Why electric driving is a matter of life-and-death

Posted by Mark Visbeek on 3/25/10 • Categorized as Design Thinking, General, Sustainability

The extreme growth of the world industry in the past century can be attributed mainly to the fast improvement in ease and efficiency of the transportation of products and people over increasing distances. This high degree of mobility made us independent from the location of certain activities. All over the world, we eat fresh grapes from Argentina without even thinking about it, and a business meeting in Copenhagen is not even a problem if you have to be back in Amsterdam the next morning. Increasing mobility makes the world smaller, and makes things possible that would otherwise be unimaginable. The big problem, however, is that as fast as our mobility improved, our dependency on it grew, too.

Movement takes energy, and we are in the middle of an energy crisis. We still have some of the natural resources left to extract our energy from, but not long from now everything will simply become perished or unattainable. So far, this is not a new or particularly shocking story. However, to witness the complete lack of realization that we do not have an unlimited amount of oil –to name one of our most important resources today– at our disposal, is astonishing.

What should we do?

For one thing, the solution lies in reducing our need for movement and transportation. Communication technology plays an important role in this. Teleconferencing obviates the need for above-mentioned roundtrip to Copenhagen, and a thorough literature research can be conducted without needing to visit a library at some university at the other end of the country. Also, the deliberate development of local solutions for local problems contributes to reducing our dependency on mobility. Why get grapes from Argentina when you can perfectly well grow them in your own country?

On the other hand, this dependency on mobility is difficult to counter. Therefore, it is important to make sure the unavoidable movement and transportation is done as efficient as possible. Here, ‘efficient’ does not necessarily mean ‘in a way that takes as little energy as possible’, but more ‘in a way that ensures we can continue to use mobility for as long as possible’.

The difference is in which energy source to employ. No matter how clean and efficient your combustion engines are, oil is going to run out, be it in 50 or in 500 years. We need a renewable source of energy, and to take an extreme stance on the subject: Truly renewable energy sources do not exist. Of course you can make bio-ethanol from sugar cane crops, but sugar cane does not grow automatically; without farmland no crops, without sunlight no photosynthesis. Lacking an infinite source, we need to find the source with the longest lifetime. At this point, that seems to be our sun. Our sun emits energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. A fraction of this radiation hits the earth, about 174 billion megawatts. That is 11.000 times the energy we are consuming on earth, today. If we manage to capture 0.01% of this energy, we have more than enough to meet our needs.

Ok, so how can we use this?

Back to mobility. It turns out we need to equip the sun as a source of energy for our mobility. But how do we turn this energy –that manifests itself in the form of light, warmth, wind, tides, biomass, etc. – into propulsion? Light, warmth and wind are hard to move or dose, so they need to be converted into a more flexible form of energy. This flexible form is electricity. Electricity is relatively easy to transport and direct, and also easy and efficient to convert into mechanical energy. At first sight, an electromotor seems to be the ideal solution to convert energy from the sun into propulsion.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Inherent to mobility is movement, and an electromotor requires a constant feed of electricity to keep working. Therefore, the source of electricity needs to be present and connected during the full duration of the transportation. Extremely long extension cords excluded, this means that you need to either make the conversion of solar energy to electricity happen directly in the vehicle, or you need to be able to take the electricity with you in a portable form and then subtract it from this storage gradually in the dosage required.

Storing electricity is one of the biggest challenges we are facing at the moment. The most popular way to store electricity is in a battery. Batteries are currently undergoing massive development and innovation, and this is especially true for lithium batteries. Lithium is one of the most abundant resources on earth, and the lightest metal, making it very suitable for mobile use. Lithium batteries also have a very high energy density and a very low self-discharge rate (loss of charge during storage).

Fuel cells are another hot issue. In a fuel cell, electricity is generated by making molecular hydrogen (H₂) react with oxygen. The large disadvantage of fuel cells is that the required dihydrogen is not at our disposal in nature, and therefore has to be produced. This production requires a lot of energy in the form of electricity, making hydrogen propulsion nothing more than an extra step in converting energy, with extra energy losses.

Will this save us?

The big disadvantage of all current methods of energy storage is that they all still require the use of non-renewable resources. Even with direct conversion in the vehicle, resources are used up in the creation of, for example, photo-voltaic panels. As long as we are dependent on resources that cannot be renewed exclusively with energy from the sun, we will not be able to create truly sustainable solutions.

