Electric Car Nation

[fowler9]

I think this is all doable. 2040 is 23 years in the future. 23 years ago no one I knew had a mobile phone, my school had about 3 or 4 computers and only 1 of them was PC standard at the time, cheque books were still in regular use and I got my first cash card, hardly anyone used them in shops.

 

[43021HST]

That neatly sidesteps the issue that there was enough CO2 for plants before the Industrial Revolution, as well as the fact that the rate it's being emitted at the moment is a cause for concern, as a greenhouse gas.

It's kind of like getting a tip-up truck full of Whiskas and drowning a hundred cats in it, saying "well it's food!".

It's well known before the Industrial revolution that we didn't have plants.

 

[Busaholic]

Car prices will go the way of house prices, assuming that cars with petrol engines won't actually get banned from the roads after 2040. Just as in post-revolutionary Cuba old cars will have to be renovated and kept on the road, probably sold on the black market, etc. There will not be a situation imo where either (a) a full battery charge will render a capability of a 300 mile trip or, alternatively, (b) the ability to recharge quickly and non-exorbitantly will exist. Cars will once again become the preserve of the relatively well-off, so we better get those railway lines electrified and new ones built. I take it announcements on those fronts will be issued by our government any day now, lol.

 

[Greybeard33]

I am afraid that the price of electricity in a full developed zero-carbon system (I prefer nuclear dominated but same idea) will never fall significantly below the cost of the dominant industrial heating source.
Which is either natural gas at ~2p/kWh or petcoke at about 0.3p/kWh [although I doubt petcoke is going to take off given the environmental issues with it].

This is because you can use a FIrebrick Resistive Energy Storage (FIRES) system, essentially a giant very very high temperature, ultra cheap, storage heater based on industrial recuperators in the steel industry.

And for the record, batteries are still really bad on the efficiency front, in real life.
Additionally 'near' the point of use is not good enough, if they have to pass through the LV grid to get to the point of use you are going to get hammered since that is where the bulk of the losses are and you will have to pass through it three times to get from the generator to the user.
As opposed to once for pumped storage.

Huh? Natural gas and petcoke are both hydrocarbon fuels, so neither has any place in a zero-carbon system!

Pumped storage is a proven, efficient technology, but limited by the availability of suitable sites.

Agreed large high temperature thermal storage plants may have a future role to play in evening out supply and demand on the grid, but the technology appears to be still many years away from full scale deployment and the economics are unproven. Even if the real world energy recovery approaches the 66% claimed in your link, that is no better than two-stage point of use battery storage (static buffer batteries, charged from the grid, delivering a high rate top-up charge to the vehicle batteries at charging points). Traction batteries are here today and improving every year.

 

[HSTEd]

Huh? Natural gas and petcoke are both hydrocarbon fuels, so neither has any place in a zero-carbon system!

Then where does industrial heat for cement kilns and such come from?
Are you proposing simple resistive heating for such demands?

The price of such industrial heat will set a floor on the price of electricity.

Agreed large high temperature thermal storage plants may have a future role to play in evening out supply and demand on the grid, but the technology appears to be still many years away from full scale deployment and the economics are unproven. Even if the real world energy recovery approaches the 66% claimed in your link, that is no better than two-stage point of use battery storage (static buffer batteries, charged from the grid, delivering a high rate top-up charge to the vehicle batteries at charging points). Traction batteries are here today and improving every year.

I wasn't actually talking about that part of the link, but about the idea of the firebricks themselves and talking about using it to displace natural gas, coal and petcoke fired boilers and burners for industrial process heat.

But in any case, such a system has a titanic advantage over batteries.
It costs an order of magnitude less.
FIRES is projected to reach $5/kWh(t) easily, and probably much less than that, and given that pressure vessels made of prestressed cast iron are projected at very low cost, the cost is going to be $20/kWh or similar, and that is before you move onto firing the superheated air with natural gas (the natural gas gets used as insane efficiencies).


