UKC

The energy required to move us around in those things we call cars is not much different be it petrol/diesel or electric. The big difference is where that energy comes from. In internal combustion engines it is produced at source from the chemical energy of fossil fuel with consequent direct emissions. With electric cars it is stored in batteries yet still produced from a range of sources. Currently 56.6% of UK energy comes from fossil fuels ( Gas,coal & oil) the rest from other sources (20% nuclear, 14.9 renewable). So if we are to move to electric cars where is the energy going to come from? More specifically which of the non-fossil sources is going to expand dramatically to replace the fossil sources if we are to genuinely reduce carbon emissions? I would really like to know. PS I hear the public transport argument but am sceptical about whether we can change human behaviour to give up individual forms of transport.

We just concentrated on being the change ourselves and got rid of car 5 years ago. We haven't regretted it at all. Many plus factors beyond saving emissions. Less time in traffic jams, less money needed, more exercise, more fun travelling, better appetite etc. Try it. Difficult to imagine unless you have.  

I have to have a vehicle to ferry someone around. Public transport is not an option.
I'd like an electric vehicle, but have concerns about battery manufacturing.
I think, ideally, a methane powered (from organic waste fermentation) would be best.

More efficient fossil generation reduces CO2 emissions per EV mile - the shift from coal to CCGT.

More solar PV - https://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/assets/content/cache/made/content/imag...

More wind - both through repowering old sites after their initial 25 year stint and through new sites.

Potentially tidal power.

If the giant SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets really do deliver on lower £/kg to orbit, orbital solar power.

Potentially nuclear fission or, one day, nuclear fusion.

Geothermal power from Iceland over the proposed Atlantic Superconnection.

Some people however think that we shouldn’t bother getting started now because the current gains are only marginal over ICE and oil.

Where do you live ? Just curious.

Keep plugging away though, however small we may think it is, we are all using less energy these days ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46741346

Yes it was and that is a landmark. however it took place on a short period of windy clear weather at a time of low demand so not the norm. I have tried unsuccessfully to find data from Christmas Day 2018 - a period of high demand - when it was overcast & still. Where did the energy come from then? Renewables are currently very unpredictable. We need a storage system to deal with that. 

No you don't,  it may require a radical change to your life but I doubt anyone "needs" to have a car. 

This is certainly one of the ways forward, over the last decade the waste water industry has been investing in this in a big way. Yorkshire Waters primary method of with dealing sludge was incineration but due to their investment in digestion they decommissioned their last incinerator last year, more and more of my customers in the food industry are either digesting their own food waste or sending it to commercial energy generating companies.

People will always need to eat and shit. 

Untrue.  Renewables are really quite predictable - being based on weather and climate or the tides.  What they aren’t is consistent.

Some would say that EVs can play a big role in grid scale storage, both “virtual” storage by selectively charging at times of surplus energy or low carbon intensity energy, and “real” storage by feeding power back to the grid.

We also have a giant storage system in the form of a methane gas grid and CCGT plant.  Renewables + CO2 + water > methane is one possibility (the Sabatier reaction).

I couldn't do my current job without one. I don't know what other job I could do. My husband couldn't work without one either. We both transport lots of equipment in vans. 

In town for personal transport I only cycle or walk, but there is a serious lack of public transport, and it's extortionate where it exists, so personal vehicles are pretty hard to do without if I want to go outside of town.

The person whose 'needs' require ferrying about, needs something reasonably quick.
Using public transport, we'd have to be setting back for home before we'd even arrived.
A RADICAL change in public transport is what is required.

Best to know what you're talking about before butting in, pal!

Your last paragraph looks interesting can you give more detail please.

Kendal

They do.  It made me wonder how much...  read on to find out...

Food consumption equates to about 7 GW continuous power in the UK.  Humans extract about half the calorific value of food, and digestion and conversion to electricity has an efficiency < 30% so there’s at most about 1 GW of electricity in the waste, or about 3% of current demand.   That’s equivalent to about 72 million EV miles per day.

(70,000,000 people) x (2,000,000 calories per person per day) x (4.2 Joule per calorie) / (86400 s per day) = 6,800,000,000 J per s = 6.8 GW

Me too, I drive a 3.5 ton van with the tools, equipment and myself in it I only have 100kg spare capacity. I also don't know what I would do if I didn't do my job but that doesn't mean I couldn't have a radical change to my life and do something that doesn't require a van. 

I totally agree - there are many aspects of our local travel that can be changed to lower/zero energy requirements but two aspects of our lifestyle can't - without eroding our lifestyle. Our children live 350 miles away in Coventry and I have looked at various ways to visit them. The car is still the most efficient way to do this (Time, cost, convenience). We also keep a boat at Oban (Lifestyle choice - Yes) and to get to it with our equipment we need a car. Must I sacrifice our leisure activity for the mission to reduce emissions? Climbers out there who eat miles to pursue their passion what do you think?

Or you could move closer to wherever this person needs to be, you say we need a radical change to public transport and I fully agree but I think we need a radical change to the way we live our lives, because transport is so cheap we have become dependent on it. My Mrs had 2 years off work due to illness and it took 6 months to find a new job that was local, the recruitment agency's she uses couldn't grasp that she wasn't willing to drive for 60 mins or more each way for a job and she now works at a place that is only 3/4 of a mile from our house. 

The Thermal Hydrolysis plant at Esholt in Bradford generated a record 490mw of power one week in September last year, previously they were expending massive amounts of energy burning it. Digestion is a complete no brainer seeing as the waste has to be dealt with anyway. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

Read especially the “applications” section.  

Wouldn't someone still have to do your job and therefore the same amount of fuel would ultimately be used?

All but heavy haulage, marine and commercial aviation will start going electric fast now, almost certainly battery electric.

Urban road transport will likely get smaller, shared ownership or non user owned and public transport has to improve, our towns are choked. Cars as we know them will continue being being built, just electric and with more automation, mainly for use outside the urban environment.

Aviation will switch to bio-fuel only when we can agree how to cooperate internationally to tax the sector off fossil energy, I'm not holding my breath for the next half century but assuming we can avoid another all out war it will happen. GA will electrify for operating cost reasons.

I don't see marine transport getting off the oil but I think hybrid concepts will return.

The UK is almost uniquely well endowed with a diverse range of renewable energy opportunities but culturally were stuck in the past wedded to an idea of a green country park nation that never existed away from the stately homes paid for in slaves and later smoke belching cities of slums. Windmills are for rotting in Norfolk. Realistically this has to change and solar will keep growing. Tidal power at scale needs focussed cross party support for state backing. We need one more generation of nukes but we can't or won't buy them before it's too late. It's a mess, that will only incrementally get better.

Jk

It is - but it’ll only nibble at the edge of our energy demands.  But that’s okay - 3% more from digestion means 3% less fossils and more carbon left under the ground.  

I’d love to see a small digester in our village - perhaps next door could put their horse muck in it rather than a big steaming pile outside the stables...

People take on work further and further away,  families move apart, climbers chose to drive to Scotland as soon as the winter ice is in. A lot of people think their own personal lifestyle is more important than reducing energy for the good of the population of the planet. We are back to the "radical change" is needed if anything is going to change. As an example a young lad I know lives in Leeds and drives to York every day to do his job as a QS. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people drive in to Leeds every day to work, I have zero evidence to back this up but I'm pretty sure some of those people will come from the York area and will be working as a QS in Leeds.  A little bit if joined up thinking says if they knew each other they could swap jobs and cut their respective energy footprint massively (yes I know its not that simple)

I have a policy of employing local people, I know I only have 12 people but 11 of them live within a 15 minute drive of work and 5 live in walking distance. 

There’s a consortium led by Rolls-Royce plus supply chain, civil etc, plus around 15 University R&D institutes, and we’ve been working with the govt for nearly 4 years to roll out a Small Modular Reactor programme. Deliverables initially will be 14 reactors producing up to 600MW each. 

We’ve been through numerous iterations, and the final proposal is sat with the Chancellor and the great and good now. If it does go through we could prob have them running before Hinckley Point C

That's really cool. How do you get to the crag? Do you do many trips to the far flung corners of the UK? 

The job still needs to be done but could be done by people closer to the sites. I have customers mainly all over Yorkshire and Lancashire with a few as far as Scotland and South Wales. There are companies doing what I do all over the place and there is enough work in my field within a 10 mile radius of my workshop to support my business, but competitors from out of the area travel to places near me and we travel elsewhere, also these days groups like to deal with 1 company so as an example I have a customer who has 3 depots in Yorkshire, 2 in Lancashire, 2 in Lincolnshire but also 1 on Barry Island and 1 in Edinburgh. If I want the fairly local stuff I have to take the remote sites too. If my entire industry were to get together and carve up the country and stick to our own local patch the energy savings would be great,  my 7 vans do 700 lts per week between them, that would drop to about 100 if we only worked in a 10 mile radius but it's never going to happen because A competing companies won't work together like that and B it would remove any choice from the customers. 

Is that based on the RR submarine reactors using highly enriched fuel?   I’d be uneasy at that... If it’s normal fuel then great.

My optimist sees the future in Thorium based pebble bed reactors but my money is on the Uranium travelling wave reactors Bill Gates is bankrolling. 

I like the small modular concept because it’s more viable against a backdrop of governments and companies that just can’t manage gigaprojects any more.  Designing to the political and financial environment makes it more likely we can get replacement fission plants online.  

Yes it does only nibble at the moment but as more investment is made it will get better,  the THP plant is a flagship trial that uses high pressure steam to increase the yield, there is another plant I have had some involvement with that generates energy through incineration of poo along with wood chip's, again it's a trial plant but it's looking promising. I'm quoting at the moment to supply mixing blowers for a small digester plant that will be located next to a small village in South Yorkshire . 

Once again we are back to Radical change. Everyone wants their own transport, big screen tv's, warm houses in winter and cool ones in summer. No one wants a wind farm near their house or spoiling the view on their favourite walk, put that stuff somewhere else thank you very much. 

Vote Green consistently and change will happen. Electric vehicles mean cyclists and pedestrians will breathe cleaner air.

By the way, don't anyone think from my postings tonight that I am an evangelical energy warrior. My house is cool / cold but only because I like it that way, I don't fly but only because the pissing about at the air port gets right on my tits. Today I went out and used about 10 lts of petrol in on my motorbike for no other reason than I fancied going for a ride. We all, me included need a radical change but like everyone else I'm waiting for other people to do it first. 

Standard fuel. Everything comes in an ISO frame that fits on a truck and built off site. All the frames get bolted together on site. Site design is semi submerged with novel bunding and highly robust to terrorist attacks. 

It’s a really tricky one though. I can only see a limited window for this kind of base load generation. As renewable plus transient energy storage grows, the window gets smaller. The EV batteries are really useful for power quality and stability active control of all the islander sources.

Not a chance. In my opinion the green party would bring industry in this country to its knees. Well actually I don't  because I think ultimately if they got in power they would shit themselves when they realised they couldn't offer a fraction of what they want without financially crippling the economy. I suppose that is back to radical change and as I said in the post above , I'm waiting for other people to make the change before I do so that I'm not disadvantaged by it too much.

Anyway time to do my bit for energy conservation and turn off the lights and go to bed. 

Design sounds very emenable to a government in a tight spot for energy.  Perhaps parts of it will be almost “plug and play” with one of the dozen or so 200 MW - 500 MW class small, non-tokomak fusion designs various private ventures are working on.   

