It's probably difficult to quote MW for a solar or wind system for that matter as it produces power for a long time. If you figure the system will produce about 6MW a year and has a estimated lifetime of 30Years (that's the warranty on the panels, anyway) it will produce 18,000MW. The total cost of the system was about US$50,000.- (minus US$35,000.- incentives and tax credits) which comes to US$2.78 per MW, much cheaper and cleaner than any coal ;-)

 

Your solar system on your house produces excess in the day, which gets fed back into the grid. At night, you take electricity from the grid, and use it in your house and to charge your car. If you do it this way, your net emissions will be 0. However, for a mass scale, wind and solar go hand in hand since one works mainly at night while the other works in the day.

As far as peak neodynium goes, AC induction motors such as are in the Tesla and which are more efficient for large format motors, don't require all of the rare earth metals since they don't have permanent magnets in them.

I don't know a whole lot about the lithium supply, but the way I see it is that battery technology is constantly advancing. A little over 10 years ago, EV1s were driving around w/ lead acid batteries. A few years later, they switched to NiMH. Now, the Volt is coming out with LiIon. Assuming that this pattern continues, battery chemistries will continue changing (hopefully becoming more sustainable with higher capacities) and it's possible that in a decade or so lithium will no longer be used in batteries. I'm not an expert on this, so I really don't know much about peak lithium.

 

http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/...or-hummer.html

Prius = very bad car

 

These posts are almost one year old! Is anyone still out there? I'm interested in finding out what the environmental consequences of producing the Prius battery are. A libertarian friend of mine criticized my choice of the Prius, saying that the batteries are produced in Canada in a very environmentally INSENSITIVE way and use more energy to produce than can EVER be saved in fossil fuel efficiency. Can anyone point me in the right direction to get informative information? Thanks.

 

Hi,
Well let's see:

• 3,042 lbs - weight of 2010 Prius (see Wiki and other sources)
• 97 lbs - weight of 2010 Prius battery (see Wiki and other sources)
• ~2,950 lbs of Prius - no environmental impact?

When I first heard this nonsense, I checked the Canadian nickel production and quickly figured out the Prius battery nickel is less than 1% of their total output. The rest goes into stainless steel and high temperature metals. But you may be interested in what happened at the original source of this big lie:
So there you have it. A bogus story that the Sunday Times removed because in the UK, slander is actionable.
Well let's do a little math:

• 15,000 miles per year - the EPA estimate of annual mileage
• 27 MPG - approximate USA fleet average (actually lower)
  • 555 gallons per year - 15,000 / 27
• 50 MPG - Prius mileage
  • 300 gallons per year - 15,000 / 50
• 255 gallons saved per Prius per year
• 2,550 gallons saved over 10 year life span per Prius
• Over 1,000,000 Prius have been made and sold
• 2,550,000,000 gallons saved over their 10 year life span

Personally, I don't think we need to bother your Libertarian friend with the facts and data. They have bigger problems with reality than the fuel savings of a Prius. Smile and say, "You might be right" and keep the Prius.

I have no sympathy with Libertarians and if they talk themselves out of owning a Prius ... GOOD DEAL! I would always recommend pickups and SUVs . . . to my political opposition. That way they won't have any spare gas money to give to their candidates. <wink>

Wait a minute! Are you a Republican? If so, by all means sell that Prius TODAY and get a Jeep.

Bob Wilson

 

"So there you have it. A bogus story that the Sunday Times removed because in the UK, slander is actionable."

I believe that you have misrepresented the retraction and, in the process, undermined your rebuttal to the "libertarian". The retraction refuted the accusation that Sudbury had been environmentally devastated by mining, acid rain, toxic effluent, etc. The claim was that the area was devoid of trees, a lunar landscape, etc.

The retraction did not to my knowledge refute the analysis of the carbon impact of battery production: mining raw materials in Canada, shipping them to Europe for refinement, shipping refined materials to China for battery assembly, shipping batteries to Japan for car assembly, and then shipping finished vehicles to the other side of the world for sale. So it's not just nickel content. It's all the additional raw materials and shipping needed to deliver a battery that a conventional ICE vehicle doesn't have. The article was useful in raising awareness that true carbon footprint is determined by the entire life cycle of both the vehicle and the energy source. That was at a time when people wrongly focused only on carbon emission from the point of sale forward.