There is also this study that indicates that steam from a nuclear reactor could be stored sufficiently cheaply (in giant accumulators!) to obtain 33-50 US cents (1977 basis)/kWh(e) which comes to something like $1.50/kWh in today's money.
The vessels are constructed out of materials like cast iron and steel wire that have actually got cheaper in real terms and we have far superior insulation (for this duty) to the rubberised asbestos used in this design.

If TMI hadn't put the brakes on nuclear construction bigtime in the west I expect it would have been deployed already.

If we want to solve energy storage it won't be with batteries.

 

[bramling]

As is often the case, the media is distorting a news story to improve circulation by painting a picture of a cliff-face change in lifestyle being forced upon the poor citzen by taking away their 'right' to drive fossil fuelled vehicles. Maybe some here have taken the bait.
In reality it won't be anywhere near that abrupt. The availability of clean (at the point of use) vehicles suitable for at least 90% of private vehicle use is already here. The average mileage driven in the UK in private vehicles is about 8000 miles per year which even if taken over just work days (about 240) is only 33 miles, - that is to any destination(s) and and back home. Recharging batteries for that use wouldn't even need a day-time top up, the overnight charge would easily cope at power levels compatible with normal domestic supllies. Dare I say it, the much vaunted smart meter could be a useful tool to prevent peak excesses being exacerbated, particularly in the winter.

So for those who need to regularly travel over 100-150 miles per day there will be alternatives:

drive to railhead, travel by rail or other public transport mode, pick up vehicle for local travel to destination or use public transport
drive - say 100 miles, swift recharge during break, continue etc.
own a hybrid vehicle, that may use fossil fuel when 'essential'*, but manage demand by steadily increasing pollution surcharges on fossil fuels. It's surprising how easy those who shout "impossible" the loudest find it easy to change when it hits their pocket.​

*there are reports that many hybrid cars (typically the Toyota Prius) are being driven around on petrol only with life expired batteries out of use

All sounds pretty inferior today to me. I don't do much more than 8k per year, though that is likely to increase from next year when Thameslink expands and I already have procured an extra car to allow for this, however I tend to take the car on relatively intensive weeks when I can easily cover 1.5k miles in 10 days, and I'm quite able to do London to Scotland in one hit in 5 hours on a Sunday morning. Having to adapt to an inferior routine will be an utterly retrograde step, it would be a right pain having to stop and recharge on a regular basis. That's three stops before even reaching Scotland if every 100 miles.

 

[Bletchleyite]

No bad thing if it stops you driving 5 hour stints without stopping. For most people that is not safe.

 

[bramling]

No bad thing if it stops you driving 5 hour stints without stopping. For most people that is not safe.

I've been doing it long enough and it has never caused a problem. I will always ensure I am properly rested beforehand. There's always the option to stop if necessary.

Train drivers work continuously for roughly the same time.

 

[northwichcat]

No bad thing if it stops you driving 5 hour stints without stopping. For most people that is not safe.

A good thing if you have one driver. If you have two drivers and are changing over at least every 2 hours then it's a bad thing.

 

[northwichcat]

Train drivers work continuously for roughly the same time.

Do they? The ones who work my line drive for around 90 minutes, have a 15 minute break, then drive back for around 90 minutes, then have a longer break. While on longer routes it commonplace for the drivers to be changed at an intermediate station.

 

[bramling]

Do they? The ones who work my line drive for around 90 minutes, have a 15 minute break, then drive back for around 90 minutes, then have a longer break. While on longer routes it commonplace for the drivers to be changed at an intermediate station.

There are certainly some long continuous runs, I think East Coast certainly have jobs which do London-Newcastle or Newcastle-Aberdeen in one hit.

Meanwhile, suburban work can also be continuous - especially if running late. A London Underground driver can do 4 hours 15 minutes continuously operating a train without a break. On something like the Northern Line, this could involve something like three rounders between Kennington and Edgware, with no time off the train at Kennington, and bare minimum 4 minutes at Edgware - and of course this time could be exceeded if something goes wrong on the last trip.

 

[Greybeard33]

Then where does industrial heat for cement kilns and such come from?
Are you proposing simple resistive heating for such demands?

