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Electric Cars - Realistic For Climbers and Hillwalkers?

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Where's the nearest charge point? Or petrol station, for that matter..., 3 kbWith access to hills and crags in mind, Es Tresidder examines the pros and cons of electric vehicles. Will he persuade us to ditch the diesel, and invest in battery powered travel?

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2
 gethin_allen 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Whether or not they are useful for climbers is a moot point when they are not much use to a large proportion of the public anyway. What if:- you haven't got a reserved parking space with charging facilities at home, you are renting property and aren't allowed to modify the house, you haven't got charging facilities at your place of work, you plan on going somewhere and turn up to your scheduled charging stop only to find someone else using it, or simply if you want to go somewhere a long way away and be certain of getting there on time and without the added stress of not knowing if you'll have enough juice to get there.
20
 Luke90 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

When has a new technology EVER been practical for the entire population straight away?

None of your problems are particularly fundamental or insurmountable.
5
 galpinos 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Luke90:

For city living, for which electric cars are ideal) I think the lack of off street parking will make it tricky to implement in the sort term. I live in a Manchester terrace and have no dedicated parking spot, how do I charge my car? Do we all end up having one (what happens if you are a two car household) dedicated parking spot outside your property which is cabled up from your house under the pavement to a kerb mounted charger?
1
 Oliver Houston 27 Mar 2017
In reply to galpinos:

Again, a fairly easy solution, either have dedicated spots outside, or some portion of every street reserved for electric (start with 10% of spaces, maybe at one end), I assume it would be fairly easy for a grid-fed charging point to know it's charging your car and charge you through an account linked to the car for however much juice it gives you...
As electric usage increases, increase the number of charging points on the road.
2
 galpinos 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Oliver Houston:

Don't get me wrong, I'd love an electric car but I can see the cost of installing this infrastructure being prohibitive to to it taking of in the short term. Around my house, it appears hard enough to stop people parking on double yellows or just generally like t**ts so the chances of them not using the electric only spots for non electric cars, and consequently me getting home to find I can't charge my car) seems somewhat slim unfortunately.
 Andy Hardy 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

"For those that live a long way from where they want to be climbing, things get a little more complicated. Let’s look at a hypothetical situation of someone in central London wanting to climb in north Wales. If they are wealthy enough to afford a Tesla model S (with a range of 300 miles) then no problem, hardly any change needed from driving an ICE car, just fill up with electrons instead of hydrocarbons. More realistically how would it work driving a 30 kWh Nissan LEAF (the car I have, the highest range non-Tesla electric car available at the time I bought it)? Assuming they start with a full charge and then re-charge to 80% at each stop, something like the following list of charge points ought to work.

Cherwell services: 65 miles
Norton Cannes services: 71 miles
Chester services: 75 miles
Llanberis: 72 miles"

So an electric car adds 4x30 minute stops to the journey, unless your car has done 100K when your batteries won't hold their charge as long. I'm thinking fuel cells have to the future.
2
 jkarran 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Andy Hardy:

> ...unless your car has done 100K when your batteries won't hold their charge as long. I'm thinking fuel cells have to the future.

Assuming that uses hydrogen produced 'cleanly', not from natural gas. Even then it adds a fair bit more inefficiency in the whole end to end (fusion > motion) conversion than for batteries (which may not matter if your energy source is plentiful, clean and conversion affordable). There is also the problem of safely storing and transporting enough hydrogen given the low temperatures, high pressures and dismal energy density. Yeah, it can be done but it doesn't look like the better solution to me.

Battery tech, new commercial solutions beyond simple ownership of one car/person and charging infrastructure will evolve incredibly rapidly unless we deliberately stifle innovation. Look at a 1917 car vs a 2017 one, they're barely the same class of thing. Hell, compare a 1977 car with a 2017 one!
jk
Post edited at 11:56
In reply to Iain Smith:
Your first article appears to be fairly pro-EV. The main expert Zivin appears to mainly attack the eco credentials based on current generation (coal, gas etc.) which, while not wrong short term, is kind of missing the long term point - places like California have huge solar potential, the world is steadily decarbonising.

The wired article I have read before, commissioned and funded by "Devonshire Research Group " who is a Oil industry funded "think tank". Their main beef is with the battery tech. Yes, initial mining has a large environmental impact, but after that the components are highly recyclable and their intrinsic value will ensure batteries are not scrapped. This impact shouldn't be ignored, but it is in no way a reason to stock with diesel and it's lovely particulates!

The middle one really doesn't say much - back to the "it depends on where you get your energy from" again, this is a short term view as most major world economies are steadily decarbonising.

In the not too distant future EVs will not only reduce local emissions, but through smart charging can also help smooth grid fluctuations caused by the intermittent nature of renewables, meaning lower emissions (C02, N0x & particulates ) and less requirement for diesel or gas peaking plants (small power stations on standby for periods of high demand.)

Other technologies may be part of the mix (fuel cell etc.) but EVs are the most commercialised and are clearly on a steady technology improvement trajectory that equals "mainstream " within the next 15 years.
Post edited at 12:50
 Glyn 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Good article. I live in Llanberis and have owned a Nissan LEAF EV since December last year. It's exceeded my expectations.

I can echo Es's experience with regard to performance up and down hills and luggage space (two road bikes without taking the wheels off or 5 bouldering mats!) .

Unlike Es I have the older 24Kwh version of the leaf (compared to Es's 30Kwh), it cost me £9k second hand with 20k miles. Range with the 24kwh is 70-90 miles depending on speed and driving style. A return trip to Llandudno (LPT) is no problem on a single charge and costs me approximately £1.50 in electricity. Longer trips to Porth Ysgo and Gogarth are doable on a single charge however I prefer to stop for 20min in one of the National Trust car parks for a free top-up while I brew a post boulder coffee. I would highly recommend getting the 6.6KW charger option which allows the car to charge at 23 miles of extra range per hour from the free Zero Carbon World charger points that are located all over N.Wales. Checkout: https://plugshare.com/. Driving an EV will save me approx £1500/yr in fuel costs (compared to driving my van 16k miles), therefore the entire car will pay for itself in 6 years time! Nissan LEAF’s have been known to clock up over 175K miles with minimal battery degradation: https://twitter.com/candctaxis/status/821651868862545921

Long drives are no problem, the UK motorway network is very well served with Rapid Chargers. So far we have driven to go climbing in the Peak District and Malham with no problems. Next month we're heard up to the West Coast of Scotland which is also well served with free Rapid Chargers.

