Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
We're talking about finding a solution to get us to net zero cabon and their output goes diminishes when demand goes up. That's pretty damn useless yes as a solution for the environment to get us zero carbon.
If you're prepared to supplement that with coal or gas then it can be very useful, but if you're ruling that out then as a solution for the UK to reach net zero? Having something which national output collapses, just as national demand surges is pretty damned useless.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
I'd argue that whilst they may be okay for use on some houses (e.g. south-facing), for national energy usage they are essentially useless. There's much better ways to use our land area.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
And your alternative for measuring global temperature is what ?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
I have an email from the Met Office saying that the GISS global temperature measurement methodology is dishonest.
Who is right?
I don't that's a fair characterisation of the Met Office email, and the differences between the two are relatively slight in the context of the issue as a whole.
So while they're important for scientists iterating towards a best estimate, it's not a difference that's important for deciding policy.
You haven't seen the email. Unless you worked for them 10 years ago or are Gavin Schmidt.
I repeat what I said, I don't think it's a fair characterisation of the email, but you are welcome to share it if you think I am wrong.
In any case, the Met Office have changed their methodology during the last ten years, so this has even less relevance.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
I'd argue that whilst they may be okay for use on some houses (e.g. south-facing), for national energy usage they are essentially useless. There's much better ways to use our land area.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
Wow, I missed that one. So we are pretty much there already, in areas of plentiful sunshine.
Apparently the most difficult issue out here, is finding ways to keep the panels clean from sand without using tonnes of water.
Yes (though there are probably caveats to the headline price). But the promise of super cheap power is incentivising a lot of research into more efficient desalination and electrovoltaic chemicals processing. Areas of very high insolation will become favoured locations for energy intensive industries, at some point.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
I'd argue that whilst they may be okay for use on some houses (e.g. south-facing), for national energy usage they are essentially useless. There's much better ways to use our land area.
But on the roof they are cost free from that POV
The new house I'm building in Spain has solar water heating. The panels are south facing and we're told will supply hot water for all but around 8 weeks of the year - and even then the electric boiler kick in facility won't be in full use. Our area has over 320 sunny days per year on average and the panels face south.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
But we are big players on offshore wind and that is going to increase. And tends to produce more in the winter. Solar will only ever be a secondary source of energy
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
We do need a good solution people who cannot do it at home, but I wouldn't say we're there yet.
For one thing if you're getting your groceries delivered at home then you can't recharge while out for groceries - and its not that cheap to charge at many supermarket etc charging stations. Plus if you're driving distances then "refuelling" at the motorway service station is exhorbitantly expensive.
Replacing refuelling at a petrol station near you, with doing so at eg motorway services etc as electric places to charge, is potentially going to cost more and not less.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
But we are big players on offshore wind and that is going to increase. And tends to produce more in the winter. Solar will only ever be a secondary source of energy
Which was my point.
Wind suits the UK. Solar suits California, the Middle East and Australia.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
I'd argue that whilst they may be okay for use on some houses (e.g. south-facing), for national energy usage they are essentially useless. There's much better ways to use our land area.
But on the roof they are cost free from that POV
The new house I'm building in Spain has solar water heating. The panels are south facing and we're told will supply hot water for all but around 8 weeks of the year - and even then the electric boiler kick in facility won't be in full use. Our area has over 320 sunny days per year on average and the panels face south.
Brilliant where you are. I assume that's simple heat transfer, no electrics.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
I think the biggest issue for lunar solar is the UV bombardment - for Mars of course you're further and have clouds, and 'sand'. It's fundamentally a difficult problem. Solar & nuclear combination is probably the way to go for both lunar and martian...
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
If you build highly energy efficient houses, cooling in summer and solar heat gain in the spring/autumn is the bigger problem. When we get there, developers will need simple ways to manage it.
It is quite straightforward to reduce the winter heating requirement to a couple of kw in the winter. Talking near-passive spec here. To the extent that some people heat their whole house in winter with 1-2kW of direct resistance heating (ie immersion type heater) driving under-floor heating on an Economy 7 tariff. Rather than flubbing around with 5-10k on a heat pump.
This paper is an interesting look at wind and solar energy for Britain. It shows how they complement each other to a degree, but with other contributions required to fully replace fossil fuels.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
And what’s going to power them?
There’s already plenty of EV charging stations powered by diesel gennies, because they can’t get on the grid. Rolls-Royce have the answer in small-scale nuclear, but there will be huge local opposition to every installation of them.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
I think the biggest issue for lunar solar is the UV bombardment - for Mars of course you're further and have clouds, and 'sand'. It's fundamentally a difficult problem. Solar & nuclear combination is probably the way to go for both lunar and martian...
Definitely nuclear for any large-scale development. On the Moon, there's also the fact there's 14-day nights
I'm bemused by people who claim we can have massive Lunar settlements on the tiny rims of south-pole craters that *may* have full-time sunlight ...
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
I think I would see it as a perhaps plug in when you arrive and tell it how much you want, and be charged at the till when the charging will be stopped if it has not delivered that much already. I can see such an experience as a selling point for shoppers to use a particular supermarket. They would install as many as they find are required.
I think the numbers are a lot lower than the charging point industry are shouting for. But everyone loves free taxpayers money for their cause.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
I think the biggest issue for lunar solar is the UV bombardment - for Mars of course you're further and have clouds, and 'sand'. It's fundamentally a difficult problem. Solar & nuclear combination is probably the way to go for both lunar and martian...
Definitely nuclear for any large-scale development. On the Moon, there's also the fact there's 14-day nights
I'm bemused by people who claim we can have massive Lunar settlements on the tiny rims of south-pole craters that *may* have full-time sunlight ...
How far away do you think a static fire of SH is. 74 MN of thrust will be quite something whether it launches or goes pop.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
If you build highly energy efficient houses, cooling in summer and solar heat gain in the spring/autumn is the bigger problem. When we get there, developers will need simple ways to manage it.
It is quite straightforward to reduce the winter heating requirement to a couple of kw in the winter. Talking near-passive spec here. To the extent that some people heat their whole house in winter with 1-2kW of direct resistance heating (ie immersion type heater) driving under-floor heating on an Economy 7 tariff. Rather than flubbing around with 5-10k on a heat pump.
So all we have to do as well is replace tens of millions of houses?
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
But we are big players on offshore wind and that is going to increase. And tends to produce more in the winter. Solar will only ever be a secondary source of energy
Which was my point.
