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?
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.
You won't get any argument about your first paragraph from me.
However, I do think you're overestimating the power we have around us. The late David MacKay's book (free for download from the link below) is dated, but I don't think the efficiency of solar or wind has increased that much.
"Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand and in supply."
We were talking abut Alzheimer's in footballers recently.
Association of Field Position and Career Length With Risk of Neurodegenerative Disease in Male Former Professional Soccer Players https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2782750 In this cohort study of 30 704 male individuals, 386 of 7676 former soccer players (5.0%) and 366 of 23 028 matched population control individuals (1.6%) were identified with a neurodegenerative disease diagnosis (hazard ratio [HR], 3.66; 95% CI, 2.88-4.65; P < .001). Compared with the risk among general population control individuals, risk of neurodegenerative disease was highest for defenders (HR, 4.98; 95% CI, 3.18-7.79; P < .001) and lowest for goalkeepers (HR, 1.83; 95% CI, 0.93-3.60; P = .08). Regarding career length, risk was highest among former soccer players with professional career lengths longer than 15 years (HR, 5.20; 95% CI, 3.17-8.51; P < .001). Regarding playing era, risk remained similar for all players born between 1910 and 1969....
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.
Jesus yes. Burnergate. I was just this morning trying to work out why Labour have smashed through the polling into this sudden, incredible lead. And then I remembered, with a chilly shiver
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 think also by economies of scale and tiny margins, plus supermarket colocation.
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
What people are laughing at, is the idea that after the last 18 months we somehow still can’t do a climate change summit remotely, but instead need a hundred planes involved.
What I've learnt in the last 18 months is that a ghastly videoconference doesn't begin to substitute for actually going to see people. Dunno why but it doesn't. It's a simple ROI calculation: investing in 100 private jets worth of fuel now buys lots of multiples of that investment in future savings arising from the fact this is real and not cyber.
It will be a load of bollox with a bunch of dimwitted donkeys talking lots of hot air and quaffing fine wines, food , etc, whilst using the CO2 amount of a large country and filling their wallets with expenses. End result of all the windbaggery will be the square root of feck all.
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.
Which is why solar is not the solution for the UK. Because winter is when our demand is at its peak.
Once we have sufficient tidal and wind to supply all our winter energy demands, including switching off gas central heating and going to electric heating, in the winter - then just how much of a shortfall requiring solar do you think will exist in the summer?
Or would we already have sufficient clean energy energy demands for the summer anyway once the issues for winter are resolved?
Our emissions per capita at 5.5 tons/person/year are one of the lowest in the developed world. Canada, probably the wokest nation on earth is absolubtely shocking for it's per capita energy use.
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...)
Yes, but with upcoming solar panels, you'll be looking at efficiencies of well over 30%, so you might see an uplift of 50% on what current systems produce, which will shift the overall (though not the relative) calculation, making them a bit less useless for a given property in the winter.
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 have solar thermal only, not having the roof space for solar PV. It delivers free hot water pretty much regardless of the weather during the summer, late spring and early autumn. From October to March it works fine on days with some sunshine, even in mid winter, and gets the water close to temperature even on bright cloudy days. When it’s dark and overcast I need the gas to finish the job, but even in such days it is surprising that in the middle of the day it does chug away delivering some benefit.
So I agree that it’s wrong to say it is useless in winter.
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.
That's entirely plausible and we'll be there once that's happening. Though once again we come back to requiring land being made available for this kind of thing.
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.
That's entirely plausible and we'll be there once that's happening. Though once again we come back to requiring land being made available for this kind of thing.
Surely the land is there. It's occupied by things called "petrol stations"
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.
That's entirely plausible and we'll be there once that's happening. Though once again we come back to requiring land being made available for this kind of thing.
Petrol stations are designed around the fact that the pumps* are expensive - so space is left for queuing anyway. With electric charging, the equipment costs much less, so you can have one charger per car on the premises.
So your hypothetical small, 4 pump station has the land space for at least a dozen electric charging stalls - think a mini carpark.
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.
True (although over time it could get pretty close). But what fraction of car-owning households keep their car off-road overnight? That fraction will rarely need to leave home to recharge, so demand will be lower too.
And it if turns out that the recharge station at Sainsburys lacks capacity, then the obvious thing to do is add capacity (there, or elsewhere).
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
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 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.
Jesus yes. Burnergate. I was just this morning trying to work out why Labour have smashed through the polling into this sudden, incredible lead. And then I remembered, with a chilly shiver
BURNERGATE
Realising how street some posters on PB weren't was recompense enough for me.
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.
Yep. But what's the problem. If charging infrastructure still sucks at the point at which new ICE cars are no longer sold, then there's a problem. Not until then. I'll be very susprised if that's the case (if it is, then any sane government will either make the infrastructure happen or backtrack quickly on banning ICE cars).
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.
I must have either missed that or have some memory issues!
Edit: D'oh, yes I do remember... I guess government by burner phone would have been trickier in the 90s, coverage at Chequers might have been a bit iffy.
Duckspeak heard today on the BBC (said in earnest tone): "The science shows that climate change is already here."
Er yes mate. As if nobody in their 40s would notice that blossom appears on trees about two months earlier now than it did when they were children, unless they had some d*ckhead on the radio to invoke the great god "Science" in their lughole. And as if nobody has heard about things like the, duh, ice ages either, or the ice fairs on the Thames. The climate has always changed. It's as if those who speak in front of microphones have vanishingly little care for meaning - just gob off the buzzphrases and do it with exhortation and a sense of urgency.
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.
That's entirely plausible and we'll be there once that's happening. Though once again we come back to requiring land being made available for this kind of thing.