I don't own a garage or my own driveway, it's not been too much of a problem charging the car at home overnight with a rubber cable matt across the pavement or at work.

Es didn’t mention one nice benefit of EV's is that the heating can be turned on remotely via a smartphone app allowing the car to pre-heat the interior to 21 degC and defrost itself, this feature is super nice on frosty winter mornings! Together with heated steering wheel and seats mean the Nissan LEAF is pleasure to drive over the winter months.

There are lots of Nissan LEAFs very reasonably priced on the second hand market. I would highly recommend anyone in the market for a new EV to take a look at the new (2017) Renault Zoe with a 40KWh battery which can realistically do over 150-180 miles per charge and is competitively priced: youtube.com/watch?v=LEIzORzvbdQ&
 Es Tresidder 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

EVs don't need to work for 100% of people straight away for their market share to grow very rapidly (see Norway, 18% of new car registrations in January were pure EVs). All of the things you raise are valid points for now, but they are far from insurmountable. So far I've only had to wait to charge once, and then only for ten minutes.
 gethin_allen 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Luke90:

>"None of your problems are particularly fundamental or insurmountable."

I'd consider not being able to charge it anywhere pretty fundamental unless your "not insurmountable"bit includes having charging points everywhere and electric cars be given priority parking in the streets around my home. Which I can guarantee you would be pretty unpopular with most other people nearby and would probably result in you getting your car vandalised or dog turds put through the letterbox.
And considering the council near me can't afford to repair street lights and pot holes it would be a rather substantial waste of their cash to go out of their way to accommodate electric vehicles.

17
 Es Tresidder 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Andy Hardy:

Three stops assuming you can charge at wherever your staying in Llanberis or near. Otherwise four stops.

Fuel cells, you might be right, but I doubt it. The many steps for getting from renewable electricity to electrical output from a fuel cell mean you've lost 3/4 of the energy, compared to less than a quarter for a battery EV. It seems unlikely we'll have a future in the near term where we'll have so much zero-carbon energy that we'll be happy being that profligate with it just to increase range a little bit.

Perhaps hydrogen technology will move very fast, but it has a lot of catching up to do, and battery technology is also moving very fast. Already a journey like the above would be no problem at all in a Tesla model S, and it won't be long before we see cars with performance close to that for mortal price-tags.
 wbo 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

So basically you think you'll be using an internal combustion engine forever. Or a horse
3
 galpinos 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

> Which I can guarantee you would be pretty unpopular with most other people nearby and would probably result in you getting your car vandalised or dog turds put through the letterbox.

I'm glad I don't live around your neck of the woods!

1
 Luke90 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

I'm not saying they're problems that you could personally solve or that the council could solve this year. I'm saying that they can in principle be solved.
 nutme 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Oliver Houston:

> Again, a fairly easy solution, either have dedicated spots outside, or some portion of every street reserved for electric (start with 10% of spaces, maybe at one end), I assume it would be fairly easy for a grid-fed charging point to know it's charging your car and charge you through an account linked to the car for however much juice it gives you...

In Westminster we have dedicated on street parking spots with chargers. Problem is people abuse it for leaving cars where for long times with chargers attached and other electric cars users can't charge. My neighbour own one and complains a lot about this 10% infrastructure. It's probably more like 5% really, but most of places with chargers are always occupied with electric cars just parked where. Sometimes for weeks. And since we live in Westminster most of people I know around drive only on weekends. Commuting with car is a suicide. So yeah, good strategy on papers, but doesn't really work. You literally need a dedicated space for your car plus spaces for guests.
1
 Michael Gordon 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Interesting article and nice to read about a positive experience of electric cars. But 30 mins wait every time you charge up? No, that's really not what I want on my way back from the hills in the evening, or on my way in the morning for that matter. And this is for every 120 miles? Compare this to 5 mins to fill up every 700 miles or so. Sorry, but for me time is as precious as money, perhaps more so.
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 gethin_allen 27 Mar 2017
In reply to wbo:

> So basically you think you'll be using an internal combustion engine forever. Or a horse

No, I just don't see that the current system is viable.

How about a system with rented smallish modular universal swapable batteries? You turn up at a charging point and swap a battery or two and off you go. If you can't get a vehicle close to a charging point you take out a battery and take it to the house/office.
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 gethin_allen 27 Mar 2017
In reply to galpinos:

> I'm glad I don't live around your neck of the woods!

Parking is very awkward, there's a bus stop nearby so no parking, a load of double yellows around a junction so no parking and it's all terraced houses with relatively small frontages to start with.
 James FR 27 Mar 2017
In reply to jkarran:

> new commercial solutions beyond simple ownership of one car/person

I think this is going to be a be a big part of the solution, at least long-term (the average privately-owned car in most countries is parked 95% of the time).
pasbury 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

Battery prices should come down as the Tesla gigafactory comes in to full capacity too.
 summo 27 Mar 2017
In reply to galpinos:

I don't think charging points for parking is a problem, it is just a new a situation in the UK. Northern half of nordics have points to plug in engine warmers in many residents parking areas etc..
 MischaHY 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

I personally think this is a pretty realistic idea. Batteries don't even have to be that small if removed mechanically aided. A station could then be constantly charging a stockpile of batteries meaning there are always fuel cells available. Swap it out and move on within minutes.

I think electric cars are the future, and I'm really looking forward to the innovations that are to come.
1
 RKernan 27 Mar 2017
In reply to MischaHY:

It has been tried - Renault had something go on with an israeli company called Better Place. Didn't really catch on though, think the main issue is that you'd half to swap half the car to ensure you got a decent range!
 Toerag 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Michael Gordon:
> Compare this to 5 mins to fill up every 700 miles or so.
What do you drive that only needs filling up once every 700 miles, and whose filling up process only takes up 5 minutes when you do?
Post edited at 15:04
 Es Tresidder 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

As RKernan says, has been tried. Also Tesla tried it early on, there's a video somewhere of them swapping batteries twice as fast as someone filling their tank with fuel. I'm guessing it's too complicated to get all the manufacturers to have the same type of battery, and also storage for all those batteries would be fairly massive.

> If you can't get a vehicle close to a charging point you take out a battery and take it to the house/office.

We're not talking about a 4 pack of AAs here! The battery in my car weighs about 300kg!

 Es Tresidder 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Michael Gordon:

Except that with an EV you are leaving home with a 'full tank' every time, having charged while you were sleeping. Most drivers find they use public chargers much less than they expect to. I suspect most people lose comparable amounts of time charging as they do filling their tanks because of this.
 gethin_allen 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:
"4 pack of AAs here! The battery in my car weighs about 300kg!"

