Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system There could be ten times the number of electric cars on the road by 2030 and stronger renewable energy policies are needed not just to keep them powered, but cleanly. This is according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which highlights vehicle volumes in the latest edition of the World Energy Outlook. It estimates that …
I predict that 400/230V residential distribution will be the first limiting factor in widespread EV adoption. We will need far more 11kV transformers to keep the current down to an acceptable level otherwise I^2R resistive losses are going to be too high. One EV takes 30A to charge at 7kW, and local transformers are limited to 3x400A, and we have about one per 100 houses.
But if we triple the number of 11kV substations at massive cost, we will then find the 11kV network needs upgrading. Then we upgrade that, and find the 33kV network is the bottleneck. Repeat for 66kV, 132kV, 400kV
Then something goes bang and the whole country is borked.
The electric grid is the most overloaded, inefficient, expensive, unreliable and vulnerable of all our energy distribution networks. Why are we piling everything on top of it?
"Why are we piling everything on top of it?"
Because Bill Gates* and other clowns say it's the solution to climate change. It's not, because there are astronomically high costs associated with the infrastructure. And of course where are we going to get all this power from anyway? But useful idiots will say "if you build it, they will come" or some such.
* It's the main premise of his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which I've read. Electrify everything. He also thinks we should all fly less (but not him) and stop eating meat (but not him). Seriously. It actually says that. It's almost like The Hunger Games, they are mocking us.
The only reason I'm not worried about the "britcoin" digital currency is because of this country's utter ineptitude when it comes to large-scale IT projects. It will either run so wildly over its time and cost budget that a future government scraps it before it completes, or it will come online in such a broken state that it will be quietly abandoned after a couple of years.
"The only reason I'm not worried about the "britcoin" digital currency is because of this country's utter ineptitude when it comes to large-scale IT projects."
Good point. Never mind all of the possible abuses of the system if they aren't likely to keep the system up and running reliably.
There is also what appears to be an increasing reluctance in the insurance industry to actually insure them (or if they do, at a high price). While petrol will obviously burn (and diesel too, although that is actually far more reluctant to ignite), it doesn't spontenously catch fire like faulty or damaged EV batteries can do, and petrol fires can be put out by the fire brigade in a large number of cases - again, unlike EV batteries where it's extremely difficult, and in an enclosed space like a multi-storey car park or basement car park under flats it has the potential to be extremely dangerous. Given that there is often no reliable way to tell whether an EV battery has been damaged in such a way as to make it a fire risk, insurers are likely to play it safe and replace them after even minor collisions, due to the potential payout if one does catch fire and wipes out a car park. This will inevitable impact on the premiums they charge.
And still nobody has come up with a practical solution for all those cars which just have to be parked on the street wherever there is a space - there are vast areas of housing (especially Victorian terrraces) in most towns and cities where this applies.
Modern Battery Chemistry has changed all that. If your car uses LFP batteries then they risk of spontaneous combustion is almost zero. This is unlike the older chemistries.
Even so, the frequency of EV battery fires is several orders of magnitude lower than for ICE fuel fires.
The Pro-Oil MSM love pointing the finger at EV's. They did that after the Luton Airport Fire yet it turned out to be an ICE vehicle.
Did we hear much about that? Sagebrush blowing in the wind.
I take it that you love you Coal Rolling V8 Truck them?
“Modern Battery Chemistry”. So, your answer to all the brand new electric buses going up in flames is……
Throw them all in the bin, and buy even brand newer electric buses? Vehicles that should normally last 20-30 years, you want to landfill them after a year or so? Pretending this is either exaggerated, or Pro-Oil propaganda, or “yes but the new ones are ok” is delusional. This is global problem. And there’s *a lot* of it. It’s not restricted to any manufacturer or country.
https://www.sustainable-bus.com/electric-bus/ratp-bluebus-fire-paris-compensations/
https://apnews.com/article/venice-bus-crash-foreign-tourists-investigation-998d73a2a36fac82c3d87df69eafb530
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/electric-bus-catches-fire-near-poonamallee-following-a-collision-with-another-bus/article67334028.ece
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/electric-vta-bus-fire-san-jose-cerone-yard-2-mechanics-injured-zanker-road/
https://www.indiatvnews.com/maharashtra/mumbai-moving-electric-bus-catches-fire-passengers-evacuated-safely-nmmt-transport-updates-2023-10-02-895874
https://www.kwch.com/2023/05/17/lithium-ion-batteries-involved-city-wichita-electric-bus-fire/
"They did that after the Luton Airport Fire yet it turned out to be an ICE vehicle."
That was the spin in some of the media, but other places were reporting that it was a hybrid and that the fire started in the battery.
Eitehr way, the presence of EVs in a fire, whehter or not they start it, is going to make it much harder to put out.
The vehicle was, as a quick check on the relevant government website will show, a pure diesel.
Had it been the hybrid version the battery would have been on the other side from where the fire clearly started (since we have video of it).
Of course the fire spread because when an ICE vehicle catches fire it leaks flammable liquids across the floor - an EV fire doesn't "leak" battery - hence the recent arson attack on a telsa dealership (I think) in Germany there were a few cars gutted, but they were right next to unaffected vehicles - Oh, and none of the batteries were burnt.
They probably used flammable liquids to torch the teslas.
The thing with burning petrol or diesel is you can use foam or powder to put the fire out. Most of what burns on a modern car is the plastic. Diesel doesn't burn that well.
Petrol and diesel both burn very well given appropriate conditions - that's kind of a required feature.
And in a car fire satisfies those conditions.
The cause of the fire will be something in the vehicle's 12V system...
unlike the older chemistries
Hopefully, you included the hydrocarbon systems so beloved of the uninformables?"
If someone "invented" it as a fuel source today, it would get nowhere and be banned in quick order...
"So instead of charging it at home or a handy lampost, I have to break my commute and pay how much?"
"You want it paid for in US dollars?"
"You want hundreds of billions of $ to go where? To who?"
"It stinks!"
"It puts what into the atmosphere?"
"We will put lead in it for a few decades?"
"So if the fuel tank is punctured that stuff will burn? How hot?"
"In a strong enough accident, it will explode?"
"and Hollywood showing how a car blows up if shot at will surprise few?"
"and you can put some in a milk bottle and use it as an incendiary bomb?"
The sooner we can get rid of this stuff, the better! Yes, we will still have the Daily Mail trying to persuade us that our batteries will catch fire if we go too fast over a speed bump. Will that make its readers drive more slowly?
It was a hybrid. You can even see the bright orange flare of the batteries venting in the video that was posted of it.
The claim supported by the fire service is that the fuel tank exploded. This is such an improbable thing to claim, especially if a diesel was involved, that it borders on insanity to believe it.
The claim supported by the fire service is that the fuel tank exploded. This is such an improbable thing to claim, especially if a diesel was involved, that it borders on insanity to believe it.
This puzzles me. Given the significance of the fire, I would have expected there'd be news that the fire started in a specific vehicle model. Yet the media is being very quiet about telling us exactly what model car it was. Why? If they don't know, they're incompetant, if they know, but refuse to say, who's ordered the media blackout? There's obvious public interest in knowing what car it was, and how a diesel caught fire like that given diesels are common, and usually don't do this.
> I would have expected there'd be news that the fire started in a specific vehicle model.
I presume you don’t live in the UK and didn’t see the mobile phone video a witness to the initial fire posted, in which the make and model of the vehicle was clear to see, and was picked up by the media. However, you are right after this initial report the media has gone very quiet.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12619137/Range-Rover-fire-sparked-Luton-airport-car-park-collapse-comes-six-years-Land-Rover-destroyed-Liverpools-Echo-Arena-car-park-six-months-4x4-recalls.html
Aside: link to daily mail as first result in a quick Google, also given its large readership it counts as mass media. I think the BBC also reported the vehicle details.
Aside: link to daily mail as first result in a quick Google, also given its large readership it counts as mass media. I think the BBC also reported the vehicle details.
Nope, it's been 'Range Rover', or Land Rover, not the model, eg-
In 2017 a Land Rover burst into flames within a multi-storey car park in Liverpool, creating a 1,000C inferno that incinerated up to 1,600 vehicles. The fire was hot enough to melt aluminium and engulfed seven floors of the parking structure at the Echo Arena on Liverpool's waterfront.
So could it have been a hybrid, eg-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_Rover_Evoque#L551
I think Germany already banned EVs from being parked inside some structures, NY had a fire, fatalities and structure collapse due to an EV fire. I'm not much of a petrolhead (or volthead?) so not confident in being able to recognise a hybrid vs an ICE model. People that claim they are, do seem convinced it was a hybrid. And I've been around enough diesel to know it's often hard to ignite. But there's going to be a lot of litigation resulting from this, so it's not going to stay hidden for long.
The photo disclosed the number plate and the number plate allowed DVLA look up to confirm it was diesel model. It really isn't a big deal, this came under scrutiny because people are interested, not since Zafria B heater fan wiring went rogue has there been such a witch hunt.
"It was a hybrid. You can even see the bright orange flare of the batteries venting in the video that was posted of it."
It was a 2014 Range Rover Sport.
So must have been a very early protoype vehicle escaped from JLR development site.
Anti EV nutcases were so disappointed by this news that they have spun up several conspiracy theories.
The car park fires in Liverpool and Stavanger were also started by ICE vehicles
> Modern Battery Chemistry has changed all that.…
> the frequency of EV battery fires is several orders of magnitude lower than for ICE fuel fires
This year alone two bulk car carriers have gone up in flames because of newly manufactured EV battery faults…
Yes EVs will improve as the newer technology moves into mass production and becomes widely adopted by ALL manufacturers, however, at the present and for the next few years there will be plenty of EVs on the roads using less safe battery technology.
> the Luton Airport Fire yet it turned out to be an ICE vehicle.
There are many questions arising as the ICE vehicle was identified as a diesel and hence what happened to cause it to catch fire as fiercely as it did. Plus the video footage show that the fire didn’t spread vehicle to vehicle but exploded across the car park.
> video footage show that the fire didn’t spread vehicle to vehicle but exploded across the car park.
The car park is effectively an enclosed space with barely enough room to drive under which will behave like a giant chimney, hence fires spread rapidly. Same happened to Derby's assembly rooms a decade or two back - the place was effectively gutted in no time.
Car parks should have sprinkler systems to at least slow down the fires, it does not matter if the other cars around them get wet!
"Modern Battery Chemistry has changed all that. If your car uses LFP batteries then they risk of spontaneous combustion is almost zero. This is unlike the older chemistries."
Like anything engineered, there are lots of variables to optimize for. Safety can be a key factor that shouldn't be ignored in favor of energy density. Number of cycles is also huge.
The reason we have petrol tanks that can allow us to travel 400-500 miles is how inconvenient it would be to have to stop for a fill up every 2 days. With an EV and the ability to plug in at home, that's much less of a problem. Lots of EV owners report they've only used their granny charger and only stopped at a public fast charger 3-4 times over a few years when on a long trip. If you commute to work each day, your energy usage in an EV is based more on distance than time so battling traffic isn't as much of a energy waste as it is with an ICEV. 240-300 miles of range is what many EV makers have been shooting for with a few also offering smaller battery packs for people that don't need that much and want to save some money. Since I do a lot of field service work, I track my mileage for taxes. It's a rare day that I'd need a top up while out. I would need to stop when visiting my mom, but an extra 15-20 minutes isn't a problem and I already know there are plenty of charging stations along the route. There are even some lower power fast chargers near to restaurants we often visit for lunch when I go by so that needed stop can be eliminated a lot of the time. All of this waffle is to say that super long ranges aren't needed by most.
It is not just rows of Victorian houses lining streets not built for cars.
There are roads - many, many of them - lined with "modern" houses from the 1970's and later that have cars parked all along them on both sides
to such an extent that they are essentially single-file lanes for much of their lengths.
True, some 21st Century housing estates have short driveways and parking slots for a car but those often have more than one car per tiny house.
The problem is not petrol cars, it is *too* *many* cars.
Ask anyone who commutes during "rush" hour, even those car-free folk travelling by bus.
Distributed solar(roof top) and storage(battery/inverters) are the solution but that empowers the public and removes the utility companies from having total control of the electric power system.
Can't have centralized distribution threatened because too many local, state and federal governments have investments in those utilities they keep allowing to charge more and more when the solution is distributed energy generation and storage.
Domestic distribution is already feeling the strain. It's common with terraced houses for the incoming supply to go to one end and then be linked from one distribution board to the next till the end of the terrace. That linked supply cable is sized assuming that they are statistically not all going to want to pull huge currents at the same time. That goes out of the door with electric cars that are all plugged in and charging over night.
Terraced houses able to charge cars? No such luck round here - they either open direct onto the pavement or just have the narrowest strip of land between them and the pavement. Trip hazards of charging a car parked on the road would be a no-no. And there are a lot of properties like that. It just points up the lack of public charging infrastructure.
@Doctor Syntax.
My street of terraced houses has lamposts, which could help. (Even better, a line of charging bollards could make it easier to walk along the pavement.)
Does the good doctor live in a street where the street lamps are fixed to the houses?
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***Bring back our Dabsy***
They are slowly spreading around here (Lewisham & Southwark). Originally they were 'fat' 7KW points which could only be located on wide pavements. But now they appear to have switched to using lamp posts where they are next to the kerb or lamp post sized bollards where they are not. Example: here
The real problem is these smaller chargers don't have marked bays, are not obvious unless you know they are there, so do get ICEd.
"Remember, part of the problem is the underlying assumption that we can save the planet and still continue to have and use cars just as we do today."
There are too many issues with the whole petroleum industry to enumerate here, but reducing the demand would be a good thing all around. Air quality in gridlocked cities would improve and there would be fewer cars dripping oil all over the place.
"Trip hazards of charging a car parked on the road would be a no-no. And there are a lot of properties like that. It just points up the lack of public charging infrastructure."