Wind suits the UK. Solar suits California, the Middle East and Australia.
You have to prioritise what suits you best.
True but I still think we will need a lot of latest generation nuclear.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
But we are big players on offshore wind and that is going to increase. And tends to produce more in the winter. Solar will only ever be a secondary source of energy
Which was my point.
Wind suits the UK. Solar suits California, the Middle East and Australia...
Along with much of the Mediterranean, large parts of Africa, and some of Asia.
One of the things the UK ought to be planning for is that that wind will not be the lowest cost energy source, and large parts of the developed/developing world will have access to much cheaper power than us.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
And what’s going to power them?
There’s already plenty of EV charging stations powered by diesel gennies, because they can’t get on the grid. Rolls-Royce have the answer in small-scale nuclear, but there will be huge local opposition to every installation of them.
RR PWR3 reactors are about 50m quid each when installed in Trident boats.
The tories have cut the shore based version so it's going to be tested and validated using a software simulation. Not great, not terrible.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
And your alternative for measuring global temperature is what ?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
I have an email from the Met Office saying that the GISS global temperature measurement methodology is dishonest.
Who is right?
I don't that's a fair characterisation of the Met Office email, and the differences between the two are relatively slight in the context of the issue as a whole.
So while they're important for scientists iterating towards a best estimate, it's not a difference that's important for deciding policy.
You haven't seen the email. Unless you worked for them 10 years ago or are Gavin Schmidt.
I repeat what I said, I don't think it's a fair characterisation of the email, but you are welcome to share it if you think I am wrong.
In any case, the Met Office have changed their methodology during the last ten years, so this has even less relevance.
And I repeat what I said - how on earth do you know what was in the email unless you are GS or worked at the Met Office.
And I am very happy to share it at some stage. I specifically asked the Met Office if I could post their response on realclimate at the time and they said fine. Which I then did.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
I'd argue that whilst they may be okay for use on some houses (e.g. south-facing), for national energy usage they are essentially useless. There's much better ways to use our land area.
But on the roof they are cost free from that POV
The new house I'm building in Spain has solar water heating. The panels are south facing and we're told will supply hot water for all but around 8 weeks of the year - and even then the electric boiler kick in facility won't be in full use. Our area has over 320 sunny days per year on average and the panels face south.
Brilliant where you are. I assume that's simple heat transfer, no electrics.
In those circs I would be using PV, as simple solar thermal can be a sod to maintain.
How are the taxes going to work out? Does Spain still have a tax on solar panels? AIUI they have moved on from punishing them.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Well it is if you've got 41 grand for a car.
My concern would be what Services can I charge the car at that speed, and what would the cost be and will the charger be working and available when I arrive.
That 18 minutes could easily be 40 if you aren't lucky as you wait for a charger to become available.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
I think I would see it as a perhaps plug in when you arrive and tell it how much you want, and be charged at the till when the charging will be stopped if it has not delivered that much already. I can see such an experience as a selling point for shoppers to use a particular supermarket. They would install as many as they find are required.
I think the numbers are a lot lower than the charging point industry are shouting for. But everyone loves free taxpayers money for their cause.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Well it is if you've got 41 grand for a car.
Most of the super-fast chargers on motorways and trunk roads come in at £50 or £60 for that 18 minute charge as well.
A couple of companies went around years ago, signing up obvious busy charging sites on exclusive contracts. The solution needs to be for more sites on main roads to be released for services.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
I think the biggest issue for lunar solar is the UV bombardment - for Mars of course you're further and have clouds, and 'sand'. It's fundamentally a difficult problem. Solar & nuclear combination is probably the way to go for both lunar and martian...
Definitely nuclear for any large-scale development. On the Moon, there's also the fact there's 14-day nights
I'm bemused by people who claim we can have massive Lunar settlements on the tiny rims of south-pole craters that *may* have full-time sunlight ...
How far away do you think a static fire of SH is. 74 MN of thrust will be quite something whether it launches or goes pop.
No idea.
But if it goes pop, it will be spectacular. The following is from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
Yep, we need to be building charging infrastructure.
I have had my electric Kia for a year. Initially I had range anxiety and concerns re charging, but the reality is really stress free. I just charge overnight every couple of weeks. I wouldn't go back to hydrocarbon fuels either for practicality or function. Electric cars are a lot nicer to drive too.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Well it is if you've got 41 grand for a car.
No one is pretending that we can switch overnight - but the existence of such vehicles demonstrates that it's a done deal, rather than being a vague aspiration. With the next generation of battery plants (and batteries) coming on stream, battery prices and vehicle costs will fall rapidly.
All the big manufacturers have committed to EVs, and to abandoning ICEs (albeit some more enthusiastically than others), so it will happen.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
If you build highly energy efficient houses, cooling in summer and solar heat gain in the spring/autumn is the bigger problem. When we get there, developers will need simple ways to manage it.
It is quite straightforward to reduce the winter heating requirement to a couple of kw in the winter. Talking near-passive spec here. To the extent that some people heat their whole house in winter with 1-2kW of direct resistance heating (ie immersion type heater) driving under-floor heating on an Economy 7 tariff. Rather than flubbing around with 5-10k on a heat pump.
So all we have to do as well is replace tens of millions of houses?
One of the reasons net zero planning stretches out several decades.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
I think I would see it as a perhaps plug in when you arrive and tell it how much you want, and be charged at the till when the charging will be stopped if it has not delivered that much already. I can see such an experience as a selling point for shoppers to use a particular supermarket. They would install as many as they find are required.
I think the numbers are a lot lower than the charging point industry are shouting for. But everyone loves free taxpayers money for their cause.
TESCO/VW The charging bays will be based in Tesco Extra and Superstore car parks throughout the United Kingdom and made up of:
7KW fast chargers - which will be free to use. 50kW rapids which will be priced in line with market rates. 22kW chargers where 50kW rapids are placed.
My friend did Winchester-Cambridge on a single charge in his iPace. He re-charged again while we had a coffee and a chat, then headed back for the return journey. My friend's restaurant has EV charging in the car park; charge while you eat. I think the whole process and mind-set is changing; you charge wherever your car is waiting. And for super-long distance (200 miles+) you are planning to stop for a break every couple of hundred miles. And that's with today's technology.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Well it is if you've got 41 grand for a car.
Most of the super-fast chargers on motorways and trunk roads come in at £50 or £60 for that 18 minute charge as well.
A couple of companies went around years ago, signing up obvious busy charging sites on exclusive contracts. The solution needs to be for more sites on main roads to be released for services.