Surely the land is there. It's occupied by things called "petrol stations"
Do you think that a 20 stall fast charging station, which will have the same approximate throughput as a 4 pump petrol station, would be the same size?
Not to forget that people may be happy to be at a petrol station for 3-5 minutes to fully refill a vehicle but if it takes half an hour to an hour to do similar for an electric one then you're going to need more facilities to entertain people and have them willing to be there.
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.
Which is why solar is not the solution for the UK. Because winter is when our demand is at its peak.
Once we have sufficient tidal and wind to supply all our winter energy demands, including switching off gas central heating and going to electric heating, in the winter - then just how much of a shortfall requiring solar do you think will exist in the summer?
Or would we already have sufficient clean energy energy demands for the summer anyway once the issues for winter are resolved?
I think offshore wind is targeted for 40Gw capacity by 2030.
But I'm not going down the "what is that in reality" rabbithole.
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.
Which is why solar is not the solution for the UK. Because winter is when our demand is at its peak.
Once we have sufficient tidal and wind to supply all our winter energy demands, including switching off gas central heating and going to electric heating, in the winter - then just how much of a shortfall requiring solar do you think will exist in the summer?
Or would we already have sufficient clean energy energy demands for the summer anyway once the issues for winter are resolved?
I think offshore wind is targeted for 40Gw capacity by 2030.
But I'm not going down the "what is that in reality" rabbithole.
That's precisely my point. 40Gw of capacity by 2030 would provide over 100% of our current electricity demand.
Obviously storage etc will be needed to ensure that energy is available when the wind isn't blowing, but that's offsetting demand and supply by a matter of hours or days at the most - not six months as its offset with solar from peak demand to peak supply.
If we reach the point within a decade that we have sufficient wind capacity to get us through the winter, even with electric heating, then it seems exceptionally unlikely that we won't have sufficient capacity to get us through the summer too.
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.
Jesus yes. Burnergate. I was just this morning trying to work out why Labour have smashed through the polling into this sudden, incredible lead. And then I remembered, with a chilly shiver
BURNERGATE
Realising how street some posters on PB weren't was recompense enough for me.
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Plus it works well in conjunction with wind. Get surplus wind to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, use that hydrogen to provide energy wherever electricity doesn't work.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis could also be the solution to our storage issues for when the wind isn't blowing too.
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.)
Munro Live had a video on Friday which highlights the commercial advantage it's given EU car manufacturers.
The late entrants into the market (which is probably really only GM given Ford's plans) are screwed as Tesla and the EU/ Chinese / Korean manufacturers corner the EV market.
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Hydrogen lost the race for cars. In terms of actually getting viable systems on the road, I think they will lose to all-battery-systems* there as well.
*Hydrogen powered vehicles are generally hybrid electric vehicles, with a fuel cell charging a battery. The battery has to be substantial to allow smooth startup and shutdown of the fuel cell system and for regenerative braking.
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Plus it works well in conjunction with wind. Get surplus wind to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, use that hydrogen to provide energy wherever electricity doesn't work.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis could also be the solution to our storage issues for when the wind isn't blowing too.
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
Are you sure there won't be a rush to acquire one just before the ban if electric cars are perceived to be worse?
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
How many people actually buy new cars these days? Doesn't everyone just lease them for three years and then get a new one? So the end consumers won't care about the value of the cars crashing as they don't own them.
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Plus it works well in conjunction with wind. Get surplus wind to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, use that hydrogen to provide energy wherever electricity doesn't work.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis could also be the solution to our storage issues for when the wind isn't blowing too.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis is so incredibly inefficient, due to basic thermodynamics/chemistry, that almost any other method of storing energy is better.
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Plus it works well in conjunction with wind. Get surplus wind to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, use that hydrogen to provide energy wherever electricity doesn't work.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis could also be the solution to our storage issues for when the wind isn't blowing too.
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
How many people actually buy new cars these days? Doesn't everyone just lease them for three years and then get a new one? So the end consumers won't care about the value of the cars crashing as they don't own them.
Someone has to buy the three year old car, though, otherwise the cost of the lease will be, er, interesting.
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
How many people actually buy new cars these days? Doesn't everyone just lease them for three years and then get a new one? So the end consumers won't care about the value of the cars crashing as they don't own them.
In which case lease companies will not want to buy them (or rather, will price the risk of excessive depreciation into the lease terms).
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
How many people actually buy new cars these days? Doesn't everyone just lease them for three years and then get a new one? So the end consumers won't care about the value of the cars crashing as they don't own them.
Someone has to buy the three year old car, though, otherwise the cost of the lease will be, er, interesting.
Yes, so in the not too distant future we're looking at a big disruption to the market whether the end consumer wants change or not.
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.
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.
Which is why solar is not the solution for the UK. Because winter is when our demand is at its peak.
Once we have sufficient tidal and wind to supply all our winter energy demands, including switching off gas central heating and going to electric heating, in the winter - then just how much of a shortfall requiring solar do you think will exist in the summer?
Or would we already have sufficient clean energy energy demands for the summer anyway once the issues for winter are resolved?
I think offshore wind is targeted for 40Gw capacity by 2030.
But I'm not going down the "what is that in reality" rabbithole.
That's precisely my point. 40Gw of capacity by 2030 would provide over 100% of our current electricity demand.
Obviously storage etc will be needed to ensure that energy is available when the wind isn't blowing, but that's offsetting demand and supply by a matter of hours or days at the most - not six months as its offset with solar from peak demand to peak supply.
If we reach the point within a decade that we have sufficient wind capacity to get us through the winter, even with electric heating, then it seems exceptionally unlikely that we won't have sufficient capacity to get us through the summer too.