Although grid scale storage including EV batteries swings both ways - it could also be used to match nuclear baseload to cyclical demand.  I’ve not seen any modelling on this but with enough nuclear it could remove the need for responsive gas generators.  

Modular reactors still have the fuel waste issue.  Financially this is difficult - it would be much less so if carbon burning was made to directly carry the lifetime costs of its waste rather than leaving it for future generations to suck up.  Ironic when you look at the public attitudes and regulatory control over fission waste, and how that’s really held fission back, that it’s a century of atmospheric dumping of CO2 that’s going to wreck the place. 

I believe once we have proper self driving cars on the roads we won't need to own them. We will just pay ford for eg per mile to use one probably with an option to take a whole car or share. once we've finished it will toddle off to an out of town charging/parking area to await its next call. As a result a lot less cars will need to be made (at the moment most of cars' lives are spent rusting on drives or in car parks).

We live 8 miles from the nearest, very infrequent, bus service in a community with very few facilities so the choice we have at the moment is own a car or not live there. I cycle to work and my children often get a council provided bus to school (or they cycle with my wife and I) but cycling for practical purposes much beyond that is not an option. I don't think that even if a bus service was reintroduced it could ever be frequent enough to remove the need for a car for myself and my neighbours unless the structure of our society shifted back 100 years.

No I don't, you say you need a car because you live 8 miles from the nearest public transport but then you go on to say that your options are own a car or not live there. So you have a choice that you could move to somewhere where you didn't "need" a car. It's exactly the same as me needing my van to do my job, I have spent 30 years doing what I do and I am very good at it and wouldn't know what to do if I didn't do it.  I could make a radical change and retrain though just like you could move house.

Let me ask you a question, hypothetically if something happened to you and your wife, say illness or an accident and neither of you would be able to drive again what would you do, your not going to sit tight in a remove village and let yourself and your kids starve, your going to move somewhere where you can cope and that is my entire point about the difference between genuine need and lifestyle need.

My wife only started driving 8 years ago so previous to that our choice of where to live and where she worked was dictated by public transport links.  Unfortunately due to an illness that killed her pancreas she is now insulin dependent diabetic and has to re apply for her driving license every few years, 3 years ago she passed out from hypoglycemia, it was a 1 off a week after coming out of hospital and still learning to manage the lifestyle change but if she has 2 hypos in a 12 month period it's good by drivers license  hence we live in an area with very good transport going in to Leeds center every 5 mins, the supermarket, doctors and chemist are all only a 5 min walk away and she can walk to work in 15 minutes. We would love to move away from the city but that is no longer an option.

Lusk says he needs his car, I gaurentee if for whatever reason driving was no longer an option for him he would find a way to cope with getting the person where the person needs to be. 

I may have missed this point up-thread but the potentially most significant revolution in car ownership isn't the move towards autonomous driving or electric propulsion. It's a switch to a subscription model of car-use.

For city-dwelling millenials facing the high cost of home ownership, it makes more sense to be able to summon a vehicle by app than to endure the expense and hassle of buying and housing one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_subscription

This is the big one for environmental savings.  

As becomes obvious on many car discussions on UKC, a lot of people size their vehicle based on infrequent requirements meaning that they have something much larger and more environmentally destructive than they need most of the time. This includes me…

Move to a vehicle subscription model, and people can then use the smallest viable vehicle for each journey.  75% of the time that I drive, I could be driving a single seat commuter vehicle not designed to go over 50 mph.  With so many people owning cars that are half dead weight when in typical use and entirely wasted capital the 95% of time they are not in use, there is so much scope for both profits and increased personal savings that it’s hard to see how this won’t storm to prominence.  There are always vocal people about how awful this will be, but they are free to continue funding the old model for now…   

Combined with autonomy, this allows people disabled from driving a massive change in their life, and it removes the cost of learning from young people. By allowing travel to jobs without the capital or hassle of getting a car, it removes one of the big trap doors into poverty.  Outsourcing car parking from city centres to densely packed out of town autonomous carparks, and reducing the size of the parked fleet through sharing will release large quantities of land for public amenity and building.  Getting rid of cars parked on sidestreets and narrow city streets will create so much more space for communities and cycling. The scope of this change is so large I don’t think it’s even fully predictable.

I don't feel compromised at all. Using the train/bike/coach and booking ahead I can get all over. I feel I'm on an adventure as soon as I leave the house. What you can't do without a car is quickly be somewhere else....but I see that as part of the problem. So many of us do things we don't want to do and dream of being where we aren't, and can't imagine not being able to do so at the drop of a hat. It is difficult to make these changes individually. We need a more enlightened political system.  

You'd rather have the Conservatives wreck the environment? 

Out of interest did you move to Kendal because you wanted to get rid of the car? I lived there for a few years and it was one of the best connected areas (to the rest of the country) I've been to outside of a city.

Self drive electric cars controlled by Uber style app:

you need a car you summon it via your phone...It won’t be long before this is commonplace.

I’m confused by this radical change you’re talking about. So everyone should be living in an urban centre, with good public transport links, and be able to finance a house move/ rent to these locations despite what would, presumably, be the massive increase in demand? What about chronic lack of local school places in such areas? Your radical change argument doesn’t stack because as you admit, having done the same thing for 30 years yourself, the barriers in place are too significant for most. Energy usage (especially sources of)/ provision of transport has to be led by national/local government rather than devolved to the individual. It would be my guess that the majority of people do not have the resources or disposition to go back to no central heating, no tv, moving house to get a job, not being able to travel conveniently to crag etc.

If you remove peoples mobility then you drastically decrease their opportunities. I'm afraid the radical change thing sounds nice in theory but in reality the effect would be felt by the less well off. It wasn't really that long ago since being born into a poor rural family meant spending your days working in the fields and your future prospects were poor. I'm not saying the world would suddenly go back to that kind of time but car ownership and easier movement has changed a lot of lives and taking that away would have dire consequences for a lot of people.

It would be a sad rewrite of phythons yorkshire sketch, "Ay son, when I were a nipper we used to get out t'town for us work and made a pretty penny I can tell thee. That was when we had us own cars, before't change and we all had to start fighting for jobs run 'ere. Were grand it was, really grand. Could afford all sorts, tv's, heating, the works. You tell that to kids of today, they won't believe you"

I read an article a couple of months ago saying that many of us may have bought our last car, it was a really good and well argued piece. It was similar to this one https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45786690 but better.
Very interesting.

I feel there might be some rose tinting going on there, either that or you live somewhere with decent public transport.

It's really difficult to find any kind of work in my area if you don't drive or live in a big town. I'm not even talking get yourself out of poverty/career jobs either I'm talking about washing dishes, stacking shelves. How do you get out to a hotel for your Sunday shift if you don't drive or have someone to drive you and busses don't run on Sundays? Most places (including where I work) rarely employ anyone if they can't drive because despite people's best intentions and desperation there are very few people that can turn up for shifts reliably without their own transport. There aren't always enough jobs in smaller towns to go around and you just have to travel.

When I've not had my car I've cycled to work at various stages throughout my life and it can be really enjoyable. It takes me 1.5 hours to cycle to work and the same back, it can be enjoyable and it often is when it's a choice and not forced on you. But it can be a grim daily slog in the winter and I'm relatively fit and able. Not everyone is so lucky. I've seen people in tears at the thought of their commute because their bodies been wrecked but they've had no other option. Cycling home at midnight on rural roads after a night in a busy kitchen is tough.

There are options of course. In the time I've worked where I do, I could have landed myself a minimum wage job in town by now, got rid of my car and undoubtably this would have reduced my environmental impact on the world but it would also have decreased my quality of life. As the price of fuel goes up this might end up being the way things go for a lot of people and I'm sure a lot would cope and even thrive like people always do when times are tough. Maybe it would be a lot of fun but there's also a slightly more grim reality to face as well. Rural isolation can be grim and I've seen a number of peoples lives totally changed after passing their driving test.

Tend to agree. In Glasgow where I live now my car is a luxury I increasingly struggle to justify with each passing year, and previous to that I was in Kendal which is easy enough to live in without your own transport.

Growing up in rural North Yorkshire was a different matter however. Two buses per day to many villages if you're lucky, and at weird times like 11am and 3pm. Cycling everywhere was fine for me as a fit single guy but if i had 3 kids to get to school plus arriving at work at time for 830 am? No chance without a car.

To depress oneself you can look at how many new power stations are going to be needed to build the batteries for the electric cars, completely re-build the power distribution network, provide 30million charging stations and the parking spaces, establish and run a battery recycling system etc etc....

And then work out how much has been saved from the global emissions. Battery-powered cars aren´t the solution.

And ironically, if I want to come into Glasgow, public transport is a luxury that I find hard to justify!! I hate driving into Glasgow, but it's so much cheaper, particularly if there's 2 of us. 

As you say, it's so dependent on circumstances

I'm not just talking about people making a radical change, I'm talking about society as a whole, higher tax levels to fund better public services,  investment in autonoms transport on a subscription model, better transport links and better local facilities for people in rural areas. People are not ready for it yet, cars are still seen as a status symbol and not many people will vote for a government that says they are going to tax us all more to provide better bus links to people living in the country. 

Eventually it will happen though, we have no choice. This is a small island that is filling up. The roads in a lot of areas get gridlocked every day, we could increase the cost of motoring to get people off the roads but that would seriously impact on the less well off or we could come together collectively and all sacrifice some of our personal freedoms for the good of the population of this country.  Its never going to happen though because those of us who have are too selfish to help the have-nots, sure we donate a bit to charity and feel all warm and fuzzy but ultimately we are all, me included selfish. 

I need my car, I need my holiday abroad, I need to drive to the crag, I need to buy branded food, I need to buy branded clothing,  I need to live in a house a bit bigger than I actually need,  I need to be able to eat out occasionally, I need to go to the pub, I need to post shite on a public forum using a top end smart phone. 

We are where we are and I don't see a way out of it. If we all gave all up things in the last paragraph and collectively used the money and resources we saved for the common good the world would be a better place but we are not going to do that. I know I'm not and I suspect most of the people reading this won't either. 

Yeah I get that, says you're in Stirling. I think Glasgow can be particularly expensive for public transport if you're coming in from satellite towns such as Motherwell, Hamilton or East Kilbride. Living 3 miles from the city centre it's cheap enough but just quicker or takes a similar amount of time to cycle or walk in.

My point was that some parts of the country ditching the car is not much of an issue but there's plenty of areas without your own transport you're kinda f*cked.

I also fail to see how autonomous electric cars can solve peak conjestion and the additional emissions problems. Each peak time journey made now will require at least one extra journey to get to the customer at those peak  times (that extra power use means emissions or other environmental damage somewhere).  Autonomous vehicles will be good for occasional users, the disabled and those who can't drive. Peak traffic can only be reduced by better public transport or massively cutting the need to travel (big increases in working from home in office jobs).

I also agree that no one is looking at where all the infrastructure or  facilty comes from, or worse still all the batteries (and issues like, that with curent technologies, China has a stranglehold on some key raw materials). The same applies to some conventional low carbon emission fuels like Uranium (the known resources of which are pretty limited).

Change in transport is always slow. People claiming that the average person has purchased their last car are simply in cloud cuckoo land.

Two helpful factors.  No cars parked on roads giving more road area for vehicles.  Smaller 1-person commute vehicles that take less road space in both length and width.  It’ll take either several decades or deliberate forwards looking development to realise those benefits.  