Yes, but still cheaper than petrol, and rarely needed. I have only charged on a commercial charger twice in a year, and one of those was to experiment. I don't often drive more than 250 miles without an overnight stop. Charging overnight is easy, green and cheap
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
We do need a good solution people who cannot do it at home, but I wouldn't say we're there yet.
For one thing if you're getting your groceries delivered at home then you can't recharge while out for groceries - and its not that cheap to charge at many supermarket etc charging stations. Plus if you're driving distances then "refuelling" at the motorway service station is exhorbitantly expensive.
Replacing refuelling at a petrol station near you, with doing so at eg motorway services etc as electric places to charge, is potentially going to cost more and not less.
No, we're not, but we will be.
Charging times will decrease, which will make charging no-at-home less of an issue. Combine with the possibilities of co-locating chargers with other activites,so it's not just dead time like a petrol station.
There are four groups (at least) who will potentialy provide the charging infrastructure: - Entrepreneurs - self contained chargin stations or hosted in other sites, shopping centres, public car parks etc etc. - Value-add for existing businesses - supermarkets, shopping centres etc, possibly in collaboration with the above - Manufacturers, if they want to be able to continue selling cars when EVs are required - Government/local government, if they want to push switchover to electric
I don't know what charging infrastructure we'll settle on - public/private, dedicated charging sites, co-location, public points on residential streets, but the market will decide. Could well be a combination.
Sure, there's a demand/supply problem - the demand for EVs needs good charging, but the economics of good charging require EV demand, but the same was true for IC cars and petrol stations too.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
The British love to queue so maybe they'll build this feature in but charging points seem to be really simple to build, loads of convenience stores around here have them despite the Japanese manufacturers going down various blind alleys like hybrids and hydrogen. IIUC it's basically an electric socket with a meter? Compare that to petrol, which requires all kinds of plumbing and careful engineering to stop people setting themselves on fire.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
I think I would see it as a perhaps plug in when you arrive and tell it how much you want, and be charged at the till when the charging will be stopped if it has not delivered that much already. I can see such an experience as a selling point for shoppers to use a particular supermarket. They would install as many as they find are required.
I think the numbers are a lot lower than the charging point industry are shouting for. But everyone loves free taxpayers money for their cause.
TESCO/VW The charging bays will be based in Tesco Extra and Superstore car parks throughout the United Kingdom and made up of:
7KW fast chargers - which will be free to use. 50kW rapids which will be priced in line with market rates. 22kW chargers where 50kW rapids are placed.
The only electric car chargers I know of in my area are at the local Waitrose. There are two of them IIRC. Two for a population of about 100,000 people.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
And your alternative for measuring global temperature is what ?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
I have an email from the Met Office saying that the GISS global temperature measurement methodology is dishonest.
Who is right?
I don't that's a fair characterisation of the Met Office email, and the differences between the two are relatively slight in the context of the issue as a whole.
So while they're important for scientists iterating towards a best estimate, it's not a difference that's important for deciding policy.
You haven't seen the email. Unless you worked for them 10 years ago or are Gavin Schmidt.
I repeat what I said, I don't think it's a fair characterisation of the email, but you are welcome to share it if you think I am wrong.
In any case, the Met Office have changed their methodology during the last ten years, so this has even less relevance.
And I repeat what I said - how on earth do you know what was in the email unless you are GS or worked at the Met Office.
And I am very happy to share it at some stage. I specifically asked the Met Office if I could post their response on realclimate at the time and they said fine. Which I then did.
So the email is already in the public domain?
Seems very weird that you would insist I hadn't read it.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Well it is if you've got 41 grand for a car.
No one is pretending that we can switch overnight - but the existence of such vehicles demonstrates that it's a done deal, rather than being a vague aspiration. With the next generation of battery plants (and batteries) coming on stream, battery prices and vehicle costs will fall rapidly.
All the big manufacturers have committed to EVs, and to abandoning ICEs (albeit some more enthusiastically than others), so it will happen.
Not only that the range will continue to Improve. Another key driver for take up.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
I think I would see it as a perhaps plug in when you arrive and tell it how much you want, and be charged at the till when the charging will be stopped if it has not delivered that much already. I can see such an experience as a selling point for shoppers to use a particular supermarket. They would install as many as they find are required.
I think the numbers are a lot lower than the charging point industry are shouting for. But everyone loves free taxpayers money for their cause.
TESCO/VW The charging bays will be based in Tesco Extra and Superstore car parks throughout the United Kingdom and made up of:
7KW fast chargers - which will be free to use. 50kW rapids which will be priced in line with market rates. 22kW chargers where 50kW rapids are placed.
The only electric car chargers I know of in my area are at the local Waitrose. There are two of them IIRC. Two for a population of about 100,000 people.
Is that a complete census, or just the ones you know about? It may not be 2 for a town of 100,000 after all.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k fuel pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
We’ve just bought a house that has solar panels on the roof.Have to say I hadn’t given it any thought!
Are you going to own the panels or is it a leased roof scheme. Whichever way it is it'll save you a few quid.
I purchased my panels 6 years ago and they provide a return on capital of approx 9%
Mine provide a little less than that having been purchased slightly later and facing East and West. I need to build the veranda on which roof some will live in time.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Well it is if you've got 41 grand for a car.
Most of the super-fast chargers on motorways and trunk roads come in at £50 or £60 for that 18 minute charge as well.
A couple of companies went around years ago, signing up obvious busy charging sites on exclusive contracts. The solution needs to be for more sites on main roads to be released for services.
Yes, but still cheaper than petrol, and rarely needed. I have only charged on a commercial charger twice in a year, and one of those was to experiment. I don't often drive more than 250 miles without an overnight stop. Charging overnight is easy, green and cheap
You’re one of the people for whom it makes sense - you have a private driveway, live and work in the same city, and rarely make longer trips.
For many others, EV’s don’t yet make sense, and an accelerated timetable for getting non-EV cars off the road might end up making these people second-class citizens. They’re predominately lower income groups with no off-street parking.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
In that situation, you'll go a different time or use a diferent charge point.
There are times when I absolutely avoid our local petrol station for the queues and other times I've bailed out of the queue and gone elsewhere or a different time. There will be quiet times. Plus, factor in that for houses with off-road parking, recharging at home will probably be the preferred option, cheaper and more convenient. So there will be fewer cars competing for the public charging points (as you take out the ICE cars that were parked on driveways but still taken to the petrol station for fuel).
