Electric Cars.

[IDD15]

Some electric auto exotica for the weekend, both old

Auto Conversions

and new

Porsche

Also some good news for Londoners and UK jobs

London Taxis

LEVC now have a van variant of the taxi too. As many people have already posted on here cars are only one part of the jigsaw, so its good to see further development on commercial vehicles.

idd

[Cuban8]

I was up in Derbyshire when the lights when out for half an hour or so. I have a feeling that there's more to this than what's being served up as an extremely rare event blah, blah, blah.

Just two stations go down at a time where demand is nowhere near its maximum and the grid partly falls over putting millions without power albeit for a short time.

[Don Fry]

I believe that the National Grid has been warned and has warned, about lack of resiliency, and backup for a couple of decades. In a private, for shareholder benefit, system, unless the regulator makes it desirable by bribery or fear, such small things like the thing falling over is of small consequence.

it costs money to have capacity on standby.

Edited By Don Fry on 11/08/2019 12:10:27

[Shaun Walsh]

Posted by Cuban8 on 11/08/2019 11:14:04:

I was up in Derbyshire when the lights when out for half an hour or so. I have a feeling that there's more to this than what's being served up as an extremely rare event blah, blah, blah.

Just two stations go down at a time where demand is nowhere near its maximum and the grid partly falls over putting millions without power albeit for a short time.

It doesn't matter that demand wasn't at the maximum, supply going in has to match demand going out. An unplanned decrease in supply requires that demand has to be reduced until alternative generating capacity can be brought on line. My guess is that as soon as the problem happened they started up ocgt plant and pumped storage to make up the shortfall ASAP.

A relative worked for the national grid, he said that before privatisation critical components were replaced at the end of their designed service life, after privatisation the were replaced when they failed.

[Don Fry]

OCGT = open cycle gas turbine. I looked it up

[Don Fry]

Getting back to electric vehicles, when the power went off, and a train stopped, and the grid says they restored power in half an hour, why did the train resume it's journey. Anyone know?

[Paul Marsh]

I was right, the National Grid ;lost an off shore wind farm and a power station, which over loaded the grid and shut down.~ Imagine plugging 26 million cars and trucks into the grid, which is at almost saturation. Remember that pic I put up a week ago, it actually happened!!!!

Just shows how close to maximum the grid is stretched, and shows how right I was all along. I hate it when I'm right, just being super brainy and all that...

QED

[Trevor Crook]

Unlikely to have 26 million evs any time soon, Paul - almost every one on sale has a long waiting list as demand far outstrips supply at present. It'll be interesting to see how the grid copes with no new houses having mains gas after 2025, which is a lot sooner than the mandated date for evs, and won't give the buyer the choice.

[buster prop]

There was a very relevant article (Britain unplugged) in today’s Sunday Times magazine. I never knew that there are five different charging plugs for EV’s. There is a so-called Euro standard plug which is apparently very big and heavy with its cable. The main point of the article was that there are simply not enough charging points in the UK to make electric cars practical for distance driving. They quote examples of people who have set off on long journeys and have had difficulty finding a suitable and working charge facility. I know someone who has a Nissan Leaf and had a charge point for it installed in his garage, but it’s a second car just used for local journeys. The UK planning for EV’s comes in for criticism. Apparently in 2011, Holland set up a consortium of companies that sell electricity and now have facilities to fast charge up to 20 vehicles at the same time. The UK? A budget to set up an office in 2009 called the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) which is supposed to organise the motor and power industry to come up with a method of providing charge points around the country. It has a large staff, a central London office and a budget of £1.5Bn and has achieved very little. If we have a problem to solve, the answer seems to be to create a big bureaucracy in an expensive office, produce paper and not actually do much. Sounds familiar?

[Don Fry]

Buster Prop. I assume your are of a certain age. Does Betamix a VHS ring a bell. When a driver/owner is seeking to do the miles without duty, why does the non duty payer also propose that a tax payer install the infrastructure. I reckon, the technology. If any good, will sort itself out.

BTW, is that £1.5 Bb a week, year, or since set up.

[buster prop]

Don. According to the article OLEV was set up (in 2011) with a budget of £900M which has since ballooned to £1.5Bn so I presume that is per year. You seem to object to electric car drivers driving without paying fuel duty and that the government is subsidising them. Well, the government has committed itself to reducing CO2 emissions by phasing out petrol and diesel power by 2030. Until then it wants to reduce emissions from the millions of vehicles on our roads to improve air quality. It’s a matter of national policy, not subsidising a particular group of people. Whether the technology sorts itself out or not remains to be seen. BTW, I don’t like the insulting reference to me ‘being of a certain age’ and remembering VHS/Betamax. What does that have to do with it? I believe we have crossed swords before under a different topic.