That's why I was suggesting having a number of smaller batteries, perhaps 40kg with wheels.
You could even have a mixed system where you had a couple of swappable batteries and a core battery, one type to allow that virtually instant range boost and flexibility when you can't get the vehicle to a charging point and the other to be charged if and when you get a chance.

3
 gethin_allen 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

"> Except that with an EV you are leaving home with a 'full tank' every time,"
See point above.
1
 summo 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

I think the bigger problem is electric car technology and usage will grow so fast the national grid and power generation in some countries won't keep up. In 20 years time I imagine 50% of new cars bought could be electric, maybe higher, but there aren't the plans for future green power generation in place.
 Michael Gordon 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Toerag:

> What do you drive that only needs filling up once every 700 miles, and whose filling up process only takes up 5 minutes when you do?

Renault Laguna (diesel). Pay at Pump with no queue is definitely less than 5 mins.
 Es Tresidder 27 Mar 2017
In reply to summo:

You don't necessarily need to increase capacity by as much as EVs will increase energy consumption, because you can choose to charge them during periods when supply outstrips demand.

But your point stands, switching to EVs needs to be part of a wider clean energy revolution.
 summo 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

> You don't necessarily need to increase capacity by as much as EVs....

True; but significant night or evening charging could push up the night time electric costs to both consumers using old school economy 7 and pump storage electricity suppliers.

 Es Tresidder 27 Mar 2017
In reply to summo:

Agreed, a switch to much more intelligent time-of-use pricing than old school economy 7 would be a good thing too, and likely coming, not just because of EVs, but because of the increasing share of electricity being generated by renewables.
 kevin stephens 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:
An interesting and enjoyable article, but the claim that electric cars using U.K. Electricity causes substantially less CO2 emissions than ICE cars based on a quoted typical efficiency of 20% is greatly overstated. A much more typical ICE efficiency for modern cars with similar performance is 30% to 35% or even more for some cars with no significant difference in emissions. Of course things Will hopefully improve in the lon term with decarbonisation of U.K. Electricity generation
3
 LJH 27 Mar 2017
In reply to kevin stephens:

Getting way from everything being designed to be thrown away after 5 years would also be a great help for the bigger picture, although the industry seems to overlook that for some reason?

 Es Tresidder 27 Mar 2017
In reply to kevin stephens:
I didn't base the CO2 emissions on the ICE efficiency of 20%, I just used that to explain why electric cars can be lower CO2 than ICE cars even though UK grid electricity is higher CO2 than petrol or diesel. Sorry if the 20% figure was inaccurate, the point, that ICE cars are so inefficient that an electric car can beat them on carbon terms despite a relatively CO2 heavy fuel, still stands..

Plugging some numbers in. If an electric car gets 18 kWh/100km (reasonable estimate including 90% efficiency for charging), that's 5.6km/kWh. Current 'official' grid CO2 emissions are about 500 gCO2 per kWh, so therefore about 90 gCO2/km. That's lower than almost all ICE cars you can buy. Furthermore, official grid CO2 emissions are very out of date, we're burning a lot less coal than we were 5 years ago when they were set (because of increased gas, increased renewables and decreased demand). Last year the figure was 260 gCO2/kWh (see this http://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=1-year&start=2016-03-27&&_... At that level electric cars beat even the lowest CO2 ICE cars by a considerable margin.

That's without even factoring in EV users choosing to charge at times when electricity is cheap and low-CO2.
Post edited at 19:44
tri-nitro-tuolumne 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:
My boss had one of the first mobile phones back in the 80's - huge analogue technology brick. I never thought they would take off - too heavy, too expensive and the battery life was fairly short. Technology changes rapidly over 30 years.

Like them or loathe them, electric cars are the future. I'm convinced that the issues around range and charging will be improved - it will be interesting to see the solutions.

From a recent article in the FT:
Andy Palmer (CEO Aston Martin) was asked how many electric cars they will be selling in the future. He replied all cars will be electric vehicles in the long run, adding "25 per cent of our fleet by 2025”. VW is also targeting about 25% of their sales by 2025.
Post edited at 20:10
 kevin stephens 27 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

Thanks, some good points, but based on the "official" emission factor of 500gCO2/kWh - 90gCO2/km many modern diesel cars are 90-100 gCO2/km - eg 1.6 Golf diesel so not a lot of difference.

The latest grid emissions factors mainly due to a massive displacement of coal by natural gas combined cycle generation are quite striking and will make a massive difference - a good argument for fracking when the North Sea supplies start to run dry?
1
 wintertree 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

> How about a system with rented smallish modular universal swapable batteries? You turn up at a charging point and swap a battery or two and off you go.

Tesla tried exactly this - a robotic battery swap that was faster and cheaper than pumping a full tank of gas. People would almost always opt for free supercharger use instead.

For all the fretting you read online about recharge times it wasn't reflected in battery swap use.

After all in the UK, the average car journey is something like 5 miles.
 Brass Nipples 27 Mar 2017
In reply to wbo:

> So basically you think you'll be using an internal combustion engine forever. Or a horse

And basically you think we'll be using our own cars forever...
 wintertree 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Great read.

Something related that I'm really looking forwards to is autonomous cars and how much easier they'll make doing long distance linear walks - no need to take 2 cars and do a lot of shuffling, or to mesh with public transport. Eventually no need to finalise a destination in advance either.
2
 stp 27 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

> I'd consider not being able to charge it anywhere pretty fundamental unless your "not insurmountable"bit includes having charging points everywhere and electric cars be given priority parking in the streets around my home.

Quck fix is just nick a few traffic cones and put them around your parking space when you go out.
2
 fast eddie 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

What's the collective wisdom on battery life? My limited research reveals that it's about 80k miles before it becomes impractical. Would it be financially viable to replace one it that point?

Do the fast chargers also fry your battery a bit?

Thanks
1
 stp 27 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:
Great article. Even got me to look at the Tesla cars though they are extremely pricey - 68k for the one with a 300 mile range!! I wonder why other manufacturers don't add more range to their models. Surely it's just a case of adding a bigger battery?


> The highest emitting 10% of individuals globally are responsible for 50% of greenhouse gas emissions. I suspect most of the climbers I know, with a culture of lots of driving and flying to access adventure, are in this group.