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
I said "will be", not "are" But it is also about the practicality of it - you can already get perhaps 120 miles on a stop for a coffee and a loo for 15-20 minutes, even on a Tesla Tankette. And the average distance for most on a normal day is just a couple of 10s of miles, so a full charge once a week at Sainsbury's when shopping or out for a lunch would crack it.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
So how many "pumps" will Sainsburys need to install? And who is going to pay for them..
I think I would see it as a perhaps plug in when you arrive and tell it how much you want, and be charged at the till when the charging will be stopped if it has not delivered that much already. I can see such an experience as a selling point for shoppers to use a particular supermarket. They would install as many as they find are required.
I think the numbers are a lot lower than the charging point industry are shouting for. But everyone loves free taxpayers money for their cause.
TESCO/VW The charging bays will be based in Tesco Extra and Superstore car parks throughout the United Kingdom and made up of:
7KW fast chargers - which will be free to use. 50kW rapids which will be priced in line with market rates. 22kW chargers where 50kW rapids are placed.
The only electric car chargers I know of in my area are at the local Waitrose. There are two of them IIRC. Two for a population of about 100,000 people.
My Kia Sat Nav highlights them on the map, and I am rarely more than a few miles from one, even on the Isle of Wight.
Electric cars are minimal hassle, and just about the easiest low carbon win. Much better for air pollution too, which is a major killer in the UK.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
I really respect Kia, I've got a 60-reg Kia C'eed which I've driven since new. Now eleven years old and its still going strong, I made a decision years ago I wouldn't replace it with another ICE vehicle (unless it breaks down) I'd wait until I could get an electric vehicle that worked for me - but the lack of off road parking is my biggest issue. Before the C'eed I had a Kia Picanto and again it was really good quality.
But "a brief stop at the services" - how much is that going to cost if its at the motorway services?
Motorway service stations cost nearly £1.60 per litre now, I can't imagine they're especially cheap places to recharge for electricity either.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
In that situation, you'll go a different time or use a diferent charge point.
There are times when I absolutely avoid our local petrol station for the queues and other times I've bailed out of the queue and gone elsewhere or a different time. There will be quiet times. Plus, factor in that for houses with off-road parking, recharging at home will probably be the preferred option, cheaper and more convenient. So there will be fewer cars competing for the public charging points (as you take out the ICE cars that were parked on driveways but still taken to the petrol station for fuel).
The number of dwellings without off road parking is something like a third iirc.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
I really respect Kia, I've got a 60-reg Kia C'eed which I've driven since new. Now eleven years old and its still going strong, I made a decision years ago I wouldn't replace it with another ICE vehicle (unless it breaks down) I'd wait until I could get an electric vehicle that worked for me - but the lack of off road parking is my biggest issue. Before the C'eed I had a Kia Picanto and again it was really good quality.
But "a brief stop at the services" - how much is that going to cost if its at the motorway services?
Motorway service stations cost nearly £1.60 per litre now, I can't imagine they're especially cheap places to recharge for electricity either.
No real need for the price of fuel to be regulated at service stations. It's not exactly difficult to avoid them. Charging points might be a different story, so I can imagine the price of electricity at such locations could be regulated.
It would be fun to go back to PB - had it existed - in the mid nineties and read the discussion on how mobile phones would never take off due to being expensive and the complete lack of needed infrastructure meaning they were useless for people who lived in or travelled to places outside the main population centres due to a complete lack of network coverage
It would be fun to go back to PB - had it existed - in the mid nineties and read the discussion on how mobile phones would never take off due to being expensive and the complete lack of needed infrastructure meaning they were useless for people who lived in or travelled to places outside the main population centres due to a complete lack of network coverage
We had a flashback of and insight into such thinking with Burnergate last week.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
There are two different charging needs. One is rapid charging - this is the stuff that will be installed at motorway services etc, filling (ha) the role of petrol pumps. The probable number of these will be related to the number of existing petrol pumps - maybe twice as many in the end, say, due to charging being slower than pumping petrol.
The other is trickle charging - at home or in the street. You plug in and the vehicle recharges slowly, overnight.
This is the category where vast numbers might be required.
The issue is then for those people without a driveway.
Interestingly, in the UK most lamp posts are wired as 16 or 32 Amp... Since we are changing over to LEDs for the lights (lifetime in years, fraction of the power previously used), it is quite easy to add a charging point for trickle charging to lamp posts as they are reworked to LED lighting.
The lamp post charging is being rolled out in a number of places, very rapidly.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k fuel pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
Each fuel pump can refill how many people's cars per hour? My local Sainsbury's, which is just off a motorway junction, has a dozen pumps, each of which is busy and there's a queue every time I go there. If we say five minutes per car as an average at the station then that's potentially a dozen cars per pump per hour. About 144 cars per hour throughput at that station.
Electric pumps won't be able to fully recharge a dozen cars in an hour.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Well it is if you've got 41 grand for a car.
Most of the super-fast chargers on motorways and trunk roads come in at £50 or £60 for that 18 minute charge as well.
A couple of companies went around years ago, signing up obvious busy charging sites on exclusive contracts. The solution needs to be for more sites on main roads to be released for services.
Yes, but still cheaper than petrol, and rarely needed. I have only charged on a commercial charger twice in a year, and one of those was to experiment. I don't often drive more than 250 miles without an overnight stop. Charging overnight is easy, green and cheap
You’re one of the people for whom it makes sense - you have a private driveway, live and work in the same city, and rarely make longer trips.
For many others, EV’s don’t yet make sense, and an accelerated timetable for getting non-EV cars off the road might end up making these people second-class citizens. They’re predominately lower income groups with no off-street parking.
Which is why government as well as the market will have to provide solutions.
You’re one of the people for whom it makes sense - you have a private driveway, live and work in the same city, and rarely make longer trips.
For many others, EV’s don’t yet make sense, and an accelerated timetable for getting non-EV cars off the road might end up making these people second-class citizens. They’re predominately lower income groups with no off-street parking.
Given the need to pay for battery capacity upfront (remember an EV costs £40,000 while ICE equivalents can cost from £1,000 upwards) I suspect the world is going to look very different in a few years, and lower income groups are going to have difficulty paying for a car full stop....
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
There are two different charging needs. One is rapid charging - this is the stuff that will be installed at motorway services etc, filling (ha) the role of petrol pumps. The probable number of these will be related to the number of existing petrol pumps - maybe twice as many in the end, say, due to charging being slower than pumping petrol.
