' FTD process (15.1M gallons from 136,000 dry tons of forest wastes, or about 111 gallons/dry ton), there is sufficient waste biomass feedstock to produce over 50B gallons/year of FTD fuel, which would be cost-competitive with fossil diesel.

This doesn't include the Fulcrum municiple-waste-to-fuels, which could amount to as much as 15B gallons/year extrapolated across all landfill wastes in the U.S. And if algae becomes cost-competitive, you can add another potential 50B gallons/year. That's just production in the U.S.

According to EIA, total U.S. consumption of middle distillate (diesel, jet fuel, and home heating oil) is about 88B gallons/year, if my math is correct. So there is *potentially* enough biomass to displace a large portion of fossil middle distillate fuels at competitive prices without ANY crop oils whatsoever, and without federal tax incentives.

nwdiver said:

URL="http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/study-msw-waste-us-energy-potential/"]If 100% of MSW was diverted to energy it would cover ~12% of our electricity needs. Converting to liquid hydrocarbons is even less efficient. It's a distraction.[/URL]

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So you're against utilizing MSW for fuel even if it significantly reduces the rate wastes are being landfilled just because it's a "distraction"?

That nwdiver pointed out a meaningful fact doesn't make him 'against' anything, IMO.

wxman said:

So you're against utilizing MSW for fuel even if it significantly reduces the rate wastes are being landfilled just because it's a "distraction"?

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No... by all means... use all of it. Utilize the crap out of it (literally). But the first place it needs to go is the sector not easily electrified which is aviation. And the aviation sector alone would absorb all of the biofuel we can cost effectively produce without even noticing it was ever there.

The point is that it's not a viable alternative to electrifying transportation if we have any desire at ACTUALLY address our addiction to oil. The numbers simply aren't there. It's a distraction to maintain the status quo.

First Principles; Which energy source(s) should we tap? Electrifying transportation also carries the bonus of instantly reducing the energy cost per mile by ~70%....

Aviation uses ~26B gallons of jet fuel (kerosene) per year per EIA. I've shown that all of that plus all on- and off-road diesel fuel and home heating oil (~88B gallons/year) could be fully displaced by biofuels, based on NREL's "Billion Ton Study," much of that at competitive prices to fossil fuels.

There's also development work being done with "oil cane." Oil cane with 20 percent oil in the stem, grown on under-utilized acres in the southeastern United States, could replace more than two-thirds of the country’s use of diesel and jet fuel (Huang, H., Long, S. and Singh, V. (2016) “Techno-economic analysis of biodiesel and ethanol co-production from lipid-producing sugarcane,” Biofuels, Bioprod. Bioref.). Fuel produced by oil cane is projected to be competitive cost-wise with fossil diesel. That's on top of the potential of >50B gallons/year from waste biomass (FTD), 15B gallons/year from municipal solid wastes, >50B gallons/year from algae. That would take up a large chunk of not only jet and diesel fuel, but gasoline consumption as well.

...In two papers — published today [October 4,2018] in the journals Environmental Research Letters and Joule — Harvard University researchers find that the transition to wind or solar power in the U.S. would require five to 20 times more land than previously thought, and, if such large-scale wind farms were built, would warm average surface temperatures over the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius....

I fully agree that we need to transition off petroleum. I respectfully disagree that fully electrifying the ground transportation system is the only solution and biofuel should be/needs to be included in that goal.

wxman said:

Aviation uses ~26B gallons of jet fuel (kerosene) per year per EIA. I've shown that all of that plus all on- and off-road diesel fuel and home heating oil (~88B gallons/year) could be fully displaced by biofuels, based on NREL's "Billion Ton Study," much of that at competitive prices to fossil fuels.

There's also development work being done with "oil cane." Oil cane with 20 percent oil in the stem, grown on under-utilized acres in the southeastern United States, could replace more than two-thirds of the country’s use of diesel and jet fuel (Huang, H., Long, S. and Singh, V. (2016) “Techno-economic analysis of biodiesel and ethanol co-production from lipid-producing sugarcane,” Biofuels, Bioprod. Bioref.). Fuel produced by oil cane is projected to be competitive cost-wise with fossil diesel. That's on top of the potential of >50B gallons/year from waste biomass (FTD), 15B gallons/year from municipal solid wastes, >50B gallons/year from algae. That would take up a large chunk of not only jet and diesel fuel, but gasoline consumption as well.

...In two papers — published today [October 4,2018] in the journals Environmental Research Letters and Joule — Harvard University researchers find that the transition to wind or solar power in the U.S. would require five to 20 times more land than previously thought, and, if such large-scale wind farms were built, would warm average surface temperatures over the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius....

I fully agree that we need to transition off petroleum. I respectfully disagree that fully electrifying the ground transportation system is the only solution and biofuel should be/needs to be included in that goal.

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Fascinating conversation and important to our future. I'm still lacking time/energy to dive into the science and data. Here is an interesting analysis of this topic in a research paper:

Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar

A number of analyses, meta-analyses, and assessments, including those performed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the International Energy Agency, have concluded that deployment of a diverse portfolio of clean energy technologies makes a transition to a low-carbon-emission energy system both more feasible and less costly than other pathways. In contrast, Jacobson et al. [Jacobson MZ, Delucchi MA, Cameron MA, Frew BA (2015) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112(49):15060–15065] argue that it is feasible to provide “low-cost solutions to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of WWS [wind, water and solar power] across all energy sectors in the continental United States between 2050 and 2055”, with only electricity and hydrogen as energy carriers. In this paper, we evaluate that study and find significant shortcomings in the analysis. In particular, we point out that this work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions. Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.

