this article on TheSun.co.uk indicating Mercedes are looking to make petrol-free cars sooner rather than later:

Mercedes are convinced that these two crucial areas of industry can be saved by making vehicles independent of crude oil - to improve costs, become more eco-friendly and because the oil supply will eventually run out.

The company have already spent �2million on their new long-term Sustainable Mobility plan and are set to invest a further �7billion before 2014.

Of course, the sensationalist headline which I have shamelessly ripped as the subject and is being spouted all over the internet stems from a less-than-concrete comment:

Professor Dr Herbert Kohler, responsible for Mercedes� advanced engineering, told me he believes that by 2015 motorists will have switched almost completely to alternative fuel cars, certainly in cities, to eliminate the need for petrol and diesel in urban areas.

So it's not official Mercedes policy yet, but hopefully will kick off more changes.

It's pretty cool to see the big manufacturers moving in this direction. This article was a decent read on the Chevy Volt, GM's plug-in that's aiming for 2010 production http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/general-motors

mooby wins

petrol will be powering my car until you pry it from my cold dead hands, or something

No one gives a s*** about the environment.

The fact is that the price of oil has doubled in 2 yrs and its a solid bet that it will go ever higher.

Carrot = 0 , Stick = 1

^ wha... ?

is this what you meant?

Totally agree Insom.

Until a 'Major' Car Maker starts mass producing a Fully Electric Vehicle, they will always be too expensive.

However, as mentioned previously, Toyota and GM do have their 'Plug-In' Serial Hybrids due for release in the next few yrs.

These 'Range Extended' Electric Cars are basically an Electric Car with a petrol engine as a generator only. Unlike a standard Parallel Hybrid (Prius/Civic) the drivetrain of a Serial Hybrid is powered exclusively by the Electric Motor/s.

Plug-In Hybrids really are the best of worlds. Charge up at night for your daily 40mile commute to work and on the weekends when you want to drive up/down the coast the petrol engine kicks in for the typical range of a petrol car 300+miles.

Where the hell do you work nF?

asif all those jihadis in those oil rich nations will drive around in electric infidel hunters. lawl

electricity sector is already faces a massive challenge to clean up in the timeframe we have...if all cars were converted to electricity as well the challenge would be magnified massively :S

electricity sector is already faces a massive challenge to clean up in the timeframe we have

I assume the challange is how to spend the least ammount of money doing so.

is this what you meant?

well bugger me.. I actually didn't know it was real.

I can't afford a new one right now. anyone wanna convert my s***** old Holden Nova to electric for me? :P

how will toyota "mass producing" hybrids change fuel consumption in the short term.

It wont. The pending 10,000 Aussie Camry Hybrids are powered solely by Petrol. Standard Hybrids and Diesels are simply 'rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic'.

The Australian Car Industry is finished. 'Hairdresser Hybrids' will only keep the Altona Plant open a few more yrs. Reason being that Major Carmakers are already setting up plants in China where they could probably make a fully Electric Car (or any car) for a pittance compared to what it would cost to build the Car and Batteries here in Australia.

electricity sector is already faces a massive challenge to clean up in the timeframe we have...if all cars were converted to electricity as well the challenge would be magnified massively :S

Totally agree. However not all cars can be converted to Electricity. Its simply not practical. Electric Drive works best in residential commuting. Using ED for Heavy Commerical Vehicles, Aviation and Marine, just doesnt work. Maybe Hydrogen will be better suited to those applications.

Either way we will need a s*** load more power generation to create electricity for transport and to make Hydrogen via large scale electrolysis.

My guess is that they will use the lot: Nukes, Coal, Wind, Solar, Tidal, Hydro and Geothermal over the next few decades.

Interesting times ahead.

What the f*** is 2 million pounds to a company like mercedes

if you burn the hydrogen you end up pumping out nitrous oxides .. ..

sweet, run an hose from the exhaust back into the car cabin, winnar!

on the road with a permanent whippet supply

Most people will be plugging their car in to get it charged by a coal power plant that burns coal that relies on oil to be mined.

Don't get me wrong mate - mining does use a bit of diesel, but all the massive mobile machines you see (dragchains, draglines, stacker-reclaimers etc) + the conveyoring systems use HV electricity (usually 3.3 or 11 kV).

I'd wager that you'd see a massive reduction in oil. The CO2 emissions from new coal-fired stations would be the next thing to look into. The bag-filters & electro precips on a modern station get pretty much all the particles.