Those in terrace homes will either have to move or forgo an EV. It's just like living in a leased flat that doesn't allow pets: no doggie for you. As far as the trip hazard goes, there are channels being made that insert into a cutout in the pavement so cables aren't laid across where people are walking. Solutions will be found for many charging issues but I think that trying to add gobs of public charging is picking the fruit on the top of the tree first. It would be no problem to charge an EV at my home. I have plenty of off-street parking and the former owner fitted a high capacity outlet in the garage for a welder. While that's on the inside, it's on a wall where I could park on the opposite side so installing an EVSE on the outside wall would be dead simple. I could even leave the outlet for a welder if I remember not to use both at the same time.
No confusion whatsoever. The gripe here is that domestic cabling isn’t up to it. Well it is, because if you can power an electric shower in your home you can power an EV. As for the equivalence of showering for 3+ hours, the idea is that GRID capacity will increase over the next couple of decades to accommodate. It should also be noted that most showering in the UK already takes place at narrow periods of time in the morning and evening.
You're still working on a false equivalence. Not everyone showers at EXACYLY the same time. The grid can also cope with transitory overload, which a shower is. A small voltage drop, a small variation in frequency, a bit of overload on the network can all be coped with for a short time.
A car charger is not transitory.
A good example is that you can boil a 3kW kettle without any issues. The wire doesn't get warm and the plug doesn't get warm. However what people have found is that using the 13A plugin EV chargers have resulted in burnt sockets. The reason is the 13A socket is not continuous rated. It is designed for transitory domestic loads. Even heaters don't run 100% duty cycle for very long.
Car chargers are adding loads that the infrastructure was not designed for.
"However what people have found is that using the 13A plugin EV chargers have resulted in burnt sockets."
Ideally the socket should be zero ohms impedance and not get warm at all. I'm ignoring all of the really crap product there is out there that people buy "to save money". It's not an issue to dial back most of the EVSE's that get mounted to walls for EV charging. Some granny chargers can be set differently either via a user interface or by changing some DIP switches inside.
I haven't come across a *rubber* plug for at least a decade (I still have a dual gang extension with moulded rubber sockets)
Granny chargers also don't do 13A for exactly this reason... 10A is the UK limit (though you can buy EVSE that don't respect that).
Or you can run the same off a commando socket - giving you 16A rated - all well below the typical 32A rating for a domestic ring main in the UK.
At 2kW you need ~2.5 hours between getting home at 6pm and leaving at 7am - so you could, if you were so minded, turn the wick right down, and draw ~500W for 12 hours - that's 6kWh - more than enough for the typical needs of a UK car.
"Remember, kids, a domestic EV charger uses as much power as a typical electric shower. "
That's not true. You can set an EVSE to supply whatever power level you want (or an electrician can). Granny chargers often supply less than a kettle. An electric shower can draw quite a lot of power or it wouldn't get to "warm enough".
Taking a quick look at screwfix (other retailers exist) showers up to 11kW (10.8 at any rate) are quite common, most are over 8 - there were only 2 as low as 7.5kW
A typical EVSE at a home will top out at 7.4 kW, and will modulate the power which the vehicle is allowed to draw based on the grid load to the property - generally aiming to keep it below 60A (14kW).
To get to 11kW in EVSE world you need to be three phase - at which point you're well outside typical domestic usage.
> One EV takes 30A to charge at 7kW,
True, but how often do you drive 300 miles per day? If it's very often (or if you drive even farther than that), then yes, a battery electric car is probably not suitable for you with current technology.
If you drive more like 30 miles per day, you'd be better served by charging at a slower rate (tends to be better for battery health with current Li-Ion tech).
Another wrinkle with overnight charging: most electric utilities have excess capacity during overnight hours, especially in residential areas.
There are certainly significant obstacles to doing a large scale rollout of EVs. There are also use cases that aren't appropriate for EVs (at least not without significant technological improvements). Pro or con, real data needs to drive things.
If you drive 30 miles per day, you'd be better suited to a bike. Especially once they standardise and improve the batteries on e-bikes. (Mandatory USB-C, please..)
7kW is considered a "slow charge" at least from the battery's point of view in terms of not damaging it.
And it doesn't matter how much surplus electricity there is nationally if the local residential grid can't handle it. I'm not sure where your "especially in residential areas" comes from, but if there is 10x adoption of EVs, overnight won't be a lull for residential circuits anymore.
People will put their EV on charge in the evening, and the "smart grid" will ensure that there is an orderly queue, ordered by how much each resident is willing to pay. And that will push the prices up and make even more dosh for the electricity companies. If you bid too low, you won't be able to get to work in the morning.
Because a granny charger has a 13 amp plug on it, it will be limited by that but it will be very sufficient for most people.
If we average the 30 miles per day described in another comment, that will need 7.5kwh. Your granny charger will do that in under 3.5 hours. You plug it in when you get back from work and you can unplug it before you goto bed.
"> You plug it in when you get back from work and you can unplug it before you goto bed.
Which just so happens to coincide with the UK peak electricity demand between 6pm-10pm"
It would be better to set the car to charge in the wee hours on an off peak tariff. They will all do that, btw.
Ha,
Just plug the car charger cable into a 13A socket that has one of those square mechanical timers on it.
Job done, no funky technology or Smart Meters.
Whether the timer thingy can switch the load is another matter or not melt if 10-13A is running through it for hours.
As someone else has said, most 13A connections get warm under continuous load.
If we take the shower scenario that is being used as another reference, they are very much an intermittent load, on their own 30A cable and breaker. Most showers will no run constantly for hours at a time as the unit will expire.
The same as kettles, they are all designed around intermittent use, and to be fair as is most domestic internal wiring and residential distribution network.
"Just plug the car charger cable into a 13A socket that has one of those square mechanical timers on it."
A time of charge function is already built into the car. It's based on where you are as well so if you plug in while out, the car will immediately begin charging. There's a bypass too so if you are at home and want the car to charge right away, you can press a button and it will.
Switching on the load isn't an issue - and carrying the load tends to be fine for most of those.
The tricky bit is turning off the load, but if you're really determined not to use any intelligence in your charging then you'll almost always be turning off a charger connected to a full car battery, so again, not alot of load being switched.
"EVERY EV charger connected to some network somewhere."
Where did you get that from? If you plug into a public charger, yes. Even worse is one that reads the VIN for billing and extracts heavens know what other data. An EVSE at home doesn't need to connect to any network and a 13a plug is about as brain dead as you can get.
Let's say you just use a granny charger at night that's letting you charge at 2kW. An efficient EV in the city can do 4miles/kWh so that's 8 miles of range for every hour of charging. If you have the car plugged in for 10 hours, that's 80 miles of range replaced. Depending on what EV tariffs are being offered for off-peak charging, it could be less expensive to have a higher powered EVSE fitted and only charge during off-peak hours (lots of ways to do that including setting times in the car) but charging faster. 80 miles is a fair bit of driving every day (21,000/miles/yr (5-day week)) for most people so they could set their car to only charge during off-peak when rates are lower.
"If you drive 30 miles per day, you'd be better suited to a bike."
If you are in your mid-20's and it isn't raining, sure. If you have to don "business clothes" for work, a sweaty bike ride isn't going to be viable unless your work has a locker room where you can have a quick shower and change clothes. Of course, that takes time. When you get to my ancient years, have done bad things to your back and aren't as in-shape as you once were, biking is far less of an option. It's also not that handy if you want to hit the shops on the way home and don't want to step out to find your bike has gone missing.
Understand your reasoning… Going back a decade or so, I remember some colleagues who drove ancient Jaguars - not known for their fuel efficiency, their argument was that as they only did a few miles, it didn’t matter and they could easily put the extra they paid in the same spend category as a round of drinks.
Have you considered walking? You'd only spend an hour a week travelling..
If you need to shift some stuff, those camping/festival trolleys are pretty handy.
Ok so "3 miles per week" is hyperbole. But nevertheless it must be quite a waste of resources and money to have your own car, if it is so infrequently used. Get a bike and use a hire car/van if you need to shift anything heavy?
That said, there are some EVs which are little more than souped up mobility scooters, like the Citroen Ami. My neighbour has one, good enough to go to the shops but i'm not sure i'd be happy on a motorway in it.
But it doesn't need a big battery, doesn't use lots of copper/neodymium, and doesn't need a special charger that draws a load bigger than the electric supply was designed for. It's what EVs should be. Not SUVs/vans/lorries where the technology makes no sense.
"the Citroen Ami. My neighbour has one, good enough to go to the shops but i'm not sure i'd be happy on a motorway in it."
They're not designed for, nor permitted on, motorways.
Would you feel comfortable using one as a submersible, or a space capsule? They're not designed for those uses either.
"Get a bike and use a hire car/van if you need to shift anything heavy?"
I can't count how many times I've seen a good deal on something that won't fit in my car and hiring a pickup makes it too expensive. I can't justify owning a pickup truck, but I still move enough things and drive in inclement weather often enough to justify having a car.
"If you want to do something about pollution, those are the people you need to target, not the people like me who drive about 3 miles per week."
If you can charge at home, you'd be a good candidate. The price of a limited early EV is a pittance. I was thinking of that when I was looking at a job nearby. It was 20 miles from my driveway to work and 1st gen Leafs sell for very little. The bonus is the job site has free EV charging so "fuel" would be nothing and I'd not be putting commuting miles on my current car. It would be no problem that the car only has 70 miles of range. I would have likely had all sorts of fun "adding lightness" to the car via all sorts of mods such as deleting the back seats.
The price of any EV is not "a pittance".
I have a 7 year old VW Up, it does anything from 40 to 60 mpg. and 2 years ago cost £5k
I could have bought a first generation E-Up! for £15k at the time.
Anything else was a joke (Leaf being about the only contender) as they are huge.
And this is the other issue that is constantly overlooked. Most EVs are monsters now because of the battery space and the requirement for everything to have a range of at least 250 miles. This is why EVs are a total disaster for many as the cost is absolutely out of proportion to the benefits.
"The price of any EV is not "a pittance"."
It's all relative. The cost of a used 1st gen Leaf is a pittance compared to the entry level cost of a Tesla Model 3. If you must have a car and your daily commute isn't too far, a cheap limited range EV that sells for less than many other cars of the same age could be a good way to go.
>” Another wrinkle with overnight charging: most electric utilities have excess capacity during overnight hours, especially in residential areas.”
I’ve not been able find any detail on the requirement the UK now places on developers to include an EV charging point in new homes. Whilst the individual requirement is clear, what’s not clear is the feed into the development so that all say 5,000 charging points (example of one current new homes development local to me) can be in concurrent use.ww
People love to make stuff up. New houses get 100AMP. Electricity providers will upgrade your fuse if needed.
A load management device can regulate current to the car charger if the people in the house are using the hot tub, shower, sauna, oven, smelting furnace and several kettles at the same time.
I had mine (an old Victorian cottage) updated from 60A to 100A. The DNO did this in a morning for free. It involved them installing thicker cabling from the overhead supply. While they were at it, they gave my house a dedicated phase. Previously, three cottages were supplied on the same phase. Result: no more dimming lights, and loads of spare current capacity, even with the EV charger in place.
"I have a 100A incoming main however I share a 100A fuse on the transformer with 4 other houses."
Is that a 100A fuse on the primary or secondary side of the transformer? If it's on the primary (high voltage) side, no problem. On the secondary would mean that the rating would be hit if each house was drawing 25a.
Most people only drive a few dozen miles a day, so it won't take that much charging to top them up. Assuming the car and/or charger is "smart" and talks to the grid so they can arrange which cars charge at what time of the night for that vast majority that just need a little "top up" any grid problems can be avoided.
If the utility notices trouble spots where EVs are particularly concentrated or doing a lot of charges (some newly built neighborhood on the outskirts where they have long commutes) they can move that up the list for transformer upgrades.
I think this concern is overblown, it isn't like half a neighborhood will buy a new car within a few months of each and they are all EVs.
Maybe it is more of a concern for places that rely on electrical resistance heating and see peak loads in the winter - because that means peak loads at night when you would want to be charging. If the utility wants to limit the upgrades they have to do they should offer rebates for bringing insulation up to spec and installation of a heat pump, which would reduce the power draw for overnight heating. In most places the peak load is summer late afternoon / early evening, with plenty of slack capacity available overnight for EV charging.
“Assuming the car and/or charger is smart and talks to the grid so they can arrange which cars charge”
Coupla “small” points: when you say “talks”, which protocol do you mean so I can look it up on RFC? Which system element is “the grid”? You mean National Grid? The National Grid organises supply-side, doesn’t handle consumer side at all. Come to that, when you say, “the car”….you mean, a car made by say Stellantis? Companies which make cars for a hundred countries around the world. And you want them to have a contractual and technical relationship to get this working with the U.K. National Grid…and Swedish…and US….and Chinese….and South African….and Venezuelan. Remember the U.K. Smart Meter project…..how has that panned out, in your view?
Now, “which cars can charge”….so if a 200kWh Maserati requests at the same time as a 60kWh Fiat Cinquecento….do they both get the same kW? Or the same target completion time? Or Maserati gets priority because they cut a deal with Grid? Or the car most nearly empty gets priority? Or the car whose driving history shows they are likely to need a full charge tomorrow? Or I can pay a premium price for electricity to get it first? Or are you proposing an “Electricity Neutrality” bill? Or, I have friends over and I can allow *them* to charge on my “happy hour”? Or, that’s a breach of Ts and Cs when I start subleasing my electricity as a service?
Maybe I’m making a fuss about nothing, you’re right, we should get this working in time for Christmas.
Dunno about the UK, but this is already working at some level in the US. Whether there's a true standard or some sort of ad hoc standard like the Tesla charging connector I have no idea, but since cars already have a way to communicate with chargers with all current charging standards, and communicating with the grid (i.e. whatever utility is providing your electricity) is possible via the internet, it is a software problem. i.e., it can be added to current car & charger firmware and updated as standards are made/evolve, and utilities can add/improve their support.
This isn't hardware like a charger or charging port where it has a certain connector and certain capacity and that's all it will ever support.
A colleague told me a story ...
Someone he knows (who I presume has "a bit more" disposable income than I do) bought an EV, and not a budget model. He also bought a 3phase diesel genny that lives in a shed in the back garden and runs on red diesel. The car charges from a high power 3 phase charger. My colleague did say "it only costs him [redacted] to charge each night", but without knowing how many miles that represents there's no way of knowing how that compares with just running a diesel car in the first place.