A snapshot at 1300 on Christmas day shows a demand of 37GW. This was provided by:

• Combined cycle gas: 17.2GW (46%)
• Nuclear: 6.9GW (19%)
• Coal: 3.7GW (10%)
• Imports (mostly French nuclear): 3GW (8%). This is the maximum the interconnects can support. We also sent a very small amount (-0.5%) onward to Ireland.
• Wind: 2.5GW (7%)
• Biomass: 1.7GW (5%) 
• Hydro: 0.9GW (2%)
• Solar: 1.0GW (2%), which seems high, but that's because our snapshot is 1pm.
• Pumped storage: 1.2GW (3%).

Grouping them together:

• Fossil fuels and biomass: 61%
• Nuclear: 22%
• Renewables: 12%
• Import: 8%

Current and past data here https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/. Percentages may add up to over 100% due to transmission losses and the way data is captured.

Which just counter some of the doubling of  jouneys necessary to get the autonomous car to the commuters in the first place. In some far future where fast predictable traffic flow can be had below human breaking distances maybe.

The last thing I want is replacing parked cars in city streets with more traffic. I'd much rather we have more buses or trams and better cycling spaces..

Motorbikes? even the Yamaha Niken or Piaggio MP3........

Yes. We were about 3 miles out before, but it is a lot easier and more enjoyable just to be able to take a ten minute walk into town.  

I can only talk for myself but I've always chosen places where I want to live, avoiding long drives at the weekend. Initially residential jobs, living on site. I have generally found keeping out of a car most satisfying for personal gain rather than thinking of the environment. Selfish in a good way perhaps. I just don't like sitting in traffic, and being at the mercy of big bills etc. I think what we are being told now though, is if we don't change, then change will happen. I think we need better leadership as I said earlier. I think, given the right incentives, humans would adapt very well to a greener lifestyle.  

If that was a solution for more people they’d be doing it already.  

Side impact protected, luggage carrying, quiet, comfortable, suitable for smart clothes without needing a changing area at work - all benefits of a car.  But for many people much of the time they don’t need anything much bigger than a car to deliver this.  

Most people would have to own one on top of their ususal car however, as they still need the bigger car sometimes.  That’s a big barrier to adoption.  This is where a “vehicle on demand” model really takes over.   If people flip out of the mindset of owning their own car, a lot of other changes suddenly make an awful lot of sense.

Cool idea bro.  How do you get the power back down to earth ?

Microwaves.  The details are well known and a lot safer than Sim City 2000 led many people to believe.  Using a phase conjugating antenna array in space with a pilot beam from the earth receiver prevents the beam going off-target in an intrinsically failsafe way. 

I think cars run on fossil fuels are on the way out, we are in the first early stages of that progression to whatever comes next. Which presumably will be electric and smaller vehicles for starters, but nothing happens quickly and an easy change for some is a disaster for others - namely if cost comes into the fazing out.

Initially I see large cities/towns becoming vehicle free (or as near as possible), cycle routes, public transport like trams, walking paths and small electric "somethings" providing individual transport for those that live in towns. Getting across town to work, kids to school, shopping. The problem town dwellers have is how to escape town and head to the country for recreation etc.

As a fairly remote rural dweller (7 miles to town and any public transport) we have the opposite problem of how to get to town when needed - shopping, doctors surgery, recreation for kids - and of course farmers depend 100% on their trucks to collect feed, take stock to market and 101 other jobs. This is why I hope future governments do not try and simply tax cars off the road, the wealthy will ignore it and some others will be b******d. Alternative, affordable technologies have to come into place.

I am confidant that when youngsters of today are my age and look back they will remember our cars as something archaic.

I do. Turns out lots of local communities do too when they see the benefits of commu ity ownership alongside the 'burden'. The problem is our anachronistic government.

Jk

I'd have thought that the companies that run fleets of autonomous vehicles would use the kind of planning software you see in factories where movements are organised to maximise machine usage. To explain, you may for example drop someone off at one office but then pick someone else up nearby. Vehicles may well transport more than one individual to more than one destination. Government regulation could help also by encouraging more flexible working practices to eliminate or at least blunt the rush hour spikes of traffic. With potentially thousands of vehicles and thousands of rides being organised by a piece of software a lot is possible. 

If electric cars are the future, can someone please explain to me how the electricity network is going to cope with all the extra demand placed upon it ??

Well except for the vast quantity of research going on world wide into emerging battery technologies, with one of the drivers being the use of more abundant materials (eg aluminium vs lithium).

Well except for the large quantity of research going on in to thorium cycle reactors, sea water extraction for transuranics, in-situ fuel breeding in travelling wave reactors etc etc etc.

Many people don't want to work like that, especially with kids. By the time companies get round to such processes most big sites will probably have replaced many workers with robots, as the car industry already has. Also many roads are always very busy: just even busier at rush hour there is nowhere to move traffic to unless we cut travel.

I don’t want a wind farm next to my house although we have several in eye sight. I want it to 10 miles to the west on top of the ecological wasteland that is the North Pennine “area of outstanding natural beauty”.  The same turbines would generate a lot more power up there, and turbines specified for higher average wind speed would do even better.

However that area must be protected because of its “natural” beauty… Although it is possible that the sheer quantity of concrete needed to stop the turbines from sinking into the bog would be a problem…

Tell me all this when there are commercial units up and running, maybe in a decade. I believe in research but history shows what research will bring medium term can be very hard to predict. Hydrogen cells seem a much better medium term solution to me than batteries..

Sadly, the way things are going, western civilisation might be rather messed up by then and we might have more pressing basic concerns. 

You said “no one is looking at” not “there are no commercial systems yet”.  As you say research is unpredictable but it’s getting a lot investment these days, especially with the growing EV market.

Ah yes, the hydrogen economy...  Always just around the corner...  

Indeed...

Ok. In short it'll need upgrading, more supply, more delivery capacity. It's continually being maintained and upgraded, this bit is no big deal.

The clever bit is getting the retail part of the transaction right, economic incentives and tech enabaling us the dumb consumers to consume at the opportune moment or perhaps even trade a fraction of our stored energy back onto the grid. This improves the 'efficiency' of renewables driving down cost and it reduces to scale of the distribution upgrade required. Cars are used at a very low duty cycle and most are used quite predictably/periodically, we could charge them slowly or better, when excess energy is available. It's not a trivial engineering erring problem but it's mostly about finding the right business and regulatory model.

We will need more generating capacity but I don't see that as a problem, it's an opportunity.

Jk

Flat for 20mi in every direction here, plenty good enough, it doesn't have to be perfect.

We did this a while ago, its an interesting question, the concrete, steel and site roads are 'paid off' in the first 2-3 years even if they destroy the peat they displace which they don't, it just gets moved.

Jk

Well not quite round the corner for me but I filled up last week on my way home in a petrol station and the next pump was a hydrogen one.

You say highly populated urban areas ....

When you consider the average journey length of car journeys in the week (10m) and the density of population in this country I reckon the network could cover 80%+  of people’s needs

I have wondered about the efficiency of electric cars vs internal combustion engine cars.

For traditional internal combsution engine vehicles, I know that less than 1% of the chemical energy in the fossil fuel (petrol or diesel) is used to move the passenger.

Does anyone have an estimate of efficiency for the whole "electric car" system, assuming that the electricity is produced from fossil fuels.  Some estimates I have read put the efficiency of modern coal-powered power stations at around 40-45% (max).  But how efficient is the electrical motor in electric cars?  I suppose there is less energy wasted as sound and heat, but how much less.

I suspect, although it would need some more accurate numbers to prove it, that due to improved system efficiency, even electric-powered vehicles result in less CO2 emissions than internal-combustion engine vehicles, per km driven.  I could be wrong though, so if anyone has any estimates or links I'd love to see them.

Sure - but it’s still news when a single new pump is added nationwide and there’s only one car model that can use them.  It’s been limping on as a concept for a long time now, and I’m sure it’ll continue to do so.  I’m quite skeptical about it going mass market though.   

Can of worms.  An efficient EV is good, some emerging hybrid SUVs are awful.  It’s so dependant on the carbon intensity of the electricity you charge from as well.  Unlike ICE vehicles though, EVs improve as the grid decarbonises over time.  People tend to twist the figures to whatever view they want to push.  There are also no great like-for-like vehicles to compare, and EVs encourage a much better driving style.

The main efficiency loss in an EV is round trip charging/discharging losses rather than the electric motor.  

What’s beyond doubt is that the fossil fuels burnt in centralised external combustion generators at power plants emit tiny fractions of the health destroying filth in to the air that mobile internal combustion generators do.  Further the filth produced by an existing EV decreases in the future with better fossil generation and more renewables, unlike an ICE where it increases with wear and tear, EGR blanking, cat removal etc...

Thanks  - I understand that, but even if we assume for now that, say 90% of the electricity comes from coal, oil gas etc, it seems fairly plain to me that efficiency should be better overall using EVs and hence much less CO2 per km driven, wherever the energy comes from to charge the battery.  I hear the argument trotted out fairly regularly that there is little point in EVs if the electricity comes from fossil fuels, so I think the efficiency issue should get more focus.  It's great material for school STEM classes etc and could hopefully influence the thinking of future generations

That's an important factor I hadn't considered and it's true that the air pollution is another major factor.  Thanks.  

It’s so difficult to actually compare though as there are so many variables.  

• Petrol has to be processed more - at energy cost - than the stuff going in to power plants.  Win for EVs
• Petrol has to be transported at energy cost.  This one is often ignored by people.  Win for EVs.
• Electricity is lost in transmission through resistance etc.  Win for ICE.
• EVs regenerate far more than ICE vehicles (which do a bit these days through smart alternators).  Win for EVs
• Drivers or low range EVs tend to drive more efficiently...  
• Real world ICE efficiency sucks compared to CCGT power stations - win for a EVs
• A smart country would do district heating from its power plants. recovering more energy that is lost from ICE vehicles.  This is massive as you can heat millions of homes for free, displacing massive fossil usage.  The UK is not a smart country.  Potential win for EVs.
• The grid has nuclear, wind, solar and one day Icelandic geothermal.  CO2 / kWh is going down down down.  Win for EVs.
• EVs charge more at night when carbon intensity of the power grid is lower.

The different factors are almost endless.  There are studies out there and they tend to come out T parity or EVs ahead.  I’m happy that our Leaf represents less CO2 emissions than the old ICE vehicle it replaced.  With another 800 W of 2nd hand solar panels having come online this weekend on a new log store, even more so. 

It was the main reason we went electric with my wife’s car, which we car-share 3 out of 5 weekdays and use for all weekend mileage.  Since I moved out of the pit village to the hills my nose has recovered and I find the filth in the air in town offensive.  There’s an estimated 1-6 million early deaths a year from air pollution.  Throw in more than 10x as many people with life limiting illnesses and disease.  We got a small battery pack EV which limits the lithium requirements and the pack will be fully reused or recycled end of life, but there is still a 1-off environmental cost far away for the lithium mining.  But no gulf war(s)...

Sounds like an idea devised by someone too smart for his/her own sake

'm not sure why but I'm not convinced by the idea of putting a massive microwave beam of death into orbit.
There is more than enough space for terrestrial solar, so I'll take that, thank you very much

I was at a Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership committee meeting maybe 10 years ago, which was all battery/fuel cell. When it was BMWs R&D director’s turn, he took the opportunity to tell us that BMW was ditching fuel cells in favour of burning hydrogen directly in IC engines. Mrs P in Sheffield has some experimental experience burning hydrogen in engines and says the flame front is a bit ‘fierce’ but that it’s a mainly materials problem. I wouldn’t write off the internal combustion engine just yet. I’ve also some mates at Siemens who have a lot of gas turbine running time under their belts burning hydrogen.