Straying OT now, but Slide 17 of the FIRES presentation you linked actually proposes industrial kiln heat from electrically heated firebrick as the simplest application. A zero carbon economy must eliminate CO2 emissions from industrial processes as well as from electricity generation and transport.

The price of such industrial heat will set a floor on the price of electricity.


I wasn't actually talking about that part of the link, but about the idea of the firebricks themselves and talking about using it to displace natural gas, coal and petcoke fired boilers and burners for industrial process heat.

But in any case, such a system has a titanic advantage over batteries.
It costs an order of magnitude less.
FIRES is projected to reach $5/kWh(t) easily, and probably much less than that, and given that pressure vessels made of prestressed cast iron are projected at very low cost, the cost is going to be $20/kWh or similar, and that is before you move onto firing the superheated air with natural gas (the natural gas gets used as insane efficiencies).


There is also this study that indicates that steam from a nuclear reactor could be stored sufficiently cheaply (in giant accumulators!) to obtain 33-50 US cents (1977 basis)/kWh(e) which comes to something like $1.50/kWh in today's money.
The vessels are constructed out of materials like cast iron and steel wire that have actually got cheaper in real terms and we have far superior insulation (for this duty) to the rubberised asbestos used in this design.

If TMI hadn't put the brakes on nuclear construction bigtime in the west I expect it would have been deployed already.

If we want to solve energy storage it won't be with batteries.

Design by PowerPoint is easy, but when the energy mega-projects you seem to favour make it through from studies to detailed design and construction, the projected costs and timescales tend to go out of the window. The Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor, already at least three times over budget and six years behind schedule, puts Network Rail's electrification tribulations into perspective.

Back on topic, costly hydrogen fuel cells appear to be the only realistic alternative to batteries to eliminate road traffic pollution (hydrogen-fuelled IC engines emit nitrogen oxides). I think the relatively low level of investment in developing/deploying hydrogen vehicles and infrastructure speaks for itself.

 

[najaB]

The Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor, already at least three times over budget and six years behind schedule, puts Network Rail's electrification tribulations into perspective.

That is not a good example of the art of the possible. As HSTEd has pointed out previously, most (if not all) of the Canadian CANDU generating plants came in more or less on budget and on schedule.

 

[HSTEd]

Straying OT now, but Slide 17 of the FIRES presentation you linked actually proposes industrial kiln heat from electrically heated firebrick as the simplest application. A zero carbon economy must eliminate CO2 emissions from industrial processes as well as from electricity generation and transport.

Precisely, but the point I am making is that they will burn the cheapest fuel available, or use electricity if it can be obtained cheaper.
Which means, with the use of very low capital cost heat storage systems, that electricity will never be cheaper than the cost of burning those fuels. Until you reach enough power that all those heat demands ar eprovided by electricity, which takes us to Quebec levels of per capita consumption, at the least.

Design by PowerPoint is easy, but when the energy mega-projects you seem to favour make it through from studies to detailed design and construction, the projected costs and timescales tend to go out of the window. The Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor, already at least three times over budget and six years behind schedule, puts Network Rail's electrification tribulations into perspective.

You can point to Flamanville and Okiluoto as disasters, and I accept that they are both disasters. But I could also cite numerous reactors completed on time and on budget.

Barakah for example is an enormous project that has progressed on time and on budget in a country with no experience of building such things - built compliant to western standards and quality control regimes.

CANDU Inc/AECL has delivered its last several CANDU type units on time and on budget, indeed it even completed one of the Qinshan units before schedule.

You can't cite a dud reactor design like the EPR and condemn the entire industry.
And whilst megaprojects have bigger failure costs, they also achieve far more.
A pair of large PWRs produce as much electricity as all the wind turbines in the UK did last year.

 

[AM9]

All sounds pretty inferior today to me. I don't do much more than 8k per year, though that is likely to increase from next year when Thameslink expands and I already have procured an extra car to allow for this, however I tend to take the car on relatively intensive weeks when I can easily cover 1.5k miles in 10 days, and I'm quite able to do London to Scotland in one hit in 5 hours on a Sunday morning. Having to adapt to an inferior routine will be an utterly retrograde step, it would be a right pain having to stop and recharge on a regular basis. That's three stops before even reaching Scotland if every 100 miles.