The other is trickle charging - at home or in the street. You plug in and the vehicle recharges slowly, overnight.
This is the category where vast numbers might be required.
The issue is then for those people without a driveway.
Interestingly, in the UK most lamp posts are wired as 16 or 32 Amp... Since we are changing over to LEDs for the lights (lifetime in years, fraction of the power previously used), it is quite easy to add a charging point for trickle charging to lamp posts as they are reworked to LED lighting.
The lamp post charging is being rolled out in a number of places, very rapidly.
Still want to know what the denizens of Trellick Tower are supposed to do? Queue up at the lamppost outside the main entrance.
Not to say it won't all happen but there needs to be some creative thinking to address the known unknown problem of charging stations.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
If you build highly energy efficient houses, cooling in summer and solar heat gain in the spring/autumn is the bigger problem. When we get there, developers will need simple ways to manage it.
It is quite straightforward to reduce the winter heating requirement to a couple of kw in the winter. Talking near-passive spec here. To the extent that some people heat their whole house in winter with 1-2kW of direct resistance heating (ie immersion type heater) driving under-floor heating on an Economy 7 tariff. Rather than flubbing around with 5-10k on a heat pump.
So all we have to do as well is replace tens of millions of houses?
One of the reasons net zero planning stretches out several decades.
It would be fun to go back to PB - had it existed - in the mid nineties and read the discussion on how mobile phones would never take off due to being expensive and the complete lack of needed infrastructure meaning they were useless for people who lived in or travelled to places outside the main population centres due to a complete lack of network coverage
I don't think anyone's saying electric cars won't take off.
Just that a lot needs to be done before they're universally adoptable. Which was true in the 90s to get universal coverage for mobiles too.
There is some ludicrous absolutism in this "debate" over energy.
Solar panels obviously produce less power in the winter than they do in the summer. So they aren't a complete solution to our needs - but they're obviously *part* of the solution. We're building wind farms yet it isn't always windy - because they are part of the solution.
We will need some nuclear capacity certainly during transition. But we are an island surrounded by free energy - tidal, wind and solar. Back this up with local storage (as used EV packs are already being converted into) and a lot of people can use very little grid power if properly equipped.
It would be fun to go back to PB - had it existed - in the mid nineties and read the discussion on how mobile phones would never take off due to being expensive and the complete lack of needed infrastructure meaning they were useless for people who lived in or travelled to places outside the main population centres due to a complete lack of network coverage
I don't think anyone's saying electric cars won't take off.
Just that a lot needs to be done before they're universally adoptable. Which was true in the 90s to get universal coverage for mobiles too.
If electric cars take off they'd surely be called electric planes?
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k fuel pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
Each fuel pump can refill how many people's cars per hour? My local Sainsbury's, which is just off a motorway junction, has a dozen pumps, each of which is busy and there's a queue every time I go there. If we say five minutes per car as an average at the station then that's potentially a dozen cars per pump per hour. About 144 cars per hour throughput at that station.
Electric pumps won't be able to fully recharge a dozen cars in an hour.
Those petrol station numbers have dropped by 1/3 since 2000, the majority of which took place in a 5 year period.
These transitions happen more quickly than people expect.
There is some ludicrous absolutism in this "debate" over energy.
Solar panels obviously produce less power in the winter than they do in the summer. So they aren't a complete solution to our needs - but they're obviously *part* of the solution. We're building wind farms yet it isn't always windy - because they are part of the solution.
We will need some nuclear capacity certainly during transition. But we are an island surrounded by free energy - tidal, wind and solar. Back this up with local storage (as used EV packs are already being converted into) and a lot of people can use very little grid power if properly equipped.
It may not be always windy but its almost always windy - and its a lot simpler to do storage from a couple of hours ago when it was windy than it is to store energy from summer when its sunny all day, to use in winter when the heating is switched on.
It would be fun to go back to PB - had it existed - in the mid nineties and read the discussion on how mobile phones would never take off due to being expensive and the complete lack of needed infrastructure meaning they were useless for people who lived in or travelled to places outside the main population centres due to a complete lack of network coverage
I don't think anyone's saying electric cars won't take off.
Just that a lot needs to be done before they're universally adoptable. Which was true in the 90s to get universal coverage for mobiles too.
Precisely. If electric cars were such a certainty, why is our government having to ban the ICE?
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
That's precisely my point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
If you build highly energy efficient houses, cooling in summer and solar heat gain in the spring/autumn is the bigger problem. When we get there, developers will need simple ways to manage it.
It is quite straightforward to reduce the winter heating requirement to a couple of kw in the winter. Talking near-passive spec here. To the extent that some people heat their whole house in winter with 1-2kW of direct resistance heating (ie immersion type heater) driving under-floor heating on an Economy 7 tariff. Rather than flubbing around with 5-10k on a heat pump.
So all we have to do as well is replace tens of millions of houses?
No - more like improving them all to C on the EPC scale, which halves the energy demand from an E/F. Even that will be a huge contribution.
In England there is already a regulatory escalator pretty much in place by 2030 for Private Rental to reach that - it is now an offence to privately rent an EPC F property (with exceptions for eg listed buildings). Council and Housing Association are largely there already due to Governments throwing money at them since approx 2000.
There is nothing in place for Owner Occupied which is why I keep shouting about it.
In 5 years time Owner Occupied will be firmly established as the slum sector for energy efficiency - but Mr Sharma mentioned it on R4 Today this morning, so expect something from Rishi in the autumn. Perhaps following Scotland.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
I'd argue that whilst they may be okay for use on some houses (e.g. south-facing), for national energy usage they are essentially useless. There's much better ways to use our land area.
But on the roof they are cost free from that POV
The new house I'm building in Spain has solar water heating. The panels are south facing and we're told will supply hot water for all but around 8 weeks of the year - and even then the electric boiler kick in facility won't be in full use. Our area has over 320 sunny days per year on average and the panels face south.
Brilliant where you are. I assume that's simple heat transfer, no electrics.
Ah - not a clue on the details but my builder's wiring the place up for car charging, fibre, etc as well as wrapping the house in concrete as he fears the future of climate change will be more storms! Since he's sticking wonderfully to our budget I'm inclined to trust him :0
I really respect Kia, I've got a 60-reg Kia C'eed which I've driven since new. Now eleven years old and its still going strong, I made a decision years ago I wouldn't replace it with another ICE vehicle (unless it breaks down) I'd wait until I could get an electric vehicle that worked for me - but the lack of off road parking is my biggest issue. Before the C'eed I had a Kia Picanto and again it was really good quality.