However, we are at the tipping point today. The point that we need to switch energy sources for our mobility. Such a transition requires enormous amounts of time, money and resources, and we cannot wait until our current energy sources are depleted. To prevent that we are, literally, coming to a halt, we need to start today with the transition to the most sustainable solutions that are available today. We simply have no time left to wait for batteries with a bigger capacity, to wait for cheaper PV-panels, to wait for cars made of renewable seaweed, to wait for oil sheiks. We are in an awful hurry, and we need to move towards the alternatives that, with the smallest relative investment of time, money and resources, give us the largest amount of extra time to develop towards true sustainability.

Tagged as: cars, charging, driving, electric, electric cars, electric driving, electric mobility, energy, mobility, solar, sun, transportation

Website Designer Riyadh

In my point view that one is not good.. Electric driving always danger only.. Thanks for sharing this information..
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Mark Visbeek

Interesting points.

For the sake of brevity, I left out some information about our sun that I feel is important, now that we are talking about the amount of time a certain source will give us before depletion. The sun will continue to get warmer (and thus emit more energy) for the next 5 billion years. After the first billion years, the earth will have become so hot that water cannot exist anymore, and life as we know it now will become impossible. This means the sun will be able to provide us with energy for as long as humanity will exist (in its current form). This also means it is the only logical solution to pursuit. Since a transition to another energy source takes this enormous effort, why bother moving in a direction that has to be abandoned again within the next couple hundred years? It may be cheaper and faster in the short run (which I doubt), but it is, like I said, a dead end.

I'm not saying we should not use alternative sources like nuclear power. What I'm saying is that we should focus our -development- on a path leading to true sustainability. We can use other available sources to support that development, but we should not be developing in the wrong direction.

As far as the tipping point goes; I'm not talking about passing a point of no return. I'm saying that we have reached a point at which our actions from the past -will- have negative consequences in the future, regardless of how hard we work to remove the original causes of those consequences. Our earth as an organism, or 'mechanism', rather, is large and reactions are slow. The consequences of our actions are delayed, but they certainly can't be avoided.

That the planet earth will survive is out of the question; The balancing mechanisms are strong enough to wipe us out and restore peace. However, for humanity, this is not important. It is about how -we- will survive this self-created crisis.
Richard

Hello Mark,

I understand that this touches much more interesting points than mentioned here.
However I like to doubt two:

1)
You state that Nuclear energy is a dead-end-street because it is a fossil resource. However in your article you state that solar power is also limited. With the current known resources we can live on for at least hundreds(maybe thousands) of years on solely nuclear power, enough time to develop almost fully renewable resources. If it is true what you say about the passing of the tipping point, and you want to reduce emissions, nuclear power can’t be ignored for this reason. It’s just a matter of definition, whether you account nuclear power as a sustainable energy resource or not.
More reading on nuclear power: http://www.inference.phy.cam.a...

2)
Secondly about passing the tipping point: I agree that we have done so much emissions that we cannot turn them back within, let's say a hundred years. I’m just interested in which tipping point you are writing about. Do you mean the point of no return about global warming? That things only will get worse on this planet? No problem for the earth considering the much more extreme conditions in the past. Only concern is whether these large numbers of humanity all will survive. Therefore leading to the central question for me: is the amount of humans sustainable on this planet?

Mmm, maybe too complex matter to handle in such small posts, but I’m curious about your point of view!
Mark Visbeek

Richard, thanks for your comments, I appreciate it!

The debate on nuclear energy is a very delicate one, and I consciously avoided it in this article. As I explained in the article, the reason I am advocating solar energy (in all its forms, not just photo-voltaic) is that it provides us with renewable sources. A shift towards nuclear energy is not a shift in the direction of sustainability, as it uses uranium, a fossil resource. The reason that we should not move towards nuclear energy is the same reason we should not continue to use oil; It is a dead-end street.

Furthermore, we are not at the tipping point today. We were at the tipping point a long time ago. Multiple researches show that we have passed the point where we can reduce our emissions without large consequences. We are now looking at impending 'overshoot scenarios', where we see it has become inavoidable, even with the most rigorous of measures, to overshoot our 'safe level' by a few percent.

This means we already need to accept that, for example, sea levels will rise to a dangerous level, and that we need not only reduce our energy use and dangerous emissions, but that we need to prepare ourselves for the negative effects that are inevitably upon us. And that's why it's a matter of life and death.

Eager to hear your reaction.
Richard

Good post Mark, however a few commments:
- Why is electric driving a matter of live-and-death?
- Why are we today at the tipping point?
- Why is solar power the ultimate solution if the requirement is: "the smallest relative investment of time, money and resources, give us the largest amount of extra time to develop towards true sustainability"
If that is the only criteria, nuclear power scores best on investment of time, money and resources.

By the way, long extension cords could be a solution for transporting energy from source to vehicle, look at trains for example ;)

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