It's an interesting question. I suspect in terms of transport climbers do burn more fuel than average. But in the top 10%? Seems unlikely. I thought buildings were bigger contributors to CO2 than transport. I'd imagine the top 10% are likely to be fairly rich folks: bigger houses heated to higher temperatures, bigger vehicles like SUVs burning more fuel per mile, and although they won't go on climbing trips abroad they probably have holidays abroad too, probably multiple times per year. Also the rise of indoor climbing means it's not necessary for climbers to travel as much as we used to. Though of course walls have their own energy costs so not sure how much better that is. Climbers are also more environmentally aware than many people. Some even refuse to fly because of the emissions.
Post edited at 22:25
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to kevin stephens:

It might be a good argument for fracking if 260 gCO2/kWh was where we needed to be. 260 is great compared to where we were a few years ago, but it's also a long way from where we need to be.
 Michael Gordon 28 Mar 2017
In reply to stp:

> I suspect in terms of transport climbers do burn more fuel than average. But in the top 10%? Seems unlikely.

Agreed. The top 10% will be rich frequent flyers (for business) I would have thought, not just (say) 3 or 4 trips a year.

 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to fast eddie:

The battery on my car is guaranteed to 80k miles (see article). Lots of anecdotal evidence of batteries lasting very much longer than this. C&C taxis in Cornwall have clocked up 170k on one of their's, with a lot of rapid charging (https://twitter.com/candctaxis/status/821651868862545921).

I've seen replacement batteries quoted at £5k but I've never heard of anyone doing this.
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to stp:

Thanks for the positive comments!

> Great article. Even got me to look at the Tesla cars though they are extremely pricey - 68k for the one with a 300 mile range!! I wonder why other manufacturers don't add more range to their models. Surely it's just a case of adding a bigger battery?

Adding more batteries is not that simple, they are heavy and take up a lot of space! The Tesla batteries have a better energy density than the Leaf ones (3 times the capacity for double the weight), which I guess is one of the reasons they are so expensive. Batteries are improving very fast though, my car has 30 kWh of batteries in the same space, and nearly the same weight, as the previous 24 kWh model. The upgraded Renault Zoe has nearly double the capacity, in the same space and for hardly any more weight.

> It's an interesting question. I suspect in terms of transport climbers do burn more fuel than average. But in the top 10%? Seems unlikely. I thought buildings were bigger contributors to CO2 than transport. I'd imagine the top 10% are likely to be fairly rich folks: bigger houses heated to higher temperatures, bigger vehicles like SUVs burning more fuel per mile, and although they won't go on climbing trips abroad they probably have holidays abroad too, probably multiple times per year. Also the rise of indoor climbing means it's not necessary for climbers to travel as much as we used to. Though of course walls have their own energy costs so not sure how much better that is. Climbers are also more environmentally aware than many people. Some even refuse to fly because of the emissions.

Remember we're talking about the top 10% globally, not the top 10% of UK emitters.

Looking at the Oxfam report the top 10% have emissions of about 17 tonnes per person. Not hard to get that high with several flights a year on top of a normal lifestyle heating your home and running a car. Plenty of online carbon calculators that will let you see how you stack up to that.
 BnB 28 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

Thanks for the article Es. I enjoyed it above all for your personal commitment to a reduced carbon lifestyle and certainly more than for the questionable suggestion that electric cars are more enjoyable to drive. Perhaps they will become so when they cease to be so damn heavy relative to their performance and range. As a part time resident of Skye for whom a day in the hills often involves 150 miles of driving, range anxiety would be the death of me I think!!

A visitor to my business arrived in a top of the range Tesla yesterday and I had a play in the cockpit. I'm surprised he arrived at all, so dominant is the massive interactive screen where normally all the radio and AC controls would be found. Autonomous can't come soon enough if we're all going to be confronted with 26" of LCD when we ease into the seats.

One thing that could hold back the spread of electric cars is the potential weakness in the second hand market for them during the rapid development phase of battery technology. Who wants to buy a car with an aging early development phase 80 mile range battery while new cars are coming out with "real world" 200, 300, 400 mile + ranges?

The smaller capacity and low slung nature of the propulsion system does bring significant packaging advantages. The new Jaguar iPace concept is an exceptionally sporty and practical design. It's the first small SUV I've ever thought looked sexy yet it's internal dimensions knock its rivals into a cocked hat. Smaller than a Porsche Macan outside, yet 10% bigger inside. And with performance, if not yet the range to match. This is an important car, as Jaguar's commitment to bring the iPace to market demonstrates.

http://www.jaguar.co.uk/jaguar-range/i-pace-concept-car/index.html?cm_mmc=P...
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to BnB:

Thanks BnB.

Have you driven one? If so what did you not like about it?

As I said, I've not driven a lot of really nice cars, but it is definitely the nicest car I've driven.
 BnB 28 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

Hi Es. The current problem (apart from range) with electric propulsion is the weight of the batteries, which is the enemy of handling as well as performance and economy. Placing the batteries low in the car is helpful to the driving dynamics but you can't completely hide half a ton of extra weight!!

The stunning new Jaguar iPace is expected to weigh 2.2 tonnes for example. My BMW estate is almost as fast (<5s 0-60) and weighs 1.7t.

We each have different priorities however. I'm a sports car fan with a shameful history of Porsche ownership. A trip from Skye to Inverness in a 911 is an absolute revelation. For others a car is just a conveyance.

The Tesla just didn't convince. That Jag on the other hand...
In reply to BnB:

You're saying that not based on driving, but just on weight figures alone?

Since I have also not driven one, nor driven a Porsche cayenne (but know it is supposed to handle well), I will counter your point by saying it is also 2.2t.

The model 3 tesla is expected to be 1430kg to 1560kg depending on exact model.

I'm not sure why you'd want one of those jaguars with the massive wheels and skinny tyres on potholed Highland roads!
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to BnB:

> We each have different priorities however. I'm a sports car fan with a shameful history of Porsche ownership. A trip from Skye to Inverness in a 911 is an absolute revelation. For others a car is just a conveyance.The Tesla just didn't convince. That Jag on the other hand...

I've never driven a sports car so I'm not really qualified to comment on how my car compares to that (I imagine unfavourably, if you're bothered about that sort of thing), but plenty of folk saying similar things about the Tesla model S. Did you actually drive one, or just sit in the cabin? See this, for example: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/tesla-model-s-p85d-earns-top-road-t...
MarkJH 28 Mar 2017
In reply to Michael Gordon:

> Agreed. The top 10% will be rich frequent flyers (for business) I would have thought, not just (say) 3 or 4 trips a year.