But "a brief stop at the services" - how much is that going to cost if its at the motorway services?
Motorway service stations cost nearly £1.60 per litre now, I can't imagine they're especially cheap places to recharge for electricity either.
Hyundai / Kia seem to have mastered the electric drivetrain. The efficiency they get out of their cars is ludicrous compared to the competition. So the new Ioniq 5 / EV6 is understandably getting attention (especially as both cars are uniquely styled) - but there is a rather basic reality check.
The cars are capable of ultra-fast charging. Almost all chargers are not capable of this. And the handful that are charge an insane 69p per kWh. If we are all going EV, then you are going to need banks of these chargers at motorway services - scores of them - and the feed from the grid to power them. Which is enormous investment hence the Rolls-Royce running costs charged by Ionity.
Then we have freight. The electric highway trial about to be done on the M180 will be an expensive failure (trucks are going to rip that catenary down in about 5 minutes) and electric isn't practical - so we need Hydrogen as part of the mix. As with the solar panels debate, absolutism is leading to daft decisions being made. EV is not a one size fits all solution. And I post this with a full EV on the drive.
There is some ludicrous absolutism in this "debate" over energy.
Solar panels obviously produce less power in the winter than they do in the summer. So they aren't a complete solution to our needs - but they're obviously *part* of the solution. We're building wind farms yet it isn't always windy - because they are part of the solution.
We will need some nuclear capacity certainly during transition. But we are an island surrounded by free energy - tidal, wind and solar. Back this up with local storage (as used EV packs are already being converted into) and a lot of people can use very little grid power if properly equipped.
It may not be always windy but its almost always windy - and its a lot simpler to do storage from a couple of hours ago when it was windy than it is to store energy from summer when its sunny all day, to use in winter when the heating is switched on.
So during the winter your heating is powered more by tidal and wind and less by solar.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
Do you understand how the free market works at all?
If we had a free market we would not have a shortage of lorry drivers.
The interior minister is now getting involved in an argument with Marine Le Pen on twitter about why the perpetrator hadn't been deported, despite being subject to a deportation order.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
There are two different charging needs. One is rapid charging - this is the stuff that will be installed at motorway services etc, filling (ha) the role of petrol pumps. The probable number of these will be related to the number of existing petrol pumps - maybe twice as many in the end, say, due to charging being slower than pumping petrol.
The other is trickle charging - at home or in the street. You plug in and the vehicle recharges slowly, overnight.
This is the category where vast numbers might be required.
The issue is then for those people without a driveway.
Interestingly, in the UK most lamp posts are wired as 16 or 32 Amp... Since we are changing over to LEDs for the lights (lifetime in years, fraction of the power previously used), it is quite easy to add a charging point for trickle charging to lamp posts as they are reworked to LED lighting.
The lamp post charging is being rolled out in a number of places, very rapidly.
Still want to know what the denizens of Trellick Tower are supposed to do? Queue up at the lamppost outside the main entrance.
Not to say it won't all happen but there needs to be some creative thinking to address the known unknown problem of charging stations.
In the end trickle charging at home/on the street will turn out not to be a thing, long term, IMHO
I know several people with Teslas and no assigned parking at home, for example.
The costs of installing and running the fast charger systems are vastly less than the stuff for petrol. Most people don't see the cost behind safely delivering, storing and pumping petrol. By comparison, some mass produced transformer systems and charging point are simple, low maintenance and have a comparatively trivial safety "space"
While it's been a while since I had the "inside" numbers, my guess is that you could run a 20 "stall" fast charging station for less than the running cost of a 4 pump petrol station.
It would be fun to go back to PB - had it existed - in the mid nineties and read the discussion on how mobile phones would never take off due to being expensive and the complete lack of needed infrastructure meaning they were useless for people who lived in or travelled to places outside the main population centres due to a complete lack of network coverage
I don't think anyone's saying electric cars won't take off.
Just that a lot needs to be done before they're universally adoptable. Which was true in the 90s to get universal coverage for mobiles too.
Precisely. If electric cars were such a certainty, why is our government having to ban the ICE?
I think that was primarily to give a big kick to manufacturers. When governments collectively gave a hard end-stop to the ICE era, it forced them to investment heavily in the new technology. (And there was still a commercial advantage for the early adopters.)
I've got a feeling that synthetic fuel PHEV vehicles are what we need and what we will end up with (plus some pure electric). Imagine if PHEV were allowed long term on the condition of having > 50 (or 100) mile electric only range. The majority of journeys would be electric only but long range would be as convenient as now. Porsche are committed to producing synthetic fuel so that enthusiasts can run older cars. Wind and solar need a massive amount of spare capacity and storage to guarantee continuity. One way of storing excess energy is creating synthetic (non)fossil fuels. The proportion of synthetic in petrol could be smoothly increased over time without infrastructure changes. Home heating should be mainly electric with a transition of adding a non-fossil component to gas (Hydrogen?).
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k fuel pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
Each fuel pump can refill how many people's cars per hour? My local Sainsbury's, which is just off a motorway junction, has a dozen pumps, each of which is busy and there's a queue every time I go there. If we say five minutes per car as an average at the station then that's potentially a dozen cars per pump per hour. About 144 cars per hour throughput at that station.
Electric pumps won't be able to fully recharge a dozen cars in an hour.
Those petrol station numbers have dropped by 1/3 since 2000, the majority of which took place in a 5 year period.
These transitions happen more quickly than people expect.
That's petrol stations not pumps or even recharges done.
There used to be a lot more dedicated stations with a few pumps, now we have a lot of supermarket pumps which have very high throughput.
To take the example of the ~144 cars per hour filling up at the one Sainsbury's I mentioned, that possibly could have been spread over 2-3 or more stations in the past instead of the one supermarket.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
There are two different charging needs. One is rapid charging - this is the stuff that will be installed at motorway services etc, filling (ha) the role of petrol pumps. The probable number of these will be related to the number of existing petrol pumps - maybe twice as many in the end, say, due to charging being slower than pumping petrol.
The other is trickle charging - at home or in the street. You plug in and the vehicle recharges slowly, overnight.
This is the category where vast numbers might be required.
The issue is then for those people without a driveway.
