Comments

Episode-2906- Listener Feedback for 7-5-21 — 2 Comments

  1. Just recently discovered your show – excellent work!

    Interesting to hear your thoughts on recharging electric vehicles and “load on the grid”!

    I had been thinking about this recently and I thought: if I had an electric truck with an electric motor and battery system, why couldn’t I put a gasoline generator and an inverter in the back, and simply recharge the batteries as I’m driving along? This idea would be analogous to how a diesel train works, which is actually an electric vehicle. The train burns the diesel in a generator to continuously recharge its batteries to power the electric motors which move the wheels. The advantage of this is that it allows the generators to work at a steady pace and operate as efficiently as possible, while allowing the battery system to handle periods of peak power.

    My car engine can produce over 100 hp but how often do I actually need this much power – maybe a few seconds per week as a accelerate into traffic? An all-electric vehicle with a powerful motor can easily handle the peak power demands needed for acceleration and driving up hills, but the problem is the batteries can only hold a limited amount of total energy. As you allude to in your show, this can be solved by placing a small gasoline generator within the vehicle to charge up the batteries on-demand as needed, or perhaps continuously. I think the one potential of the electric vehicle is not as a replacement for gasoline fuel, but rather as a way to utilize the energy in gasoline much more efficiently.

    And of course, this would also allow your truck to essentially become a moving power station, which can be very handy.

    Thanks for all your work – really appreciated!