I appreciate that and thanks for outlining the various factors - really useful for my own thinking about going electric...

I can understand all that.  We lived in China for a year or two not long ago and we all had loads of respiratory complaints that totally cleared up after a few months back in Europe.  We now live in the Correze region of France which, I believe, has some of the cleanest air in Europe.  Each time I have to go to Lyon, Paris etc, I notice the filth in the air almost immediately, so air pollution is something that is very much on our radar.  Hopefully we will be able to ditch car ownership altogether in a few years, but we may go electric in the meantime.  Currently we have a small petrol engine car, which we only use for longer journeys.  I mostly cycle to supermarkets etc when we need supplies and we walk to the village with our daughter for school.  I travel a fair bit by car for work, but I'm looking to reduce that too The discussion here has been really useful, so thanks!

Long ago Wintertree Sr knew someone who’d run a Rover V8 engine on hydrogen.  It makes more sense than fuel cells for sure.  ICEs running on either methane or H2 are a lot less polluting in terms of filth than those using petrochemicals.

One of the best proposed applications I’ve seen is for rocketry - using the boil off from cryogenic H2 and O2 to run a small ICE on space vehicles to provide electrical power rather than just venting it.  

ICEs will also run on methane which is a much better place to store renewable energy than hydrogen.  We have a whole nationwide infrastructure for it already including for vehicles.

I’ll be surprised if hydrogen is being used widely for anything except rocketry and Sklyon/SABRE style pre-cooled air breathing rockets.    The only areas where hydrogen is an advantage over methane are (1) fuel cells and (2) liquid hydrogen can absorb an awful lot of heat.

I am well aware of the use of Hydrogen as a clean fuel, one advantage is that it uses an easily adapted ICE so the motor industry is less threatened and more likely to adapt. However what I don't know is  - what is the overall energy usage of producing it in the volumes needed? I recall it comes from an electrolysis process which must require energy.

It's complicated. Electric vehicle motors will operate somewhere between about 10 and 80% efficient, in the cruise they should be near peak, accelerating hard from standstill they are dreadful but only for a moment. 70% would seem a reasonable average guestimate for the motor-gearbox.

Controller will average mid-low 90s%

Battery probably 85% in and out

Charger mid 90s%

Regen braking will recover no more than 5% percent long term for normal use, 2 is perhaps more realistic.

Wall-road that's ~45%, slightly better than pump-road for a typical IC drivetrain (30-35%).

The more practical and perhaps less estimate-error prone way to look at it is to look at the front air inlet area of similar performance IC and EVs, the EV's have notably smaller air inlets for their lower cooling requirements, higher like for like running efficiency (in use at least, neglects charging losses).

jk

Burning methane produces CO2, hydrogen cells don't.

Methane is extremely difficult to store as it is virtually impossible to liquify economically, hydrogen is easily liquified and easy and efficiently produced from methane.

Tricky

hydrolysis is highly inefficient, and the gas then needs to be compressed (gave me pause for thought when I drove a demonstrator with 300 bar bottles behind my head). However, if the wind is blowing while everyone is asleep, it makes a useful energy storage vector whatever the efficiency. Seem to remember that it requires some really nasty chemicals to work.

Irrelevant if that methane was made from atmospheric CO2 or waste CO2 as a form of energy storage.  That was my suggestion - sorry if it wasn’t clear.  

Yet almost all hydrogen comes from steam-reforming methane and emitting the CO2

Odd - apparently there were 14.8 million methane vehicles on the roads back in 2011.  Methane is stored in our gas grid in vast amounts.  It’s stored in various LNG tanks like the one out next door neighbour has.  

Perhaps you are confusing hydrogen and methane?  Hydrogen is exceptionally difficult to store because the protons diffuse through solid metal tanks re-emerging in tiny cracks to form pockets of hydrogen gas, embrittling the metal.  It’s notable that methane is becoming popular in rocketry as it’s so benign to work with and has a higher storage density than hydrogen, despite its lower exhaust velocity.

I work for a REC and it is a big deal. The cables in the ground are simply not big enough to cope, some of them have been in situ for over fifty years. They are tiny in comparison to today's cable size. No one wants to pay to upgrade them, let alone the upheaval it will cause.

Where do you plug in your electric car if you live in a terrace house and park on the road ??

What happens if you get caught in snow and are unable to move, how are you going to keep warm ??

Good to see someone who knows what they're actually talking about!

There’s about 10 GW of spare capacity at night that is used during the day.  It’s there right now.  

You don’t.  It sucks.  They’re not a solution for everyone.  But in 20 years time the batteries just might be good enough that most terrace dwellers can charge weekly.  

You might fall down a hole.  What about the fog? Stuck in the hole, in the fog, in the middle of the night, with an Owl!

If I get benighted in the Leaf, I’ll put the electric heated seat on and that’s about it.  Good for > 24 hours.  If it’s really cold I’ll run the cabin heat pump up for a while - good for several hours flat out or all night metered and unlike an ICE there’s no risk of killing my self by sucking the exhaust fumes in with the blower.   Most EVs have or will have much larger batteries than our 24 kWh Leaf as well...

Mind you the thing is like a miracle in the snow, the ultra-responsive mechanics of a small (in terms of rotational inertia) electric motor make traction control seem like magic.  It’s why you have to start pulling fuses to really enjoy it...

These are exactly the sorts of questions I ask myself regarding electric cars. Also at the moment the cost per mile of an electric car is much cheaper than that of petrol/diesel cars. That of course will change when electricity is taxed to replace the current fuel duty. Also it will be interesting to see how good these batteries are at holding their charge after long term use. 

An Owl might not scare you - but what about a Tapir?

<great thread everybody, very informative>

Good thread!  Meanwhile all across the UK thousands and thousands and thousands of homes are being built with the transport solution either being more cars on the same roads or more cars on the same roads with a few new roads being built *sigh*.

I doubt anybody is disputing that figure, but is it sufficient to re-charge 31.6 million cars overnight?

Can we wait that long? I thought ICE vehicles had to be history well before that.

The government have ballsed this up.  The OLEV grants have installed a swath of 16 A and 32 A, 230 V chargers across the country.  Pretty brutal for everyone to get home and turn on a 16 A appliance for a couple of hours.  

We use a 6A charger which is still enough to put 70 miles into the car overnight; we drive about a third of that a day normally.  Much friendlier to the grid I figure.

There should have been a “smart” standard for domestic chargers before the OLEV scheme started with an emphasis on delaying the start of an overnight charge and flexible charging rates.  Even then that standard would have been hamstrung because there isn’t a standard for existing EVs to communicate total energy demand to the chargers.  

The sum total smarts in the OLEV units is a GSM and WiFi bassed panic button to let someone somewhere drop them offline.  

Like Clint86 I also live in Kendal. We moved here 4 years ago and at the time I was working in Lancaster and I could not have worked my Sunday contracted hours by using public transport. Also the cost would have been very high compared to using the car. The bus takes over an hour. I now work in Kendal so I can walk or cycle. 

If my wife wants to visit her sister in Sedbergh say on a Sunday she needs the car as there is no public transport between Kendal and Sedbergh. Cycling would not be an option unless we got an electric bike, a decent one costing £2000. 

This is worth a read on future lithium supply.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-future/?cmpid=socia...

There is an international trade in liquid methane with ships can carring up to 170,000m3 (more than 100,000 tons).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_carrier

CH4 has much higher boiling point (-164C) so easier than H2 (-253C) to liquidise.

Its about 200 million miles worth.  I think about 600 million miles are driven per day.    So existing capacity here and now is enough for more than a 1,000 fold increase in the number of EVs on the roads in the UK.  It needs sympathetic smart charging however.

Climate wise I increasingly think it’s already too late, and cars aren’t even the major problem.

New sales stopped in 20 years.  So that gives 30 years before they’re largely off the roads.

No problem then!
But, as arch alluded to, would your average urban street distribution cabling be up to the job?
Bearing in mind that the drop in demand is business etc not working during the night.

If the cars had slow chargers at 6 A or 10 A and were staggered throughout the night then without a doubt, yes.   A slow charging car uses less juice than a kettle or tumble dryer, and far less than an oven or an electric shower.  Hell it uses less juice than the lighting in a big house that hasn’t upgraded away from incandescnat lightbulbs.

The problem is most installed chargers can’t do the lowest possible charging rates, and there exists no coordinated means to stagger charging of EVs throughout the night.

However this can all be addressed without digging up reams of under street cabling.

Some great info there - thanks!

I'll ask the question again.

If you live in a row of terrace houses and park on the street. Where and how are you going to plug your car in ??

What if you live in a flat ?? Same applies. 

Might as well if you’re going to ignore what people write.

If you live in a terrace it isn’t for you yet.   So what?  Not enough EVs can be made for everyone to buy one in the next decade anyway.  So there’s no problem.

Imagine this though - EVs work for some people, they buy them.   Battery technology and charger speeds improve as the market grows and more is spent on R&D.  More chargers appear at workplaces, shops, leisure centres etc.  In 20 years, some terrace owners will charge at their destinations, others will rapid charge once a week just like with petrol.  Some will overnight charge from lamppost mounted chargers.  Most probably won’t own a car in 20 years time though...  

What if you were down a hole?  In the fog?  With an owl?  At night!

Plenty of peope are happily adopting EVs now.  There’s no denying that the technology has momentum.  Nobody has claimed that everyone can or should switch right now.  So I’m not really sure what your point is other than “look this emerging technology isn’t as capable as the existing one”.  Which is news to nobody and is the case for just about every emerging technology...

In be more concerned with all the trailing leads running everywhere, but hey ho.

Just for your information, most lamp feeds are 4mm squared cable with a 5 amp fuse fitted. 

Yes, trailing leads vs 6,000,000 early deaths worldwide from pollution a year.  Lots of EVs already charge from public posts and it’s not brought about the apocalypse yet.  In practice you can lift one or two paving slabs to run a spur to a post at the roadside edge of the pavement.

I know.  The fuse can be changed for 15 amp which the cabling supports and two cars can charge at 6 A simultaneously.  With LED lighting it’s all in budget.  4 mm^2 cabling is plenty of spare for slow overnight charging.  A typical commute only needs 20 to 30 Ah total @ 230 V.

There has barely been a year that's passed where electricity demand hasn't increased and the infrastructure hasn't been incrementally grown and/or improved to meet that demand. We don't electrify the whole fleet overnight, it is at least a 20year project to remove and replace existing vehicles from daily service and to make it work a lot of public and private investment will be needed, realistically some of this will have to come from new tax on road-use or road-energy. Again we come back to the point that cars have a very low duty cycle and predictable usage allowing the charging load of a large fleet to be distributed over time allowing peak grid loads to be managed, the distribution infrastructure will no doubt need upgrading no doubt but not to cope with everyone switching on their chargers at once. 'Smart' (I hate that word) consumption is key to making this work and to boosting the resilience of a renewable-heavy supply. Some of this, much of it is yet to be standardised and implemented but it will be because it must be, electric vehicles as distributed storage (or virtual storage as smart consumers) are a huge opportunity.

At the roadside where you park, perhaps you don't even need to plug in or at work or the supermarket carpark or the energy station somewhere on your journey like you do today... where did Karl Benz fill up in 1886? The world changes, just because you can't see how it might or you don't want it to doesn't mean it won't. Every single street in my town has been dug up this year to pull optical fiber to every house.

