Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum

All right, try this:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key= ... utput=html

Gas is fungible, importing from Canada is pretty close to the same thing as importing from Venezuela. And, marginal gas comes from imports and costs quite a bit more than domestic or Canadian gas.

-Iain

I don't see the 23kw number you quoted in the spreadsheet. Are you sure that was an gasoline minivan?

Keep in mind that we import 72% of our petroleum and less than 13% of natural gas.

By the way, I hope that companies who build electric car will notice that the inductive coupler described in the Berkeley paper would be perfect for an electric car charger.

It could sit on the floor of your garage and activate whenever the car is parked on it (the car would lower its coupler when the parking brake is engaged). This super convenient feature could make electric power a must-have feature for all luxury cars within 20 years.

Public chargers that conform to the standard would activate with a credit card swipe. Or possibly a data link through the coupler.

Consider that putting chargers under every parking spacing in every parking lot (to power plug-in gas/battery hybrids) would involve a lot less infrastructure than powering every mile of freeway.
- It would be almost as effective at replacing gasoline.
- It would be equally effective at solving range problems of electric cars.
- It would have a much more cost effective roll-out plan, as converting only a few parking spaces in each lot would be adequate for the first few percent of cars, whereas converting a small fraction of the highways could be worthless to drivers in non-powered areas.

The car mounted coupler would not need to be as long as in the powered free-way case, as the power density could be higher without the efficiency loss a freeway system would have.

A more plausible scenario. Though you do lose the long range driving capability. You only get to go as far as your batteries will take you before you park for a long time or switch over to liquid fuel.

I'm still not happy with 40% of the charging energy turning into heat. Give me a hard contact anytime to transfer electric energy.

Nissan already has an idea like that:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/charging-nissan-electric-car-wireless-induction.php

The important thing is to set up a standardized system so that all EVs can use the same charging stations anywhere in the country. They need to also set up a standard billing system where the car has an RFID that would automatically bill you for the electricity. This may be an issue, since I understand in some places the local electric company has a legal monopoly on selling electricity.

There is a Wireless Power Consortium, that is trying to set up standards for wireless chargers, but it is for smaller devices like cell phones.

http://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/technology/how-it-works.html