You driving habits are hardly typical so they won't get in the way of the removal of fossil fuel ICEs. Either alternative technologies will emerge that you can buy/rent or you will need to manage your aspirations. The removal of gross pollution will certainly not be a retrograde step for the nation or the world, so it's a case of the needs of the many being greater then the wishes of the few.

 

[Doc Shunter]

Battery powered cars, (& driverless cars) are realms of fantasy stuff.

Where is all the power coming from to charge these things en masse ? Oh yeah, I forgot. Windmills.

And just imagine the chaos with thousands of people regulaly stranded, unable to go anywhere for hours cause they forgot to charge the battery

Never going to happen.

 

[D365]

And just imagine the chaos with thousands of people regulaly stranded, unable to go anywhere for hours cause they forgot to charge the battery

How's that different to forgetting to fill up with fuel?

 

[D365]

Could electric cars have for lack of a better description "traction motors" on each axle, each being able to operate independently?

Most electric cars do have independent motors connected directly to each wheel. The drive arrangement does not tend to be like that on an ICE vehicle.

 

[najaB]

Battery powered cars, (& driverless cars) are realms of fantasy stuff....

Never going to happen.

Funny how they are both happening, right now.

And I'll point out that electric cars predate the use of the internal combustion engine.

 

[AlterEgo]

Battery powered cars, (& driverless cars) are realms of fantasy stuff.

Where is all the power coming from to charge these things en masse ? Oh yeah, I forgot. Windmills.

And just imagine the chaos with thousands of people regulaly stranded, unable to go anywhere for hours cause they forgot to charge the battery

Never going to happen.

No, the power will not come from "windmills" (I think you mean wind farms?). Wind power is a small part of the overall fuel mix. There are some issues with local distribution networks but those are not difficult to overcome.

Electric and driverless cars are already happening.

 

[Doc Shunter]

No, the power will not come from "windmills" (I think you mean wind farms?). Wind power is a small part of the overall fuel mix. There are some issues with local distribution networks but those are not difficult to overcome.

Electric and driverless cars are already happening.

In a miniscule, experimental way.

They will never become mainstream or ever be able to replace the I.C.E, same as windmills/farms and 'renewable' energy is all loopy greenie fantasy.

Physics 101 tells us there is no free lunch.

And for example of the 'driverless' car. What happens with your driverless car in a busy car park and you are cruising around looking for that quick dash to get that spot before someone else does.?

It sounds all fluffy and dandy, but put batteries and driverless cars into the REAL WORLD and it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

La la land.

The return of the horse & cart and penny farthings has more cred.

 

[najaB]

They will never become mainstream or ever be able to replace the I.C.E, same as windmills/farms and 'renewable' energy is all loopy greenie fantasy.

Physics 101 tells us there is no free lunch.

I'm confused, could you please explain what the 'free lunch' is in your analogy?

 

[Doc Shunter]

I'm confused, could you please explain what the 'free lunch' is in your analogy?

No Free Lunch = You can't get out what you don't put in.

Batteries, solar panels & those hideous windmills just don't cut the gig.

Trust me, I live in Australia.

We are going to hell in a hand basket down here because of loony, green policy.

And the hypocrisy of it all.

Have you seen what it takes to manufacture and eventually dispose of these inefficient batteries, wind farms etc? The damage they do to the environment for such little gain?

Nope. A slippery slope back to fires and caves is where we are heading with this lunacy.

And don't even get me started on the global warming crap.

 

[najaB]

No Free Lunch = You can't get out what you don't put in.

I still don't follow. The combination of nuclear, renewable and a declining amount of fossil fuels will provide more than enough power to keep the lights on. In the UK we have significantly reduced the amount of coal in the mix with no ill effect as yet: UK electricity mix by source.

 

[Busaholic]

No, the power will not come from "windmills" (I think you mean wind farms?). Wind power is a small part of the overall fuel mix. There are some issues with local distribution networks but those are not difficult to overcome.