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It's a very interesting analysis that seems to come to the conclusion that current projections of cost and performance are not realistic or sustainable (me: especially if other things like poverty get in the way). It also highlights to me how simple variations in figures/Math and unsupported assumptions can cause havoc in any argument.

TM

Tin Man said:

It's a very interesting analysis that seems to come to the conclusion that current projections of cost and performance are not realistic or sustainable if other things like poverty get in the way. It also highlights how simple variations in figures/Math can cause havoc in any argument.

TM

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I'm excited about the potential of scaling power to gas via the sabatier process but this is just a REALLY inefficient battery. It would allow us to store energy on an effectively limitless scale. This step of the transition is only viable as we progress from ~80% => 100% clean energy and have massive curtailment events of wind or solar. Electrifying everything as much as possible is a crucial step to achieving even ~80% clean energy.

EVs would provide the bulk of daily-weekly buffering while CH4 will allow for seasonal long-term energy storage... and rocket fuel.

nwdiver said:

Electrifying transportation also carries the bonus of instantly reducing the energy cost per mile by ~70%....

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Somewhat evident that "facts" get mixed in with assumptions and oversimplifications to try and prove a favored scenario.

My take on futurism is how badly it has performed in the past for us.....

TM

nwdiver said:

The wind piece is pure nonsense. It's right there in the study itself; 'Then, they covered one-third of the continental U.S. with enough wind turbines to meet present-day U.S. electricity demand. The researchers found this scenario would warm the surface temperature of the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius' Aside from the fact that 0.24C is a bargain compared to the 1C we've already caused not the mention the 2C we're headed towards we'll never be 100% wind because solar....​

]

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It also says "...The Harvard researchers found that the warming effect of wind turbines in the continental U.S. was actually larger than the effect of reduced emissions for the first century of its operation...."

Jacobson assumes 50% wind and 45% solar in his 100%-renewable-by-2050 scenario. Even 50% wind-generated electricity will potentially cause unintended climate effects. And as the study mentions, even solar has SOME climate effects.

nwdiver said:

...Those fantastical biofuel numbers have never been achieved and represent only a small fraction of the real picture. For example Joules technique required CO2 feed stock from a power plant so the output would have been limited. Those numbers also ignore the terrible EROEI of biofuel... some barely >1. Wind and solar are ~3x higher than biofuels. Similar to nuclear power biofuel only marginally pencils out on paper if you ignore some of the fundamentals. In reality they're both thermodynamic and economic nightmares....​

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I'm talking about the POTENTIAL of biofuel. Biofuels from wastes already pencil out cost-wise as I've highlighted, even without any tax incentives.

Potential biofuel production from non-food-crop feedstocks (per NREL's "Billion Ton Study"):

Forest and agricultural wastes - 488M dry tons/year X 111 gallons FTD/dry ton = 54B gallons/year @2022 (most of that is cost-competitive with fossil fuel)
Algae - 58B gallons/year of bio-oil X 85% (0.85) yield = 49B gallons/year
Non-food crops - 564M dry tons X 111 gallons/dry ton = 62B gallons/year
Oil cane (not included in NREL crops) - two-thirds of 88B gallons/year (current middle distillate use) = 59B gallons/year
Used cooking oil - 3B gallons/year (per EPA) X 0.85 = 2.5B gallons/year
MSW-to-fuels (extrapolated to all U.S. landfill wastes) - 15B gallons/year

Total - ~241B gallons/year; total U.S. fuel consumption per EIA - ~235B gallons/year

So there's potentially enough biomass feedstock to displace ALL fossil fuel currently used in the U.S.

nwdiver said:

...If the biofuel future is so bright why is the US only producing enough to meet ~5% of aviation needs? Why has biofuel output only increased ~3x since 2000 compared to 35x for wind and >100x for solar?...​

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The biofuels-from-wastes facilities are not yet completed. The collapse in crude oil prices also slowed growth in biomass-based fuels.

nwdiver said:

The reality is that clean energy powered EVs is actually cheaper than petrol and wind/solar is now actually cheaper than gas. Aside from MWS feedstock which is extremely limited biofuels cannot compete with oil economically and economics matters.​

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There's at least one study that disputes that claim without tax credit incentives (which are now starting to expire) - …LCDs ranged from 26¢ per mile for conventional gasoline ICEVs to 38¢ per mile for long-range BEVs using electricity derived from solar energy….

Again, biofuel produced from feedstock at <$60/dry ton is already competitive with fossil fuel.

nwdiver said:

Then... on top of ALL that... without a fleet of EVs how would you propose buffering wind and solar? It's a synergistic relationship. Wind and Solar enable clean EVs and EVs enable more wind and solar.​

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Solar energy is stored in biomass-based fuels too.

Clicked thru one of the links above.. Wow...diesel hybrid technology...very 21st century. Now if they can mate it a manual transmission...and even...wait for it...put it a 2-door car. In this 21st gee-whiz century 2-door small cars are apparently just too futuristic...and difficult. Maybe in the future they will figure out a way.