There is a very strong correlation between income and CO2 emissions. Given that if you are earning UK minimum wage, then you are well within the to 10% of earners globally, I suspect that there are very few people in the UK who aren't in the top 10% of emitters, and even fewer who are climbers.
 BnB 28 Mar 2017
In reply to Alasdair Fulton:

Yes, I've driven electric cars and hybrids. Meanwhile, the Cayenne and Macan both handle well for their weight, but they are still big heavy cars! I cross-shopped the Macan against my 3 series and the difference in handling dynamics is considerable, despite the best efforts of Porsche's engineers.

The Jag's wheels are horrid. I hate big wheels and fought the dealer to supply my current car the smallest diameter wheels available (to fit over the big brakes). But I'm a big fan of designs that revolutionise packaging, seating, storage and capacity. The Jag is a winner in this regard.
In reply to BnB:

I guess it might be a while until EVs compete with true sporty cars. The model 3 might (based on specs) so time will tell. As I said further up, I think the industry momentum is firmly behind EVs and the technology improvement path is heading towards fulfilling your criteria. I'm excited to own one sometime in the future. We'd love an electric camper but the options are currently too impractical so we're doing a life extension on our old van for the time being.
 spenser 28 Mar 2017
In reply to kevin stephens:

Well to wheel emissions for natural gas produced by fracking are noticeably higher (on average 14%) than conventionally obtained gas (page 2768):
http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1876610215012941/1-s2.0-S1876610215012941-main.pdf?_...

There's some interesting discussion here too:
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/this-weeks-poll-electric-cars-and-the-uk-grid...
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/driving-towards-an-energy-dilemma-the-inexora...
 kevin stephens 28 Mar 2017
In reply to spenser: that may possibly be for the North Sea but not piped or shipped from Russia or the Gulf when the North Sea runs out. Electricity produced from gas emits half the CO2 per kWH compared to coal fired electricity. Gas generation is the only practicable alternative to coal generation for the medium term. We are a very long way from battery backed renewables on demand, of course there's always the nuclear option......

 SC 28 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Until they become available second hand for £5k or less I, and many others won't be buying one. Once they get that cheap, how much service life will be left in the battery?
I also think that with the current rate of development of electric cars, the current range may be obsolete within a few years. It's not long ago that the Gee Whizz was the electric car to have. When new technology comes along, will it use the same chargers as current cars?
 kevin stephens 28 Mar 2017
In reply to SC:
There must be a good business opportunity in investing in a fleet of vans with dirty diesel generators to recharge stranded electric cars
1
 kevin stephens 28 Mar 2017
In reply to MarkJH: a big part of people's hidden carbon footprint is emissions from cargo ships burning filthy bunker oil in bringing their new stuff from China. Emissions from cargo ships dwarf those from civil aviation

 kevin stephens 28 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:electric sports cars are nothing new, one held that land speed record in 1898!
http://www.nationalmotormuseum.org.uk/record_breakers_motoring_topic

 Howard J 28 Mar 2017
In reply to Michael Gordon:

> Agreed. The top 10% will be rich frequent flyers (for business) I would have thought, not just (say) 3 or 4 trips a year.

Globally, we're all in the top 10%.
In reply to Howard J:
> Globally, we're all in the top 10%.

And globally it is also a bogus measurement because the poorest people who produce the least CO2 per person also tend to have far more children than the richest 10%, one of the reasons the richest 10% have a better standard of living is they have controlled family sizes. There's no environmental benefit in low CO2 per person if you grow the number of people.
Post edited at 14:44
2
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Top 10% of (per capita) emitters have carbon footprints 11 times bigger than the bottom 50% of emitters. I very much doubt the bottom 50% of emitters have 11 times as many children. https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme...
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to Howard J:

Average UK per capita emissions is below 10 tonnes. To be in the top 10% of global emitters your emissions have to be greater than 17 tonnes. I suspect many climbers are >17 tonnes though.
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to kevin stephens:

> There must be a good business opportunity in investing in a fleet of vans with dirty diesel generators to recharge stranded electric cars

I doubt it. I know a lot of EV owners, virtually or in reality, and I only know of one who has been stranded. That was because he bought an old electric van that couldn't be rapid charged and didn't realise he wouldn't be able to charge it at motorway services...
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to SC:

> Until they become available second hand for £5k or less I, and many others won't be buying one. Once they get that cheap, how much service life will be left in the battery? I also think that with the current rate of development of electric cars, the current range may be obsolete within a few years. It's not long ago that the Gee Whizz was the electric car to have. When new technology comes along, will it use the same chargers as current cars?

You've answered your own question. If the current range become 'obsolete' they'll be a lot cheaper than £5k. If EVs improve fast enough for that to happen I imagine it would also kill the resale value of any ICE car, especially if cities start to take air quality more seriously.

Plenty of anecdotal evidence of EVs still remaining very useful far in excess of 100k miles (see post above about C+C taxis).
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to kevin stephens:

> a big part of people's hidden carbon footprint is emissions from cargo ships burning filthy bunker oil in bringing their new stuff from China. Emissions from cargo ships dwarf those from civil aviation

I'm not sure this is true. Direct emissions from aviation are 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions (https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/aviation_en), emissions from shipping are 2.5% (https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/shipping_en). Factor in the additional radiative forcing effects of emitting at high altitude to those figures and aviation is more emissions.
In reply to SC:

Plenty on Autotrader around 3yrs old/50k miles for £6.5k.

Lots of people have done 100k with not a lot of battery degradation.

Also, the recycle value of the battery will stay pretty high, so depreciation of an older vehicle should be quite low. No timing belts or major services to worry about.

The major unknown risk at the moment is total battery failure, but so far it seems quite remarkably rare.
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:
Interesting article but I have a minor quibble (sorry it is a bit nit picking) and a pet hate to confess.

You say energy use goes as speed cubed. It is my understanding that it is power that goes as speed cubed rather than energy. If you go faster then the journey time is reduced inversely with speed. Energy is power x time and so goes as the square of the speed. Alternatively drag force goes as speed squared and energy = force times distance leads to the same result.