We also need to cover eg heating, though. It is "energy demand" we have to cover not "electricity demand".
And - to visit my rabbithole - wind only delivers a fraction of peak capacity of perhaps 25%. Not sure what the exact no is off the top of my head.
To use typical numbers for a mid-demand family of today 12000 kWh in gas and perhaps 3.5kWh electric, that could be 8 kWh per annum once all electric with a CoP of 3 on a heat pump, and significantly less once we have the housing stock renovated reasonably.
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.
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.
Which is why solar is not the solution for the UK. Because winter is when our demand is at its peak.
Once we have sufficient tidal and wind to supply all our winter energy demands, including switching off gas central heating and going to electric heating, in the winter - then just how much of a shortfall requiring solar do you think will exist in the summer?
Or would we already have sufficient clean energy energy demands for the summer anyway once the issues for winter are resolved?
I think offshore wind is targeted for 40Gw capacity by 2030.
But I'm not going down the "what is that in reality" rabbithole.
That's precisely my point. 40Gw of capacity by 2030 would provide over 100% of our current electricity demand.
Obviously storage etc will be needed to ensure that energy is available when the wind isn't blowing, but that's offsetting demand and supply by a matter of hours or days at the most - not six months as its offset with solar from peak demand to peak supply.
If we reach the point within a decade that we have sufficient wind capacity to get us through the winter, even with electric heating, then it seems exceptionally unlikely that we won't have sufficient capacity to get us through the summer too.
The seasonal variation in wind power is greater than the seasonal variation in demand.
I expect this will be even more the case when all cars are electric, though if heating goes all electric it might not be - but we'd need a lot more than 40GW of generation at that stage.
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...)
Yes, but with upcoming solar panels, you'll be looking at efficiencies of well over 30%, so you might see an uplift of 50% on what current systems produce, which will shift the overall (though not the relative) calculation, making them a bit less useless for a given property in the winter.
They will still be plug ugly though.
In-roof solar significantly fixes that if done well, and saves on the same area of roof tiles.
And does not have the horrible costs of solar roof tiles.
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Plus it works well in conjunction with wind. Get surplus wind to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, use that hydrogen to provide energy wherever electricity doesn't work.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis could also be the solution to our storage issues for when the wind isn't blowing too.
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Hydrogen lost the race for cars. In terms of actually getting viable systems on the road, I think they will lose to all-battery-systems* there as well.
*Hydrogen powered vehicles are generally hybrid electric vehicles, with a fuel cell charging a battery. The battery has to be substantial to allow smooth startup and shutdown of the fuel cell system and for regenerative braking.
You need to watch that Harry's Garage video - JCB aren't using hybrid electric vehicles, they are simply using hydrogen as a replacement for diesel / petrol.
And you will see why I say petrol once you watch the video...
Yes, a report from 2018 saying there is a lack of HGV drivers across Europe, and it will get worse each year as drivers retire, and that expecting Eastern Europeans to fill the void is wrong headed
“ Tim Philips, director of Duma Consulting and former chief executive of Freightex, wrote, in a commentary in the report, that simply bringing in drivers from East Europe has, in turn, created a similar gap in the markets they left.
“This is currently being partially filled by drivers from further afield, such as Ukraine. However this is not an inexhaustible supply and there are trucks parked up with no drivers,” he adds.”
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
Are you sure there won't be a rush to acquire one just before the ban if electric cars are perceived to be worse?
Was there a rush hor high power vacuum cleaners before the ban? How about incandescent light bulbs? (Serious question, as both were hyped up a bit beforehand but I'm not sure whether there was, in fact, any evidence of a rush)
Yes, a report from 2018 saying there is a lack of HGV drivers across Europe, and it will get worse each year as drivers retire, and that expecting Eastern Europeans to fill the void is wrong headed
“ Tim Philips, director of Duma Consulting and former chief executive of Freightex, wrote, in a commentary in the report, that simply bringing in drivers from East Europe has, in turn, created a similar gap in the markets they left.
“This is currently being partially filled by drivers from further afield, such as Ukraine. However this is not an inexhaustible supply and there are trucks parked up with no drivers,” he adds.”
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Hydrogen lost the race for cars. In terms of actually getting viable systems on the road, I think they will lose to all-battery-systems* there as well.
*Hydrogen powered vehicles are generally hybrid electric vehicles, with a fuel cell charging a battery. The battery has to be substantial to allow smooth startup and shutdown of the fuel cell system and for regenerative braking.
You need to watch that Harry's Garage video - JCB aren't using hybrid electric vehicles, they are simply using hydrogen as a replacement for diesel / petrol.
And you will see why I say petrol once you watch the video...
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Hydrogen lost the race for cars. In terms of actually getting viable systems on the road, I think they will lose to all-battery-systems* there as well.
*Hydrogen powered vehicles are generally hybrid electric vehicles, with a fuel cell charging a battery. The battery has to be substantial to allow smooth startup and shutdown of the fuel cell system and for regenerative braking.
You need to watch that Harry's Garage video - JCB aren't using hybrid electric vehicles, they are simply using hydrogen as a replacement for diesel / petrol.
And you will see why I say petrol once you watch the video...
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
Are you sure there won't be a rush to acquire one just before the ban if electric cars are perceived to be worse?
Was there a rush hor high power vacuum cleaners before the ban? How about incandescent light bulbs? (Serious question, as both were hyped up a bit beforehand but I'm not sure whether there was, in fact, any evidence of a rush)
My father-in-law still has a good stash of 100W bulbs, but I can't say whether that happened nationally.
