Heat isn't an indicator of inefficiency. I think we have safely put that idea to rest.
Umm, that is categorically false.
Take three light bulbs that put out 1,000 lumens of light. One is incandescent, another is fluorescent, and the other is white LEDs. The incandescent will burn your hand if you touch it. The fluorescent will be uncomfortably warm, and the LED will barely be above room temperature. The very definition of efficiency here is, "of the electricity consumed, how much is turned into useful lighting, and how much is wasted as heat?" Of course, the incandescent is least efficient, the fluorescent is better, and the LED is best of all.
Here we are comparing lighting now, to engines/motors? C'mon now. It might be different were my claim about lighting.
But, stop to think: Your comparison here isn't fair either, because the incandescent light is a
resistive load, and the others are
inductive loads. A resistive load will always generate heat no matter the application. That alone does not make it inefficient. It is what it is, a resistive load and comparing resistive loads to inductive loads isn't apples to apples right from the jump.
Of course a inductive load is going to be more energy efficient than a resistive load, it's the nature of the two beasts. But there are jobs a resistive load can do that a inductive one cannot, and vice-versa. Inductive loads are much more suited to lighting than resistive ones are. You've taken the resistive load in one of its worst applications, and compared it to inductive loads in one of their best?
Same thing with engines. The least thermodynamically efficient engine on the road today is Mazda's wankel rotary. Not surprisingly, it runs blazing hot. Not surprisingly, they also respond extremely well to turbocharging.
Which does three things: greatly increases fuel efficiency, ability to do work, and heat!
Or look at Bruce Crower's six cycle engine. (Owner and founder of crower cams) It eliminates the radiator altogether. After the exhaust stroke, it injects water which flashes to steam and produces power from the heat that was otherwise lost through the radiator.
If you trouble yourself to read back, you'll see I quite eloquently shot down the broad-brush, blanket premise that "IC engines are the most inefficient users of fossil fuel," an assertion that was based
solely on the fact that they generate "waste heat." Heat
alone is not an indicator of inefficiency, that's my only claim here, and in fact in a combustion process it's quite the opposite.
Right now there's no purely electric cars that match a IC car in energy efficiency. It's a "feel good" proposition that has nothing to do with science. There's simply no getting around the fact that to do a quantity of work, it costs you a quantity of energy.
Any mundane, off-the-shelf electric motor can easily hit 80%~85% efficiency. Better motors get into the low 90's. There is no engine on the face of the earth that can begin to approach that. Not turbines, not turbodiesels, not even Stirling engines. The world record holder for brake specific fuel consumption in a gasoline piston engine is Revetec's prototype, which is 39%. Maybe a turbodiesel version of their engine could hit say, 50%. That's still way behind electric motors built 50 years ago.
These efficiency ratings aren't measured under loaded conditions. And they also aren't application-specific, such as if used to drive an automobile. We're debating mechanical efficiency or fuel efficiency? There's no way when
comparable work is being done, with comparable sized engines/motors, the electric motor trumps the IC.
You can prove this by looking at cost-per-mile for various fuels. Electrics always win. CNG cars come in second, then diesels, then hydrogen cars come in dead last. Electrics run equivalent to 70 cent per gallon gasoline, because they are efficient.
We are back to the fact that the workloads are different, and so is the performance. Cost per mile on a EV that is half the weight of a typical IC car, can't go very fast for very long, isn't exactly a fair comparison, as you admit next:
The answer so far has been, reduce the work. So they make electric cars lighter, smaller, and compromise on capabilities. They approach it with a defeatist mentality from the start. No one ever wants to compare an IC powerplant in that lower work situation to an electric. The IC would be much smaller and more efficient because you have greatly reduced the workload. So it's a fallacy until you make it a apples to apples comparison. Is an electric car more efficient than a pickup truck? You can't determine that until you compare the workloads. No one really thinks of this, they just accept without really thinking, the "electric is more efficient" mantra.
I do agree that we need an apples to apples comparison. What you will typically find is, for a regular car or truck converted to lead-acid batteries, the range is a paltry 20~40 miles. Ni-Mh...maybe 60. The newest and best lithium batteries? 120 miles. For a full size, steel body 4-door pickup anyhow. Did you ever see that electric truck that Bush posed with for a photo op? It had a 120 mile range and could charge up in 10 minutes. Of course, 120 miles is still not good enough, not by a long shot.
When workloads are comparable, electric loses in vehicles. Hugely so.
That's the problem. Batteries. It's always been about batteries, not the motors. Motors are great, but batteries are terrible.
Batteries are also
heavy.
Electric motors are miserly and make great use of the power they have available,
Huge advantage here, electric motors in most applications don't
idle. In a electric vehicle, there's NO energy being spent until you are actually propelling the vehicle. Mechanical motors idle, keeping the hydraulic pressure in the tranny up, keeping the 12v system charged, the power steering hydraulic pressure up, the water pump going, and many other things. This is another factor no one takes into consideration when making these comparisons -- the different nature of the two beasts. If the electric motor in a EV had to idle to keep all the same stuff up, it would be further demolished in the comparison.
but the trouble is there is very little energy stored in that battery for them to use. Which of course is why they resort to lame gimicks like undersized motors and ultralight ultraexpensive construction, to wring out every last drop of range.
This is why they approach EV design with a defeatist mentality from the start. You don't see locomotives ever plug in to charge their batteries, in their design there's no compromise for less work. They are a rolling power plant. You don't need very many batteries when you are generating megawatts of power with a big diesel genset, any more than I will on my 5000 volt/amp diesel-electric Hummer I am building.
The semantic noise in the EV vs. IC vehicle debate prevents logical conclusions until all the parties involved level the playing field of the comparisons and just admit that the limitations of battery-operated electric far outweigh the cherry-picked odious efficiency comparisons. Can you make a EV drag racer to smoke the asses of typical factory stock IC vehicles? Well hell yes, you can and the video posted here earlier shows that quite nicely. But can you take that same vehicle and smoke the ass of a IC vehicle designed for drag racing, with a comparable power to weight ratio? Of course you cannot.
When the workloads are
equal, the EV loses each and every time.
The diesel-electric? We shall see.
My dream would be to make horse travel popular again.