I do have thoughts if permanently fitting a small genny when I build my garage. Hooking up the cooling to the thermal store would capture most of the waste heat, and it would be good for a) carrying on like nothing's happened when the power cuts start*, b) running 3 phase garage tools when I want to instead of using a single-2phase converter and significantly limiting the size of stuff I can play with, and c) well when there's a real feed in rate for the solar PV** ... err no I never thought about that ...
* sooner or later we'll be getting power cuts when demand outstrips supply and the weather isn't the wright sort of weather for the renewables.
** look forward to having a tariff that pays you to dump your stored lecky (in battery banks) into the grid when demand is high.
HMRC collects about £2bn per month in fuel tax. At 52.95p/l, that is about 3.8bn litres of petrol and diesel every month. Replacing all that with electricity is a lot more than just a few kw per vehicle per night.
Yes it may be true that "most" people only drive a few miles per day. But it certainly is not the case that most fuel is purchased by people who only drive a few miles per day.
HMRC collects about £2bn per month in fuel tax. At 52.95p/l, that is about 3.8bn litres of petrol and diesel every month. Replacing all that with electricity is a lot more than just a few kw per vehicle per night.
I'm guessing it should be possible to estimate electricity demand by looking at existing fuel demand. Areas that sell a lot of fuel are presumably going to need a lot of electricity as a substitute. A harder sell might be making up for that £2bn a month the Treasury is going to lose as fuel duty declines. But that's quietly in hand, ie the recent requirement for EV charging points to have a seperate 'smart' meter.
9kWh in a litre of petrol, 10kWh in a litre of diesel. Slightly more diesel sold than petrol, but it is pretty close to 50:50.
Electric cars are somewhere between 2-3 times more efficient than petrol/diesel, because the efficiency losses mostly take place before the electricity reaches your meter.
So somewhere in the order of 180TWh per year, in addition to the 300TWh we currently use.
Using fuel duty will be an underestimate as it excludes 'red diesel' used for agricultural and industrial purposes (large backup generators etc I assume can use red diesel)
And then there's heat pumps.. How much gas is currently used to directly heat our houses and businesses? AFAIK it's significantly more than the gas currently used for electricity generation.
Adding that up I would have thought the electric grid would need to at least triple in size if not quadruple, and it's expensive enough just to maintain it at its current size.
This is all absolutely true. I am just looking at the amount of electricity required to power all our road vehicles.
Another thing: Public service bus operators can claim back the fuel duty. I'm not sure if this is shown in the HMRC figures as a reduction in tax revenue, or somewhere else as an expense.
Using fuel duty will be an underestimate as it excludes 'red diesel' used for agricultural and industrial purposes (large backup generators etc I assume can use red diesel)
There are fun arbitrage and tax evasion possibilities here. So if you've installed a bunch of EV charge points, and the usual diesel gensets to power those.. Should you be fuelling EVs via duty paid, or 'red' diesel?
The idea of EVs charging off of Diesel gensets would surely strike despair into most people.
If you used Red Diesel to run a genset (~25% efficiency?) to charge an EV, would it really be cheaper than plugging it into the grid? If so then something is incredibly broken with the energy market (yes OK we all know it is broken, but is it THAT broken?)
About 34.5p/kWh excluding VAT for the fuel. [source: Boiler Juice, which says the average price of red diesel today is 86.34p/l. Dividing by 2.5 to get from litres to kWh].
Given the current prices including 20% for electricity from a public charger, you would make a gross margin on that. I don't know if it would be enough to cover the transaction, maintenance, and capital costs.
But mostly, if you have a large warehouse, and you want to fast-charge all the lorries while they are unloading/loading, it is probably the only way to do it.
The idea of EVs charging off of Diesel gensets would surely strike despair into most people.
It's not an idea, it's a reality. Many current vehicle charging stations weren't designed around provisioning HVDC because they didn't need to be. They needed to be cheap land with convenient access to charge cars with fuel from fuel pumps that didn't need much energy. And if they did need more energy, it's easy to install a modest genset to power the pumps, and you (should) have fuel on tap.
If you used Red Diesel to run a genset (~25% efficiency?) to charge an EV, would it really be cheaper than plugging it into the grid? If so then something is incredibly broken with the energy market (yes OK we all know it is broken, but is it THAT broken?)
At the moment, cost isn't the issue. Well, it is, but price sensitivity is hidden behind a slew of subsidies. So EV's get flogged to gullible consumers on the basis of deceptive TCO figures. Electricity is (or was) cheaper than petrol or diesel. Then owners discover that charging at public charge points can cost an awful lot more than the price per kWh they're charged at home. Plus they need a compatible charging connector, an app, and for that lot to work.
Meanwhile, the people behind EVs will happily tell customers they're getting 'green' energy because they've installed a few small solar panels somewhere visible from the charge points, but the gensets providing the actual electrons will be out of sight, and out of marketing. Just wander around some busy EV charging sites and you should be able to spot where the gensets are hiding. As long as the cost of generating that pseudo-green energy is less than you can flog it to gullible motorists for, then business is good. If you become dependent on grid tie-ins, or unsubsidised fuel for the gensets, it all falls apart.
"So EV's get flogged to gullible consumers on the basis of deceptive TCO figures."
But maffs is hard.
I always recall the line from Real Genius "that's what you get for not having an education". There are nice spreadsheet online that do a very good job of helping one analyze whether an EV would be a good buy. It would be stupid to have the manufacturer giving you advice in the same way as having a solar installation company doing the assay to see how large of a system you might need (if you have any ROI to begin with). They don't do that, they hand you the guff about a "standard system" for homes in your area with some margin to grow. Everybody I know that's got a quote from those places was quoted something way overbuilt and way over priced. Unfortunately, many people fall for it and have a hard time selling their homes later.
"If you used Red Diesel to run a genset (~25% efficiency?) to charge an EV, would it really be cheaper than plugging it into the grid?"
If you can use the heat as well, it could be well worth it depending on maintenance and repair costs. There's also going to be a cost with permits to store and receive shipments of fuel. I expect that for a large tank, there will be (semi) annual required inspections. You would really need to have a use for a lot of heat. A friend of mine worked for his dad installing cogen systems at laundromats. The idea was that if you are going to heat a bunch of water, you might as well get some electricity out of the process as well. They used a modified Toyota 22R engine jacketed to capture a good portion of the heat it produced while running on natural gas.
"Should you be fuelling EVs via duty paid, or 'red' diesel?"
If the tax was written and implemented to maintain roads (bridges, etc), there doesn't seem to be a problem with using 'red' diesel in a generator since it's not used on the roads.
"Adding that up I would have thought the electric grid would need to at least triple in size if not quadruple, and it's expensive enough just to maintain it at its current size."
People keep insisting on having kids so just maintaining "the grid" at its current size is a non-starter. I don't see merit in building out using the same 100 year old technology since there are plenty of ways to use/distribute power more efficiently.
People keep insisting on having kids so just maintaining "the grid" at its current size is a non-starter. I don't see merit in building out using the same 100 year old technology since there are plenty of ways to use/distribute power more efficiently.
I don't think having kids is the problem, it's more general population growth. So UK went from having low birth rate/replacement rate to high immigration, without really investing in the services or infrastructure to support that. So now we have crowded schools, long hospital waits as well as a demand for more housing. So population's gone from 60-70m+ in a relatively short time. And during that time, there's also an obvious increased demand for energy with larger fridges, dishwashers, washer/driers, electric showers and heaters and all the assorted gadgets that make up modern living. And then there's the commercial demand from offices to energy intensive stuff like data centres.
Supply just really hasn't kept up with demand, and we've also taken the insane option of relying on unreliable, expensive and intermittent generating sources while simultaneously regulating reliable, cheaper alternatives out of the market. The article was correct in saying EV's are in impending trainwreck, but very wrong to suggest 'renewables' are the solution. They're not, they're the problem.
"I don't think having kids is the problem, it's more general population growth."
The historical way population has increased is through people (women) having kids. Weather local population growth is home grown or imported is just fiddling detail.
9kWh in a litre of petrol, 10kWh in a litre of diesel. Slightly more diesel sold than petrol, but it is pretty close to 50:50.
Yep, that's one of the things neo-luddites don't seem to grasp, the volumetric efficiency or energy density of fuels vs wind. Which is true for all aspects, ie production, distribution, storage and use. Luckily, xkcd has an explainer-
https://xkcd.com/1162/
and if the tape was extended waaay to the left, we'd get wind.. but the calculations for wind energy density are a lil more complex.
2-3 times? Are you having a laugh?
9.5kWh/litre would be 40kWh/gallon - that is quite a bit higher than is usually quoted: 33kWh/gal petrol, 37 for diesel.
Average UK car does a shade under 40mpg (36 petrol, 43 diesel)
So that's ~1.1m/kWh
To be as low as twice as efficient you'd need be looking at a Vauxhall Vivaro, or an eVito, or an EQV300... all of which are vans, not cars.
Heck, even the ID Buzz gets over three.
If you're in a car and getting less than 3.5m/kWh then there is something seriously wrong - 4 is regularly acheivable, and many models will do 5.
I have a first gen MG ZS, and it's long term average is 3.7. It's an aerodynamic as a brick, and has nothing approaching thermal management of the battery - on a good run I'll have that giving me over 5, but it tends to be between 3.5 and 4.
Let's go the whole hog and account for 10% charging losses and 8% grid losses... that's 3 to 4 times as efficient as petrol.
Butwe really ought to be accounting for the energy used in drilling, transporting, refining, transporting, delivering... petrol/diesel... Frankly I can't be bothered to do the maths on those.
"So that's ~1.1m/kWh"
There's a big difference between the latent energy in a fuel and what you can realistically extract from it. A piston engine isn't all that efficient, but a turbine-electric car might be a tad more noisy and harder to maintain. Startup is a bit more involved too.
The energy used to drill a well for oil will often amortize out to zero (close enough) so that can be ignored, but once the oil is brought to the surface, it goes on the Cook's tour of world locations before splashing into your petrol tank. Not to mention all of the energy it takes to refine the oil into something that can be used for transportation. Electricity is far more efficient than that and there isn't the need for military involvement to keep places where electricity is made from exploding into war and cutting off supply.
>> "So that's ~1.1m/kWh"
>There's a big difference between the latent energy in a fuel and what you can realistically extract from it. A piston engine isn't all that efficient...
Indeed - such a difference that if we took the petrol, and burnt that in a power station... even at just 40% efficiency (typical for an oil fired plant), accounting for transmission and charging losses (0.4*.92*.9) we're at 33% efficiency, which is *still* better efficiency than burning the petrol in a car.
Of course we also just cut out a major distribution step in the petrol supply chain, and we wouldn't need to refine the fuel as heavily (saving a pile more energy), so the balance is actually even further in favour of the EV.
"Of course we also just cut out a major distribution step in the petrol supply chain, and we wouldn't need to refine the fuel as heavily (saving a pile more energy), so the balance is actually even further in favour of the EV."
A further benefit is that on a kWh basis, the emissions from a power plant are much less than a bunch of ICE's producing the same amount of energy in cars. It's not feasible to fit the same level of emission controls on a car. I haven't seen a verifiable scientific study I can quote, but I have seen many articles on how even a coal fired plant with modern scrubbers outputs less per kWh than vehicles. If carbon capture is ever perfected for utility scale coal power plants, that would make EV's even more eco-friendly.
" Replacing all that with electricity is a lot more than just a few kw per vehicle per night."
All of that petroleum based fuel was refined using gobs of electricity so swapping ICEV with BEV gets some of that back. The transition isn't going to be overnight and it's a good thing for it to take time so all elements of grid, car repair shops, etc have time to adapt. This is why I'm against government mandates and taxpayer money being spent on public charging. It wasn't needed to go from horses to automobiles and it shouldn't be necessary for people to switch from ICEV to BEV if it makes sense. The infrastructure took some time to build before many people didn't need to own a horse or saw value in something with a petrol engine (or an EV early on). The bonus now is electricity is all over the place and it's a matter of having the right amounts in the right place. In the mean time, if you need a charge and all that's available is a bog standard outlet, it can work even as painfully slow as it might be. The same thing applies if your horse needed to eat and the only fodder available was a grassy field that was going to take more time than if you could have put hay and oats in a trough.
"Assuming the car and/or charger is "smart" and talks to the grid"
That's the key piece of needed technology. The simplest thing to do is transmit pricing. When prices are high, supply is constrained. When prices are low, there is plenty to go around. People can set their cars to charge based on prices and other parameters or just tell the car to charge regardless of price as they need to go on a long trip. That same pricing information would be handy to anybody that wants to save some money on things like heating. A dual zone water heater can just heat up water at the top of the tank but heat the whole thing when price drops below a certain point. HVAC settings can have a price parameter to keep a leash on costs. It's really needed if you install a home battery. When prices are high, you can use power from the battery and recharge it when prices are low or you have excess solar generation.
> they can move that up the list for transformer upgrades.
Have you any concept on the lead times for power transformers ?? This is one of the biggest concerns should we have another Carrington event as it could take a decade to replace them
"I predict that 400/230V residential distribution will be the first limiting factor in widespread EV adoption"
Why? Most people charge their EV's in the middle of the night when tariffs are low and they aren't otherwise using much power.
"The electric grid is the most overloaded, inefficient, expensive, unreliable and vulnerable of all our energy distribution networks. "
Citation needed. Just a cursory look at how far petroleum products travel from the well to the point of usage shows how very much more inefficient it is to burn petrol and diesel for personal transportation.
"the most overloaded, inefficient, expensive, unreliable and vulnerable of all our energy distribution networks"
Firstly you are looking at the grid "as is", no one is claiming the current grid is sufficient. It does need significant investment at all levels, as original poster states. That's a reason to do the investment and the work, not to ignore all issues with the current way of doing things and keep going as before.