Electric and driverless cars are already happening.

Estimated 10,000 more wind turbines needed, in addition to all the nuclear power stations now coming quietly onstream and on budget as we all sleep, and I'm someone who LOVES the idea of electric power, from the time in the mid 1950s when, aged 7 or so, I used to help the milkman with his electric milk float for two or three hours on a Saturday by carrying bottles to the door, in return for a 9d strawberry yoghurt in a big glass pot: also saw the Harrods electric delivery vans whizzing round the London suburbs. Never could understand my father's obsession with railway steam engines when we had lovely Southern electric, doubledeck trams when I was very young and trolleybuses a few miles down the road until the end of my Primary years. The trouble is battery power and the remarkably slow progress being made with that 'major breakthrough' always being about ten years away. Don't discount the Saudis and the whole petroleum lobby either, with the ability to dump cheap gasoline on the world and e.g. offer to pay to construct new hospitals and railway lines, offers that might become impossible for our politicians to ignore.

 

[najaB]

And don't even get me started on the global warming crap.

Which part of androgenic climate change is 'crap'? The fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? The fact that since the industrial revolution human beings have been introducing massive amounts of stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere? The fact that the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher now than it was a hundred years ago? Or the fact that mean global temperatures have been trending upwards in line with carbon dioxide emissions?

You're more than welcome to dispute the link between these provable facts, but I'd love to hear your alternate explanation.

 

[Doc Shunter]

I still don't follow. The combination of nuclear, renewable and a declining amount of fossil fuels will provide more than enough power to keep the lights on. In the UK we have significantly reduced the amount of coal in the mix with no ill effect as yet: UK electricity mix by source.

Ah, nuclear is good.

We don't have that here. Very conservative lot in many ways. And yet we have uranium coming out of our ears.

We need a Sizewell or three down here.

The windmills, solar panels and batteries though ? No way. Hopless and inefficient.

 

[Doc Shunter]

Which part of androgenic climate change is 'crap'? The fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? The fact that since the industrial revolution human beings have been introducing massive amounts of stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere? The fact that the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher now than it was a hundred years ago? Or the fact that mean global temperatures have been trending upwards in line with carbon dioxide emissions?

You're more than welcome to dispute the link between these provable facts, but I'd love to hear your alternate explanation.

Global temps haven't been trending upwards at all.

Even if that were true, do you honestly believe this could all happen in the short space of time since the 'industrial revolution' ? A mere 'blip' in the time the earth has been around ?

There is but one thing that dictates the climate on this planet. It's called The Sun. Not insignificant, moronic humans.

 

[AM9]

No Free Lunch = You can't get out what you don't put in.

You can get out whatever has been put in, by the wind, by the sun, by the tides etc..

Batteries, solar panels & those hideous windmills just don't cut the gig.

You need to explain whatever that means.

Trust me, I live in Australia.

That helps us a lot in understanding your post.

We are going to hell in a hand basket because of loony, green policy.

Green policy will delay the hell on Earth that carbon profligacy brings. It will also sweep slow to learn dinosaurs from its path.

And the hipocracy of it all.

If you mean hypocrisy then please enlighten us what it is that you are trying to say.

Have you seen what it takes to manufacture and eventually dispose of these inefficient batteries, wind farms etc? The damage they do to the environment for such little gain?

Have you seen the damage that non-recyclable fossil fuel waste does to the environment compared to that from reusable battery materials? Are you informed well enough to be sure that future battery designs won't be better for the environment?

Nope. A slippery slope back to fires and caves is where we are heading with this lunacy.

Sounds like some still have a caveman mentality.

And don't even get me started on the global warming crap.

Maybe you are trolling, maybe just in denial of the impact of global warming. Try and paint your picture of the future for our education.

 

[Domh245]

Global temps haven't been trending upwards at all.

Even if that were true, do you honestly believe this could all happen in the short space of time since the 'industrial revolution' ? A mere 'blip' in the time the earth has been around ?

There is but one thing that dictates the climate on this planet. It's called The Sun. Not insignificant, moronic humans.

https://xkcd.com/1732/