I can't see a slightly less noisy vacuum cleaner being a particularly big problem for anyone, but people do get rather attached to their vehicles...
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
Which is why values of collectible cars are going up #SaveTheV8s
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Hydrogen lost the race for cars. In terms of actually getting viable systems on the road, I think they will lose to all-battery-systems* there as well.
*Hydrogen powered vehicles are generally hybrid electric vehicles, with a fuel cell charging a battery. The battery has to be substantial to allow smooth startup and shutdown of the fuel cell system and for regenerative braking.
You need to watch that Harry's Garage video - JCB aren't using hybrid electric vehicles, they are simply using hydrogen as a replacement for diesel / petrol.
And you will see why I say petrol once you watch the video...
How do they solve the hydrogen storage challenge?
Never seen a gas canister? - it's the same approach, watch the video...
OT I've just seen the medallists arrive off the plane on Sky News. Very enjoyable. I wonder where the non-medallists were. Do they have to travel by containership for 6 weeks?
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
The solution for a lot of years was it's not a problem because the drivers albeit old existed.
Then the older drivers started to retire and the younger ones found that local parcel delivery paid nearly the same while allowing you to go home every night.
OT I've just seen the medallists arrive off the plane on Sky News. Very enjoyable. I wonder where the non-medallists were. Do they have to travel by containership for 6 weeks?
They're on a Wizz Air flight that connects to a Ryanair one and flies them into Southend!
OT I've just seen the medallists arrive off the plane on Sky News. Very enjoyable. I wonder where the non-medallists were. Do they have to travel by containership for 6 weeks?
Flying back economy from Tokyo is probably punishment enough, it’s a 13 or 14 hour flight, to then be bundled out of the back of the plane onto a bus, with no ceremony….
OT I've just seen the medallists arrive off the plane on Sky News. Very enjoyable. I wonder where the non-medallists were. Do they have to travel by containership for 6 weeks?
Flying back economy from Tokyo is probably punishment enough, it’s a 13 or 14 hour flight, to then be bundled out of the back of the plane onto a bus, with no ceremony….
I can only assume someone is following them ringing a handbell chanting "shame... shame..."
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Hydrogen lost the race for cars. In terms of actually getting viable systems on the road, I think they will lose to all-battery-systems* there as well.
*Hydrogen powered vehicles are generally hybrid electric vehicles, with a fuel cell charging a battery. The battery has to be substantial to allow smooth startup and shutdown of the fuel cell system and for regenerative braking.
You need to watch that Harry's Garage video - JCB aren't using hybrid electric vehicles, they are simply using hydrogen as a replacement for diesel / petrol.
And you will see why I say petrol once you watch the video...
How do they solve the hydrogen storage challenge?
Never seen a gas canister? - it's the same approach, watch the video...
The issue is range. Either how compress the hydrogen to insane pressures - which looses alot of energy, unless you use the pressure to provide power. Which leads to some interesting engineering challenges. And also means that the cylinders are bombs....
Or you use cryo hydrogen which is also fun, fun, fun....
IN either case, hydrogen is not really easy to store large amounts of, in a small volume.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
The solution for a lot of years was it's not a problem because the drivers albeit old existed.
Then the older drivers started to retire and the younger ones found that local parcel delivery paid nearly the same while allowing you to go home every night.
Yes, and with the boom in home delivery for general goods and food across the whole continent those opportunities in local parcel delivery will have been taking in almost all of the drivers who may well have gone down the HGV route.
It's quaint to think that the UK is somehow special and that we're having all of these massive problems that aren't replicated basically everywhere in the world but that isn't the case. The whole long distance logistics industry is grappling with drivers realising they get paid a pittance to do what they do and delivering local is not only paid better in a lot of cases, it's also easier and less stressful.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
The solution for a lot of years was it's not a problem because the drivers albeit old existed.
Then the older drivers started to retire and the younger ones found that local parcel delivery paid nearly the same while allowing you to go home every night.
OT I've just seen the medallists arrive off the plane on Sky News. Very enjoyable. I wonder where the non-medallists were. Do they have to travel by containership for 6 weeks?
Flying back economy from Tokyo is probably punishment enough, it’s a 13 or 14 hour flight, to then be bundled out of the back of the plane onto a bus, with no ceremony….
I can only assume someone is following them ringing a handbell chanting "shame... shame..."
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
I was speaking to my friend who works high up at Asda and he Brexit has paid a part, in descending order,
1) A shortage of drivers due to Brexit as drivers decide to stay in the EU.
2) Plenty of drivers don't want to sit in customs for ages, especially when you can (and did) seamlessly cross the EU border until last December and still can if your destination isn't to and/or from GB.
3) Because we test so much (much more than our EU neighbours) we're losing more drivers to isolation than anywhere else.
4) There's only so many hours a driver can drive, given the shortage, there's not enough slack in the system to pick up. It's not easy to train from scratch, there's a world of difference between driving refrigerated stuff vs. dry stuff vs. electronics etc. It isn't a case of hurrah you've passed your HGV test now go and drive hundreds of miles, you have to build up the knowledge and experience.
5) He expects the Army to be called up, apparently the government is scared shitless about empty shelves, it destroys their narrative.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
The solution for a lot of years was it's not a problem because the drivers albeit old existed.
Then the older drivers started to retire and the younger ones found that local parcel delivery paid nearly the same while allowing you to go home every night.
Yes, and with the boom in home delivery for general goods and food across the whole continent those opportunities in local parcel delivery will have been taking in almost all of the drivers who may well have gone down the HGV route.