Overloaded / Unreliable - That explains the constant blackouts!! More seriously, the issue isn't so much of load as of storage to buffer supply/demand variations (gas and liquid fuels are easily and conveniently stored, the grid lacks grid-scale batteries). I will give you this one (but that's *exactly* why upgrades are needed)
Inefficient - Only at the distribution level. Once you count the energy costs to pump and refine fuel oils, and the inefficiency in burning them, the end-to-end efficiency is significantly better for electric
Expensive - Absolute bollocks. You're comparing the cost to upgrade the electric grid to the cost of *keeping* the currently installed gas and fuel distribution networks, conveniently forgetting that the latter have a century of (very heavy) investment behind them. Add to that the military cost of propping up friendly dictators to keep the supply running. Of course there is a cost to switching over, which is (a) migration projects naturally cost a lot and (b) the more it's been opposed in the last decades, the more upgrades need to be squeezed in into a shorter timeframe. It's only expensive because of the refusal to wind down on fossil fuels
Vulnerable - You mean like when some arseholes whose country is involved in energy production start a shooting war and fuel costs suddenly skyrocket? Sure, our current networks are in no way vulnerable to the whims of Saudi Arabia and all the gulf states, Russia, Venezuela and all those African countries eyeing up China as a more reliable partner than 'the west'?
Vulnerable - You mean like when some arseholes whose country is involved in energy production start a shooting war and fuel costs suddenly skyrocket? Sure, our current networks are in no way vulnerable to the whims of Saudi Arabia and all the gulf states, Russia, Venezuela and all those African countries eyeing up China as a more reliable partner than 'the west'?
You're overlooking someone important. Fuel costs have largely skyrocketed because Western politicians have started those wars, and also sanctioned suppliers. This has been great news for Western oil producers, especially the US, but a disaster for citizens and the economy. But it's great news for 'Net Zero' ambitions, and after Bozo persuaded Zelensky to tear up the peace deal he'd signed, great for his finances. He's got a job with a 'think tank' and a TV show.
If only there were something like rooftop solar and battery storage which would greatly offset home peak energy usage during "peak" demand but they haven't invented that yet.
Oh wait, that already exists. Too bad public managed utilities are allowed to limit distributed solar and battery storage while collecting billions to add centralized solar and storage which do NOTHING to help with the local xformer loading.
As well as the need for clean energy and charging infrastructure, electric vehicles are heavier than ICE vehicles which will probably result in more wear and tear on the road infrastructure. Will roads need to be repaired more often than they currently are once EVs get into more common use? Or do we need a redesign of our roads? Remember: It's not just cars, but buses and trucks, too.
And it's not just roads. What about bridges? Car parks? Ferries? Docks? Level crossings?
I think if you charged them VED, then there'd be even less reason for many people to get them.
They *are* the right solution for some people, and probably work out cheaper in the long run if you have everything lining up - shortish journeys - solar panels - your own driveway - you can afford a new one. Although with insurance costs going up specifically for battery powered cars, that's also a worry.
In the purchase and annual running costs, VED is very small element.
I think the problem with VED is that the government are avoiding doing a wholescale overhaul, so that ICE vehicles no longer qualify for the £10 or potentially any of the sub £200 Pa rates.
And yes as an owner of ICE vehicles, I know this would hit me (personally) in the pocket.
In my state, they are charged road tax - an exorbitant annual fee on top of regular registration. It's a flat rate that punishes those who don't drive a lot, and subsidizes those who do.
Instead it should be based on distance driven, as fuel taxes (indirectly) are.
Public chargers here have surcharges that also go (allegedly) to road repair funds.
"(depending on what the tax revenues get used for"
In California the taxes get used to provide attorneys to people that have entered the country illegally so they can fight expulsion. Ok, not only that, but the money that was supposed to go in the fund for roads got redirected to the General Fund so it can be used for anything and California is about as liberal as they come with all sorts of government funded "feel good" programs.
Any taxes collected for road use should go into a fund only for roads. <shrug> well, it makes sense to me.
"Instead it should be based on distance driven, as fuel taxes (indirectly) are."
That sounds good on the surface, but the apparatus to collect, collate and calculate the miles driven costs money and is invasive. Let the government get their foot in the door and the next thing is they'll want a breakdown of why the trips were made and then to where, precisely, did you go, when were you there, etc.
There's lots of data collected about "average" miles driven per year and it's easiest to just asses a flat fee to recover what was collected in petroleum fuel taxes. The State could adjust that from time to time (with limits) to account for heavier vehicles being used and the need for more maintenance and hopefully better road construction to start with.
"We should at least charge them road tax"
Many places do and more all of the time. I remember doing a little fast math on what some US states were charging as an EV fee at the annual registration and I'd have to drive 25,000 miles to pay enough in petrol taxes to equal that amount. Don't fash yourself about the taxman demanding his due, that's not a worry.
And how much, pray tell, does an Electric HGV weigh?
Wear on residential and country roads is not chiefly HGVs. Your figures are for major roads and motorways.
Also "axle pressure" doesn't make much sense to me. In order to have a pressure, you must have an area, and an axle doesn't have an area. Wide tyres and more of them serve to reduce the pressure at the road contact interface
"The Tesla Semi with its 500kWh battery would be unable to carry a full load in Europe without exceeding the 40/44 tonne MGW limits."
That's what I thought, but Tesla's (only) customer right now is Pepsi's Frito-Lay division. Packets of crisps aren't very dense. As it turns out, most of the time large trucks "cube out", in other words, the trailer is full up before the weight limit is hit. A company shipping steel and other dense items isn't going to do well with an electric truck. Range and charging time will be super important too. Passenger cars sit a lot, but commercial vehicles don't.
EVs are getting hard to insure because the slightest dent to the battery writes it off as unsafe, and that is the most expensive component.
But it's pushing up the premiums for ICE drivers too, because if you prang an EV and it's your fault then it's your insurance company on the hook to pay for the battery
Also EV drivers tend to drive like maniacs with the increased torque. IIRC they have twice as many accidents as ICE drivers, according to insurance companies
That's the main reason I was thinking of getting one (until I looked into it a bit more, and the price of electricity went through the roof). They are fast. Mid-life crisis and all that. However, I'm thinking of getting something much older and petrol and much more fun for burning around, and just pay the extra VED. Mx5? MR2? SLK? 325? Any other suggestions?
"Mx5? MR2? SLK? 325? Any other suggestions?"
Depends what you want. I've put my money where my mouth is and gone for a poverty-spec MX-5 1.5 that was just coming off a four year lease. Lovely car to drive and genuinely puts a smile on my face every time I drive it, absolutely no regrets on the spec or engine. Driving on the mountain road from Rhyader to Devils Bridge a couple of weeks ago was a joy beyond measure. If you want more performance you could go for the 2 litre and all the toys, but there's much faster performance cars than a 2 litre MX-5 if that's what you're really after. Regarding the toys, each to their own, but the satnav's like most car maker satnavs (sluggish, non-intuitive, costly to update), and the benefit of a fancy stereo in a soft top car isn't that much of a big deal. The MX-5 is about being lightweight, having great handling, and looking fab. If buying older models, there's great spares availability and a fanatical owners club, although I think the latest model is worth shelling out for if the budget stretches.
SLK's: A very nice car, very comfortable - friend of ours has one - but it's a lot more money, more grown up, and there's a lot more of it than an MX-5.
325? Well it's your money, but for me that's just a saloon pared down to two doors and the lid peeled off. If I had one, I'd always look at proper convertibles and think "I wish I'd bought one of them".
MR2 - fond memories of the first one (regular ride, not mine), and a good reputation but you'd be looking at something pretty old.
Don't forget the Fiat 124 spider - basically a Fiat engine in a mildly tweaked MX-5 bodyshell. Something a bit different, looks appealing, but you then won't be in the unofficial "wave to other MX-5 drivers" club.
And there's the Honda S2000 if you don't mind the age and high running costs - that's perhaps the optimal combo of performance and convertible, but any maintenance can be pricey and VED is a horror.
Thanks. I hadn't thought about the Fiat 124 Spider, although I have seen them around.
Currently have a Honda Prelude 1997 sitting in the drive, but it will only run for 30 seconds (which is 30s more than last week), which is more of a "project" than a mid-life-crisis. Will not be doing long trips in that, but might take it on the track.
Depending on your outlook, risk aversion, and local climate.... if you want properly fast accelleration, you buy a motorcycle. A ZX-14R can cherfully show a taillight to a tesla fancycrap edition, and for a fraction of the price.
That's the route I went, at least. A powerful motorcycle, and then a cheapish car for particuarly ugly weather (read: snow). Means the buck goes a lot farther on the 'fun' end, but without all the compromise needed when you just need to get from A to B.
(If considering this route, please budget an extra two grand or so and buy the best gear you can. It's completely worth it, not only for getting less hurt in a crash, but also for comfort when you don't crash.)
I had a surprising amount of fun in a vauxhall tigra. It's just a two-seat corsa with the lid peeled off (and a rep as a ladies' car, apparently) but it was pretty cheap and held the road decently at speed. The only downside was the extra weight from the motorised roof, but with the roof down all that weight is low in the centre of the body, which improved the handling. Other general complaint was vauxhall build quality. It rattled and squeaked a lot. Heated leather seats, though.
The first part simply isn't true.
Or rather, it's exactly the same as for any recent vehicle with any type of propulsion, due to the requirement for the car to sacrifice itself to save the occupants.
The "driving like a maniac" is why some brands of EV are a lot more expensive. Same as why Audis and Beamers cost more to insure.
The recent massive bump in insurance premiums is claimed to be due to the automotive supply chain failures making all repairs cost far more and take longer.
Whether that's true is a different question, of course...
"But it's pushing up the premiums for ICE drivers too, because if you prang an EV and it's your fault then it's your insurance company on the hook to pay for the battery"
Your insurance company is only on the hook to pay UP TO the limits on your policy. If that doesn't cover it, you are still liable.
The power grid very obviously can't handle everyone moving to an EV, it hasn't needed a report to show this. So it's great that the government are upgrading the grid, vastly increasing the amount of public transport, reducing the cost of public transport too, and implementing an order of magnitude increase in the number of EV charging points.
Wait, what's that Mr. Sooty? The grid is only starting to be upgraded but supposedly will be complete by 2030 (oink, flap), major public transport projects have been cancelled, the price of public transport is (a few local initiatives such as the Bee network aside) going *up*, and the number of fast charging points is only rising slowly (in part due to lack of grid capacity). You mean the government hasn't even half arsed this? I am so surprised!
We're all in for a huge amount of disruption if the local addition of (if I remember correctly) two 20KV power lines or similar for six EV charge points is any guide. It took weeks on end.
"it hasn't needed a report to show this"
The bad news is that it has. Successive HMGs seem to think that all they need to do is pass legislation setting targets of whatever and whenever and it'll all happen whilst lacking any notion of what actually has to be done.
The Just Stop Oil & similar should also read it. You can't just do this, that or the other. You have to plan, put real money in and work hard at implementing the plan over a number of years.
The reports aren't really helping. We all know that the only reason for a report is to remove the government's excuses : they know very well their plan is rubbish, but that a proper approach is a vote loser.
Friends of the Earth and the Good Law Project are challenging the government's Net Zero strategy (again) because it's clearly utter nonsense. Difference this is likely to make : minimal.
We don't do public transport in the UK!
Buses - privatised and deregulated in most places. Apart from London (and to a lesser extent other large cities) they are crap, intermittent or nonexistent. When you get to smaller towns and rural areasm nonexistent applies in most cases.
Trams / urban rail networks - a few cities do have quite good systems. London, obviously. Manchester. Liverpool. Newcastle. Smaller tram networks in Nottingham, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Croydon area. All of these could be expanded more, but that qoule require investment. A number of big cities (the Leeds/Bradford conurbation, Bristol, etc) have nowt.
Railways - being run down by the current government. Much less flexible than even a few years ago (don't do diversions any more - line closed = cancelled trains and buses if they can find any). Standards variable. England very rarely builds any extensions, and manages to go vastly over budget with most rail projects. Scotland and Wales marginally less bad. Some routes have trains which are totally inadequate (Crosscountry particularly - tatty, rattly 20-year-old 4 and 5 car units which have been thrashed since new and never had any major refurbishment).
I used to use trains particularly a lot (didn't have a car for many years). A few years it got to the stage where I'd had enough of the shit service, authoritarian jobsworthery during 2020/21, strikes, etc, and bought a car.
If the government actually wanted to reduce car use, providing decent public transport would be a major part of the way to go about this. Local connectivity is particularly needed, not major grandstanding projects like HS2 which go way over budget them most of them gets cancelled (anyone acctually believe that the funding intended for this will end up with local transport projects?)
And even the railways largely run on diesel, because the government can't get their act together and electrify most of the network. Plus even where electricity could be used, a lot of freight still uses diesel because it's cheaper than the price Network Rail charges for electricity...
Did a few years at the end of by career in this. Now have sympathy for whoever is minister of transport. Remember the saying about the Troubles in NI - if you think you have the answer, you don't understand the problem. Sure - there are mistakes. f-ed up franchising system, HS2, shyte management in NR - but if you think there's an "answer" or that throwing money at it will do anyhting, ... err nope
True, no doubt - but there are ways to easily make a bad situation worse and the current government seems to be doing them - e.g. insisting that some operators cut costs by withdrawing trains that they actually need. So that'll be a few more people who get pissed off with the increasing overcrowding and use a car instead.
Because the government is so London-centric, they seem to want to assume that usage in the rest of the country is still down a bit as it is around London (although even there it's increasing). Anyone pointing out that in a lot of the country it's now back to where it was in 2019 or above gets ignored.
Not to mention that most UK tram projects go hopelessly over budget and behind time (Nottingham , Sheffield I am looking at you!)
Plus the uber disruption of digging up roads, moving services out of the way and demolishing houses.
However Nottingham's tram is quite nice as we are close to the Toton P&R but I would sooner have not had the disruption of ripping the place up especially when we have a really good bus service already
"Or was that a conspiracy theory? Hard to remember which ones are real."
Some from column A, some from column B.
Politics is a big problem. There's lots of fanfare for a new rail line, but no so much for ongoing maintenance and upgrades. After some time the current system gets worn out and unreliable and people move into their cars long before anybody in government notices (being driven everywhere or having been allocated a nice car to drive themselves). The level of red tape can be overwhelming too so private companies aren't interested in transportation projects unless a government is handing them a cost-plus contract so there's a guarantee that they will make stacks of money whether they build it efficiently or not.