Interestingly, in the UK most lamp posts are wired as 16 or 32 Amp... Since we are changing over to LEDs for the lights (lifetime in years, fraction of the power previously used), it is quite easy to add a charging point for trickle charging to lamp posts as they are reworked to LED lighting.
The lamp post charging is being rolled out in a number of places, very rapidly.
Will no-one think of the dogs? I foresee carnage when Rover takes his leaks!
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
But that doesn't matter if you're charging at home.
Since a considerable proportion of houses don't have off road parking, any solution can't be simply "charge at home".
The new Kia EV6 has superfast charging and 300 mile range.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
Surely the point is that the Country will need hundreds of thousands of these recharge points. A 18 minute wait wait might not be so good if you are 10th in the queue to use the recharge point.
How many hundreds of thousands?
We currently have maybe 100k fuel pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
Each fuel pump can refill how many people's cars per hour? My local Sainsbury's, which is just off a motorway junction, has a dozen pumps, each of which is busy and there's a queue every time I go there. If we say five minutes per car as an average at the station then that's potentially a dozen cars per pump per hour. About 144 cars per hour throughput at that station.
Electric pumps won't be able to fully recharge a dozen cars in an hour.
Those petrol station numbers have dropped by 1/3 since 2000, the majority of which took place in a 5 year period.
These transitions happen more quickly than people expect.
That was presumably driven by car ranges increasing.
A Mark 1 or 2 Ford Escort from the 70s had a 9 gallon tank and gave about 30 - 35mpg at best, so a range of circa 300 miles. The equivalent ICE small family car today will be offering a range of close to double that, sometimes more.
I've got a feeling that synthetic fuel PHEV vehicles are what we need and what we will end up with (plus some pure electric). Imagine if PHEV were allowed long term on the condition of having > 50 (or 100) mile electric only range. The majority of journeys would be electric only but long range would be as convenient as now. Porsche are committed to producing synthetic fuel so that enthusiasts can run older cars. Wind and solar need a massive amount of spare capacity and storage to guarantee continuity. One way of storing excess energy is creating synthetic (non)fossil fuels. The proportion of synthetic in petrol could be smoothly increased over time without infrastructure changes. Home heating should be mainly electric with a transition of adding a non-fossil component to gas (Hydrogen?).
It may be that tidal will be part of baseload eventually.
Assuming that it does not slow down the moon unacceptably.
Comments
31/3/18 / 17.2
5/7/18 / 17.3
7/10/18 / 15.1
8/1/19 / 6.3
31/3/19 / 10
1/4/19 / 20.1
11/7/19 / 16.4
9/10/19 / 15
6/1/20 / 5.6
31/3/20 / 9.3
1/4/20 / 18.6
20/7/20 / 17.7
27/10/20 / 12.4
17/1/21 / 4.4
31/3/21 / 10.7
20/4/21 / 11.2
26/7/21 / 17
Average daily generation for my system (Period ending)
If you're prepared to supplement that with coal or gas then it can be very useful, but if you're ruling that out then as a solution for the UK to reach net zero? Having something which national output collapses, just as national demand surges is pretty damned useless.
I can imagine that one entrepreneur in particular will be very interested…
In any case, the Met Office have changed their methodology during the last ten years, so this has even less relevance.
But the promise of super cheap power is incentivising a lot of research into more efficient desalination and electrovoltaic chemicals processing. Areas of very high insolation will become favoured locations for energy intensive industries, at some point.
As a country that requires a lot of heating and not air conditioning, energy demand surges in the winter and drops in the summer. As we switch from gas central heating, to electric powered central heating, that's only going to be exaggerated.
Solar output collapses exactly when we need it most. It may be economically productive for you, but its not environmentally a solution for the UK as a whole.
I really think that we are quite close for people who cannot do it at home.
A wind turbine blade factory in Hull is to be doubled in size after the government confirmed it would provide financial support for the expansion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-humber-58143027
For one thing if you're getting your groceries delivered at home then you can't recharge while out for groceries - and its not that cheap to charge at many supermarket etc charging stations. Plus if you're driving distances then "refuelling" at the motorway service station is exhorbitantly expensive.
Replacing refuelling at a petrol station near you, with doing so at eg motorway services etc as electric places to charge, is potentially going to cost more and not less.
Wind suits the UK. Solar suits California, the Middle East and Australia.
You have to prioritise what suits you best.
It is quite straightforward to reduce the winter heating requirement to a couple of kw in the winter. Talking near-passive spec here. To the extent that some people heat their whole house in winter with 1-2kW of direct resistance heating (ie immersion type heater) driving under-floor heating on an Economy 7 tariff. Rather than flubbing around with 5-10k on a heat pump.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148115303591
A few people got 100% richer…
There’s already plenty of EV charging stations powered by diesel gennies, because they can’t get on the grid. Rolls-Royce have the answer in small-scale nuclear, but there will be huge local opposition to every installation of them.
I'm bemused by people who claim we can have massive Lunar settlements on the tiny rims of south-pole craters that *may* have full-time sunlight ...
I think the numbers are a lot lower than the charging point industry are shouting for. But everyone loves free taxpayers money for their cause.
It can charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes, a brief stop at the services.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/kia/ev6
It is a perfectly viable ICE replacement, and newer smaller models on the way. Kia build quality trounces Tesla too.
One of the things the UK ought to be planning for is that that wind will not be the lowest cost energy source, and large parts of the developed/developing world will have access to much cheaper power than us.
The tories have cut the shore based version so it's going to be tested and validated using a software simulation. Not great, not terrible.
And I am very happy to share it at some stage. I specifically asked the Met Office if I could post their response on realclimate at the time and they said fine. Which I then did.
How are the taxes going to work out? Does Spain still have a tax on solar panels? AIUI they have moved on from punishing them.
That 18 minutes could easily be 40 if you aren't lucky as you wait for a charger to become available.
https://www.driving.co.uk/news/business/shell-waitrose-team-ev-charging/
TESCO/VW
The charging bays will be based in Tesco Extra and Superstore car parks throughout the United Kingdom and made up of:
7KW fast chargers - which will be free to use.
50kW rapids which will be priced in line with market rates.
22kW chargers where 50kW rapids are placed.
A couple of companies went around years ago, signing up obvious busy charging sites on exclusive contracts. The solution needs to be for more sites on main roads to be released for services.
But if it goes pop, it will be spectacular. The following is from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4408pt2.pdf
I have had my electric Kia for a year. Initially I had range anxiety and concerns re charging, but the reality is really stress free. I just charge overnight every couple of weeks. I wouldn't go back to hydrocarbon fuels either for practicality or function. Electric cars are a lot nicer to drive too.
