Energy chat, the future of car propulsion

[Scottman]

The four cylinder petrol twin cam, electronic injection engine is really very clean and efficient. I have two complete 1.6 2011 and a 2014 sitting on pallets in my garage.

the price of cars has increased so much in the last two years that I decided to just gather components and then build up a Fiesta to drive as I wear them out! Fiesta is just about perfect for the way I use a car. I can comfortably go 600 or so miles per day in reasonable comfort and the fuel economy is excellent. I can even go camping with the carrier basket I fabricated on the trailer hitch. I really don’t want to even consider what camping out of an EV might be like!

as it is now, my tent camping setup has LED lighting, 12 volt and inverted AC power from an added deep cycle battery. My Apple phone is my Wi-Fi hotspot and if the weather gets bad I can sleep in the car because I made a load floor to replace the rear seats. I could brew coffee and make breakfast on my hot plate griddle. I doubt that an EV would have that flexibility of functionality.

[StephenFord]

10 minutes ago, Scottman said:

the price of cars has increased so much in the last two years that I decided to just gather components ...

I guess it's all relative. My aunts brand new USA Chevrolet Trailblazer cost the equivalent of £17,500. That is just amazingly cheap as in the UK, for that price here you'd pretty much struggle to get a new SUV of any sort LOL

[Carl123]

10 hours ago, unofix said:

and on a recent trip to my cousins, they needed only 5 one hour stops to recharge in a 600 mile drive

The winners in that sort of trip will be those "entrepreneurs" who will capitalise on those enforced one hour stops

Think haircuts, massages, nail bars, car cleaning, food courts, slot machines (mini-vegases (sic) ), mini fun fares for the kids, businessmen club lounges, etc, etc, etc

But like our current motorway service stations everything will come with a premium price tag attached to it

[StephenFord]

2 hours ago, Carl123 said:

The winners in that sort of trip will be those "entrepreneurs" who will capitalise on those enforced one hour stops

You are so right! It really, really bugs me the way the 'recharging' process is often accompanied by the throwaway comment that you can always get a 'coffee' whilst waiting. When I refuel my car, I have no desire whatsoever to spend on a £5 coffee with an overpriced bun! 

[Eric Bloodaxe]

5 hours ago, StephenFord said:

You are so right! It really, really bugs me the way the 'recharging' process is often accompanied by the throwaway comment that you can always get a 'coffee' whilst waiting. When I refuel my car, I have no desire whatsoever to spend on a £5 coffee with an overpriced bun! 

It does need a complete rethink of how we do things. The enforced coffee stop is perhaps not too bad if you're on a long journey when you need to refuel yourself as well as the car (as well as popping to the loo) anyway. 

But as I think I mentioned earlier, we'll have to forget just popping to the filling station for 5 minutes and do it while parked for an hour or so for a supermarket shop or whatever (assuming home charging is not an option).

Even so, this still presupposes a reasonable range of 350 miles or so and ability to get a decent charge in about 40 minutes.

I have a horrible feeling that an EV would actually work quite well for my good lady, who needs no encouragement to linger in a shop of any kind. However, she likes small cars and while, say, a Fiat 500 EV or similar is £30k plus there's no chance as she also likes good value and that isn't!

[Scottman]

I believe that the “5 one hour stops to go 600 miles” is very close to the reality of the coming situation. 
affordability is a huge concern. With the largest percentage of cost of the EV being it’s battery, it’s not a great stretch to expect that a lower cost EV will be a sub optimal vehicle for anything beyond local commute’s. I doubt that the drivers of the “short range” EV would be allowed more than a predetermined amount of kWh per month of charging access. The powers that be will have control over your range and kWh. The little people will have little mobility.

 The situation would require the introduction of technology in charging speed or battery chemistry or vehicle design that would be nothing less than revolutionary compared with the most advanced vehicle designs of today. I won’t even go into what changes might be required to charging infrastructure. But it is almost a certainty that the changes will not be infrastructure agnostic.

[Eric Bloodaxe]

Of course we have to remember that EV doesn't necessarily mean battery (or indeed that "carbon neutral" doesn't necessarily involve EVs at all). Other technologies are available (and more will undoubtedly emerge) - if governments are prepared to think a little further outside the box and let human ingenuity have it's head.

[Scottman]

That last part. “Where governments are prepared to think a little more outside the box and let enginuity flow”

They have zero interest in anything that doesn’t first feather their own nests. The entire subsidy scheme for wind and solar is not based on successful implementation. Every bit of it is upfront payments.

In America and Michigan, I see exactly zero movement on rebuilding the electrical infrastructure. None. Yet the shift to electrification is fully engaged, at the end user level! Supply level? Not so much. We are well and truly screwed in less than ten years.

 

[Eric Bloodaxe]

1 hour ago, Scottman said:

They have zero interest in anything that doesn’t first feather their own nests. The entire subsidy scheme for wind and solar is not based on successful implementation. Every bit of it is upfront payments.

I'm not quite sure on that one, at least here. It seems to be more a case of giving money away in the UK.

Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire (which I keep banging on about as it's near to me) has received £4billion in subsidies since 2012 and will receive about £6 billion more by 2027 when the current subsidy schemes expire. This is for burning biomass imported from North America which they claim is from "waste" but several recent exposes have shown this to be at least partially untrue.

The logic is supposed to be that new trees are planted to offset the carbon released. But even FoE and other green groups have said that is nonsense and you could have planted trees as a carbon offset even if continuing to burn the coal that came from the nearby coal mine, which is why the power station was built there in the first place. The mine (the UKs last deep coal mine) closed in 2015 as there was "no market" for its coal.