"You can't just do this, that or the other. You have to plan, put real money in and work hard at implementing the plan over a number of years."
A number of decades, to tell the truth. The proposed electrification of heating and transport are uses the transmission and distribution systems were not designed for, and rather than tinkering around the edges to get a successful outcome you'd need to design the system you want, then work out how to build it, estimate the costs (then double them) and work out how you're going to afford it. The vast cost of this would be of the order of three trillion quid (according to National Grid's very competent analysis teams), factor in the inevitable screw ups and you're talking 5 trillion. Now that needs to get democratic backing, so we'd need the politicians to hold a referendum (or offer alternative views in a general election), and only then should we start throwing money at this. At that level of cost, then physical resources will be stretched, so you won't be able to do it in ten-fifteen years for the net zero ambitions of parliament.
At the moment, the politicians have started on this £5 trillion road trip, but without an informed debate or a democratic mandate, without any system wide planning, without any thought to where the energy will actually come from, or how the system will stay resilient. It's total fucking madness, and all parties you can vote for are committed to the same madness.
.. I saw that article and had assumed they were talking globally.
But no, it's just the UK.
Apparently the global estimate by Bloomberg is around the 21 trillion mark (call it 30 trillion) . So how does the UK, with <1% of the world's population need >10% of global expenditure to reach net zero? Easy.. Just look at HS2
> So how does the UK, with <1% of the world's population need >10% of global expenditure to reach net zero? Easy.. Just look at HS2
And we are a very congested build up Island, so much of these works involves digging up and knocking down other infrastructure
" It's total fucking madness, and all parties you can vote for are committed to the same madness."
So, pretty much everything we expect from government already. There are no parties, just different patterns on the neckties and BS that's exactly the same once you get past the smell.
@Doctor Syntax
"You have to plan, put real money in and work hard at implementing the plan over a number of years."
This has been the problem. The gov has had a plan, that didnt include building any actual power generation but monuments to a sky god. The plan discontinued power generation but didnt replace it nor account for the increasing demand over time.
On top of that we have seen real money pumped into these monuments and lots of money has been lost to this dream of magic providing the power. And this hasnt been over years but over a decade if not more than two. We have a plan, it is the targets that cannot be hit, that rely on technology that doesnt exist to solve a problem not understood but also by the claims of the 'problem' we have planned solutions such as Drax burning wood chips.
Hell the datacentres are already looking at privately sorting out their own power supplies! Too much planning and stealing money to spaff on dreams instead of doing the job they exist for.
Tufton Street can't even understand the difference between MW and MWh so I'd be careful with using them as a source for your conclusions
Whereas the Green New Easter Islanders can't understand that building these monuments won't make the wind blow. Or if the wind blows too hard, it'll damage them. What was the dogma again? Global Warming will mean more 'extreme' weather? So let's throw billions at the subsidy seeking scumbags to build monuments that are both dependent, and vulnerable to the weather.
And to add insult to injury, those same scumbags have been telling us windmills have been getting cheaper, and will continue to be cheap.. Except now projects are being cancelled because costs have gone up. No suprise UK electricity is already some of the most expensive in the world, and if the eco-freaks continue with their regulatory capture, it's only going to get worse.
And Why are they pegged to gas prices? It's a combination of two factors.
1: The electricity market systems we have which mean that the electricity price is set by the highest-bidding generator that is needed (even if the others bid low, they will get the high price) and the high bidders are always gas plants
2: The gas plants are always needed, because renewables are not dispatchable (we can't control the wind and sun to suit demand) and they do not provide synchronous inertia i.e. without gas plants we would be unable to maintain a stable 50Hz and we would get blackouts
We can't change the second one, but we could redesign the markets. But the tories wouldn't like that as it's "anti-business"
We can't change the second one, but we could redesign the markets. But the tories wouldn't like that as it's "anti-business"
Sadly, Labour is just as bad, if not worse. After all, it was gormless Ed Milliband who gave us the Climate Change Act with it's 'legally binding' carbon reduction targets. If that had only been CO2, that wouldn't have been quite such a disaster. DECC-head Ed Davey of course made matters worse with his market reforms, but also did the usual political move of pimping himself out in various consultancy gigs to the 'renewables' scumbags. And then the can's been kicked down the road until we're where we are now with the looming 'Net Zero' fiasco.
Rishi could repeal the CCA, but the poor lil man probably doesn't want to find himself superglued to Greta. Plus he's wealthy enough not to be personally impacted by the energy crisis anyway. Consultancies and quangos await, or he can just enjoy a warm and very comfortable retirement on his wife's money.
So in other words, the tories, labour, lib dems, and the greens, are all utterly hopeless, and jointly responsible for this calamitous situation we find ourselves in.
I can believe it. We're living in a world where Marketing and AI-driven social-sentiment-optimisation (i don't know if that's a real term, i just made it up) is what wins elections, rather than any kind of good governance.
We're doomed. Dooomed.
Bring back Corbyn, at least he's not lining his own pockets like the rest of them. Might stand a chance of re-nationalising some of the energy industry.
Bring back Corbyn, at least he's not lining his own pockets like the rest of them. Might stand a chance of re-nationalising some of the energy industry.
At least Corbyn had a brother who understood the science, or at least why 'The Science' is a steaming pile of bollocks. Without extreme data torture, there has been no correlation between CO2 and temperature throughout recorded history. Or at least any positive correlation. It's one of those 'rain follows the plough' spurious correlation problems. Temperature rises, CO2 rises. Dogma mixes up cause and effect. Biology provides a convenient explanation in the traditional carbon cycle, but lobbyists ignore this because it makes it harder to flog windmills to brain-dead politicians who have no scientific training, knowledge or aptitude.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/10/27/to-what-extent-are-temperature-levels-changing-due-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions/
A new Norwegian paper has found that the effects of man-made CO2 emissions are not strong enough to explain global warming in the last 200n years, implying that natural factors must play a large role:
Which is both good and bad news. We've wasted trillions on the bullshit idea that CO2 is the driver. This has been possible because CO2's a consequence of human activity, and thus easy to make profits from. It's the sad reality that people actually have found a way to tax the air we breath, as well as additional taxes and subsidies for every activity we conduct. But the physics of the CO2 molecule are very well understood, and unless you rely on homeopathy (ie climate 'science'), effect exceeds cause and it simply cannot lead to the Thermageddon the neo-Luddites tell us is coming. Paul Erlich has made a lot of money off this scam, but every one of his predictions has been falsified. There is one narrow window in CO2's absorption/emission spectrum that doesn't overlap with H2O. Water is dominant, not CO2. We've know this for decades, and it's why real Greenhouse operators don't use CO2 for warming, but to improve crop yield.
But this is also a problem. In the '70s, the media was whining about a possible impending Ice Age. Now, it's warming. If we assume warming, we're running the risk of being unprepared for any substantial cooling interval. Oddly enough, that's happened previously with the Little Ice Age (LIA), which amongst many deaths helped trigger the French Revolution. It's possible (or probable) that this could happen again given we may be heading into another Grand Solar Minimum, which may have been responsible for the LIA. And we know that cold causes more excess deaths than warm.
As for re-nationalisation, re-nationalising what? National Grid would be an obvious candidate, but they just love 'renewables' because they can make billions flogging additonal connections to 'renewables', and attempting to manage the problems they've created.
"Great, then it can be run as well as other government-run services, like the NHS. That'll be a big help."
Where would they find enough 1980's era computer equipment to use when they nationalize it is what I'd like to know. That's the latest period they have certified systems from. Anything newer is "unproven technology" and therefore can't be purchased.
"Climate Change Act with it's 'legally binding' carbon reduction targets. "
That's very simple to deal with, just start banning businesses that output CO2. Too bad that a lot of that has to do with food, but compliance to meet any binding obligations can be done. What happens on the other side of the ledger has to be ignored. Still, fantastic opportunities in the mortuary and funeral industry to be had.
"those same scumbags have been telling us windmills have been getting cheaper, and will continue to be cheap."
The problem with wind turbines is there isn't a match between when they are generating and when there's demand. Hooking them into the grid is hopeless the way things work now. They either need to power things that don't have a problem with the intermittency or the grid needs to be able to signal when the wind is blowing and power can be had on the cheap. The turbines are getting cheaper, but that's not the issue, it's a utilization problem.
"rely on technology that doesnt exist to solve a problem not understood but also by the claims of the 'problem' we have planned solutions such as Drax burning wood chips."
Yes, but you left out that those wood chips are imported since the Greens would lose their minds if they were sourced locally. Burning tons of bunker fuel is perfectly fine, apparently.
Yes, you could buy an electric bike, if you a) have a shed to put it in where it won't get nicked and won't burn your house down if/when the battery explodes (yes, insurers are cottoning on to this, too)
and b) you don't mind the extra risk to yourself by travelling unprotected from collisions with 2-ton EVs driven by rich tw*ts who have little regard for your life because you're soft and light enough not to dent their battery
Or, you could just walk to work, the shops, your dentist etc because they are all going to be 15 minutes away, and the ones in your neighbourhood are going to be just as good as the ones in the nice neighbourhood..!
Or, you could just walk to work, the shops, your dentist etc because they are all going to be 15 minutes away, and the ones in your neighbourhood are going to be just as good as the ones in the nice neighbourhood..!
This is still a real problem today. If you live in a poor neighbourhood and want to buy better food or even things like good shoes, you have to go to a different neighbourhood. Shops in your own area might not stock these products, either due to lack of demand or fears of theft. Of course, you can order online, but then people wonder why the high street is dying.
> Of course, you can order online
And your online shopping is delivered by..?
Oh yes, a Diesel powered van because even the greenwash-happy corporates have started to realise that their electric vans don't last very long before they conk out and take ages to charge, and time is money
"Oh yes, a Diesel powered van because even the greenwash-happy corporates have started to realise that their electric vans don't last very long before they conk out and take ages to charge, and time is money"
It's because the Amazons and Walmarts have outsourced their deliveries to the lowest bidder that has no chance at all of affording an electric van to use for deliveries. The deliver companies have often in their turn outsourced the actual delivery work to some gig driver who is in an even worse position to afford an EV.
There are company owned Amazon electric delivery vans that have been working out very well. For a fleet, the lowered maintenance and fuel costs really add up fast and they can afford it (Rivian made and Amazon owns a big chunk). They can also tack on a premium surcharge for delivering in zero emissions zones. There's also that big bucket of corporate greenwash they can advertise.
My wife recently got one. she has a bad knee, and the normal bike was getting too much. It stays on eco mode most of the time.
She loves it. It's great. It stays locked in the garage at night. We have a decent (ish) cycling infrastructure around here, so mostly off road. Around Christmas time it's the *only* way to get into town, unless you want to sit in traffic for ages and then fight for a space.
What's not to like?
Well that would suck. I'm sitting in half of it right now. Is it just the cheap Chinese ones which go up in flames, or would a Raleigh (more expensive Chinese one?) be just as easily combustible.
Actually, the battery stays in the house most nights so the garage will probably be fine. :-D
It entirely depends on what is inside it, and you're not allowed to look, and there are no (that the Chinese manufacturers seem to care about) standards dictating what must be inside (unlike for IT and automotive).
If the battery has a proper BMS and well-made cells, then probably it will be OK, but most e-bikes apparently do not.
A "proper BMS" is one that a) monitors the voltage of EACH cell (not just the stack voltage, and under-voltage is just as bad as over-voltage) b) monitors the temperature of EACH cell, and c) has some coulomb-counting logic to measure the pack's capacity and how it changes over time. Any modern laptop does this, and you can even get a handy printout from Windows of your battery's health over time with the command `powercfg /batteryreport`.
Actually, most 'proper' e-bikes have perfectly good batteries. It's the cheap 'knock-off' shite (mostly from China's sweatshops) that are allowed to be imported here and sold to unsuspecting, but very price conscious ('Oooh, something for hardly any money') customers, that are the problem.
I would LOVE to be able to walk to work. I've just done a 136-mile round trip today to install an IT suite. Now, if you could move the Europort container terminal to the end of my road, I'd be grateful, but I don't think my neighbours would be. Plus, once I've done that one day's work, which other site are you going to move to my road so I can walk there?
"I would LOVE to be able to walk to work. I've just done a 136-mile round trip today to install an IT suite."
When I have office days, I do walk to work. The path from my bedroom to my office also goes right past the coffee service.
When I have field days, I'm in the same boat with 60-150mile totals while carrying a fair bit of gear.
That's not to say that it won't work for people in other situations. I've seen some really nice train stations that were designed with bicyclists in mind. Lots of secure racks under a roof to secure the bikes that includes on-site security and CCTV so thieves don't get any ideas. My closet train station isn't within biking distance, but it's also in a very bad part of town with no overnight security so I wouldn't leave my car there to take a train 175 miles to stay with friends over a weekend. I'm stuck driving.
I've seen some really nice train stations that were designed with bicyclists in mind. Lots of secure racks under a roof to secure the bikes that includes on-site security and CCTV so thieves don't get any ideas.
Our local council spent a 5-figure sum building one of those in part of the station car park, it can hold ~80 bikes. I've never seen more than 6 in it, but now there's not enough space to park, so people use other stations :-(
My closet train station
That's handy :-)
It will take ages. What's the average age of a car in the UK? Last year that figure was 12.2 years in the US (I couldn't find data for median but I'm assuming the two should be pretty close)
So even if EVs were mandated for all new vehicle purchases tomorrow it would be 2035 before we reached the point where HALF of all cars on the road were EVs! And of course there is no such mandate - and when there is one it will probably START in 2035 at the earliest so we wouldn't reach the halfway point until after 2040.
"So even if EVs were mandated for all new vehicle purchases tomorrow it would be 2035 before we reached the point where HALF of all cars on the road were EVs! "
Change isn't the problem, it's the rate of change. The worst thing a government can do is mandate rapid change. There's just too many moving parts that will never coordinate properly for there to not be huge numbers of problems. Some local electrical grids are going off bang after the inputs have been switched to a bunch of "renewables" where they were never designed to handle many discrete sources. One day the combination of inputs and outputs melts down something that nobody saw as being a problem. With a slower approach, engineers have the time to do the calculations from end to end and also verify that what's in the plans and what is sitting at the substation match up.