There are coal deposits out West in Queensland that make the Bowen Basin reserve look tiny. There's no way we'll be changing over from coal as our base-generation fuel of choice in the next couple-of-hundred years.

hear that, electricity is going up and will stay there

you'd be better off buying a horse

although horses are stupidly cheap right now

the instructions are woeful but assembly is straightforward. You have been told!


much like pcs you'd think.

You realise how pissy 300w (peak) is right?

last i heard tapping into the powergrid earnt you something like 10c a kw/h, and costs several grand to hook up, so not worth it.

you'd be better off getting a hundred amp hours worth of batteries an inverter and rewiring your household lights to run off it. cause thats about all it'd be worthwhile for. atleast you'll have a light to turn on then when the noise of the wind turbine stops you from sleeping.

ahh well, its time to pump the tyres up on the pushy.

i've been cycling to work for the last 5 years. one thing i noticed in brisso when i was there last year, no one cycles but whinges over fuel costs.

Yeh wind turbines in urban area's would suck. The noise problem would pretty much get them banned.

Solar panels ftw, especially here in sunbaked oz. Before someone says 'Solar Panels cost to much' (which is currently true) the fact is that Solar Panels and NanoTech is improving at a steady rate. Once the chinese start pumping out these cheaper next gen panels it will be more feasible to cover your roof with panels. Although even the most well intented and efficient use of resisdential Solar Panels will only offset a portion of an average household's power needs during daylight hours. It will never provide base load power!
But with the pending increases in electricty costs, Solar is looking better all the time.

if you burn the hydrogen you end up pumping out nitrous oxides which negates the whole zero pollution thing in the first place. they are also less efficient because hydrogen is a horrible fuel in a ICE.

are you sure about that? i always thought burning hydrogen with oxygen at an optimal mix of 2 to 1 results in H^2O, i.e. water.

last i heard tapping into the power grid earnt you something like 10c a kw/h

if you have solar panels and are doing grid feed (hooked into the grid as well) when you are using less power then you are producing your meter runs backwards. therefore it stands to reason that you are getting paid the same amount as you pay for Kilowatts from the electricity company.

at present that might be ~12c/KW but it is only going to get more expensive where as with the continual focus on energy efficiency household power use is hopefully going to stay the same or decrease.

last edited by ara at 01:15:38 30/Jun/08

nitrous oxides are produced by a hydrogen ice in exactly the same way that they are produced in a petrol or diesel ice. its due to the temperatures of the gases causing the atmospheric nitrogen to form oxides. its not a direct by product of the burning of hydrogen.

if you have solar panels and are doing grid feed (hooked into the grid as well) when you are using less power then you are producing your meter runs backwards. therefore it stands to reason that you are getting paid the same amount as you pay for Kilowatts from the electricity company.

uh no, it doesn't work that way.

basically, solar sucks balls. and its being propped up by government rebates when the dollars would be better spent elsewhere.

The big cost in solar though is still the panels, right? As soon as demand gets high enough won't we see a decrease in the panel cost?

From what I've been reading there's a f***ton of people out there making new panels, including that Google-backed place, all just waiting for the market to explode.

If it takes 80 years to pay off, thats ok, I'm sure there are people out there that are willing to spend a bit of extra money to go solar.

I seem to remember that it also takes a long time to recoup the Energy that is spent actually making the panels. How long do panels have to run/last for them to actually have a +ve impact on energy?

ok its about 3.5c per kwh for grid connected solar which in brisbane would make about 10-14c a day with a 1kw solar array.

where are you getting your information from because it appears way off the mark.

just for arguement sake, i called AGL to ask them. They gave me the following figures (it appears it does vary based on the distributer for your particular area).

Victoria
Origin
15.61c/KW
AGL
15.42c/KW

Queensland
Origin via Powercor
15.77c/KW

Origin via Citypower
14.17c/KW

All these seem pretty good considering that the current tarrif i pay is ~11c/KW.

last edited by ara at 13:51:44 30/Jun/08

A grid feed system uses electricity produced by your solar panels to off-set or negate the amount of electricity purchased from your energy retailer. It does this without the need of batteries using a sophisticated grid interactive inverter to produce mains voltage electricity. A special meter provided by your local energy authority meters both import and export of electricity.