This is off topic, but I think this forum should distinguish between gasoline and diesel technology when discussing ICEs.

A closer look at new low emission, high efficiency diesel engines can support an argument that they are a better near-term choice than hybrids until alternative vehicles are viable. A small block turbo 4 cylinder diesel in a Prius-sized sedan:
- can produce mid 40 mpg highway and high 30 mpg combined in current technology, with greater fuel efficiency improvements ready to enter production
- dramatically outperforms the Prius in speed and handling
- doesn't have the added weight, carbon hit, toxic materials, and obsolescence problems/unknowns of the battery
- uses fuel that contains 11% more energy than gasoline
- uses diesel engines that are vastly quieter and smoother than old diesels
- operates at higher temperatures, which requires less energy to be diverted to cooling the engine
- has greater than 40% average efficiency in the base engine while the turbo increases that efficiency even more (note: when you cite 25% ICE efficiency, you're referring to base engines and not turbo/super charged engines that allow small displacement engines to produce greater power and energy efficiency)
- has multiple controls to reduce nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and particulates
- doesn't rely on an electricity supply chain that suffers from significant energy loss at every stage from generation to storage in the battery
- uses proven technology and fuel distribution infrastructure that has already been built and doesn't require vast upgrades or expansion (which has its own carbon and environmental impact)
- has a price differential of a few hundred dollars vs a couple thousand or more for hybrid technology compared to gasoline only vehicles
- will soon have newer diesel technology using engine encapsulation techniques and improved fuel management to improve efficiency and reduce emissions even more

From a petroleum energy supply chain perspective (while we're still using fossil fuels) a 50/50 mix of gasoline to diesel consumption creates optimal efficiency since gasoline, diesel, propane, butane, etc are all refined from the same barrel of oil.

So basically, I'll take the vehicle that gets almost the same mpg as a Prius, performs better, and doesn't have the added baggage of the battery. Current hybrid technology may be a way to move electric vehicle technology forward, but it's not the most efficient near-term solution to buy us time to get to a future that's not reliant on petroleum.

 

We can agree it was retracted. Must have been something wrong.

100 / 3000 ~= 3.33% of the total mass

Apparently the remaining 2,900 lbs comes like the flowers that bloom in the Spring.

Except when we look at the metrics from the EPA web site:

• 40.1 MPG (27 vehicles) - Jetta TDI 2009 reports
• 46.5 MPG (115) - Prius 2008 reports
• 49.2 MPG (68) - Prius 2010 reports

Well its a dirty job and someone has to do it.

Bob Wilson

 

Hmm. First I assume anyone who objects so strenuously to the 32 lbs of nickel in a Prius battery, to be consistent, will also fervently avoid buying stainless steel or any other alloys where most of the nickel goes. Probably also organizing a boycott of using nickels for change and lobbying to make all vending machines stop accepting these dangerous nickels.

Second a conventional car battery weighs about 32 lbs and contains about 19 lbs of lead, which the EPA Toxic Release Inventory classifies as a serious persistent biological toxin (and up there with mercury in the top 6 highest priority toxins on the CDC's CERCLA list of priority hazardous chemicals). It may be cheap, but it's far more toxic than the Prius battery pack. A 118-lb Prius battery contains about 32 lbs of nickel, which is nowhere near as toxic as lead, mercury or cadmium. That conventional lead acid battery will have to be replaced sooner than the Prius battery pack. 38 lbs of lead, 32 lbs of nickel.

Fortunately 96% of lead-acid car batteries are recycled. Most nickel is also recycled. Which makes the prospect of people casually dumping 118-lb Prius battery packs in our landfills and leaching nickel pretty absurd even if you leave out that unlike lead-acid car batteries, the Prius battery also has a 1-800 number and a $200 payment to anyone who returns one.

Botton line, seems a real stretch and some really twisted logic to heap so much criticism on the 32 lbs of nickel in the Prius battery!

Or else I might think someone is just grasping at straws here.