> What's the average age of a car in the UK
Well mine is just over your average at 12.5 here in the (petrol,UK), plan is to replace it with upon retiring just before the "ban" with another one that should (prangs permitting) last another 15 or until they take my licence away !
"Well mine is just over your average at 12.5 here in the (petrol,UK), plan is to replace it with upon retiring just before the "ban" with another one that should (prangs permitting) last another 15 or until they take my licence away !"
Luxury!
Mine's 16yo and still in good nick but has a lot of miles on. A low mileage used engine installed is ~$1,500 and it could use a new coat of paint. That's what's preventing me from getting an EV. The lower operating cost of the EV doesn't get anywhere close enough for there to be any ROI. If my ICEV gets in an accident and isn't economic to repair, that might be the point where I buy an EV if I can afford it.
"The power grid very obviously can't handle everyone moving to an EV"
Why not if it can provide refineries with enough energy to turn crude into transportation fuels for ICEV's? There will be some issues with distribution, but that can be handled over time if government doesn't insist on a super fast conversion from ICE to EV.
There could be ten times the number of electric cars on the road by 2030
Don't make me laugh.
We haven't even reached the 1 million figure in the UK yet. Precisely because people generally speaking have the common sense to know getting one (even if they could afford one) is a shit idea.
We can't produce the electricity required for the UK even *without* more people having electric vehicles. Add in things like: fires caused by batteries, a lack of charging infrastructure, where to charge the car depending on things such as whether your house has a driveaway etc etc. Then there's the cost.
I recently saw a documentary where a journalist who was a massive proponent of electric vehicles got one, then less than 12 months later gave it back on the basis it was an awful experience. The reality of charging a car for 30-40 times how long it takes to fill up with a bit of fuel just isn't common sense.
Ironically it doesn't really matter about the environment. Producing electricity - and all of the infrastructure changes necessary - for this "revolution" isn't environmentally friendly.
Yes we ought to think about an alternative to petrol/diesel. But electric vehicles in their current form are so far off the mark.
In a fleeting attempt to dispel some of my own negativity and cynicism: Flow batteries are apparently promising. But they do require a rather large amount of exceedingly hazardous chemicals, and portable they are not.
The trouble is, any device which stores a lot of energy and has both fuel and oxidiser (for want of better terms for non-oxidation based power sources) in the same compact container is known by a more common name..
"A Chinese company proposed a flow battery EV but the range was dismal. Refuelling was quick."
People get hung up on charging times on EV's, but most owners know that aside from long trips it's only about 30 seconds. The only time is what it takes to plug the car in. It can charge without you having to stand there holding the plug. I don't like spending the 5-10 minutes at the petrol station standing in the wind and inhaling fumes. Part of that is having to go to the petrol station in the first place. It's just one more thing on my list of things to do since the number of times a month I'd need to visit a public charging station can be counted on one hand, and not all of the fingers either. This last month I didn't have any trips longer than 150 miles in a single day.
"The problem in the UK is that a fair % of houses do not have off road parking or you have a shared parking area"
Yeah, well, the automobile has 'only' been around for 100years and it always takes time for the UK to incorporate new things. /sarc
I've lived in flats with roommates where there wasn't assigned parking for more than one car and most of the time I was the one that had to deal with finding a place to park and having a hike back. I'd never do that again and haven't for ages and ages. There's a compatibility mismatch if you want/have to live somewhere with no parking and you also want an EV. In some cases you can ram those parts together, but there's no point arguing that since a bunch of people live somewhere that can't accommodate a vehicle that personal transportation is complete rubbish. I have friends that live in super big cities and don't have their own car. That's one of the trade offs. I don't find what they put up with in a big city worth what I see as very little in return. Yes, they make far more money than I do annually, but I keep more of mine since their cost of living is many times more without even having a car.
"In a fleeting attempt to dispel some of my own negativity and cynicism: Flow batteries are apparently promising. But they do require a rather large amount of exceedingly hazardous chemicals, and portable they are not."
They might be a good storage option for solar/wind energy along side rail road tracks. In the US there are vast swaths of land that's not even very good for growing cactus along side motorways. A large solar PV field adjacent to a highway rest area (almost like motorway services but without any services) could power a row of EV chargers. A flow battery with better cost and maintenance requirements than a lithium based battery could be a good. The land nearby is useless for anything else so crop some solar power and sell it to EV owners on long trips that need a break to visit the loo and power lighting at the rest area without needing to string miles and miles of power lines. I'm visualizing the last time I did a trip from LA to Las Vegas. Endless miles of scrub begging for some way to use it for something. There's one town sort of middleish that's a big stopping point. It has EV charging, but there's a need for much more as EV's get more popular. I don't think that train service will ever come back. Every time there is talk, somebody turns it into an HSR project and it's gets dropped for being too expensive.
True. But I've no idea what it might be
Nuclear! No, belay that. It would have been a good idea if we had done a France when they did, and carried on now when they have got cold feet. Oil and gas will run out eventually so we'll be back to coal before they do. The only other option is a low energy agrarian economy like we had centuries ago, but then we need the low population density to match...
Cue the Soylent Green factories.
We could put one on rails. What could possibly go wrong
Maybe stick to wires for that one.
> The only other option is a low energy agrarian economy like we had centuries ago, but then we need the low population density to match... Cue the Soylent Green factories.
Alternatively, could I interest you in a pandemic, zombie apocalypse, robot apocalypse, or nuclear war?
There was a very relevant documentary series by James Burke in 1978.
Episode 1 starts off with how the electric grid can fail catastrophically and what that implies, and it goes on to ask if anyone really knows how to use a Plough anymore
"Episode 1 starts off with how the electric grid can fail catastrophically and what that implies, and it goes on to ask if anyone really knows how to use a Plough anymore"
That's a great series. I recall it often when I hear about local power grids shutting down their original base-load power plants and substituting lots of dodgy renewable sources. As James points out, the cause the NY blackout was a part that hadn't been upgraded when other parts of the network were expanded. The relay contact opens and causes a cascade of other things to protect themselves or, alternatively, go bang. A complex network can't "simply" be changed willy nilly without breaking of leaving a ticking bomb somewhere. The power issues in Texas are another good example. Can the wind turbines work well enough in freezing temperatures? Will they start turning if they have been idle and have been hit with freezing rain? What's the backup plan? Anybody? If I were living there, I'd have put some money into my own backups. A wood burning stove and a generator would be minimum.
"getting one (even if they could afford one) is a shit idea."
The stepson bought an EV, but has since sold it and gone back to petrol, citing lack of infrastructure, needing to plan long journeys around charging stations only to get there and find they either aren't working or there is a long, time consuming, queue. The final straw he got a parking fine for charging up his car "out of opening hours" in a supermarket car park.
"but has since sold it and gone back to petrol, citing lack of infrastructure, needing to plan long journeys around charging stations"
Sounds like they were a poor candidate to begin with. There's also a learning curve that can't be ignored. I just watched a show where a person in an MG4 and another in a Tesla Model 3 did a trip from London to Land's end and back. Of course the Tesla driver was using Tesla stations (Exeter mainly) and using the onboard nav app. The driver of the MG didn't seem to know of a good EV nav app so was using Waze and not something like A Better Route Planner and charged up using some of the most expensive public charging on the planet. He also nearly got caught out as he had planned a charge stop near the limit of the car's range without having much experience with the car (and crap weather). To me, they nullified most of their talking points as they had also took different routes so comparisons weren't valid for the trip. The trip was also an extreme case rather than getting the cars for a week and using them in a more normal way. Do lots of people drive from London to Land's end and back over two days? Not choosing a hotel with EV charging was also sort of crazy.
Actually it will have to happen, because although the government announced they wouldn't phase out petrol sales as soon as previously declared, the draconian penalties that manufacturers will be hit with for not meeting government EV targets have not changed at all. The eco-morons howled with rage when the government announced they would push back the ban on ICE cares, but overlooked that manufacturer penalties of up to £15k per car will assure the same outcome as the original rules. So government are as committed as ever to the same old plan, and pushing back the formal sales ban was merely to dupe their own supporters into thinking they were rowing back on the costly and misguided eco-adventure they're taken us on.
You're quite right that EVs are a poorly conceived idea with many problems that they'll bring with them, but what of it? As stated by others above, the problems won't affect the rich, and politicians have been busy dodging the difficult choices on energy for the past thirty plus years.
The manufacturers have probably got more clout with the government than we have. We stop buying EVs, as we can't be compelled to buy them, and when the fines start to bite, the manufacturers will just stop selling any vehicles here. That might concentrate a few minds in Westminster. Otherwise I guess we'll turn into Cuba, maintaining old bangers for decades.
...we can't be compelled to buy them...
Law no.XXXX
Article 1. Operating a combustion engine equipped vehicle on public roads is forbidden. The penalty shall be a fine no less than the value of the vehicle payable in cash in 24 hours, confiscation of said vehicle and no less than 10 years in a state controlled penitentiary.
See, we don't force you to buy one.
"Law no.XXXX
Article 1. Operating a combustion engine equipped vehicle on public roads is forbidden. The penalty shall be a fine no less than the value of the vehicle payable in cash in 24 hours, confiscation of said vehicle and no less than 10 years in a state controlled penitentiary.
See, we don't force you to buy one."
When oil shot up to $140/bbl some years ago, the shift from driving a Hummer to taking the bus in the US was nearly overnight. The issue became that in places that had public transportation, they got slammed AND had to pay going rates for fuel months faster than it would take to go through the process to increase fares. People also got mad when busses bypassed stops where nobody was getting off as there was no more room to let more people on. No spare drivers and few spare busses.
It also impacted businesses that pay the least amount whose employees often drive land yachts that get really crap mileage but can be purchased for pocket change.
When oil shot up to $140/bbl some years ago, the shift from driving a Hummer to taking the bus in the US was nearly overnight.
The biggest shock to the US system was probably the OPEC crisis that helped kick the shift from muscle cars, land yachts and assorted gas guzzlers into high gear. Now, the US is creating another OPEC crisis by destabilising many of OPEC's members, cancelling US production and has been flogging off it's strategic reserves. Politicians really are smart, aren't they?
"cancelling US production and has been flogging off it's strategic reserves. Politicians really are smart, aren't they?"
That rabbit hole goes even deeper when you realize that not all of the oil extracted in the US can be processed in the US. It's not economic to build refineries so there hasn't been much done since around 1980. When some of them have burned to the ground due to inevitable fires, they don't get rebuilt which is reducing capacity even further. The political aspect of oil can't be ignored either and can be the more scary part.
"'yeah we just blocked off the valve as it was cheaper than fixing it'."
That's what you get when you have a load of MBA's running a business and when repair and maintenance costs more than what's been allocated. They stop doing them to keep from ruining all of the work they put in formulating the budget. The engineer telling them that not having that valve working properly is a massive fire risk only has a bachelor's degree and they have a Master's so how smart can that senior engineer be?
"The biggest shock to the US system was probably the OPEC crisis that helped kick the shift from muscle cars, land yachts and assorted gas guzzlers into high gear. Now, the US is creating another OPEC crisis by destabilising many of OPEC's members, cancelling US production and has been flogging off it's strategic reserves. Politicians really are smart, aren't they?"
As old as I am, I can barely recall the OPEC crisis (1973?). One has to remember that the answer from the US car companies was to come out with "mid-size" cars when everybody was buying small imports that got much better mileage. The US companies did deals with the Japanese companies and re-badged some small cars so they'd have something on the lot that would sell.
There's plenty of US oil that can't be processed in the US. Not all oil is the same and refineries can only use certain narrow grades that they are designed for. New refineries are not being built in the US and haven't been built for decades. I agree that plenty of reserves are not being tapped that could be mainly due to politicians pandering to one anti-oil group or another. I don't see it as being a bad thing to not use it all up as fast as possible, but the political angle is not good. The selling off of strategic reserves is also politicians buying votes even when it makes no sense at all to do it. I'm sure the military could use up what's left in a month of war given how inefficient military machinery is. A B-52 long range mission burns up over $1 million of fuel. Pilots don't often train the full cycle due to the costs.
Politicians are smart, it's just that their aim in self-enrichment, not running a country for the benefit of the citizens. If you look at it that way, they're genius level.
"Actually it will have to happen, because although the government announced they wouldn't phase out petrol sales as soon as previously declared, the draconian penalties that manufacturers will be hit with for not meeting government EV targets have not changed at all."
I preduict that the deadline will keep on moving into the future. Most of the Guardian-reading save-the-world types won't be so keen on the whole thing when it actually starts to affect them!
What will become a problem is lack of smaller, cheaper cars - Ford have already phased out both the Ka and the Fiesta. Not everybody wants, can afford or has space for some fucking massive SUV type thing.
"I preduict that the deadline will keep on moving into the future. Most of the Guardian-reading save-the-world types won't be so keen on the whole thing when it actually starts to affect them!"
The voices that influence the Guardian all live in hoity-toity posh metropolitan areas well served by public transport, whilst those voices delude themselves and their readership that they're working class socialists. Look at that eco-git Monbiot: Prep-school, Stowe, Brasenose College, BBC. A typical silver spoon eco-socialist, and the Graun and its readers fawn over his every utterance. If you're hoping people like that are going to shove net-zero into some form of credible, affordable, deliverable plan, then I think you're going to be sadly disappointed.
Admittedly Monbiot has got around a bit, and reportedly lives in South Devon now, so any pain inflicted on the metrollops is not going to worry him.
"Yes we ought to think about an alternative to petrol/diesel. But electric vehicles in their current form are so far off the mark."
If you are looking for the silver bullet drop-in replacement, don't hold your breath. For many people, an EV can work just fine. I'm one, but I don't have the upfront money needed for a purchase right now. They won't work for everybody anymore than a mandate that all cars are small hatchbacks and everything else is banned. While plenty of people could get by with a small car, plenty more need something bigger.
The work day of 2030:
8:00 - wake up, brush teeth, shower
8:15 - eat your insect meal allowance
8:30 - check your social credit score
9:00 - turn on your laptop, log it in to work.