[Former Member]

[This posting has been removed]

[Glyn44]

Posted by Tom Sharp 2 on 12/08/2019 01:01:12:

I'm still using my VHS recorder and I've also got a Music Centre capable of Quadrophonic Sound. When it comes.

Tom, I had a nosey round the Black Sabbath exhibition in the Birmingham Art Gallery last week, and they have a room playing Sabbath tracks in Quadrophonic. Standing in the centre it was stunning. Might be worth the wait!

[FilmBuff]

I have tried to make EV of PHEV for me as a company car driver - but it just wouldn't work based on my 20K mileage a year.

I have compromised and just ordered a self charging petrol hybrid - a Toyota C-HR.

Benefit in Kind is a reasonable 22% and I will save around £1100 per year compared to my diesel car in tax alone.

On an extended test drive - Toyota pulled off a neat trick in their internet connected car. After the test drive of around 16 mixed urban and dual carriageway miles - I was shown a print out of the results. I had averaged 68.7 mpg and the electric motor had been "involved" for 70% of the time. Full results and a google map video of my actual route showing when the electric motor was used was simultaneously emailed to me. Very neat and TBH was the deal clincher - along with the actual car, of course.

Now the small print. It looks like the data also includes when the motor is being used to charge the battery as well as powering the car. But I was impressed with the seamless interaction between motor and engine during the drive and how much the motor is used during setting off from rest and the typical crawling around a carpark type driving.

[Denis Watkins]

My neighbour runs one of these Toyotas as an high mileage company car FB

And cannot speak highly enough of the lower cost stress free driving

With the Hybrid not requiring an umbilical cord attached to the house

Edited By Denis Watkins on 12/08/2019 08:06:59

[IDD15]

Buster Prop

My understanding of your post is that you are not currently "indoctrinated" into the EV world, if you are then I'm sorry if the following tells you something you already know!

There are really two main competing standards for Rapid DC charging at the moment, CCS and CHADEMO. Most (not all!) Rapids support both of these two standards. Some even offer a third AC charging option. Hence Don's reference to the VHS/BETAMAX spat. The only manufacturers who support CHADEMO are Nissan and I think Mitsuibushi.

Certainly in the last 12 months or so I think every car manufacturer who has announced or even delivered a BEV has gone the CCS route. However Nissan and Mitsuibushi sell a lot of electric vehicles in the UK so CHADEMO is probably going to be around for quite some time.

Criticism in the article of how the UK has rolled out public charging I don't think any BEV driver would disagree with. If you go to the Fastned site you can see how well this company has built a comprehensive network of Rapid chargers in the Benelux, Northern Germany region. Happily they have just opened their first site in the UK, with hopefully with a lot more to follow. There are also a couple of other companies who are also gearing up, Ionity being one.

In the nearly three years I have been driving my Leaf things have a got a lot better, but Government does seem very "hands off ". The fact that we contactless payment has been so long in coming is I think a good example of this.

If I was still doing the business miles that FilmBuff has to do then I don't think I'd be very happy driving a BEV! Unless of course it was a Tesla but that's a whole different story!

idd

[IDD15]

Posted by Denis Watkins on 12/08/2019 08:06:14:

My neighbour runs one of these Toyotas as an high mileage company car FB

And cannot speak highly enough of the lower cost stress free driving

With the Hybrid not requiring an umbilical cord attached to the house

Edited By Denis Watkins on 12/08/2019 08:06:59

This is exactly my point all along. People need to get a vehicle that suits their needs, with the current state of vehicle development/infrastructure a BEV cannot suit everybody. In 5 years it might be a totally different story, but who knows?

idd

[Martin Harris - Moderator]

This thread has strayed a long way from the OP which simply asked questions about the ongoing availability of and access to electric cars for the ordinary man in the street. It seems to have become largely a platform for evangelists and sceptics of electric vehicles to air their views.

On attempting to balance some of the arguments in my mind a question has occurred to me for the green scientists out there.

I understand from my physics education at school that energy can be neither created nor destroyed - simply converted from one form to another. A significant proportion of the energy thrown our way by the sun simply radiates back into outer space after heating a few air molecules, a bit of ground and some more air molecules on the way out.

This balance has existed for billions of years, resulting in the suitability of planet Earth to support life as we know it.