Eh? Use the heating, wear a coat, shiver, die eventually if it's that bad. Surely you can think of a better reason to press on with the unabated destruction of our ecosystem than that?

jk

The really relevant metric is g CO2 / mile, and at the moment (assuming sensible behaviour on the part of the EV owner like charging from solar panels, or from a 100% renewable energy supply, or even just late at night when the UK mix is biased towards nuclear) this is in the region of a quarter of that of a similar ICE. 

Of course, one can argue that if everyone had an EV then there wouldn't be enough green energy available, but that's a challenge for the grid, not for the cars.

The battery longevity question really has been put to bed - as I've said before, look at all the Prius taxis still running with 100,000+ miles on the clock.  My PHEV has just gone past 25,000 miles and I really haven't noticed the slightest degredation in its range.

And look at what's happened to battery specs in the last decade or two.  We've gone from the Gen 1 Prius, with a 1.3kWh battery that meant the rear seats were a bit small and there was little room in the boot, to the upcoming Hyundai Kona and Kia Niro, which look like they're going to be genuine 250-300 mile range cars at perfectly sensible prices. 

I'm afraid I file methane and hydrogen unde the same heading as nuclear fusion; great ideas but I don't think they're going to come off.  They've been 'just around the corner' for so long now.

On paper, electric cars are the way forward, in real life there is lots of other things to consider. But it seems like you boys have all the answers. 

No. Remind me, when did we decide to live a life preserved in aspic, stuck in the 20th century with nothing getting better because nothing must change?

Cars last c20 years, production line to recycling plant. If every new car in the showroom in 2030 is electric the last of the daily-use dinosaurs goes off the road c2050. It'd be nice if we could speed that up, we really need to but realistically we probably need the time to shift public opinion and develop the infrastructure.

jk

BMW have moved back to fuel cells, they share technology with Toyota and probably the first off the line will be the 5 series (and replacing the i8 since they use the same platform). Mercedes are going the same route with the GLC and the Sprinter as well as the bus lineup.

Now non-electrolysis systems are coming on line the main objection to fuel cells (using electrolysis to make it) will disappear, the ethanol-water mix Nissan are using being a typical example of what´s coming. There is also a catalytic system which converts ethanol or bio-gas or methane into electricity, the leaders in the field being probably Morphic. We keep an eye on progress as we´ve a bio-gas plant and are running out of increasing the efficiency conventionally.

Most car manufacturers are betting on some kind of fuel cell system in the medium/long term, half the cost, a quarter of the weight and refuelling in  few minutes without a gigantic overhaul of the already overstrained electricity network are attractive compared with batteries!

Of course there's a lot to consider but that's what we do as thinking animals and as engineers, we solve problems. They're not solved problems and each year will bring new ones but the technical problems are very solvable and the opportunity here is huge. The problems frankly are political more than technical as you're ably demonstrating.

jk

No surprise there but the small number of chargers aready installed are no big problem so long as the situation improves before EVs become more mainstream and some pressure is applied to upgrade the existing stock of charge-points. Sadly our government will have it's head up it's arse with Europe for the next decade so change when it comes will come from elsewhere, we will be following not leading.

Absolutely while you're managing the charge yourself but a charger capable of variable rate based on communicated forecast of supply and predicted or communicated future demand ("Car: you're going to Devon tomorrow morning" or "Car: we won't need you until the 12th") could be even more useful especially if you allow it to autonomously store and sell a fraction of stored energy back once it's made profitable considering the battery cycle life.

Yes. It'll happen because it self evidently has to and there is economic opportunity in it for consumers and governments with climate change commitments to meet.

jk

Yes, the answer to most of the problems - (real, perceived and outright manufactured) are available and don’t rely on unpredictable research breakthroughs.  They do need commitment and planning over the next 20 years.  

I think the least sustainable thing about most current BEVs is the use of rare earth elements to make permenant magnet motors.  Even Tesla have balked at getting the cost down enough on induction motors when it comes to the Model 3.  But this is the early adopter stage with only a few people making things.  The industry is gearing up slowly for a widespread switch...

Rare-earth is a bit of a misnoma as I understand it, most of the elements aren't actually especially rare but their supply has been limited by low demand not driving much prospecting or development until recently. In the long run I guess we'll re-use/recycle or another architecture or a hybrid motor architecture will win out.

jk

Yes nothing is really “rare” if you dig enough, and there’s a lot of people who deliberately misuse the term “proven reserves” to imply scarcity when often it means “nobody bothered to survey for more yet”.

Its not the reserves that bother me with rare earths, it’s the quality of material that has to be mined and refined to get at them.  It’s really not nice ecologically.   There is a case to be made that global climate trumps local ecology, and that the alternative of oil has been disasterous to both.

Eventually reuse will take over from mining as you say.  

Here we all are worrying about cars.  Meanwhile, global shipping is so exempt for any responsibility for its emissions that it’s cheaper for the USA to ship raw ore to China for rare earth extraction than to do it locally.  Unbelievable - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/us-tariffs-helping-t...

Interesting you are so relaxed about availability of  rare earths. If you search for posts on this subject its clear most 2018 posts show western governments still are very concerned and that China currently controls about 85% of the market. Car company insiders I know were certainly worried about this even before Trump got more bullish on his trade war..

Your claim of a car probably only needing to charge once a week in 20 years due to improvements in battery technology certainly sound unlikely without battery technology research breakthroughs, all other factors being equal. All the big improvements in batteries energy density were down to the use of new research driven chemistries. These might come with new problems eg longevity might not match current commercial car batteries in electric cars. Its all a big unknown.

There's more than one way to make an electric motor and it's far from clear PMAC will win the battle for EV supremacy anyway. China currently controls the majority of rare earth magnet production but not because it alone has the raw materials, more that it has been willing to turn a blind eye to the production cost. That will change.

How can you say something is unlikely 20 years from now when we are basically there already? Seriously, think what's changed in 20 years and we don't need magic new tech here, we just need the economies of scale and incremental improvement. On a single weekly charge I could already commute in a second gen' Leaf with enough to spare for a weekend jolly to the local crag or airfield, the Leaf is hardly an exotic and it's already slipping behind the competition on range.

jk

We are already there.  A 12,000 mile a year driver needs 230 miles a week on average.  The 64kWh packs in the Niro and Kona exceed this.  I will frankly be surprised if we don't see 500 mile ranges in bog-standard consumer cars by the middle of the next decade.

Totally agree, the exotics are already there on range and will this year be matched by ordinary runabouts.

I'd be a bit surprised at the runabout end of the market, excess storage isn't really needed by most users but it comes at a big cost in running energy consumption, performance and of course cash! Today 500mi range might seem a selling point but I think as we get used to living with sensibly spec'd EV's the 'range anxiety' thing will fade away. I'd imagine unless there is a surprise technological revolution in storage we'll see Euro/UK spec runabouts top out at 2-300mi range. Battery prices are unlikely to crash as EV production ramps up, battery supply and demand should all being well grow in lock-step but of course there is no guarantee, if EV sales are sluggish we may get used to cheap big batteries, if battery plants struggle and storage prices remain stubbornly high I guess we'll see a growth in clever charging and easy-ownership services.

jk

I'm not saying any such thing.. almost the opposite in fact:  I think the 20 year predictions here are dumb..  Developments in battery tech are slow apart from new chemistries, which come from research, which face the same arguments that some here were using against fuel cells, and other tech no one has even mentioned might be in play by then (or war or other major economic disaster might mean we have even gone backwards). I was arguing a daily journey requiring a full daily charge won't beome a singe weekly charge without R&D delivering that.  I am confident that R&D will improve most of our problems if we allow them to, albeit often not in a way we expect; and that comes from history.

Not interesting so much as what happens when I took the time to understand *why* China is dominant in rare earths.  It comes down to the economics of mining and processing, not resource scarcity.  The economy is shifting towards EVs in a massive way so this is all going to change...

Did you read the article I linked to on this?  Americans hurting because they can’t export raw ore to China for low cost processing without paying trade tariffs on the re import.  They’re worried about their profit margins not foreign “control”.

As I said before, Tesla have shown it possible to do EVs without rare earths in the motors, and as the field matures this could scale down to more affordable cars - especially as motors have a lifetime of > 4 typical cars so could be highly reused.

For over 50% of motorists it’s alreadt a reality with the higher range existing EVs.  The average driver does something like 180 miles per week.  

I flat out disagree.  Lithium technologies are seeing continual ongoing energy density increases from incrementally improved manufacturing and improved understanding of how failure develops.  There’s a long way to go (about 7x I think) in lithium before the theoretical limits are reached.  The R&D is nowhere near the land of diminishing returns yet.

I can see England’s second largest on shore wind farm from my house, I run in the area of the wind farm and several over local ones on a regular basis. I have absolutely no problem with them being there. I have much more problem with some domestic solar installations, but they are improving massively.

I'm really confused! Probably my fault but I really don't see what you're getting at, you can go to a showroom today and buy an electric car that will commute all week on one charge. Later in the year they become genuinely affordable. They already are to people like me with modest commutes (if I wasn't skint and allergic to car finance).

Jk

  It’s stored in various LNG tanks like the one out next door neighbour has.  

Why on earth has your next door neighbour got a LNG tank? With all the problems keeping it cryogenic and coping with the boil-off either they have an unbelievably complex system for whatever reason like they run a truck company or they are keeping it under pressure (56bar) so the tank is either small of incredibly expensive.

LNG is reasonably easy to store in an industrial context as it´s already been liquified and the energy costs at the producer end are fairly irrelevant as otherwise they can´t ship the product (and the gas is effectively free), as a gas at atmospheric pressure it´s crap, we can produce surplus methane easily and wanted to convert some of the tractors to use it, as compressed gas it´s too voluminous and the pressure tanks become ridiculously expensive and to refrigerate it takes 20-40% of the energy you store let alone the capital costs of the plant which are horrendous (or slightly more).

The future of the car is its exclusion from city centres.

In pursuit of better health (obesity), greater freedom of movement for people aged 5-90, faster travel, better air quality, and, to breath new life in to our cities, more of the road network will be given over to segregated cycle lanes.

Traffic comprised of electric vehicles still constitutes congestion.

However a large portion of this country's housing stock is made up of terraced houses and flats - all with no dedicated parking.

How do you think people will be able to recharge these vehicles overnight ?

All very well if you live in suburbia, but not in the inner cities, and those who live there don't have the money to move out.

battery swap stations?

It's been answered already: things change, we'll probably charge where we park. We built the roads and the cities around them, we can add charge points if we need them. Charging at the roadside will become available as demand grows (as we see already happening) and for those who still need alternatives we will have charge points in carparks, supermarkets, roadside energy stations where we once bought petrol and at work. Perhaps we even have a charging lane with near-field wireless power installed on sections of trunk road though I wouldn't bet on it.

Look how much the world has changed in just a hundred years, it's utterly unrecognisable in many ways yet the idea we might a decade or two from now have incrementally improved our electricity generation and distribution infrastructure (like we did the sewers, trains, the telegraph and the roads, like we always have with electricity distribution before as we electrified our homes, businesses and streets) to match our twenty first century transport needs... unthinkable! This attachment to the past, the unwillingness to imagine and build a better future that doesn't just look like a 'nostalgia world' theme park, it's baffling.

jk

I think your unfliching optimism for battery powered electric cars is whats really baffling.