It's quaint to think that the UK is somehow special and that we're having all of these massive problems that aren't replicated basically everywhere in the world but that isn't the case. The whole long distance logistics industry is grappling with drivers realising they get paid a pittance to do what they do and delivering local is not only paid better in a lot of cases, it's also easier and less stressful.
The retiring generation are those who simply loved being on the road.
The next generation don’t as much think like that, they know they can earn unlimited overtime and be home every night doing local work in a van, or else they go into the more specialist areas such as the petrol tankers and other dangerous or oversized loads.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
I was speaking to my friend who works high up at Asda and he Brexit has paid a part, in descending order,
1) A shortage of drivers due to Brexit as drivers decide to stay in the EU.
2) Plenty of drivers don't want to sit in customs for ages, especially when you can (and did) seamlessly cross the EU border until last December and still can if your destination isn't to and/or from GB.
3) Because we test so much (much more than our EU neighbours) we're losing more drivers to isolation than anywhere else.
4) There's only so many hours a driver can drive, given the shortage, there's not enough slack in the system to pick up. It's not easy to train from scratch, there's a world of difference between driving refrigerated stuff vs. dry stuff vs. electronics etc. It isn't a case of hurrah you've passed your HGV test now go and drive hundreds of miles, you have to build up the knowledge and experience.
5) He expects the Army to be called up, apparently the government is scared shitless about empty shelves, it destroys their narrative.
Calling the Army up isn't going to fix the issue.
Adding 2,000 more poorly trained (for say refrigerated or long distance loads) army drivers, just isn't enough to resolve all the issues and it would make the gaps even more obvious as news stories focussed on any and all gaps that appeared once the army starts driving those lorries.
The Government would be well advised to leave such stupid ideas behind.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
The solution for a lot of years was it's not a problem because the drivers albeit old existed.
Then the older drivers started to retire and the younger ones found that local parcel delivery paid nearly the same while allowing you to go home every night.
Indeed.
Seems like there's a possible solution there.
I'm not massively invested in this and have only had a passing look at the issue, my best guess is that logistics will look a lot less hub/spoke for production/delivery in the future. Another aspect is that if the cost of transportation of basic goods rises to realistic levels it will make local producers much more competitive, businesses that can deliver within 20-30 miles of where they are based rather than 2000-3000 miles will have a leg up in their market.
This isn't just something that will change the UK, it's going to affect all of Europe and the US as it will force companies to buy local and people to shop local. If we're talking about climate change it's got to be better to import less.
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
How many people actually buy new cars these days? Doesn't everyone just lease them for three years and then get a new one? So the end consumers won't care about the value of the cars crashing as they don't own them.
Your monthly lease cost is dependent on what the leasing company can get out of the car in 3 years. If it is going to be worth square root of f all, the consumer is going to be the one paying for that, not the leasing company.
Mr. Max, could be wrong, but for those very concerned with carbon dioxide I've read that transport actually contributes way less than most people imagine and other areas are significantly more important.
Not saying your line doesn't have force. I suspect it'll affect a lot of people who will think just that, but I'm unsure whether the numbers stack up.
Good tack for local businesses, though. Buying British becomes less nationalistic and more "better save the planet" but wrapped in a Union Jack.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
I was speaking to my friend who works high up at Asda and he Brexit has paid a part, in descending order,
1) A shortage of drivers due to Brexit as drivers decide to stay in the EU.
2) Plenty of drivers don't want to sit in customs for ages, especially when you can (and did) seamlessly cross the EU border until last December and still can if your destination isn't to and/or from GB.
3) Because we test so much (much more than our EU neighbours) we're losing more drivers to isolation than anywhere else.
4) There's only so many hours a driver can drive, given the shortage, there's not enough slack in the system to pick up. It's not easy to train from scratch, there's a world of difference between driving refrigerated stuff vs. dry stuff vs. electronics etc. It isn't a case of hurrah you've passed your HGV test now go and drive hundreds of miles, you have to build up the knowledge and experience.
5) He expects the Army to be called up, apparently the government is scared shitless about empty shelves, it destroys their narrative.
Honestly, part of the solution is to just stop testing everyone so much. We've got ourselves into a ridiculous situation where being double vaccinated isn't enough to get on with life.
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
How many people actually buy new cars these days? Doesn't everyone just lease them for three years and then get a new one? So the end consumers won't care about the value of the cars crashing as they don't own them.
Your monthly lease cost is dependent on what the leasing company can get out of the car in 3 years.
Yes, so the disruption will be to the leasing companies. Mr and Mrs average with 2.4 kids will be a bit annoyed when they come to get a new car and find that they will either have to pay through the nose for an ICE or pay through the nose for an electric vehicle that isn't nearly as convenient as their old car.
I think the second hand ICE market might become quite big.
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
I was speaking to my friend who works high up at Asda and he Brexit has paid a part, in descending order,
1) A shortage of drivers due to Brexit as drivers decide to stay in the EU.
2) Plenty of drivers don't want to sit in customs for ages, especially when you can (and did) seamlessly cross the EU border until last December and still can if your destination isn't to and/or from GB.
3) Because we test so much (much more than our EU neighbours) we're losing more drivers to isolation than anywhere else.
4) There's only so many hours a driver can drive, given the shortage, there's not enough slack in the system to pick up. It's not easy to train from scratch, there's a world of difference between driving refrigerated stuff vs. dry stuff vs. electronics etc. It isn't a case of hurrah you've passed your HGV test now go and drive hundreds of miles, you have to build up the knowledge and experience.
5) He expects the Army to be called up, apparently the government is scared shitless about empty shelves, it destroys their narrative.
Calling the Army up isn't going to fix the issue.