9:15 - hop on the treadmill to generate electricity while AI does the work for you
12:30 - take a break, eat another insect meal allowance
1:30 - hop on the treadmill
2:00 - attend the daily mandatory "Appreciate Our Overlords" webinar
2:30 - drink a cup of recycled water, fresh from your personal dehumidifier
3:00 - answer any emails the AI deemed "too human" to handle
4:00 - engage in "free time" inside your 2m x 2m personal leisure cube
5:00 - dinner: a surprise insect dish! (Spoiler: It's crickets. Again.)
6:00 - mandatory VR social hour to maintain "healthy" human interactions
7:00 - watch the government-approved daily news roundup
8:00 - partake in the national anthem sing-along, broadcasted live
8:30 - update your daily thought log to ensure compliance
9:00 - prepare for bed with a night-time relaxation drill
10:00 - lights out and dream moderation begins! Sweet controlled dreams!
Those initiatives are not widely impacting people - there are other roads to use in Oxford LTN, and for ULEZ a large proportion of cars are exempt.
It'd be a completely different matter if a substantial proportion of people were effectively prevented from owning a car.
Whether it is a definite plot by the 1%, or an exercise in policies that are unlikely to be implemented any time so the people at the top can continue business as usual is a question..
It'd be a completely different matter if a substantial proportion of people were effectively prevented from owning a car.
Once everyone is forced onto EVs, electrical supply constraints will be the rationale for curtailing their use. Eventually, if the restrictions on their use become too onerous, the general public will simply give up ownership.
I won't be so sad if transport regresses back 100 years.
It will be a blessing if local areas need to provide for their local communities, so all the local services we've lost over the decades reappear.
Employers that are not online will set up for employing local people. Such as where I grew up at the back end of a time where 80% of the main earners work for the same employer.
Need to go anywhere occasionally, cars available for hire for those journeys, optionally with a driver.
Improved public transport.
The bicycle thing is fine in the right sort of weather.
I won't miss cars because the roads are such a tedious place, congested and with obnoxious manners.
What will be missed, if air transport has to be curtailed will be getting to see other places and cultures, which if approached in the right* way does expand the mind and understanding.
* not 2 weeks in Lanzarote lounging about in the sun expecting an FEB every morning and and Sky TV.
"It will be a blessing if local areas need to provide for their local communities, so all the local services we've lost over the decades reappear."
That's absolutely not going to happen in the near future though - employment and physical retail have centralised in specific areas - largely town / city centres and out of town retail and business parks around large cities. Business in general has also centralised - gone are the small shops everywhere, swathes of which have been wiped out by large warehouse-size shops and the internet. For the whole '15 minute cities' thing to be actually workable would take a major restructuring of society, employment and retail which isn't going to happen in the timescales they are proposing, and probably not at all.
"It will be a blessing if local areas need to provide for their local communities, so all the local services we've lost over the decades reappear."
What? Nobody wants that which is why all of these "local" people are ordering online from Amazon and having it delivered the next day. While they might be frustrated from time to time that the high street is mostly boarded up, they don't make the connection.
"But they'll still need to get to work"
Then they can take the stairs down from their flat on floor 15 to the office on floor 10, and at the end of the day they can do their shopping in the shops on the ground floor.
You don't need transport when your whole life is confined to a single tower block.
"Personal, long distance transportation is set to become a thing of the past for anyone outside of the 1% in the West."
It depends a lot on where you want to go. I was hoping to do a trip to The Fully Charged Live show in Texas a few years back. I thought it would be good to take the train rather than drive. To take the train I would have had to arrive a day earlier than I would have liked and to be able to attend the whole time, I'd have to wait another day to take the train back. Two extra nights of hotels and meals eaten out made driving massively cheaper. All of that and Helen Czerski wasn't going to be there. Total bust.
And yet US - effectively - encourages monstrosities on wheels (the bigger and more expensive, the larger the tax write-off for those who can afford them).
Great for the grid, environment and other taxpayers /s.
Let's just wait till the trickle down economy passes them used but properly greenwashed trucks to dirty masses. One day we may all be driving "clean" electric vehicles but our fridges will be running off gas powered generators (to keep food from spoiling when neighbors plug in their fleet of monster trucks).
I don't know who is driving the "bigger is better" cars in the US. I know I'm certainly not doing it, and I regularly complain to the factories that until they're making smaller trucks that I'm not buying. What they call a compact truck today is literally only an inch or two smaller in all three dimensions than a full size truck from 20 years ago, and the full size trucks aren't much smaller than a freaking delivery truck. What sucks for me is there aren't that many old compact trucks left anymore.
Those compact trucks from 20 or 30 years ago were made of tin and paper and wouldn't pass even the most basic of current crash safety tests. That's why "compact" trucks of today are so huge: All of the safety features they incorporate to keep the driver from being turned to mush.
All cars are big cars, now. I'm not even thinking about things like those enormous escalades and otehr monsters that are so popular in certain American subcultures, but things like five door family cars or supposedly smaller "compact" vehicles. Look at your typical hatchback from the turn of the century and compare it to what we have now. Today's hot hatch is larger than many full-size saloons (or sedans, I think the US calls them?) were back then. A mid-90s mondeo is the same size as a current generation ford focus. The current generation of the mini is longer and wider than my jeep cherokee, which was considered an average sized car when it was new. It's small compared to the norm, today.
"And yet US - effectively - encourages monstrosities on wheels"
If you watch the mandated amount of TV each day is does. It a lot about being bombarded by advertising all day, every day that bigger is better. Of course it is for the car companies. The margins they make for giant pickups and SUVs is nuts. All of the geegaws that they glue on add another month's salary yet cost the manufacturer pennies.
Way back when I was in school, the maths requirement for graduation was tiny and dumdum match was good enough. There wasn't then and I don't think there is now a requirement for household budgeting/personal finance in the last couple of years of school when it should be taught. SM and advertising say that one must have a new car at least every 5 years and it has to be expensive. My TV is in the garage taking up space and needs to be sent off to landfill (tube type I can't even give away). With two engineering degrees, I can't help (over) analyzing things so there's no chance I'm going to spend a mint on a car or buy new. I can easily look up that giant vehicles are actually less safe than "common sense" makes them out to be. Amazing that the government is good for something.
Once when my car needed extensive repairs I was able to borrow a one ton pickup from a friend. Good god! Parking was a pain and I was always looking to see if petrol was pouring out from underneath through some hole. I didn't put too many miles on that truck before giving it back. My friend knew what it cost to run which is why it was just sitting around available to be loaned out. He still used it enough to justify keeping, but only just. I expect there are people with monster vehicles that aren't as cost sensitive, but they aren't likely noticing how much they're spending until petrol takes a big jump.
The UK grid, overnight, shows a demand drop of 10-15GW. That is a colossal pain in the arse - it means paying generators to stop in order to keep the grid balanced. If there were more people charging overnight it would actually help. OK, so there are issues with running circuits out to public fast chargers used during the day, but DNOs can put quite a lot through 11kV and 33kV lines. If they want to
From Day 1 it's been a battle to get into green heads the requirement of energy STORAGE.
This is stupid: ""Unless countries take actions to incentivize EV drivers to charge outside peak electricity consumption periods... - said Jonathan Davenport, senior director analyst at Gartner."
STORE energy in order to entirely ignore "peak electricity consumption periods." This isn't hard. Batteries are the current obvious method. What is potentially the easiest is to store energy from renewable sources into water derived hydrogen. Burn it quick and easy as required. Oxygen in, water out. Anyone can make hydrogen at home from renewable sources.
Typically, as witnessed with nuclear energy, what wins the day is NEITHER quality NOR rationality. Instead, it's brain dead old MONEY.
Do it right or give up, green-washers.
Storage is stupendously expensive. Utterly mind-bogglingly so.
Encouraging people to charge their EV outside peak times is trivial - they need to charge at night. When they aren't driving it.
The problem is of course that also requires somewhere to park your EV at night that has a charging point. There's an awful lot of housing with no off-street parking.
The wind generally blows at night, although it does tend to be dark, so maybe a mix including a LOT more nuclear would be sane?
"Storage is stupendously expensive. Utterly mind-bogglingly so."
Grid-scale storage is crazy expensive, but it's not an issue with storing the same amount of power in lots of EV's. It's also much more efficient as it removes at least one AC-DC-AC conversion with all of the inherent losses.
"There's an awful lot of housing with no off-street parking."
There's also a big need due to city planning for people to have vehicles. Either convenient public transportation can be put in place or planning permission for new homes or extensive remolding has to include off-street parking. The number of vehicles that can be parked tied to the size of the home/number of flats. In some places it's nuts to get around since the roads are effectively one lane with people parked half on the pavements and half in the road.
>This includes solar photovoltaics generating "more electricity than the entire US power system does currently,"
So generating more electricty through the power of fucking magic?
>and the renewable share of the electricity mix has to increase to nearly 50 percent from the 30 percent it is today.
Wish in one hand and shit in the other.
Renewables aren't the solution here. As others have said, electric grid is a problem, but if you want generation, you need to invest in nuclear. Get sustainable commercial fusion out the door and we've solved a lot of problems. Make your EVs a hybrid vehicle with a hydrogen engine that provides power direct to the electric motor and/or recharges the battery.
It's got mis-selling written all over it.
Overstated claims of range - says 300 miles on full charge but it is unfeasible to use this, since you should not charge it above 80% or let it drop below 20%
The non-disclosed liability caused by the dangerous batteries - think about what precautions they must take within the battery factories to keep the cells apart compared to jamming together into a sled intended to travel along public roads at 80mph. Can you imagine a fire in a battery factory?
The environmental claims - amount of raw materials extracted and difficulty of recycling.
All of our current solar wind and nuclear electricity is already used - adding extra demand to the grid for charging EVs will not cause a solar panel or wind turbine to magically appear. The extra demand will be satisfied by nat-gas surely?
I bet some lawyers are already dusting-off their dieselgate documents and doing a Ctrl+H diesel -> electric...
Whichever part of Big Oil paid you to post this crap didn’t get their money’s worth.
“The environmental claims - amount of raw materials extracted and difficulty of recycling.”
Because it’s well known that Ford F-350s appear magically underneath waterfalls, and since they run on unicorn farts - no concerns at all!
“All of our current solar wind and nuclear electricity is already used - adding extra demand to the grid for charging EVs will not cause a solar panel or wind turbine to magically appear. The extra demand will be satisfied by nat-gas surely?”
WTF are you on about? New renewables come online literally every day.
We have bucketloads of renewables. So much that the installed capacity already dwarfs our peak load by a factor of 2. But building a new wind farm or solar farm does nothing when its dark and still. And we don't even have the transmission capacity to shift the renewable energy when the wind is blowing. We have to pay them to turn off.
So we are hooked on gas, and no amount of extra renewables coming online will fix that.
But that wasn’t the claim! The OP idiotically claimed that we’re out of renewables. That’s just wrong!
Your argument is nonsense too. Of course we need more storage to overcome the intermittent nature of most renewables (and more surf/tidal powered stuff). But each and every EV is a GIANT BATTERY. You can charge at home when your solar panels are running, and disconnect when they’re not.
It’s almost like you people are looking for reasons why these problems can’t be solved, instead of looking for solutions. Perhaps because you have a vested interest in petroleum?
Your argument is nonsense too. Of course we need more storage to overcome the intermittent nature of most renewables (and more surf/tidal powered stuff). But each and every EV is a GIANT BATTERY. You can charge at home when your solar panels are running, and disconnect when they’re not.
No, we do not. Normally when a problem requires a solution, you do a spot of root cause analysis to identify the underlying problem. So 'renewables' are fundamentally intermittent, unreliable and very expensive. The underlying problem cannot be fixed. We knew this centuries ago, and hence why the 'Age of Sail' was replaced with the 'Age of Steam'.
Neo-luddites ignore history, physics, engineering and economics and think building bigger windmills will solve those fundamental problems. Guess what? It doesn't, and it just meant we became more dependent on gas for when the wind doesn't blow just right. So already there's the cost of windmill + standby generator.
Now, people who have a vested interest in greenwash and subsidies want to add more cost and complexity by building massive battery packs. Those people gloss over the difference between power and energy to say crap like 'X GW of storage', but gloss over that the typical storage amount is enough for a few minutes demand. And if the power shortage is due to a blocking high, once the batteries have discharged, they won't recharge until the wind picks up again.
But in between times, they will make millions in subsidies by supplying 'grid stabilisation' services, which is basically solving a problem the 'renewables' scumbags have created in the first place.
Perhaps because you have a vested interest in petroleum?
And perhaps you have a vested interest in pushing 'renewables'. Or perhaps you just skipped too much school to go on climate protests..
Same old Jellied Eel spew.
“So 'renewables' are fundamentally intermittent, unreliable and very expensive.”
As opposed to that sweet sweet Saudi/Russian oil, or the Deepwater Horizon rig, or the Exxon Valdez. Or heck, we could build a pipeline from Venezuela! It’d pay for itself, probably.
Same old Jellied Eel spew.
Same old fact-free vomit from the 'rewables' lobby..
As opposed to that sweet sweet Saudi/Russian oil, or the Deepwater Horizon rig, or the Exxon Valdez. Or heck, we could build a pipeline from Venezuela! It’d pay for itself, probably.
What's wrong with North Sea oil? Much closer to home. Or oil & gas from Qatar. There were plans for a pipeline from there, but the route passes through some currently 'hostile' territories. So the US has 4 carrier battle groups there, or on their way there to 'promote peace', or finish off the regime change that was started in Syria. The US has already seized Syria's oil fields, and is in the process of securing new oil & gas fields off the coast of Gaza. Or of course there's oil & gas exported from the US. Foreign policy has made that a lot more profitable following interventions in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the West hasn't even started bombing Iran, yet.
And of course given 'renewables' dependence on gas for the days when wind speeds are an Inconvenient Truth, as gas prices increase, so do the 'renewables' scumbags profits. Offshore wind 'costs' around £40/MWh, according to one of the last rounds of CfD bids. 'Renewables' scumbags rush out press releases claiming their product is cheap, and can only get cheaper! Then, our idiotic politicians ban gas imports, gas prices go up, and the 'renewables' scumbags get paid £300/MWh or more making massive windfall profits because gas prices have increased.