Despite all the proseletysing the uptake of battery powered electric cars continues to be disappointing and there is no sign of likley mass change of heart anytime soon.  Fuel cell cars or hybrids need much less infrastructure change, much reduced 'fueling' time and are lighter (needing less energy to move) so in my view will be very much part of the mix in 20 years. They are already in use in California (where car futures usually show first).

We in the UK live in what seems to be a gradually increasing capitalist influenced society and as such there is good chance the lower classes might get left further behind, continuing a trend of recent decades.   If so, I see car ownership declining fast for the poorer in society through a mix of financial and tighter regulatory constraints. I think they will have much fewer cars and rely even more on public transport (a massive potential problem in rural areas).  Things will possibly get better for most of us who can afford cars, and those cars will certainly be much less poluting, but I can see little reason for strong optimism on equallity of wealth, and as such  the middle classes might soon be being left behind as well (as they already are in the US).

I’m not sure what’s disappointing about the uptake?  They’re selling as fast as they are built.  Faster, in some cases.

Well except for the raft of new BEV models coming to market this year and next year and the appearance of more mid-range BEV models.

Fossil fuel hybrids - sure - but they’re clearly a technological dead end.

Fuel cells - you can tell they’re such a winner by the numbers.  7,000 fuel cell cars on the road globally and over 1,000,000 BEVs and PHEVs sold globally last year.

Meanwhile despite your earlier assertion to the contrary, improved manufacturing is delivering a 5% to 8% increase yearly in the energy density of lithium batteries, with pack sizes going up or pack weights going down.  Charging speeds are going up.  Copious hard data is appearing on pack lifetimes.   Even ignoring the possibility for, say, aluminium ion battery technology to reach market readiness it amazes me that some people seem to think that BEVs are doomed.  Look at how far it’s come as a minority product in the last decade, then imagine what 20 years of increasingly mainstream use will do.  

There’s no magic hydrogen generator, and the combined efficiency of electroclysis and a fuel cell is not a nice number.  An awful lot of infrastructure is needed to support a large hydrogen fleet. The only real advantage is faster charging, and that’s a smaller problem than many people claim, even now let alone in 20 years.  

They've not been very user friendly until recently and they're still not cheap. We're looking at the first wave of early adoptions of a new to mass market technology that has in a number of ways yet to surpass the highly evolved one we've learned to live with, it's not surprising they're still quite rare.

Hybrids are an evolutionary step, one we will move past at least in lightweight vehicles in the blink of an eye. I expect it'll survive longer in heavier goods vehicles and we'll see hybrid energy systems creeping back into shipping.

Fuel cells might well win out in cars but they haven't to date and they're hardly new tech, like batteries they're very well established, like batteries they have proven strengths and known deficiencies. I'm not against fuel cells, indeed I think we will probably see both technologies adopted at significant scale alongside each other for many years. I'd be surprised if we don't given the established road-fuel industry needs to reinvent itself in short order to avoid extinction, supply of hydrogen, ethonol etc seems an avenue worth exploring for them. Likely one or the other technology ultimately wins the lions share of the 'car' market, perhaps even eventually squeezing the other concept to extinction. To a degree this will be shaped by government policy but likely mostly market forces. As fuel cell cars still need a battery or other power-dense energy storage capacity to provide for and absorb transients and we need grid-scale storage anyway which might as well be multi-function and distributed I personally think if one concept clearly wins the light-transport market in the coming half century it will be 'plug in' battery-electric. Fuel cells only become and remain attractive once/while there is a critical mass of users to support the energy supply business at a density necessary for the convenience of customers, the same isn't true of battery electric, almost every business and household in the UK already connects and subscribes to that network/service.

We do need to get the regulatory framework and the economic integration between energy grid, transport and consumer right, this bit is enormously important.

I think that trend has been challenged already with brexit (and related similar phenomena elsewhere), we clearly aren't going to tolerate that trajectory much longer and we do still have a significant degree of control. Arguably we're living in curious post-recession moment where emotions run high as the trickle down from a visibly recovering economy fails to arrive at the coalface but unlike previous recoveries, this is superimposed on the ever more obvious need to face our looming climate disaster. this more than transient recession after-effects will shape the actions and societies of our near future or condemn them. Change is coming, sure it might be a period of rapacious turbo-capitalism but if so it won't last.

I don't see people weaned off cars any time soon, our world is built for them. I don't think anywhere near as many urban dwellers will own their own in the future but there will still be plenty of (probably still too many) cars in the towns and cities of 2050.

jk

We have trouble enough getting houses built just to serve the growing population.

There is absolutely no way that the millions (yes MILLIONS) of current domiciles which are terraces and flats (without bespoke parking) could be replaced in a hundred years with those that do have same, let alone 20. On top of this, just where do you expect these new houses to be built ?

What planet are you living on ??

How many terrace dwellers drive less than 300 miles per week?  Hint: the average across all UK drivers and thus housing types is about 280 miles.

So a great many terrace dwellers can have a 300 mile range EV and rapid charge it once a week.  That works now.  It’s not affordable because we are at the early adopter stage, and that much rapid charging isn’t ideal for the battery pack.  But... in 20 years the packs will have even more capacity, will rapid charge faster and with less degradation.  These things are improving rapidly year on year.

So EVs will work - in terms of charging - for most terrace dwelllers *now* and will work much more affordably in 20 years time.

But... 20 years is also a long time to build destination charging (work, play, shops etc).

Then there’s 20 years to upgrade wherever terrace dwellers do park to have charging.  You just need an allocated parking space, not necessarily one on your property.  

Three totally different solutions only one of which is needed for any individual.

I don’t know why I’m trotting these out again when you’ve apparently chosen to ignore them twice.

We choose to choke housing supply. We could and have at times in the past made different choices with different results.

Also there is no connection between housing/planning policy and our ability to install charging infrastructure on residential streets. Bad planning policy and our (current in-)ability to cost effectively decarbonise our electricity supply do interact.

Why on earth would you need to replace millions of homes to add charging points to the roadside? You might want to for other reasons but let's stick with electric transport for now.

There are ~37M cars in the UK, if they last on average 15 years showroom to shredder we're replacing 2.5M each year. If all of those replacements are electric we need to add charge points (and of course generating capacity and or load balancing tech) at a rate to support that change.

Now we know the current crop of EVs will for most users only need charging on average around once per week (typical 10k/year / 52 = 190mi/week), lets say since people don't like running on empty they actually charge on average twice a week and we agree/regulate not to dump cars on charge points when the charger is not needed so they can be shared. All sounding reasonable? Each charge point assuming it is used for a whole night and only at night (conservative but reasonable assumptions) supports 3.5 cars so we need (assuming this is the only way cars will be charged) to install them at a maximum rate of about 700k/year once every car replacement is ICE for EV, we're nowhere near that yet. If each post physically supports two cars at a time that comes down to 350k posts/year, this requirement falls further as battery range in mid-low price EVs increases as it is likely to toward 300mi/charge.

Installing that kind of infrastructure isn't trivial but if we can pull fiber to every house in a city over the course of a year just so we can argue on here with lower latency or all watch HD cat videos at the same time then I think we can probably manage.

Does that seriously sound beyond the capability of a developed nation of 70M people given what we're discussing here is basically a plug socket with a meter and some sort of card/key/password reader?

The only one we have.

jk

I can see the possibility of swathes of poorer people forcefully weaned off cars in cities as its a cheap and easy way to meet air quality targets and improve  carbon emission targets.  Way too many cars on the road in poor inner city areas are still uninsured, untaxed and/or would fail current emissions standards. Changes in MOT regulation and automatic insurance, tax and MOT camera checks are already making cheap car ownership way less viable. Tightening up on the regulations and the policing of this is possible but might have some unwanted political consequences. We rely on foreign freight to meet current logistics needs, they could be targetted too, as vehicle compliance is generally better in the UK, again there are consequencies (we need them).

I think even if we don't brexit, the British poor are in for a really hard time in the coming years. This utopianism your electic battery car future typifies ignores the political realities, especially the impact on and of the poor in the UK ... unless you want a US style utopia where the poor get disenfranchised and demonised: second class citizens, in health, housing, education, law and justice. The infrastructure changes are theoretically possible but very unlikely to meet the rates you suggest in the UK because fuel cells might look a better option and even if they dont we are shit at such change and frankly are pretty broke and we have major funding crises in pretty much every government department. We in the UK prefer to dither and delay on infrastrucure spending and when we do throw money, target it at the SE and burn a lot on grandiose white elephants like HS2 (where stage 2 is optimistically scheduled to be ready in 15 years if it even starts... politically unlikely I think given stage 1 spiralling costs) or overpriced PFis.

History is littered with optimistic utopian 10 and 20 year plans that nearly always didn't happen, or if they did, they usually happened in different ways to those expected..

You would have thought so, but, with this Government ...

This government is a clown show but they will be soon gone washed away as your tidal wave of brexit bullshit collapses on them. The next will likely be as bad or worse but this doesn't need government funding or significant intervention, it pretty much needs government to stay the hell out of the way. The standards we adopt will be developed supra-nationally anyway whether we're at the table or not.

jk

You're not talking about cheap car ownership if the problem is better enforcement of law, you're talking about illegal car use. No this bothers me less than it seems to most but supporting the use of uninsured, untaxed knackered cars as a social good is a bold position to take on here!

As do I but they will fight back hard and they will ultimately make themselves heard.

There's nothing utopian about EV's, they're a practical, existing and affordable solution to a serious environmental and public health problem and they can form the basis of a greater energy distribution solution. They're not as they stand a panacea, they're an opportunity for society and a useful replacement for many people's ageing cars.

I genuinely don't see how you get from switching the normal energy storage medium in cars over a 20+ year time frame to disenfranchisement and exploitation of the poor.

There is no reason to expect electric cars to be radically more expensive than IC, we already see them available across a wide range of price points and we know the historic effect of increasing manufacturing scale on prices. As cars age they become affordable to the poorer end of society (people like me) then they die, that is as true of EVs as it is of diesel dinosaurs. The genuinely poor have never had the means to legally own and run cars as a luxury.

I have absolutely no problem with the cost of urban car ownership making it relatively exclusive, that doesn't mean urban car access has to be or should be anything of the sort. There are good alternatives to single user ownership where space is at a premium and the use case allows or even favours it.

jk

"These things are improving rapidly year on year."  No they are not unless you include middle single figure percentage changes (that to continue rely in many cases on new R&D outputs by 10 years time) as rapid.

Single digit percentage changes compound fast over a decade or two. +5% PA yields 265% over 20 years. Which is nice since the technology is already good enough to compete today.

jk

It's a growing trend that we make more and more poor people's cars illegal and enforce that better. This sits alongside many other areas of their life that are getting worse due to goverment or council changes. Its not something I see as politically sustainable even short term.  When people get f*cked over they push back in political terms and a minority break the law more...its a social and political reality. I think we already have brexit to thank for that and I'm hoping we take a few steps back on further change disproportionately impacting the poor and try and avoid major riots in the next few years. I'm pretty sure I can sell that. Its hard to build when you struggle to repair self inflicted damage. 

Yep but that needs new tech which in itself is competing with other different new tech in hard to predict ways. Your new tech is a bit too utopian and blinkered for my liking.

When bad times are around growth doesn't always happen. Real average income and longevity is already in reverse and we have real risks of seriously nasty events in the near future.

What needs new tech?