Adding 2,000 more poorly trained (for say refrigerated or long distance loads) army drivers, just isn't enough to resolve all the issues and it would make the gaps even more obvious as news stories focussed on any and all gaps that appeared once the army starts driving those lorries.
The Government would be well advised to leave such stupid ideas behind.
You and I know that but the experts in government and their fans on here think it will fix it short term, and this government is all about short term.
I was chatting to a friend who seems to know about electric cars and he was suggesting that as the years pass the batteries degrade to the point the car is worthless and there will be a huge problem with disposing of all the dead batteries
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
The solution for a lot of years was it's not a problem because the drivers albeit old existed.
Then the older drivers started to retire and the younger ones found that local parcel delivery paid nearly the same while allowing you to go home every night.
Indeed.
Seems like there's a possible solution there.
Supermarkets should start shipping everything via DPD?
That doesn't mean it isn't still true. In fact I'd be shocked if it wasn't given the market dynamics and boom in home delivery and general lack of investment in supply chain logistics across the whole continent. The solution has always been to throw cheap labour at it, it's well past time to look at a new way of doing business.
I was speaking to my friend who works high up at Asda and he Brexit has paid a part, in descending order,
1) A shortage of drivers due to Brexit as drivers decide to stay in the EU.
2) Plenty of drivers don't want to sit in customs for ages, especially when you can (and did) seamlessly cross the EU border until last December and still can if your destination isn't to and/or from GB.
3) Because we test so much (much more than our EU neighbours) we're losing more drivers to isolation than anywhere else.
4) There's only so many hours a driver can drive, given the shortage, there's not enough slack in the system to pick up. It's not easy to train from scratch, there's a world of difference between driving refrigerated stuff vs. dry stuff vs. electronics etc. It isn't a case of hurrah you've passed your HGV test now go and drive hundreds of miles, you have to build up the knowledge and experience.
5) He expects the Army to be called up, apparently the government is scared shitless about empty shelves, it destroys their narrative.
Calling the Army up isn't going to fix the issue.
Adding 2,000 more poorly trained (for say refrigerated or long distance loads) army drivers, just isn't enough to resolve all the issues and it would make the gaps even more obvious as news stories focussed on any and all gaps that appeared once the army starts driving those lorries.
The Government would be well advised to leave such stupid ideas behind.
You and I know that but the experts in government and their fans on here think it will fix it short term, and this government is all about short term.
Any editor is going to go
Day 1 - photos of army driving lorries for XYZ Day 2 onwards, photos of empty shelves in XYZ
I was chatting to a friend who seems to know about electric cars and he was suggesting that as the years pass the batteries degrade to the point the car is worthless and there will be a huge problem with disposing of all the dead batteries
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
Battery degradation is an issue, but as with anything, if there is a sudden surge in spent batteries, there will be opportunities for recycling materials from same.
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?
They aren't banning the engine, only the sale of new cars etc. There will be a lot of legacy cars about up to 10 years after the ban. I also think the car companies need a push in the right direction, as it is so easy for them to remain in a rut. I also suspect that you won't be able to buy a new ICE car well before the ban takes place, the companies will not want to be landed with a stock of useless cars.
Even 3 - 5 years before the ban comes in sales of ICE cars will crater. You wouldn't want to be holding on to one that wasn't somehow collectible.
How many people actually buy new cars these days? Doesn't everyone just lease them for three years and then get a new one? So the end consumers won't care about the value of the cars crashing as they don't own them.
Your monthly lease cost is dependent on what the leasing company can get out of the car in 3 years. If it is going to be worth square root of f all, the consumer is going to be the one paying for that, not the leasing company.
This.
Prior to purchasing my JCW Mini, I had a top of the range VW Passat estate that cost me £120 a month because VW leasing had entered the wrong value in the value at 3 years box.
About 300 people were able to get orders through to the extent that VW couldn't turn them down before they fixed the error.
Afternoon all. I've just come to (almost) the end of my car lease and done a swap. Thought hard about an electric car, but was talked out of it...... think the salesman wanted to get rid of stock. However, while we spend most of our time pootling about Essex, we also make trips to North West England and North Wales and those areas are where, at the moment, charging points are fewer and further between. And I don't want to be dependent on the good nature of my wife's relations to recharge the car.
I was chatting to a friend who seems to know about electric cars and he was suggesting that as the years pass the batteries degrade to the point the car is worthless and there will be a huge problem with disposing of all the dead batteries
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
That is one of the things Tesla (and others) has fixed over the years. Battery life isn't the issue that it was in the early Nissan Leaf days.
I was chatting to a friend who seems to know about electric cars and he was suggesting that as the years pass the batteries degrade to the point the car is worthless and there will be a huge problem with disposing of all the dead batteries
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
Partially true. The batteries do degrade over time, but not as much as was feared a decade or so ago. Tesla taxis have run up half a million miles in the States. They’re finding uses for recycling them too, such as domestic power storage using solar energy to recharge the car at night.
What is true is that very few EVs make it to 10 years, compared to ICE cars. The cost of a replacement battery pack writes them off mechanically, so people are being very wary of older EVs.
I was chatting to a friend who seems to know about electric cars and he was suggesting that as the years pass the batteries degrade to the point the car is worthless and there will be a huge problem with disposing of all the dead batteries
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
It says in the Telegraph the buggers weigh so much you can't get them off the ground with a jack without twisting the chassis. Flat tyres become an issue.
I was chatting to a friend who seems to know about electric cars and he was suggesting that as the years pass the batteries degrade to the point the car is worthless and there will be a huge problem with disposing of all the dead batteries
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
Some electric vehicles has been running on the road for decades.