Currently the solar energy that is produced off-sets the amount you buy at 1:1, however, with feed in tariffs already operating in other countries and soon in Australia, a premium price for your electricity would be your reward for producing clean, green energy

from http://www.centralwestsolar.com.au/grid/grid.htm

also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariffs_in_Australia

last edited by ara at 13:59:16 30/Jun/08

Oh sorry, my mistake. I was reading the REC value as the tariff (which is 3.5c/kwh). That goes to the electricity company which probably explains where i got the initial ~10c/kwh from.

I'll try again.

4000/0.65c a day ~= 17 years to pay it off if you're doing nothing but pump out solar. if you are using electricity it'll be more than that as it'd be reaped as savings at the 11c tariff.

last edited by nF at 15:07:57 30/Jun/08

By saying make energy cost more, I mean tax the f*** out of it. Use that revenue to fund R&D tax rebates on currently marginal technologies to accelerate their viability.

While present polluting technologies remain cheaper people will delay jumping on the next wave of technologies.

It astounds me that no government has started factoring the environmental costs of polluting energy into its economics.

Use that revenue to fund R&D tax rebates on currently marginal technologies to accelerate their viability.

by marginal you mean uneconomical.

aka, solar. niche solutions that don't work on a larger scale.

also, jacking up local energy costs (especially for polluting ones) pushes energy intensive processes off shore into countries who don't give a f*** about dirty energy. nothing is solved there, atleast globally. its probably a big step backwards. there needs to be a global system in place and it has to be market driven, if it isn't then its not a real solution.

s*** like solar just can't work mainstream, if it was mandated that every new house had 2kw of solar on the roof the only thing that'd change would be that raw material prices would go through the roof (selenium has increased in price by a factor of 5 in as many years as it is). the economies of scale would vanish under the increased cost of materials and to be honest i doubt there'd be anymore benefits to scale than have already been seen. certainly not enough for solar to stand on its own two feet without subsidies even without the increase in raw material costs.

s*** like solar just can't work mainstream, if it was mandated that every new house had 2kw of solar on the roof the only thing that'd change would be that raw material prices would go through the roof (selenium has increased in price by a factor of 5 in as many years as it is).

Aside from Head and Shoulders, what else is selenium used in that I would care about?! (thank you David Duchovny and Evolution)

Surely some other raw material prices would come down. If everyone had 2kw of solar (even 1kw) then during the day we'd need (x) amount less of coal burned, meaning demand for coal would go down, right? At least in .au industries. Then there's the other benefits such as massively reduced CO2 emissions.

As has been pointed out we don't NEED it in Australia cuz we have awesome coal (not to mention uranium), but I'd still like to see it. It annoys me to see our stupid sun wasting all its stupid photons on things like roads and tin roofs.

Man I love that Tom Hanks is pushing electric cars



I don't want a roof full of solar panels or wind gens to stop me having to pay for electricy ever again... I just don't want to buy petrol ever again.

ever.

ever.

again.

of course if it goes like this baby that'll kinda be a bonus. not a bad car considering it runs on modded electric forklift motors



last edited by koopz at 19:00:19 30/Jun/08

welcome back!

re lpg:

...

it comes from crude oil and/or naturally occuring LIMITED sources from under the ground - and it's btu sucks

which means it's just like using petrol, but you churn through your limited supply much much faster. haven't we been through this before?

all technologies have high startup costs when they are in their early development (think BluRay players, Plasma TVs and DVD recorders etc).

big difference is that chips get cheaper over time because they get smaller. smaller chips meaning you get more chips on a given area of silicon. early adopters also pay the majority of the r&d costs. bluray players aren't getting too much cheaper anytime soon because of the rarity of the s*** in the lasers.

if government acknowledges the economic benefits of non-polluting energies with financial incentives/disincentives, then this curve can be accelerated and allow popular take-up prior to the breaching of the necessary pricing points in the market.

see for example the speed with which the water tank rebate program flew off at with government and council rebates, and they were very small amounts of money which changed consumers minds and acceptance levels.

water tank example is a good one, what happened to the price of water tanks. they doubled. and what difference did it make in the end? how many people with the water tanks have actually tapped them into their toilet, washing machines, etc?

I think you need to wake up lol

Cizane Tribal I posted 2 utube vids showing a solar printing machine on the previous page.

Also there is a Solar Thermal plant operating in Spain.



Basically its a field of mirrors reflecting the sun's energy towards a solar tower that heats water, turns a turbine.

Just seems crazy that here in Australia we have insane amounts of useless desert wasteland that's baked s***hot everyday and we do f*** all with it.

err click-drag powerlines? didnt you ever play simcity?