The only bit of what I'm talking about that doesn't already exist commercially is the technical and commercial tie-up between consumer and supplier of electricity allowing the implementation of distributed virtual storage (real bidirectional storage requires a different charger architecture integrating a data connection but it's nothing novel, just different). There is no obvious barrier to implementing it, similar arrangements between energy suppliers and non-transport low duty-cycle high-power consumers already exist, the missing part is really only the business interface between consumer and supplier and a regulatory framework for that.

What's happened to this country in the last few years that a large opportunity is overlooked for fear of or lack of belief in the ability to solve relatively small problems to unlock it?

Of course economic growth as it's measured today isn't inevitable, it's probably not even desirable. That doesn't mean living standards of the masses automatically must fall. We don't have to keep doing things the same way delivering bad outcomes, we never have before. None of this is really relevant to what powers new cars either way.

I agree we're in for hard time. Britain is on the road to very painful irrelevancy with all that entails and to be honest I suspect we have war peeping over the horizon again but it's all far from inevitable and it doesn't mean we should stop working and planning for a sustainable future just because it might not arrive on time if at all.

jk

The continued 5% improvements for 20 years needs new tech. Its the same argument you failed to grasp before. The only place  it could be done with current tech would be somewhere with a state dictatorship like China and even there a slower introduction would be better. There would simply be too much push-back politically in the west right now. The immediate benefits to change to battery electric need to be clear and especially so in finance terms. That's probably 10 years off in my view, without any big economic disruptions. Fuel cell/ hybrids might be a better bet then. Big car company inertia favours retaining internal combustion engines as long as possible and also possibly favours fuel cells over just batteries.

No it doesn't, at least nothing radically new. Your 5% PA gains don't have to come from the battery or any other high tech bits alone. Frankly they aren't really necessary at all, EVs are already today good enough for many users and they're hitting the market at affordable prices, the problem if anything in 2019 is meeting demand. But let's suppose we still want to see gains because who likes standing still... those gains could come from radical new tech (and they might) or more likely from the incremental improvement across a range of existing fairly mature technologies and disciplines as pressures and priorities are shifted toward energy conservation and sustainability.

For example vehicle size: Why are cars as big as they they are? Big cars are bad if you're interested in energy. They contain a lot of energy intense materials. They're heavy which costs acceleration and running energy. They're big which increases drag and running energy. The excess size and weight leads to over spec'ing powertrain and running gear to deliver transient performance and a robust product at an energy and material use cost. They take excess space in busy environments. So why do we buy big cars? This is a marketing and a psychology problem, we buy big cars as status symbols, to feel powerful and safe, to telegraph our success but in addressing this to change what we value we can deliver very significant performance increases without ever going near a battery.

Shape: Why do cars today still look a lot like 40 year old cars, when did we become so conservative. Again, this is a marketing issue as much as and ergonomic or materials one but unshackling designers from variations on the classic 2 box hatch design opens up a world of serious aerodynamic improvements without ever going near a battery.

Tyres: Why do even little shopping cars today come on 9x18 tyres? As wear items these come with manufacturing costs, they come with aerodynamic and weight costs and inertial costs but the wheels and tyres we covet are driven by vehicle size and convention, not so much by engineering for a lower energy world. Again this is to a degree a marketing issue, not fully independent of the previous examples.

Take each major component, take how vehicles are regulated, marketed, how they're taxed or scrappage is incentivised, make little tweaks to refocus on energy conservation incrementally at a pace people will stomach but always relentlessly moving in that energy conservation direction and the cumulative gains compound up. Of course there will be resistance, people are nothing if not nostalgic but most are also pragmatic, they buy the best suited and liked of what's available today and they'll do the same again when the range has changed in a few years.

Only a dictatorship can electrify the majority of cars in a reasonably timely manner while seeing incremental performance and or cost improvements continue? Nonsense! Of course this government won't do it either but it isn't impossible and it doesn't require revolutionary change, just for government to better reflect the spectrum of views in society than this one does which is what our democracy (notionally at least) exists to ensure.

I've said in every post this is at least a 20 year 'project' to replace the majority of ICE vehicles in the showroom then not long after on the road, that it will be driven mainly by market forces but that has to be in conjunction with a responsible pricing of carbon emissions through taxation. It also has to involve phased introduction of taxation of road use (or electricity for traction use), balanced carefully against existing fuel taxes as the national fleet makeup changes.

jk

That’s a very loaded view of the evidence.  This  “middle single digit figure percentages” announced to a *doubling* every ten years.  Even if the imroviement rate halves for the next decade, BEVa will exceed almost everyone’s needs in 20 years.  

My point has been that these are incremental improvements in an existing battery chemistry and that there is a lot of incremental improvement left to reap.  Your comment on changes only being down to new battery chemistry was totally false.  

You can play the “but R&D is needed” card - of course it is but it’s relatively safe R&D compared to what fuel cells need...

Any details?  Why do you think the current processes of optimising cell design, tweaking chemistry, combating bridging tendril formation through electrode design and myriad other factors are suddenly going to stop yielding progressive gains?  We are nowhere near theoretical limits with current battery chemistry.

I’ve not seen a single credible, evidenced argument that the last 15 years of improvements to lithium chemistry are approaching an end.

In some ways, the Sinclair C-5 was a visionary product hamstrung by the technology of its time.

I had had high hopes for the Lit Motors C-1, but it’s in the doldrums of investment failure.  Other similar self-balancing 2-wheel cars are emerging from new and established firms however.  

The problem is we aren´t going to have a single solution, there will have to be at least two parallel systems (unless there is some truly amazing development in battery systems. The road freight industry, agriculture, mass transport and heavy plant are going nowhere with any kind of foreseeable rechargeable option even at the most optimistic level. An HGV using current cutting edge technology will need over ten tons of batteries to drive one driving shift (180kWh for ten hours, 6.3kg per kWh for a Tesla Model 3 battery = 11,340kg. The cost is also eyewatering incidentally, at Tesla´s claimed $190/kWh that´s $342,000) so first we need 35% more trucks and then millions of charging stations capable of charging at 2MW for the drivers rest period at truck stops and on motorway parking places. So apart from razing the cities of the world flat to build charging for the city dwellers we also need a complete new network for the road transport industry. Agriculture and heavy plant suffer the same if not worse, our maize harvester will need 30 tons of batteries to do one days work and only gets six hours to re-charge not to count the practicalities like it´s already on the weight limit for travel and is going to sink out of sight in the fields.

So we need an alternative to the system powering commuters Bobby-cars and currently it´s some kind of bio-diesel, solar produced diesel like Audi produce or fuel cells. The money currently is on fuel cells, 78% of auto company executives say it is the future, the Chinese are diverting funding from battery production to fuel cells and most governments are planning a hydrogen infrastructure.

In the medium/long-term (a carbon-free world) governments are either going to have to put in two systems, one for battery vehicles and one for the rest or can choose to build a partial system for the first and one for the rest, the cheaper and more logical option is to tinker with the battery system and go wholesale into the second which I´m betting is fuel cells since the other options are not as good. A hydrogen distibution and refuelling network is so cheap relative to the other costs as to be irrelevant.

Efficiency is a funny thing with alternative energy, hydrogen production is becoming more and more efficient as research money is poured in (78% seems to be cutting edge nowadays) and is a suitable way to use, store and convert surplus renewables, tonight it´s windy in N Germany so the wind farms are disconnected from the grid and in the summer our bio-gas plant is shut down due to the excess of solar so we burn off the methane, better would if we put this to some use since no grid-sized storage facilities have been developed and may well not be in the foreseeable future. Incidentally, the idea of using parked up EV´s to store the grid is appealing but practically faces too many problems apart from them all being in a traffic jam on the M25 when you want to cook your dinner, The efficiency of for example Wintertrees charging system isn´t exactly appealing, 83% for a Renault Zoe charging and who knows what in the other plus the grid losses makes the alternatives look brilliant!

I've been having quite similar thoughts.

Jk

Sure, when you selectively discount the hidden inefficiencies in liquid fuels like processing energy costs and transport energy costs, and when you pick a bad charging efficiency.  The Leaf is about 90% efficient with a standard 230 V EVSE inlet to the onboard charger.  80% is more typical for a 110 V,10 A inlet, but let’s not let the silliness of the USA confuse us.

You also give the creation efficiency ( from clutteing edge research) of H2 vs charging efficiency (of worst in commercial sale) of a BEV, but you omit the efficiency of conversion to motive power which is battery discharge, motor and inverter limited for BEVs but *also* has the round trip battery losses and fuel cell losses for H2  (practical fuel cell vehicles being heavily dependant on a battery for any acceleration and obviously a motor and still have a motor and inverter).  Thermodynamics limit fuel cell efficiency to about 80% even before considering real world limits, so in a pure efficiency race they’re never going to win.  Ever.

Heavy machinery is going to struggle with batteries for the foreseeable - agriculture, mining, airborne.  There synthetic diesel and hydrogen have more role.  For freight however there’s an increasing trend to overhead cantenary on main roads and ports which works a treat it seems.

As I said efficiency is a funny thing, fossil fuels are a finite resource so using as little as possible is desirable as is reducing the corresponding CO2 emisions. With wind or solar we just build more and use what we have more effectively.

If you have renewables producing energy when it can't be used then storage (eg H2 or elon musk battery australia) means you can generate income by selling stored energy at times of peak demand. Obviously high efficiency is more econmic but if the energy efficiency is relatively poor it's still both extra income and reduced requirement for fossil fuel at times of peak demand. 

Cable TV, I wish. No chance of getting it where I live. Maybe electric cars are suitable in cities, but in rural areas?

Electric cars would be nice. But in some rural areas they just aren’t an option (see Pontypool on Zap-Maps), I looked into them last year. But I couldn’t have a charger (as it would need to be on my neighbours land, and she doesn’t want random cars parking on her land, my car parks there only because it has done so before her recently built home was built).

The roads near my house are so narrow that cars/vans have to park on footpaths. Technically it’s illegal but as there are no other options, there has never been a prosecution (I know as a neighbour who is blind finds cars parked on footpaths a problem, especially if it’s wet or there is snow). If there were roadside chargers then HGV’s and emergency services would not be able to get access to the local roads.

Maybe the local, flat, green areas could be made into car parks with charging points, but even if the locals agreed to it, who would pay for the work? Yes, the Welsh Assembly is keen on supplying charging points, but only if it’s easy. If it’s not it’s sent for consultation, which means it’s scheduled for the 12th of never.

Indeed - and that’s an argument for methane or H2 storage at the grid scale.  Although the amortised cost of the additional kit to do storage and return must be less than the value of the stored electricity and efficiency obviously factors in to that.  So “renewables” don’t outright dismiss efficiency concerns even then.

I think methane has advantages over hydrogen as we already have a national methane grid with massive storage and methane to electricity plants.  But unless we import 80% of our winter energy needs, we need a way to store the summer excess for winter, and only hydrogen or hydrocarbons are viable.  The Tesla battery in Australia is doing very short duration arbitrage - hours - rather than seasonal - I can’t imagine batteries being usable for seasonal storage for, well, ever.  Nor is hydro.  

However for the thread’s topic of road vehicles having a crap all-round efficiency hurts, especially when - as for the next two decades - much of the energy input comes from carbon intensive fossil fuels. 

Batteries seen a much better fit to small scale things like cars and liquids/gasses to grid scale storage.  Both technologies are heavily compromise laden and have different sweet spots.  

Fuel cells could yet storm to supremacy but every “argument” trotted out against BEVs on this thread is flawed and BEVs are a rapidly maturing technology with growing adoption and investment.  