Loss of range of around 1% per year has been observed. The reason for this is largely that for sensible designs, water cooling/heating of the battery keeps a steady ambient temperature. It's the getting hot bit that kills the battery in phone/laptop.
The cost of a battery replacement has dropped from "price of a new car" to a few thousand pounds.
Battery recycling is beginning to become a thing. There is considerable value in the battery from Priuses, for example.
I was chatting to a friend who seems to know about electric cars and he was suggesting that as the years pass the batteries degrade to the point the car is worthless and there will be a huge problem with disposing of all the dead batteries
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
Extracting and reprocessing lithium seems like a huge, huge opportunity in the next 5-7 years. It's a tiny market right now but it could become really competitive with newly extracted lithium in the near future.
I think their take is vaccines / vaccine passports / any demands for testing etc is akin to lockdown. Maybe I am overthinking the antivaxxer nutter position.
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However, I do think you're overestimating the power we have around us. The late David MacKay's book (free for download from the link below) is dated, but I don't think the efficiency of solar or wind has increased that much.
https://www.withouthotair.com/download.html
"Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand and in supply."
Association of Field Position and Career Length With Risk of Neurodegenerative Disease in Male Former Professional Soccer Players
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2782750
In this cohort study of 30 704 male individuals, 386 of 7676 former soccer players (5.0%) and 366 of 23 028 matched population control individuals (1.6%) were identified with a neurodegenerative disease diagnosis (hazard ratio [HR], 3.66; 95% CI, 2.88-4.65; P < .001). Compared with the risk among general population control individuals, risk of neurodegenerative disease was highest for defenders (HR, 4.98; 95% CI, 3.18-7.79; P < .001) and lowest for goalkeepers (HR, 1.83; 95% CI, 0.93-3.60; P = .08). Regarding career length, risk was highest among former soccer players with professional career lengths longer than 15 years (HR, 5.20; 95% CI, 3.17-8.51; P < .001). Regarding playing era, risk remained similar for all players born between 1910 and 1969....
BURNERGATE
Once we have sufficient tidal and wind to supply all our winter energy demands, including switching off gas central heating and going to electric heating, in the winter - then just how much of a shortfall requiring solar do you think will exist in the summer?
Or would we already have sufficient clean energy energy demands for the summer anyway once the issues for winter are resolved?
https://twitter.com/tristanbaurick/status/1423746109160280067
So I agree that it’s wrong to say it is useless in winter.
Incidentally, this is not a fuel cell, but more of a traditional diesel engine altered to use hydrogen, which should be much cheaper.
It might be that batteries work well for cars, but larger vehicles require hydrogen or other systems.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry-news-tech,-development-and-manufacturing/jcb-unveils-hydrogen-fuelled-combustion
https://www.jcb.com/en-gb/news/2020/07/jcb-leads-the-way-with-first-hydrogen-fuelled-excavator
So your hypothetical small, 4 pump station has the land space for at least a dozen electric charging stalls - think a mini carpark.
*And the tanks that feed them etc.
And it if turns out that the recharge station at Sainsburys lacks capacity, then the obvious thing to do is add capacity (there, or elsewhere).
Edit: D'oh, yes I do remember... I guess government by burner phone would have been trickier in the 90s, coverage at Chequers might have been a bit iffy.
Er yes mate. As if nobody in their 40s would notice that blossom appears on trees about two months earlier now than it did when they were children, unless they had some d*ckhead on the radio to invoke the great god "Science" in their lughole. And as if nobody has heard about things like the, duh, ice ages either, or the ice fairs on the Thames. The climate has always changed. It's as if those who speak in front of microphones have vanishingly little care for meaning - just gob off the buzzphrases and do it with exhortation and a sense of urgency.
Not to forget that people may be happy to be at a petrol station for 3-5 minutes to fully refill a vehicle but if it takes half an hour to an hour to do similar for an electric one then you're going to need more facilities to entertain people and have them willing to be there.
But I'm not going down the "what is that in reality" rabbithole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Q7nAYjAJY
For HGVs it's probably a way better bet than trying to convert them to electric, you won't have the X hour downtime otherwise required.
Obviously storage etc will be needed to ensure that energy is available when the wind isn't blowing, but that's offsetting demand and supply by a matter of hours or days at the most - not six months as its offset with solar from peak demand to peak supply.
If we reach the point within a decade that we have sufficient wind capacity to get us through the winter, even with electric heating, then it seems exceptionally unlikely that we won't have sufficient capacity to get us through the summer too.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis could also be the solution to our storage issues for when the wind isn't blowing too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNHQOyz5TcY
The late entrants into the market (which is probably really only GM given Ford's plans) are screwed as Tesla and the EU/ Chinese / Korean manufacturers corner the EV market.
*Hydrogen powered vehicles are generally hybrid electric vehicles, with a fuel cell charging a battery. The battery has to be substantial to allow smooth startup and shutdown of the fuel cell system and for regenerative braking.
https://twitter.com/moonmelon1/status/1424666135774076928?s=19
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8VuTBiXEAcNKqS?format=jpg&name=large
https://insideevs.com/news/486824/norwegian-tests-korean-evs-more-efficient-winter/
And - to visit my rabbithole - wind only delivers a fraction of peak capacity of perhaps 25%. Not sure what the exact no is off the top of my head.
To use typical numbers for a mid-demand family of today 12000 kWh in gas and perhaps 3.5kWh electric, that could be 8 kWh per annum once all electric with a CoP of 3 on a heat pump, and significantly less once we have the housing stock renovated reasonably.