We are now trapping some of this energy and turning it into heat via direct thermal processes and photo-voltaic generation of electricity. Could this mean that making use of "green" energy actually contributes significantly to global warming?

Is there also an effect on our climate by wholesale extraction of wind energy slowing the movement of air around the world? Tiny, maybe but our climate relies on delicate balances - just consider the effects of the North Atlantic Drift which carries the water warmed in the Gulf of Mexico to give us our temperate climate at latitudes which should result in Russian style winters and relies on a balance of differing water densities controlled by the melting and freezing of the arctic icecap.

Demands for energy will grow while the human population expands and there is also a current tendency for it to migrate northwards into the colder and more energy hungry "first world". Sadly, unless the human race takes steps to address its exponential expansion and demands for energy, drastic resolutions involving mass suffering through war, famine, pestilence or disease are inevitable. Perhaps this should be the main focus for our scientists and politicians worried about global warming to address - i.e. tackle the issues of energy demands rather than just finding alternative methods of supplying and using energy which may seem so attractive at first sight.

Edited By Martin Harris on 12/08/2019 11:38:01

[Keith Miles 2]

Excellent post, Martin, and very thought provoking.

Call me morbid, but It seems to me that the human race is, ultimately, on a road to nowhere just as surely as the Sun is destined to explode!

[Shaun Walsh]

Gross overpopulation is the elephant in the room unfortunately.

[Frank Skilbeck]

Posted by Martin Harris on 12/08/2019 11:37:11:

We are now trapping some of this energy and turning it into heat via direct thermal processes and photo-voltaic generation of electricity. Could this mean that making use of "green" energy actually contributes significantly to global warming?

Edited By Martin Harris on 12/08/2019 11:38:01

Or conversely we are currently in the process of releasing heat that was gathered over billions of years, i.e. fossil fuels, and releasing it over a very short period....................

But in answer to your question no the heat is radiated away, but a portion of the infrared that is being radiated back into space is interacting with CO2 and Methane which then re-radiates this heat back. without this the Earth would freeze, but if there's too much re-radiation then we warm up. Over 1 million years prior to industrialisation CO2 has fluctuated between 172 - 300 ppm, it now stands at 410 ppm and is increasing by around 2ppm per annum.

[Keith Miles 2]

Addendum.

In referring to the Sun, I did mean the celestial body and not a specific example of emergency toilet paper.

We could certainly do without the latter.

[FlyinFlynn]

"We are now trapping some of this energy and turning it into heat via direct thermal processes and photo-voltaic generation of electricity. Could this mean that making use of "green" energy actually contributes significantly to global warming?"

It certainly contributes significantly to warming my pool.

[Nigel R]

"Gross overpopulation is the elephant in the room unfortunately."

It will take many, many generations before attitudes change worldwide to accommodate a sensible discussion on population levels.

however, it's not all doom and gloom -

simply keeping this next bit to facts as presented by wiki:

western & european birth rates have levelled off

asian areas are levelling off

african growth remains high and is estimated to do so for the next hundred years

median population growth predictions are to around 10 billion.

note european populations have been quite stable for a while; when other areas adapt to increasing longevity with falling birth rate the population there will also stabilise.

I would (personal opinion) note that this level of population doesn't seem to allow much of the natural world to remain very natural, which is beyond unfortunate, and it will need a remarkable shift away from fossil fuel to maintain living standard. Sadly humanity seems incapable of self limiting to a lower level which would allow a better coexistence with the other billion or so species that were here first.

 

Edited By Nigel R on 12/08/2019 15:28:56

[Trevor Crook]

Martin, I read a scientific paper that stated that the sun delivered more energy to the earth in an hour than the earths population consumes in a year from all sources, nuclear, fossil etc. So I don't think a major take-up of solar pv is going to upset the planet's thermodynamic balance very much. I suspect the effect of wind farms is similarly insignificant.

IDD summed up the situation nicely - at the moment evs certainly aren't suitable for every motorist, but if they fit your situation and you do your homework, they have several advantages at present. Some of those will be eroded as time goes on. The government will undoubtably start putting duty on public chargers, and may apply it to home chargers via a smart meter. The very low depreciation of the latest evs will increase as production starts to meet demand.

On the plus side, the price of the cars will come down, the infrastructure will improve and they will continue to be much more efficient than ic, less polluting and using a power source that will hopefully be more renewable. Apparently 80% of the batteries content are now recyclable, after they have done probably 10 years in a car, then reduced duty in domestic or industrial storage.

It's the power generation and distribution that will provide the biggest challenge.