Further, there are some power uses that are independent of speed (electric instruments, lights etc) and some that vary linearly with speed as well so overall the energy use probably goes up a little bit less than speed squared

Also, being a real grumpy old man now, either squared or cubed it is not exponential: I do hate every rapid rise being labelled as exponential when it isn't.
Post edited at 22:24
 Es Tresidder 28 Mar 2017
In reply to harold walmsley:

> Interesting article but I have a minor quibble (sorry it is a bit nit picking) and a pet hate to confess. You say energy use goes as speed cubed. It is my understanding that it is power that goes as speed cubed rather than energy. If you go faster then the journey time is reduced inversely with speed. Energy is power x time and so goes as the square of the speed. Alternatively drag force goes as speed squared and energy = force times distance leads to the same result. Further, there are some power uses that are independent of speed (electric instruments, lights etc) and some that vary linearly with speed as well so overall the energy use probably goes up a little bit less than speed squared Also, being a real grumpy old man now, either squared or cubed it is not exponential: I do hate every rapid rise being labelled as exponential when it isn't.

Thanks for your comment Harold, I learnt something there. Every day's a school day!
 Mark Edwards 28 Mar 2017
In reply to SC:

> Until they become available second hand for £5k or less I, and many others won't be buying one.

This is my major consideration as-well.
I like Renault’s approach where you lease the battery.
As to my mind, why buy a second hand electric car with a possibly used-up battery, when the cost of a new battery is more than the value of the car.


In reply to Es Tresidder:
> Top 10% of (per capita) emitters have carbon footprints 11 times bigger than the bottom 50% of emitters. I very much doubt the bottom 50% of emitters have 11 times as many children. https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme...

I agree, 1.61 children/woman in the EU and lots of countries in Africa with 4 or 5 children/woman. So 3x as many.

The number of children per woman determines the population growth rate per generation but the time gap between generations will be smaller in poor countries where women have children at a younger age than in rich countries so it is not the only factor.

I agree that these factors don't cancel out 11x more carbon use, but they might well get it closer to 2 or 3x more carbon use. Then you can argue about how much useful work is being achieved for that carbon: the carbon cost of activities which are useful for humanity as a whole should be deducted before drawing moral conclusions from comparing carbon emissions between groups.
Post edited at 22:56
 BnB 29 Mar 2017
In reply to Alasdair Fulton:

> I guess it might be a while until EVs compete with true sporty cars. The model 3 might (based on specs) so time will tell. As I said further up, I think the industry momentum is firmly behind EVs and the technology improvement path is heading towards fulfilling your criteria. I'm excited to own one sometime in the future. We'd love an electric camper but the options are currently too impractical so we're doing a life extension on our old van for the time being.

What's interesting to me as a sports car enthusiast is that advances in power cell technology ought eventually to bring the overall weight of an electrically powered sports car well below that of an ICE-powered one. Then the low centre of gravity and lighter weight will really pay dividends. But there's a way to go. The BMW i8 is the current darling but feedback from owners suggests that driving pleasure comes more from the moral high ground than the low slung driving position. Needless to say, an all-electric Porsche is on its way, the Mission-E. This car will be the acid test. Tesla, as a newcomer, can afford for their cars to be a little left field in appeal. Porsche's 911 however is the gold standard in high volume engineering and Porsche the most respected motor manufacturer on the planet. 2020 is the expected launch.

 Oliver Sherman 30 Mar 2017
In reply to harold walmsley:

Great article, Es. Volkswagen are targeting 20-25% of production by 2025 to be electric (I expect PEV and PHEVs), and if the rest of the industry follows that's around 20-25m out of 100-110m cars produced in 2025 will be plug-in vs something like 770k out of 84m in 2016. So the industry is behind it. At the moment it costs around $14k for a battery equivalent to a small petrol engine that costs around $4k, but the former is falling in price rapidly as cost for production per MWh of capacity come down, so the future is bright in that sense.

For Harold. I was racking my Physics A-Level brains here. F=MA, so the energy would increase linearly as acceleration increases, but K=(1/2)MV^2, so the drag produced by a car moving through air would increase in proportion to the speed squared, i.e. much faster than in a linear way (even if not literally as per the exponential function). Is that about right? You definitely feel the difference when out on a bike and not drafting someone! Anyway, those equations explain why lightweighting (using aluminium vs steel mostly) and reducing drag on EVs is so important whilst ranges are still low (on the whole) vs ICE alternatives.

Interesting to hear a bit about what it's like to use a pure EV car in the hills
 jkarran 30 Mar 2017
In reply to BnB:
> What's interesting to me as a sports car enthusiast is that advances in power cell technology ought eventually to bring the overall weight of an electrically powered sports car well below that of an ICE-powered one. Then the low centre of gravity and lighter weight will really pay dividends. But there's a way to go. The BMW i8 is the current darling but feedback from owners suggests that driving pleasure comes more from the moral high ground than the low slung driving position.

The problem with things like the i8 (apart from the fact I can't afford one) is that is it's carrying two complete, full-power drivetrains. They need to bite the bullet and bin the oil burner.

Modern batteries can deliver more than 1BHP per marsbar size/weight unit and for road use the full power duty cycle is low so with wet cooling motors can be small and light. All electric drivetrains with limited range are already a match for all but the most extreme IC engines. Factor in zero lag, near perfect control for launch/traction management and full torque from zero speed and I know which option I'd prefer.

> Porsche's 911 however is the gold standard in high volume engineering and Porsche the most respected motor manufacturer on the planet. 2020 is the expected launch.

Unless they go chasing silly range figures I don't expect it'll disappoint.
jk
Post edited at 12:49
1
 wintertree 30 Mar 2017
In reply to jkarran:

> The problem with things like the i8 (apart from the fact I can't afford one) is that is it's carrying two complete, full-power drivetrains. They need to bite the bullet and bin the oil burner.

I started out thinking that, but if you compare the weight of the 7kWh pack in the i8 to the 100 kWh pack in the relevant Tesla, the petrol engine and transmission weight are not out of place for a car with comparable range.

Battery pack specific energy is increasing all the time though, for example look at the massive gains in the latest Renault Zoe. I'm saving up for an all-electric i8 when this trend has continued for another decade...
 adsheff 30 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

You're right, they aren't useful for everyone - only 90% of the population.

I have a Nissan Leaf. I also have a 40 mile round-trip commute (on motorway) to work. The Leaf can easily do 95 motorway miles. It can do 130+ around town. From Cardiff I can get to the Brecon Beacons and back on one charge. The car exceeds our regular use by a large margin. It is plugged in every night and every morning it has a full tank. It costs 1/4 of the price of burning petrol, I never go to petrol stations. It is much much more energy efficient (90% compared to 30% for old style cars). Oh, and it emits no toxic fumes for other people to breathe in.