It is modelled, but that is a decent ballpark.
https://www.naf.no/elbil/aktuelt/elbiltest/ev-winter-range-test-2020/
I expect this will be even more the case when all cars are electric, though if heating goes all electric it might not be - but we'd need a lot more than 40GW of generation at that stage.
And does not have the horrible costs of solar roof tiles. Don't tell Euro-Twitter.
The rain at the weekend was due to Brexit !
And you will see why I say petrol once you watch the video...
“ Tim Philips, director of Duma Consulting and former chief executive of Freightex, wrote, in a commentary in the report, that simply bringing in drivers from East Europe has, in turn, created a similar gap in the markets they left.
“This is currently being partially filled by drivers from further afield, such as Ukraine. However this is not an inexhaustible supply and there are trucks parked up with no drivers,” he adds.”
https://www.bifa.org/news/articles/2018/dec/truck-driver-shortage-crisis-now-spreading-across-the-whole-of-europe
So it wasn’t Brexit
(Serious question, as both were hyped up a bit beforehand but I'm not sure whether there was, in fact, any evidence of a rush)
https://www.jcb.com/en-gb/news/2018/04/jcb-sparks-huge-interest-with-its-first-ever-electric-digger
The question is which tech wins in the race to the bigger vehicles.
EDIT - you can actually buy the electric one, now.
I can't see a slightly less noisy vacuum cleaner being a particularly big problem for anyone, but people do get rather attached to their vehicles...
https://www.bifa.org/news/articles/2018/dec/truck-driver-shortage-crisis-now-spreading-across-the-whole-of-europe
So easy to check stuff like this.
I've just seen the medallists arrive off the plane on Sky News. Very enjoyable. I wonder where the non-medallists were. Do they have to travel by containership for 6 weeks?
Mike's taking a two week holiday starting the end of the month.
You have all been warned.
So the Russians invade the rest of Ukraine, Iran develops the bomb, and aliens land in early September all nailed on.
Then the older drivers started to retire and the younger ones found that local parcel delivery paid nearly the same while allowing you to go home every night.
Or you use cryo hydrogen which is also fun, fun, fun....
IN either case, hydrogen is not really easy to store large amounts of, in a small volume.
It's quaint to think that the UK is somehow special and that we're having all of these massive problems that aren't replicated basically everywhere in the world but that isn't the case. The whole long distance logistics industry is grappling with drivers realising they get paid a pittance to do what they do and delivering local is not only paid better in a lot of cases, it's also easier and less stressful.
Seems like there's a possible solution there.
1) A shortage of drivers due to Brexit as drivers decide to stay in the EU.
2) Plenty of drivers don't want to sit in customs for ages, especially when you can (and did) seamlessly cross the EU border until last December and still can if your destination isn't to and/or from GB.
3) Because we test so much (much more than our EU neighbours) we're losing more drivers to isolation than anywhere else.
4) There's only so many hours a driver can drive, given the shortage, there's not enough slack in the system to pick up. It's not easy to train from scratch, there's a world of difference between driving refrigerated stuff vs. dry stuff vs. electronics etc. It isn't a case of hurrah you've passed your HGV test now go and drive hundreds of miles, you have to build up the knowledge and experience.
5) He expects the Army to be called up, apparently the government is scared shitless about empty shelves, it destroys their narrative.
The next generation don’t as much think like that, they know they can earn unlimited overtime and be home every night doing local work in a van, or else they go into the more specialist areas such as the petrol tankers and other dangerous or oversized loads.
Adding 2,000 more poorly trained (for say refrigerated or long distance loads) army drivers, just isn't enough to resolve all the issues and it would make the gaps even more obvious as news stories focussed on any and all gaps that appeared once the army starts driving those lorries.
The Government would be well advised to leave such stupid ideas behind.
This isn't just something that will change the UK, it's going to affect all of Europe and the US as it will force companies to buy local and people to shop local. If we're talking about climate change it's got to be better to import less.
Not saying your line doesn't have force. I suspect it'll affect a lot of people who will think just that, but I'm unsure whether the numbers stack up.
Good tack for local businesses, though. Buying British becomes less nationalistic and more "better save the planet" but wrapped in a Union Jack.
I think the second hand ICE market might become quite big.
I have no knowledge of the subject but is this a fair assessment anyone
Day 1 - photos of army driving lorries for XYZ
Day 2 onwards, photos of empty shelves in XYZ
https://twitter.com/DisorderBritain/status/1424717088082604039?s=19
Apparently the group is called "Official Voice".
Prior to purchasing my JCW Mini, I had a top of the range VW Passat estate that cost me £120 a month because VW leasing had entered the wrong value in the value at 3 years box.
About 300 people were able to get orders through to the extent that VW couldn't turn them down before they fixed the error.
I've just come to (almost) the end of my car lease and done a swap. Thought hard about an electric car, but was talked out of it...... think the salesman wanted to get rid of stock. However, while we spend most of our time pootling about Essex, we also make trips to North West England and North Wales and those areas are where, at the moment, charging points are fewer and further between.
And I don't want to be dependent on the good nature of my wife's relations to recharge the car.
What is true is that very few EVs make it to 10 years, compared to ICE cars. The cost of a replacement battery pack writes them off mechanically, so people are being very wary of older EVs.
Loss of range of around 1% per year has been observed. The reason for this is largely that for sensible designs, water cooling/heating of the battery keeps a steady ambient temperature. It's the getting hot bit that kills the battery in phone/laptop.
The cost of a battery replacement has dropped from "price of a new car" to a few thousand pounds.
Battery recycling is beginning to become a thing. There is considerable value in the battery from Priuses, for example.
(Though it was.)
Strange criticism.