With the next generation of battery plants (and batteries) coming on stream, battery prices and vehicle costs will fall rapidly.
All the big manufacturers have committed to EVs, and to abandoning ICEs (albeit some more enthusiastically than others), so it will happen.
Charging times will decrease, which will make charging no-at-home less of an issue. Combine with the possibilities of co-locating chargers with other activites,so it's not just dead time like a petrol station.
There are four groups (at least) who will potentialy provide the charging infrastructure:
- Entrepreneurs - self contained chargin stations or hosted in other sites, shopping centres, public car parks etc etc.
- Value-add for existing businesses - supermarkets, shopping centres etc, possibly in collaboration with the above
- Manufacturers, if they want to be able to continue selling cars when EVs are required
- Government/local government, if they want to push switchover to electric
I don't know what charging infrastructure we'll settle on - public/private, dedicated charging sites, co-location, public points on residential streets, but the market will decide. Could well be a combination.
When petrol cars were first taking off, you had to go and buy (or have delivered) the fuel and store it somewhere. Completely impractical for someone living in a flat or even terraced house
https://www.britainbycar.co.uk/aldermaston/408-britain-s-first-petrol-station
Sure, there's a demand/supply problem - the demand for EVs needs good charging, but the economics of good charging require EV demand, but the same was true for IC cars and petrol stations too.
https://twitter.com/Le_Figaro/status/1424689908875137028
Seems very weird that you would insist I hadn't read it.
GOP megadonors flock to Tim Scott, building 2024 buzz
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/09/tim-scott-mega-millions-fundraising-502764
We currently have maybe 100k fuel pumps in the UK, at 8500 filling stations.
The SMMT are demanding 2.3m public charging points. We are heading to 50k charge points very soon.
https://theenergyst.com/uk-needs-to-install-700-charge-points-per-day-to-switch-to-evs-by-2030/
https://www.edfenergy.com/electric-cars/charging-points
I just don't believe that we need 2.3m, and I think that the landscape will change very quickly.
For many others, EV’s don’t yet make sense, and an accelerated timetable for getting non-EV cars off the road might end up making these people second-class citizens. They’re predominately lower income groups with no off-street parking.
There are times when I absolutely avoid our local petrol station for the queues and other times I've bailed out of the queue and gone elsewhere or a different time. There will be quiet times. Plus, factor in that for houses with off-road parking, recharging at home will probably be the preferred option, cheaper and more convenient. So there will be fewer cars competing for the public charging points (as you take out the ICE cars that were parked on driveways but still taken to the petrol station for fuel).
Electric cars are minimal hassle, and just about the easiest low carbon win. Much better for air pollution too, which is a major killer in the UK.
But "a brief stop at the services" - how much is that going to cost if its at the motorway services?
Motorway service stations cost nearly £1.60 per litre now, I can't imagine they're especially cheap places to recharge for electricity either.
The other is trickle charging - at home or in the street. You plug in and the vehicle recharges slowly, overnight.
This is the category where vast numbers might be required.
The issue is then for those people without a driveway.
Interestingly, in the UK most lamp posts are wired as 16 or 32 Amp... Since we are changing over to LEDs for the lights (lifetime in years, fraction of the power previously used), it is quite easy to add a charging point for trickle charging to lamp posts as they are reworked to LED lighting.
The lamp post charging is being rolled out in a number of places, very rapidly.
Electric pumps won't be able to fully recharge a dozen cars in an hour.
Not to say it won't all happen but there needs to be some creative thinking to address the known unknown problem of charging stations.
Just that a lot needs to be done before they're universally adoptable. Which was true in the 90s to get universal coverage for mobiles too.
Solar panels obviously produce less power in the winter than they do in the summer. So they aren't a complete solution to our needs - but they're obviously *part* of the solution. We're building wind farms yet it isn't always windy - because they are part of the solution.
We will need some nuclear capacity certainly during transition. But we are an island surrounded by free energy - tidal, wind and solar. Back this up with local storage (as used EV packs are already being converted into) and a lot of people can use very little grid power if properly equipped.
These transitions happen more quickly than people expect.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/312331/number-of-petrol-stations-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
In England there is already a regulatory escalator pretty much in place by 2030 for Private Rental to reach that - it is now an offence to privately rent an EPC F property (with exceptions for eg listed buildings). Council and Housing Association are largely there already due to Governments throwing money at them since approx 2000.
There is nothing in place for Owner Occupied which is why I keep shouting about it.
In 5 years time Owner Occupied will be firmly established as the slum sector for energy efficiency - but Mr Sharma mentioned it on R4 Today this morning, so expect something from Rishi in the autumn. Perhaps following Scotland.
The cars are capable of ultra-fast charging. Almost all chargers are not capable of this. And the handful that are charge an insane 69p per kWh. If we are all going EV, then you are going to need banks of these chargers at motorway services - scores of them - and the feed from the grid to power them. Which is enormous investment hence the Rolls-Royce running costs charged by Ionity.
Then we have freight. The electric highway trial about to be done on the M180 will be an expensive failure (trucks are going to rip that catenary down in about 5 minutes) and electric isn't practical - so we need Hydrogen as part of the mix. As with the solar panels debate, absolutism is leading to daft decisions being made. EV is not a one size fits all solution. And I post this with a full EV on the drive.
https://twitter.com/GDarmanin/status/1424681358748786691
I know several people with Teslas and no assigned parking at home, for example.
The costs of installing and running the fast charger systems are vastly less than the stuff for petrol. Most people don't see the cost behind safely delivering, storing and pumping petrol. By comparison, some mass produced transformer systems and charging point are simple, low maintenance and have a comparatively trivial safety "space"
While it's been a while since I had the "inside" numbers, my guess is that you could run a 20 "stall" fast charging station for less than the running cost of a 4 pump petrol station.
There used to be a lot more dedicated stations with a few pumps, now we have a lot of supermarket pumps which have very high throughput.
To take the example of the ~144 cars per hour filling up at the one Sainsbury's I mentioned, that possibly could have been spread over 2-3 or more stations in the past instead of the one supermarket.
A Mark 1 or 2 Ford Escort from the 70s had a 9 gallon tank and gave about 30 - 35mpg at best, so a range of circa 300 miles. The equivalent ICE small family car today will be offering a range of close to double that, sometimes more.
Assuming that it does not slow down the moon unacceptably.