It’ll certainly be interesting to watch the next 20 years unfold.

Pity tidal hasn't taken off, four highly predicable peaks of production per day so you need storage for hours rather than months.

Yup.  It might yet happen for the UK given our exceptionally luck geography, but it doesn’t have the economy of scale that more globally applicable generation has.  

I’ve seen proposals to build under-sea hydro storage using fresh water and tanks going down deep - easier than going up mountains and less NIMBYism.  That could happily share sub-sea wiring with tidal generators.  

It’s all capital intensive verging on gigaproject scale stuff though which isn’t good when faced with totally inept and ineffective government.

I thought the tidal lagoon ideas looked interesting, but I believe the idea has been shelved due to cost / ecological concerns.

So your attitude is that those with expensive housing can have private transport, but those without such housing can walk to work (and give up any ideas of any active life that's beyond walking distance).

Are you by any chance related to those b*st*rds who owned Kinder Scout and set their gamekeepers on people way back.

The streets where I live have pavements that are so narrow that any form of upright with a cable connection on it would mean that anyone with a pram or a disability would not be able to progress. I am not unique. And with the price of housing going up faster than incomes the future for the young is even worse.

WE choose - I certainly didn't.

There has to be space - there isn't.

Try looking at terraced streets and areas around flats.

A fibre (not fiber, can't you spell !) is trivial compared to mains power in the streets. Fibre just needs shielding, mains power needs properly protecting so that someone doesn't get killed.

You can't just put a plug socket on the pavement. You need to get mains power along under the pavement, then have multiple secure uprights (that protect the cable) along the pavement, provide a box to plug into, along with some form of reader (all safe and tamper-proof), and then you have got to do all this and still have a pavement along which people can walk (and even move along in wheelchairs !). Plus you have to avoid blocking gateways and all sorts of other items such as gas piping, drains and water supplies. Simple it isn't !!

Its close to an outright lie for you to claim I have said that.  

You have now ignored *3 posts* from me, and several posts from another person addressing exactly this point with multiple alternatives.  Some were in response to you directly.  

For what it’s worth I was a terrace dweller for ten years, and your parking arrangements sound luxurious compared to mine.

The point is there are an almost endless list of ways to solve this “problem”.  Why is it so deeply offensive to you - that it’s driven you to claiming outright lies about what I’m saying - to consider that it could be solved for most people in 20 years time?

I’m torn on ecological concerns.  What’s the point in saving a bit of an ecosystem only for it to get wiped out along with thousands of others by what’s happening to the climate?  We in the UK are complicit in lots of foreign ecosystems being trashed on our behalf but aren’t willing to do it locally for the greater good.  It’s a moral mess.

We’re on borrowed time.

3 dislikes for queering the gross misrepresentation of my posts by fred99.

I honestly don’t understand how fred99 got from me giving a series of different ways things are improving in terms of BEVs for people in houses without dedicated charging to saying that I think people without expensive houses shouldn’t have cars.  The later is a total fabrication in terms of what I have said.

Jolly good.   Here’s another post for you to dislike. 

Of course that's exactly what's happening now, with a massive push by the Chinese government to push electric vehicles.  This article is very good on the scale of the effort going on in China now - $60 billion invested in the last decade, a million electric vehicles expected to be sold this year - nearly as many as the rest of the world combined.  By 2020 China will dominate world battery production.

https://qz.com/1489228/beyond-the-tesla-bubble-the-future-of-electric-cars-...

The effect will be similar to what happened when China entered the solar cell market - prices will collapse, partly driven by the technological improvements that always happen with high volume manufacturing, partly driven by the resulting glut in the market (and the fact that the capital costs of the manufacturing plants in China will end up being effectively written off).

Who you vote for is your business but the UK's affordable housing shortage is a political choice, it is absolutely not indicative of an inability to build things when we choose to.

For on street charging solutions? There really is. A connection post needs to be no thicker than the connector, around 3" would suffice if space was at a premium. If people can get past the wing mirrors they can get past that. There is also the possibility of near-field wireless charging, if you can park you can charge.

I live in one. You're looking for problems, not solutions. Charge points don't need to look like petrol pumps in the middle of the pavement. If we needed they could be integrated into the curbstones for example or even placed between marked parking bays on the street surface rather than the footpath. In most places a more ergonomic design would be better but nothing is impossible even were space really is at a premium.

Spelling, really? I try but like many it's something I have a little difficulty with. Trying not being a dick I try not take the piss out of others for their difficulties and mistakes but each to their own, at least when someone does we all know where we stand. The fiber was laid in a series of new 4" ducts, not pulled through existing channels. The armoured power cables, water and gas pipes the fibre ducts run alongside required just as much digging. nobody died despite exposing and recovering the city's existing vascular system. The point is that is a major infrastructure project involving digging up every single street/pavement in a city to add infrastructure of future value is possible, practical and in this case took just a year. The disruption was tolerable. Change at this scale is not needed in the urban environment to adopt battery electric vehicles, our electricity distribution network, capable of powering kettles, ovens and heaters is already capable of charging cars if it is managed carefully.

As a species we've sent men to the moon and returned them safely to earth, to the bottom of the oceans, we circumnavigate the globe in our billions beyond the breathable atmosphere, we image deep within our living brains in multiple dimensions, detect planets many millions of light years from home, we harness the power of the elements and the atom, run trains deep under our towering cluttered cities and beneath the seas, navigate effortlessly by timing clock ticks from space, create and break codes, connect billions across continents via the marvels in our pockets. It's staggering what we've done when we turn our minds and resources to solving a problem... yet you can't imagine finding an acceptable solution to putting power socket on our streets? Streets we designed and built for horses and carts, long gone cable cars and Edwardian electric trams (also 'impossible', right), cobbled and laid without sewers, gas or electricity, streets that now support machines of complexity unimaginable even in my own short lifetime. It's embarrassing really.

jk

That could be very interesting when it’s raining. Although Section 722 of BS 7671 for the installation of electric vehicle charging points state “the lowest part of the socket-outlet is between 0.5 m and 1.5 m above the ground”.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/wireless-electric-vehicle-charging

Indeed but standards can evolve where appropriate safe alternatives become available and necessary. We don't have to keep doing things the way we did until we can't do what we need because we've tied our hands. The obvious solution for most applications is clearly a raised post, bollard or wall mounted power point but where space really is at a premium or other constraints preclude that solution we might have to look to alternatives, perhaps not involving direct electrical connection.

For clarity I meant conventional ergonomically sized posts/bollards could be placed in the road between and delineating parking bays rather than on thin pavements.

jk

I hope that China can develop the economies of scale quickly but finance in china is so opaque I'm still not convinced the chinese economy isn't one big bubble. It is amazing how fast they are shifting from coal, in electricity generation and very good news for global emissions in that..

Certainly how Korea or Taiwan invested in LCD technology worked like that. Invented in the UK and neglected in development in the UK.

I mean, come on, Henry, be serious.  Are you really suggesting that people will build some sort of refuelling point for these machines everywhere you might need one, across the whole country?  You'd need one of these - I guess you'd call them petrol "stations" - in almost every significant town!  Where would they go?  Surely storing that much flammable liquid will be very dangerous!  No-one would want to live near one.  And anyway, why would we do this when we have perfectly good horses?

This really should be the direction we’re heading in, but it would be a massive short term vote loser. 

83% of population of England is urban, and average travel speed in large towns is well below 15mph, but we still travel inside 1.5 tons of steel while generating masses of pollution. We need small personal electric vehicles for towns and the ‘bike’ lanes to support them. Lots of people would still want their own car, we are hopelessly attached to them, but they would be used less and there would be fewer cars per household. 

Do you honestly think that a 3" post sticking up around a metre from the ground wouldn't get smashed into by the twerps currently driving - the number that bash into the local residents cars around here would indicate that a 3" post would last less than a week.

And who do you think will pay for this major road improvement ? We had a 6" (yes 6") hole in the round twenty yards from my house, and it took whoever 8 weeks to (sort of) fill it in, and there are still major holes all around, plus the pavement kerbs are all askew and the pavements uneven. This mainly due to the parents/6th formers at the local school using the path to drive along - apparently the road isn't wide enough for them - see my view on how long a 3" post would last.

And just how long had you been waiting ? Just how many people are still waiting ? To do this nationwide is an immense operation, and the cost would be unbelievable. And again, who exactly will pay for it ? Do you honestly believe, given the average voters unwillingness to vote for anyone who promises increased taxes, that people will stand for their money being used this way ?

There you have it; many of the streets in our older towns/cities were designed for horses and carts. As such the houses are much closer together, the streets and pavements are narrower, and we do not have a great deal of space available. It was expected, when these houses were built, that the inhabitants would set off for work on foot (probably on hearing the works hooter). The inhabitants were also expected to work 6 days out of 7, go to church on Sundays, and know their place. Actually being able to go out and enjoy yourself was purely the province of the well-to-do. In todays world, the idea that anyone can expect a large proportion of the population to go back to that is stupid - the people living there won't stand for it.

Far better to have (for example) hydrogen powered vehicles, where people can fill up their vehicles fuel container quickly and remotely. The alternative is to demolish most of our towns and cities and start again (although from what I've heard doing that to Sunderland wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea  ).

  I wouldn't argue with anything you say about the prospects forthe poor, but I don't believe that's going to hold technology back, and trying to do so has never worked in the past. The best solution will win. There's a huge electricity grid already in place - just the cost of building a fuel cell infrastructure for a limited number of users will kill it or leave t a tool for the rich

You’re right.

In 20 years time...

Some people without private parking will not have had their on-street parking adapted - even by wireless chargers where wired isn’t practical.

Some of those people won’t have a time share with guaranteed weekly access to a charger within say 500 meters of their house.

Some of those people won’t be able to charge once a week at their work destination.

Some of those people - inexplicably - won’t be able to drive to a public charging station and charge for 3-10 minutes once a week.

Some of those people won’t be able to charge during their weekly shop / swim / whatever.

Perhaps I’ll start a business to cater to those people.  Once a week I’ll drive their car away overnight, charge it and bring it back.  See yet another solution for you to ignore.

The only problem is there’s only one customer for my business.  They’re called Fred.

Sorry if I’m resorting to sarcasm but you have ignored about 10 times several people’s suggestions that there are other solutions than wired charging right outside your house.  Some of them are viable - if expensive - right now.  None of the objections you keep raising have any impact what so ever on these other solutions becoming cheaper and more accessible over the next 20 years.

In reality in 20 years I imagine many younger people in terraces will be saving a financial fortune and a load of hassle by renting whatever vehicle they need in an on-demand way, with charging being somebody else’s job in the fleet management firm.   Throw in autonomy and even owned cars can take themselves off to charge.

The fact that Chinese finance is opaque is pretty much the point.  What happened with solar cells was that many factories were opened, financed by soft loans from state banks and grants from local government, prices collapsed because of the inevitable glut, the companies went bankrupt or were restructured with the loans written off, but they keep on churning out solar cells which they can now sell even cheaper because they’ve ended up not having to pay the cost of their capital.  Same will happen with batteries.  The point about bubbles is that the money may not be real but the factories they pay for most definitely are, and that physical capacity is still there long after the bubble that built them has burst.

The drivers for the Chinese government doing this are very strong. They need to get on top of their city air pollution problems, which are already causing a public health disaster, and if in doing that they end up dominating the world auto industry of the future, so much the better.