You can list all the what-ifs you like, but the fact is, an electric car can and does work for most people's needs. Innovation would stop dead if everyone had your mentality, luckily they don't.
1
 gethin_allen 30 Mar 2017
In reply to adsheff:

If it works for you that's great but you obviously have somewhere you can plug it in. Massive chunks of the country's housing stock don't have driveways and dedicated parking places so a system based on you always charging it at home over night is simply not useful.

You mention Cardiff so I'll give you some local examples. Go to Grangetown or Canton where most of the houses are terraces, or go to the bay where most of the housing is in flats and where are you going to charge your car over night. If you live in the posher bits or more mature areas where the properties have driveways that's great but I don't.
Can you provide information proving that electric cars can work for "MOST PEOPLE'S" needs?
And also, remember that your electricity comes from somewhere which does make pollution, just not where you are.

Innovation would be a grand thing if the designers were to design something to meet the needs of the consumer rather than designing something that the consumers should adapt to using.

And if you want to go all eco warrior about having an electric vehicle and say I'm destroying the planet, I ride my bike to work when possible (about 60% of the time) and otherwise my commute is 4 miles in a relatively fuel efficient car. And my previous car, which was also a relatively small and efficient petrol engine, lasted 14 years before if finally died so I really got value for money on the embodied energy and materials used to build it.

Why don't you take the train to work?
1
 Appleby 30 Mar 2017
In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:
> the poorest people who produce the least CO2 per person also tend to have far more children than the richest 10%

Children per women is shrinking in most countries - even poor ones - and the poulation is flattening. See this video for a cogent explanation.

youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w&
Post edited at 14:08
baron 30 Mar 2017
In reply to adsheff:
And the cost of a nissan leaf is how much?
 wbo 30 Mar 2017
In reply to baron: comparable to other cars. And very cheap to run

 nscnick 30 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

As vehicles go in principle and general there is nothing wrong with them. It is when the real aspects of practicality are looked at anyone sensible realises that the cons massively outweigh the pros. Unlike urban and suburban areas there is an almost complete lack of refuelling (charging!) locations. How many people in reality travel a 120 mile round trip to find a charging point? By the time of return there will only be half charge remaining! What happens if the battery goes flat, or the charging point is fully occupied? If the battery is flat then the vehicle is immobile, and it is useless asking the local farmer or householder to spare a gallon of fuel! Until there is an extensive rural charging infrastructure these vehicles will only be of any real use in an urban environment. In even only a partial winderness absolutely not!
baron 30 Mar 2017
In reply to wbo:
It's a very expensive car, especially if you remove the government grant, compared to other small cars.

1
 Es Tresidder 30 Mar 2017
In reply to nscnick:
> How many people in reality travel a 120 mile round trip to find a charging point? By the time of return there will only be half charge remaining!

I think you misunderstood my article. You tend to only use rapid (public) chargers on long journeys. Most of the time you charge the car overnight at home (either from a standard wall socket or a dedicated charger, which is a bit quicker). Public charging is often the first thing people ask about, but most EV owners find they use public chargers much less than they expected to. I haven't used one for nearly two months.

> What happens if the battery goes flat, or the charging point is fully occupied?

Worst case scenario is you get a free rescue (Nissan provide this when you buy the car), but I've not needed one in the 8 months I've been running the car and I don't anticipate ever needing one. I've only had to queue for a charge once (for ten minutes). The battery doesn't just go flat unpredictably, you get loads of warning about how much charge is remaining and how far you're likely to be able to drive on the remaining charge.
Post edited at 20:19
1
 BnB 30 Mar 2017
In reply to jkarran:

> Unless they go chasing silly range figures I don't expect it'll disappoint.jk

I'm very intrigued to see what they do with it. They'll be coming from a very different angle than Tesla I imagine. The driving experience will be at the forefront for sure. Acceleration has never mattered as much as road handling in Weisach.

 d_b 30 Mar 2017
In reply to baron:

I think the big problem is that nobody knows what the second hand market is going to look like yet. People pretty much know that a mechanically sound second hand car has more or less the same performance and range as a new one, but the same is not true of battery packs.

Hopefully these issues will be worked out soon so those of us who never spend more than 5 grand on a 3 year old second hand car know we aren't going to get screwed.
In reply to adsheff:

> It is much much more energy efficient (90% compared to 30% for old style cars).
Don't forget though that only a fraction of electric power generation is carbon free at the moment and the part that uses carbon is far from 100% efficient so the overall carbon related energy efficiency of electric powered vehicles is considerably lower than the efficiency of the vehicle itself. It is only the latter that approaches 90%.

In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

This isn't the real issue surely?

Isn't the real issue whether or not Skoda are bringing out an electric Octavia estate as a superior alternative to the (already perfect) 1.9tdi?

Until then I'm fine with fossil fuels and non-craft coffees, and bacon sandwiches.
 timjones 31 Mar 2017
In reply to Alasdair Fulton:

> In the not too distant future EVs will not only reduce local emissions, but through smart charging can also help smooth grid fluctuations caused by the intermittent nature of renewables, meaning lower emissions (C02, N0x & particulates ) and less requirement for diesel or gas peaking plants (small power stations on standby for periods of high demand.

We had a meeting on renewables last week and it was mooted that it should be possible to "charge rent" for the storage capacity of your vehicle batteries when you are not using them.
 gethin_allen 31 Mar 2017
In reply to timjones:

> We had a meeting on renewables last week and it was mooted that it should be possible to "charge rent" for the storage capacity of your vehicle batteries when you are not using them.

Should people who use storage heaters get the same? They usually use cheaper electricity on an economy 7 plan and cars would have the same option so there's you "rent".
 timjones 31 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:

> Should people who use storage heaters get the same? They usually use cheaper electricity on an economy 7 plan and cars would have the same option so there's you "rent".

This is about more than merely storing energy for your own use.

The idea is that the charge in the batteries of cars or machines that are standing idle could be fed back into the grid at times of peak demand.
 jkarran 31 Mar 2017
In reply to gethin_allen:
> If it works for you that's great but you obviously have somewhere you can plug it in... where most of the housing is in flats and where are you going to charge your car over night.

Where you park it. Go see lour councilor, write letters, organise, make yourselves a royal pain in the ass until the council address your concerns. Likewise at work, make some noise, get chargers installed. The future is electric.

> And also, remember that your electricity comes from somewhere which does make pollution

Depends who you buy it from and even if it's from one of the mainstream fossil burners they're mainly burning gas (as part of a mixed portfolio including renewables), they burn it out of town, they recover waste heat and they filter particulates.

