Our Electric Future - Andy Grove | Hacker News Reader

Our Electric Future - Andy Grove

american.com

29 pointsharshavr13 comments

Wow. Read this. Completely. This is exactly the kind of news I hope to pick up in this group... (the dot dot dot is indeed a reference to the watered down crap that has been posted here recently)

How refreshing is to to get a perspective from a former CEO of an enormous corporation. He writes for a large audience, beyond the easy geeks and enthusiasts.

He brought 'global warming', an issue that not everyone agrees with, out of the picture, and more into the 'free benfit' category, a necessary move for a national (i.e. midwestern) debate. He challenged the current and previous leaders of our free world as to why they have not even come close to upholding the degree of nixon. Brilliant.

We have a problem people should want to solve. This is a good step in letting people know exactly what will help their kids to be truly free.

(I'm sorry for saying the word 'crap' up above but seriously, only 1/4 of the posts here have to do with innovation, hacking, and making something from nothing. I really don't care about twitter's issue of the day. Let's do a weekly summary.)

ok. out of my system.

geekworld ignite!!

If HN had a 'best submission of the year' award, this article would be a contender.

What an impressive, thoughtful analysis of a huge problem.

ps - I recommend reading his bio (Swimming Across: A Memoir.).

Regarding battery technology, if I'm not mistaken, that's already a solved problem: Lithium-Ion batteries have great capacity and are quite light. Their only problem is "venting with flame" if you don't charge/discharge them within their limits, but electronic control can mostly eliminate that.

Now we just need a battery company to start making car-battery-sized Li-Ion's and sell them for a reasonable price. When that happens, I think you'll see some serious action.

A really excellent analysis of our current dilemna.

We gotta get off the fossil fuel bandwagon and start using things that can be produced at home. Andy explains how to do that.

Great post.

Electrification is critical, but this article fails to adequately explore the issue of where all this electricity will come from. North American natural gas will be in rapid depletion within 15 years, probably sooner. The high quality anthracite coal is pretty much gone. Claims of the US being the "Saudi Arabia of Coal" are unfounded and net energy from coal mining will probably start to decline within 20 years. Never mind that coal mining is extremely oil intensive. Talk of more electricity starting right now basically means nuclear, and some say the uranium situation isn't as simple as you might assume. You could also begin highly uncertain bets on solar and tidal technologies. He kind of understates the challenge.

This talk of electric cars is also a bit silly. Electrifying transport means RAIL. Don't open the issue with electric cars. Electric cars will probably only ever be good as short commuters due to the physics of battery energy storage density. That's just a small piece of the transportation challenge. Might as well just get people to drive much smaller, more efficient cars, and more mopeds and motorcycles; that's just as good a solution. There will probably never be electric trucks. There will never be electric passenger planes. As indicated above, our capability to substitute electricity watts for our current gasoline watts is not nearly as certain as he seems to assume. Rail is far more efficient and lessens this risk. The proposition of sinking massive amounts of capital into new experimental infrastructure for mass use of electric cars just as we're taking trillion dollar write-downs on gasoline and car related infrastructure is a also bit far fetched. There are no ifs or buts about rail. It's a simple, known quantity.

Anyone talking about electric cars and not rail deserves to be hit in the face with toy train.

Electric rail is completely orthogonal to electric cars. Gasoline, used almost only in personal vehicles and light trucks, was responsible for 9 million barrels per day in 2004:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_public...

Electric cars are suitable to replace at least two-thirds of those vehicles, yielding a savings of 6 million barrels/day. I say this because the commute for 68% of people is under 30 miles round trip:

http://www.bts.gov/publications/omnistats/volume_03_issue_04...

Even if trains were the only use for diesel fuel and you converted every single one to pure-electric, that is less than 3 million barrels per day (the transportation section of the "distillates" column).

YOU can convert your car today. See http://www.evdl.org and http://www.evalbum.com for help and examples.

However, I would love to have high-speed electric trains for cross-country travel instead of flight.

EDIT-I've heard it alleged rails are not electrified because the property tax increases, see

http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2006-05a.htm

Converting cars to electric is ... not optimal. Cars are built very heavy these days due to "safety concerns". They're also heavy because they're loaded with features. It's very unlikely that you can find a nice light minimalist car that you can successfully convert, but if you know of any, I'd love to hear about them.

The Karmann Ghia and VW (classic) Beetles and Rabbits, that is, if you live in the NW or SW. Otherwise, you'll have to just deal with the heavier cars.

They are not optimal, but more optimal than using gasoline.

I'm questioning your premise that it's possible to substitute electricity for gasoline on the scale you're indicating. The generation isn't there. Much smaller, much slower cars used a lot less are far more plausible than huge numbers of electric cars.

Here's the catch tho'. Governments and corporations don't like decentralization, because this means a loss of control. So this will be a problem with what some will propose for electricity generation, which is a localized and decentralized effort. Centralization has usually meant better economy of scale. Electricity generation is the prime example, as well illustrated in Carr's book "The Big Switch." But new technology may trump this -- you may be able to generate all the electricity you need for normal day to day driving with your own equipment, be it via solar or wind.

I watched a piece on alternative energy the other day. One of the solar detractors suggested that you'd need to cover half the houses in Cali to generate enough electricity for the whole state -- Ok, I'll cover my house, you cover yours. The first case of "viral" power generation in history.

The electricity used to refine a gallon of gasoline can propel an automobile between 10 and 30 miles. I'm sorry I can't come up with a link at this moment, but see this one to notice a strong dependency of refiners on electricity:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/special/california/june...

In addition, electric cars are 10x more efficient from their "fuel", 3x more efficient if the source is dinosaur juice. 33kwh/gallon of gasoline, 30mpg is 3kwh/mile. Converted, that car would use 0.3kwh/mile of electricity.

Err, I b0rked the numbers:

36.8kwh/gallon of gasoline yields 1.2kwh/mile @ 30mpg, four times the electric version. If the energy comes from combined-cycle coal plant (50% efficient), then your advantage is two times. The comparison with nuclear, hydro, etc is difficult to make.

The best advantages are the ability to be energy-independent -- on a personal AND national level. An electric car will be zero-polluting for its entire life (no catalytic converter needed!) and, with fewer moving parts, can last longer.

Agreed in general. 2 points about electric one pro, one con.

1 - There is always a conversion cost in energy so whatever you had, if it was oil or natural gas, had more energy you could have used before you converted it. Transmission costs are lower, so maybe that partially counters this.

2 - Electrication, if we relate it to a software design principle, is like loose coupling. You can change the underlying code as long as the output (interface) is electricity, the implementation details are hidden from the rest of the system.

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