Biodiesel? Unfeasible on a large scale.
Solar? Stuck in its infancy.
Wind? As mentioned, the problems with sound and efficiency.
Fuel cells? The materials used are largely reliant on fossil fuels.
Tidal? This has potential, but it would be a tremendous undertaking to use this on a large scale using current tech.
Hydroelectric? Good luck getting hippies to let you build dams.
Geothermal? Unless you're piping water down there yourself, it will eventually run out (see what happened in California in the 70's). Plus only 10-15% of the world's population live in places where geothermal energy can be utilised.

Thers is no silver bullet technology. Power generation has and always will be best served by a variety of technologies used where appropriate and supporting each other to overcome their individual deficiencies.

Biodiesel: agree, currently. Better to use biomass to feed high efficiency power stations anyway and run electric cars from them.

Solar: solar PV is a well-developed technology, but it's too expensive except for remote communities. Nanosolar-type tech might give a technological breakthrough that is needed to make it feasible. Solar thermal is an emergying tech with good potential. Distributed solar may get an economic boost if you take into account the cost in new powerlines etc. that would otherwise need to be built. If the price comes down significantly in the next 10 yrs, we'll probably see legislation that forces all new buildings to incorporate solar (or other).

Wind: there is no problem with efficiency. This is the best and cheapest form of renewable energy for us to tap. Not particularly viable in QLD but in VIC, SA and TAS there are potentially thousands of megawatts possible. Sound isn't a problem if you put them somewhere really windy as you can't really hear them over the wind!

Fuel cells: long, long way to go before they're remotely affordable.

Tidal: potentially massive resource, current tech is expensive and unreliable but emerging techs (buoy surface type) are making this look promising.

Hydro: ain't gonna happen in Aus. Our big hydro resources are declining. Snowy's Eucumbene is at record lows and would need years of biblical floods to restore it. Tassie is struggling big-time too. New hydros are infeasible if your storage isn't reliable.

Geothermal: Another tech with massive potential but large scale plant is a long way off yet. It's also located nowhere near the load centres which means massive, very expensive transmission is needed. Your comments about water use are only relevant to steam-type geothermal which is different to the new closed loop hot-rocks technology proposed for australia's geothermal resources.

Then there's the BIG one you haven't mentioned, which is Energy Efficiency. At the moment we waste amazing amounts of energy as our houses, apartment & office buildings, shopping centres, warehouses, etc. are designed with very little consideration of minimising energy needs. Then there's the energy waste in inefficient lighting, air conditioners, heating and refridgeration. Then there's every appliance you can buy - they're all currently designed to the lowest purchase price rather than minimising energy use.

Energy efficient design will definitely be legislated and new buildings will all have to meet stringent designs so that they minimise the need for lighting, heating and cooling. This is a good thing as it will in fact save money in energy bills while only increasing build cost by a small amount.

last edited by orbitor at 12:02:38 01/Jul/08

solar thermal using parabolic troughs



one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla, has used his VC company to invest heavily in Ausra which is making a massive plant in California.

last edited by ara at 13:30:48 01/Jul/08

btw - I spoke with the guys @ 'Mt Gravatt 3-Point Mercedes' today.

it's all going diesel... if you look at Merc diesel SUVs right now you'd think that the petrol models were intentionally designed to given the fuel a bad name..


there goes my dream of an electric Merc

the performance figures of that hydro 7 are undrastandably since its in its infancy are so crap though :(

Regarding the engines though they have some very nice stuff, I went to the BMW welt last month and they had the X6 with that twin turbo diesel. A mate bought a 330xd and that thing hauls on the autobahn as well, was so suprised at how much torque it had compared to my old bimmer and couldnt get used to the fact that I didnt have to rev the s*** out of it to enjoy the driving.

are Kiwis getting raped like we are yet?


jebus!

more to the point - if we don't... are we going to blame ourselves years froim now if the yanks come in and do it for us?


or the Chinese?

yeah that's the same as slaps's one

we're getting raped on diesel here in Aus remember???

everywhere is.

and lol, solar updraft tower is 0.5% efficient, takes up 20 sq km and needs a 1km tall tower of concrete. retarded, just build 1 sq km of solar with 20% panels. atleast it could survive a windy day.

producing electricity

great
we need diesel, not electricity

they?!
you orbitor. YOU

I had a feeling Mercedes Corby was huffing petrol.

nF, find a way to complain about the awesome of THIS!

what if some rare bird were to fly into the beam of the tower?

actually that'd be awesome.