I see from the "energy dashboard" that biomass is producing 6.1% of UK electricity as at 16.30 our time.

And of course we are still waiting to see what they will come up with to replace the money that they will lose from fuel duty currently levied on petrol/diesel in the EV future.

[Linds]

I did not know that CO2 accounts for just 0.04% of our atmosphere on earth ... and if we let that drop to 0.02% plant life will start suffering.

So much we should know and be talking about ...

 

[unofix]

48 minutes ago, Linds said:

So much we should know and be talking about ...

Yes I watched this yesterday. It was cringe worthy at the ignorance of those who should have known the amount of CO²

It's almost 50 years since I sat my 'O' level chemistry exam, and it was a God given certainty that one of the questions would be the list of gases by percentage that made up air. I remember learning the percentages parrot fashion ready for the exam. Of course back in 1976 the level of CO² was taught as 0.035% so we've come along way since then 🤣

[Eric Bloodaxe]

And yet only last year the news was full of items about CO2 shortages like this: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cyqpypkp6wqt

Now, I've admitted before that I spent too much time chatting to the girls on the lab bench in front rather than listening to my science teacher, but surely it's not beyond the wit of man to capture the stuff for use when needed?

[Scottman]

I think that calling CO2 a “trace element” in the atmosphere is a rather generous term.

The US EPA has reclassified it from an “inert gas” into a “poisonous gas”. Which considering how absolutely critical it is for plants to thrive and make oxygen sounds like lunacy to me. One must also keep in mind that everything that America does to cut back on CO2 emissions is wiped out every time China opens up two more coal fired power plants. When a volcano erupts anywhere in the world more CO2 and other poisonous gases are belched into the atmosphere than what all the power plants in China emits in the better part of a decade.

just a little perspective there for everyone to contemplate when you are told how critical the climate change crisis is and how we must spend the trillions of dollars on preventing the temperature from increasing. The whole thing is a fraud.

the governments should spend a fraction of the cost of this on something that will improve our lives. Like paying ugly and stupid people to not reproduce. Or, building adequate housing for the indigent elderly people. Either of those would be cheap compared with the climate mitigation insanity.

[StephenFord]

You also bring up an interesting issue over the 'history' of science. In the 70s whilst at school, we were warned of the forthcoming 'ice age' which potentially could wipe out mankind. Then, we had the hole in the ozone layer, which potentially could wipe out mankind, then came 'acid rain', which could potentially wipe out mankind. 

Mankind seems to be very resilient, and listening to horror predictions of 'science' is often a futile activity...

[alexp999]

We’ve done a lot to stop the damage to the ozone layer though and it is repairing itself now. It was caused by all the propellants and refrigerants we used to use. 

[StephenFord]

2 minutes ago, alexp999 said:

 and it is repairing itself now. ..

Mother Earth repairing herself, what a controversial concept LOL

[alexp999]

1 minute ago, StephenFord said:

Mother Earth repairing herself, what a controversial concept LOL

Because we stopped using the harmful propellants and refrigerants. It’s only repairing because we changed our behaviour. 

[StephenFord]

1 hour ago, alexp999 said:

Because we stopped using the harmful propellants and refrigerants. It’s only repairing because we changed our behaviour. 

But I have changed my behaviour, only yesterday I put an old can in my recycling bin! 😂

[Scottman]

Germany shutdown the last nuclear power plant in their country today. It’s as carbon neutral as any power source has ever been. But, it has a bad Public relations reputation.

 

[Eric Bloodaxe]

15 hours ago, Scottman said:

Germany shutdown the last nuclear power plant in their country today. It’s as carbon neutral as any power source has ever been. But, it has a bad Public relations reputation.

 

Which leaves them producing about 30% of their electricity from coal, which arguably is even worse PR. Pretty mucky stuff they use over there, too, from what I remember of economic geography. (I concentrated in class a bit more for geography!😃).

[alanfp]

16 hours ago, Scottman said:

it has a bad Public relations reputation.

I wonder why?? Maybe it's because (as we now know) the industry and the governments lied through their teeth about the radioactive leaks etc.  Nobody really knows how much nuclear energy costs because so much of the development and build costs were subsidised by the government because we wanted a nuclear industry (possibly for military purposes???).

And nobody knows how much it costs to decommission a nuclear power station because it hasn't been done yet, anywhere in the world. Yes, we've switched them off but the only one that's been decommissioned is that one in - where was it? - oh yes, Chernobyl.  

Here's a little snippet about my local power station (which stopped producing electricity twenty years ago) :-

 

Demolition of the reactor buildings and final site clearance is planned for 2083 to 2093

 

[Scottman]

In Michigan, the only nuclear power plant on the western shores of Lake Michigan was shutdown in May of 2022. The decommissioning of the site will take approximately 19 years. As I have understood it. The fuel rods have been removed and are in cooling cells at this point. The vessel is going to be drained and then dismantled. I have no idea how. All of the controls and such are considered to be as technologically sensitive as the radioactive material. Palisades was a successful application of the technology and had no accidents or leaks from the vessel or the pipes. The maintenance regimen was very thorough throughout the decades it was functional. It’s not unreasonable to expect that the process will be two or more decades of work.

[alanfp]

27 minutes ago, Scottman said:

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the process will be two or more decades of work.

Or as above, in the case of my local power station, eight or nine decades.

... which I'm fine with as long as it's all factored in to the economic decisions and there is transparency regarding the facts. 

 

[StephenFord]

6 minutes ago, alanfp said:

... which I'm fine with as long as it's all factored in to the economic decisions and there is transparency regarding the facts. 

I'm truly uncertain if that is a sarcastic comment or not!  Have you met our government?? 

[Scottman]

The transparency issue is key.