And then to make matters worse, we're told the scumbags can't actually deliver at their contracted bid price of £40/MWh, but are going to need a lot more subsidies-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/10/26/offshore-wind-demands-95-mwh/
Tom Glover, country chair of RWE’s UK arm, said the price offered by the Government to wind farm operators must rise by as much as 70pc to entice companies to build.
Developers must be offered between £65 and £75 per megawatt hour (MwH) for the power generated from wind farms, Mr Glover said.
Err.. no. Why not put scumbags like Glover in jail for fraud instead. As offshore wind is obviously extremely uneconomic, the offshore windmills could be converted. The nacelles could make fine off-shore prison cells for the scumbags who lied about the cost trajectory of wind being ever downwards.
"So 'renewables' are fundamentally intermittent, unreliable and very expensive. The underlying problem cannot be fixed."
Um, the problem is one is trying to match an intermittent power source with a system that wants to see a steady input. That screams "incompatible", but not that something like wind generation is bad. It's a square peg that somebody is trying to pound into a triangular hole. The colors don't even match.
> It’s almost like you people are looking for reasons why these problems can’t be solved, instead of looking for solutions. Perhaps because you have a vested interest in petroleum?
Certainly not, I have no love for the oil lobby and I firmly believe that we have to cut our usage before the oil runs out, global warming or no global warming.
The ones who were in the pockets of the oil companies, whether they knew it or not, were(/are) the anti-nuclear lobby.
Oh ok, you’re very concerned about the problem, but since EVs are such a poor solution we should go back to putting gas storage tanks on every street corner until a perfect solution magically presents itself. Thanks for clearing that up.
I don't know what you've been smoking. And i'm not sure if I want any, thanks.
I said we need to reduce consumption. But it's no good doing that unilaterally, is it. Geopolitics says you'd just get trounced by your neighbours.
EVs on the other hand, are an even more profligate waste of resources than petrol cars. I'm talking Copper, Neodymium, Lithium, Cobalt. The stuff that we have to send poor people in ex-rainforest areas into vast open-cast mines to go and get for us. We already have to drain entire aquifers for the lithium, turning forests into deserts. Imagine scaling that up tenfold? You're mad.
Hence my post a few lines down. I believe in the problem, but the good solution was already rejected by us decades ago, now we have utter madness pretending to be the solution, and so, we're doomed.
"I firmly believe that we have to cut our usage before the oil runs out"
Oil is just too dang useful for so many things that it isn't going to run out. The price is going to continually go up and up with one of the first things that will have to drop off will be burning it for personal transportation. The last, expensive to suck out oil will be used only for the product with the highest perceived value (likely something medical). It will be too expensive to convert into fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to grow mono-crops of food stock in the US to ship for free to Ethiopia so their population can continue to expand. Growing corn for biofuels will be out as well. When calculating the Earth's carrying capacity, assumptions have to be made about non-renewable sources of energy.
"We have to pay them to turn off."
Most of the time that's not the case. They are just switched off and not paid in order to keep away from over-supply problems. Now, if there were a way to signal EV's that for the next hour, electricity is 3p/kWh with another price update in 50 mins.........
And here is a major failing on all sides as we have a number of completely disjoint standards for smart meters etc. Govts get fixated on a single issue and focus 100% on that. Which is how we got the 1st generation smart meters that have now been almost completely replaced as they were useless. How much energy and money was wasted on that?
without a quantum leap in the technology. The only hope to meet demand without hydrocarbon fuels is nuclear energy. Solar power is already shifting from new installs to replacing old installs. The older panels have a finite lifespan of around 20 years or so before they just aren't producing anymore. Time to start approving those breeder reactors, or keep burning those dead dinos.
You forgot to pick your icon. :P
As far as I was taught, coal is fossilised wood, and "crude oil" and "natural gas" are from a mixture of petrified biomass, some of which is dinosaurs, but it hardly matters to the argument. It is finite and it is running out (unlike nuclear fission energy, which while also technically finite, is many, many orders of magnitude more abundant). And oil in particular has other important uses rather than burning it all.
It is getting harder and harder to extract, requiring more energy and pollution to do so. It does need to stop, but a reduction in consumption and a push towards more nuclear is the way to do it, rather than sticking to our existing profligate lifestyles and pretending that Wind and Solar are the answer. They are not, because that solution depends on gas to plug the 'dunkelflaute' periods. And we all know that large-scale storage is impossible, because it is infeasibly expensive, not to mention dangerous.
But I don't think enough people are going to ditch energy consumption, put on the hair shirt and start growing turnips, so the next alternative is War, when the resources run out.
"Solar power is already shifting from new installs to replacing old installs."
Where I am there are large new PV installs being built. The boom is due partially to new high tension line corridors being approved and installed so the energy can be sent off to the big city. The other half is that the land in the area is "dirt" cheap. There isn't the water for agriculture and it's pretty darn flat for miles and miles so there's not much ground work to do.
There are a couple of panel resellers not too far from me. They get them from large installations and when swaps are being done at the commercial generation places. When I talked with one, he was telling me that due to the economics for the commercial operators, they aren't using the panels for more than half their rated life. They degrade a bit and couple with that small efficiency improvements, larger form factors and higher voltages, it's advantages to change them out. I've held off on buying a full install worth as I need to put on a new roof first and they always seem to have stock so I'm not in a hurry. The upside is the prices are really cheap for the panels and they encourage testing them before you take them away. If the land next door comes up for auction and I get it, I might do a ground mounted install first. I'll have to see if I can cross property lines with the power cables or if they will charge me with terrorism if I do that. For tax reasons, I don't want to combine the properties.
I’ve done loads of looking and research.
EVs where I live, are quite unsuitable for the distances involved and way too expensive (for what you get). The charging network is also laughable.
ICE still meets all my main requirements.
Availability of models is still low, so…
I’m going to keep my current ICE vehicle going for a lot longer. Liquid fuels will be with us for a long long time yet.
Your mileage may vary.
I live in a part of the world where EVs are common. Sufficiently so that if you're stopped at a traffic signal then you're almost certainly going to be joined by one or two Teslas, they're everywhere.
Being America we have a fairly iffy electric supply. Its 220 volts (the 110 bit is due to the supply being two phase so that's what you'll get at a room outlet or lamp) but the amount of power available is limited even though there's a lot of additional power generation -- solar panels, that is -- about.
The key is that most people don't drive that far every day. You've got the long distance commute diehards but most people will do just about anything to avoid spending a couple of hours each way on their commute every day. A vehicle battery has about the same range as a tank of fuel and just as we don't fill up our cars every day (certainly not with fuel edging closer to $2 a liter) we don't need to fully charge our cars every day. This spreads the load quite a bit -- you might top the battery up at night and that's all you need unless you're going some distance.
The real problem is social. Our city is all suburban homes with adequate off street parking in driveways or garages. That makes charging simple. We also have very low incidences of vandalism so the high performance chargers aren't molested, destroyed, ICEd or generally got at 'just because'. From my time living in England I'd say that it would be practically impossible to charge a car there due to space limitations (you can't drape cables where people walk) and systematic vandalism (your cable's going to get damaged or stolen 'just because'). Some outer suburban and rural areas will probably be OK but in the city -- forget it. The best you'll do is a plug-in hybrid.
You're making the false assumption that because 90% of journeys are short, 90% of cars only need to be capable of short journeys.
That doesn't hold. Most of my daily journeys are short, but once a month or so I do need to fill the tank every day for a few days, and a couple of times a year I may need to fill it twice in a day. A pure EV just isn't worth the hassle and cost, and having two cars would be even worse. A PHEV is a good compromise, and I hope we see more range-extender ones such as those that Mazda is starting to produce.
How about a sensibly-sized EV such as a Renault Twizy or Citroen Ami to take you to the shops/work every day, and on the rare occasions you need to shift a lot of stuff a long way, hire a Diesel-powered car or van? It's about having the right tool for the right job.
Electric SUVs should be paying SUV-rate road tax.
That said, I would love to see a compact high-speed gas turbine range extender / afterburner
Sunk cost.
You raise valid points but :
electric cars are generally more expensive than ICE
In the second hand market, electric cars are *vastly* more expensive than ICE, and earlier generation, so range is awful
You're already paying for a car, why should you hire another one? Buy one that does it all!
Now an interesting point, given cars are mostly sold on PHP in the UK these days : bundle a limited amount of 'free' ICE car hire in the cost
You can also potentially do this for cars bought outright. I own my second hand ICE car outright, but also pay a fairly low amount each month for servicing and MOT by the main dealer[1]. It could be bundled in this.
[1] Yes, I could probably save a small amount getting it serviced elsewhere, but the dealer are also local, convenient, and the car effectively costs me about 3 quid a day for insurance, service, and breakdown cover. My present car isn't as exciting as an old one I had that cost 200 quid a tire ten years ago, but it's minimal hassle and cheap to run.
"That said, I would love to see a compact high-speed gas turbine range extender / afterburner"
I'm sad that a friend of mine passed away before we could figure out how he could ship me a turbine he had lying about. It was originally from an aircraft "start cart" and rated for about 20kW. A 20kW turbine isn't all that large. My plan was to set it up as a backup generator and run it on used motor oil. Turbines can run on a lot of different fuels similar to what you can do with a diesel engine. I could always go to the airport and fill up some cans with Jet-A, but that's too expensive. I was working with a wrecking yard for a while and they had to drain all of the fluids from the cars they brought in. I could have had all of the used ATF and motor oil that I wanted.
"A vehicle battery has about the same range as a tank of fuel "
It's about half, but that's still very adequate since if you can charge at home, you can have a full charge every morning (or half a tank of petrol if you want to compare it that way).
Like all religions/cults, it will fragment and start fighting with each other.
The grid is not ready. Production is not ready. Technology is questionable (fires). Cost is ridiculous. Raw materials are too few. The vast majority of greenhouse gasses DON’T come from ICE vehicles.
ICE will see me out thanks. No new belief system required.
Will it though? We have signed it into legislation, and with that, doomed our local car, engine and steel plants to closure. No more German cars made with British steel (never mind British cars made with German steel), they are all going to be imported from China, and apparently may come with a remote killswitch
China are producing EVs at a loss for export (dumping). The reason exporters do that is to cause competitors to close down and create a reliance on their own products.
Relying on LNG imports is perilous too, because it can be easily blockaded. We have seen in Ukraine the new military tactic of attacking electricity grids. While the UK grid can barely keep itself upright with nobody attacking it.
I need a Private Frazer icon.
"The grid is not ready. Production is not ready. Technology is questionable (fires). Cost is ridiculous. Raw materials are too few."
What you are arguing is that an artificially accelerated ramp up is a bad idea. It was once thought that Uranium was very rare and only in very few places. The problem was that before nuclear bombs came into being, the demand for Uranium was limited to people using it in glazes and laboratories. Once the lid was off and prospectors/mining companies could see the created demand, Uranium was found all over. The same sort of thing applies to Cobalt. It hasn't been in high demand so large mines using heavy equipment weren't going to be profitable. There was enough demand that using manual labor in poorer countries gave some people an opportunity to earn an income. The whole thing about child-labor has to be looked at through the lens of those locations. There aren't many schools or daycare so parents have their kids with them while at work. Not something we see in the developed world. Just like I used to "help" my dad with property maintenance, I suspect that the 'labor' the kids contribute isn't very valuable until they are big and strong enough to do real work. That's the point in many places where they will be entering the workforce no matter what.
To the extent there are the raw materials, mining will expand to fulfill market demand and the grid will be improved to keep up with the load. The issue is that capital costs money so a mine operator can't just order a few hundred million in diggers and haulers in one go. The same with improvements to power grids. Change/growth isn't the problem, it's the rate of them. Forcing just puts strain on the system and any mistakes are immediately amplified.
Unfortunately society is structured in such a way that travel beyond walking / cycling distance is inevitable for much of the population, whether thye like it or not. Sometimes public transport is an option, but for many it isn't (because it doesn't go where / when they need to travel, or takes too long). People who suggest the simplistic 'just drive less' seem to have no answer to this problem. Much travel isn't because people want to (does anyone enjoy commuting in heavy traffic?) but because they have to.
43300: Unfortunately society is structured in such a way that travel beyond walking / cycling distance is inevitable for much of the population
frog: Thats simply not true.
For example a large number of people goto the gym, why cant they just walk around the block ?
THera re countless examples i could rattle off.
43300: Much travel isn't because people want to (does anyone enjoy commuting in heavy traffic?) but because they have to.
frog: So kids have to travel hours for school instead of walking to the local school like everyone did in the day ?
Covid showed us people can work from home, but again you just admitted defeat with your attitude and reply. There are many other changes that could be made, but morons everyone cant see the wood for the trees.
With their record on Water supply, sewage, Dentists and GP's (plus a lot more) who Trusts the government to be able to deliver enough power for the move to EVs?
We have known for 70 years what power we can supply from Nuclear and roughly what is needed, yet have failed to manage the gap, and it looks like that is happening with green energy sources.
So incentivising off peak electric charging makes me wonder what off peak will actually end up being.
If we all go electric, peak demand will be overnight presumably which will make it the new peak.
Indeed, I suspect that going all electric for everything will mean no peak or off peak at all
"So incentivising off peak electric charging makes me wonder what off peak will actually end up being.
If we all go electric, peak demand will be overnight presumably which will make it the new peak.
Indeed, I suspect that going all electric for everything will mean no peak or off peak at all"
It will be some time before any of that happens and I suspect there will still be a reduced "off peak" tariff to make it less expensive to charge an EV at night rather than add to daytime peak loads. Generation will need to be increased just to keep up with data centers and increased population. In the wee hours those people will be sleeping and if the data center is slinging data locally, it will have reduced requirements as well. Now there's more capability that's been added to keep up with daytime demand available at night after businesses close and people go to bed. Paraphrasing Prof De La Paz, solve the part of the problem you can and look at it again afterwards.
I really believe some of the strain of the power grid could be alleviated if non-residential locations were required to turn off all non-security illuminations when the business was closed. I see every day stores that are lit up like a Christmas tree but are closed. Entrances to subdivisions that have more lights than a football stadium. Skyscrapers that have spots and floods doing nothing but shine on the building sides. And billboards lit up for businesses that are closed.
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