> Innovation would be a grand thing if the designers were to design something to meet the needs of the consumer rather than designing something that the consumers should adapt to using.

We've adapted to using pretty much everything we now consider normal/intuitive. Should computer designers have eschewed the keyboard and instead shelved their designs until someone invented the e-quill and e-parchment as a data entry method?
jk
Post edited at 09:12
 jkarran 31 Mar 2017
In reply to harold walmsley:

> Don't forget though that only a fraction of electric power generation is carbon free at the moment and the part that uses carbon is far from 100% efficient so the overall carbon related energy efficiency of electric powered vehicles is considerably lower than the efficiency of the vehicle itself. It is only the latter that approaches 90%.

Refining road fuel should be considered an inefficiency in the same way electrical generation and transmission is plus we can choose to source renewable electricity.
jk
1
 jkarran 31 Mar 2017
In reply to timjones:
> We had a meeting on renewables last week and it was mooted that it should be possible to "charge rent" for the storage capacity of your vehicle batteries when you are not using them.

Smart consumption seems more likely than grid feed-in from the battery to begin with at least. The signal (line frequency) is already available, trick is making it pay (or mandating it) so people adopt smarter energy consumers and ensuring the system remains stable, that every device does not have exactly the same built in logic meaning they sync together switching in and out in time causing chaos. They're not difficult problems but they require some political/regulatory engagement and competence... fat chance of that while they're all busy burning down the house for the next couple of years.
jk
Post edited at 09:12
1
 Jamie Wakeham 31 Mar 2017
In reply to jkarran:

> They need to bite the bullet and bin the oil burner.

It's an interesting idea, isn't it, and one I suspect can't be far away for most hybrids. I'm driving a Mitsubishi PHEV at the moment - it wouldn't be the right car for a lot of people, but for me (daily commute of ~20 miles, occasional long trips) it's basically perfect. Lifetime mpg 140-odd. But I can't help wonder how much weight you'd save by just stripping out the whole petrol engine and its associated parts, and just how much battery capacity you could fit into that space... if you could give me an electric-only version with a motorway range of, say, 150 miles (ie Oxford to North Wales with only one break needed to recharge) I'd snap it up.

 timjones 31 Mar 2017
In reply to jkarran:

Given that landowners are already being offered contracts for battery banks to buffer peaks and troughs in both consumption and renewable generation it seems that there is considerable room for smart storage of energy to be fed back into the grid.

Imagine the potential in an entire supermarket car park full of cars with batteries carrying more charge than their owners are ever going to use over the next 24 hours. Or the average street full of cars standing idle.
 jkarran 31 Mar 2017
In reply to timjones:

> Given that landowners are already being offered contracts for battery banks to buffer peaks and troughs in both consumption and renewable generation it seems that there is considerable room for smart storage of energy to be fed back into the grid.

The issue with cars is the extra cycles on the battery if it's buffering the grid to any great extent. Car batteries needing to be light and energy dense will always be at the less robust end of the storage spectrum. Even if the issue is only one of perception one rather than real technical problem it's enough to delay adoption of the tech and we've seen several concerns about cycle life already on this thread. Smart consumption has much the same effect with no real downside.
jk
1
In reply to jkarran:

On my uni course last year (MSc Sustainable Engineering) we had quite a few technical discussions about energy arbitration. As in, are there potential businesses to be built on taking energy when it's cheap (windy/sunny days when demand is low) and selling it again when it's expensive. Either via battery, or chemical storage (hydrogen).

It works, it can be profitable - but one of the issues is - once it kicks of in larger scale, it does too good a job of smoothing the grid and takes away it's own price differential! At that point, any further storage costs would just have to be funded - I guess this is where cars could come in.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that if enough EVs were available for grid smoothing then the added cycling would actually be quite low. However, I still think there would have to be a fairly substantial benefit for car owners to do this, due to the added battery degradation. Since a full car charge is only £1.50-£3 I doubt even free charging would be enough of compensation.
 winhill 31 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

> EVs don't need to work for 100% of people straight away for their market share to grow very rapidly (see Norway, 18% of new car registrations in January were pure EVs).

How do we know if that's a good thing or a bad thing?

Norway is lucky, in that it's electricity is not fossil fuelled but in the US, where Tesla has sold deposits for 300,000 Tesla 3s and a third of states offer carbon equivalents below 40mpg it is a bad thing.

Even so consumers buying electric cars because they are attracted by an incentive (25% VAT saved in Norway) before they would have replaced older ICE cars are using more carbon than they're saving, it's a backward step in that sense.

It could be counterbalanced by technological improvement but the industry isn't at that point yet, Tesla constantly postponing any idea of profitability (and receiving huge $1bn dollar incentives, Faraday Futures $300m).

It's a very like consumers buying the latest wifi enabled white goods or HVAC devices before they need to replace their existing ones, overall wasting energy, not saving it.

The problem is largely that consumption addiction rather than the goods themselves, even more so with cars where you need to be a very high consumer to see the benefits.
 timjones 31 Mar 2017
In reply to jkarran:

> The issue with cars is the extra cycles on the battery if it's buffering the grid to any great extent. Car batteries needing to be light and energy dense will always be at the less robust end of the storage spectrum. Even if the issue is only one of perception one rather than real technical problem it's enough to delay adoption of the tech and we've seen several concerns about cycle life already on this thread. Smart consumption has much the same effect with no real downside.jk

Surely battery life is less of an issue if you are offsetting the cost by utilising your battery in this manner?

I find that this sort of smart thinking that starts to make the whole renewables/electric cars/green energy field a lot more exciting and interesting
 timjones 31 Mar 2017
In reply to Alasdair Fulton:

> On my uni course last year (MSc Sustainable Engineering) we had quite a few technical discussions about energy arbitration. As in, are there potential businesses to be built on taking energy when it's cheap (windy/sunny days when demand is low) and selling it again when it's expensive. Either via battery, or chemical storage (hydrogen).It works, it can be profitable - but one of the issues is - once it kicks of in larger scale, it does too good a job of smoothing the grid and takes away it's own price differential! At that point, any further storage costs would just have to be funded - I guess this is where cars could come in.I vaguely remember reading somewhere that if enough EVs were available for grid smoothing then the added cycling would actually be quite low. However, I still think there would have to be a fairly substantial benefit for car owners to do this, due to the added battery degradation. Since a full car charge is only £1.50-£3 I doubt even free charging would be enough of compensation.

Surely the whole point is that we cannot expect people to provide the resources to "smooth the grid" without adequate reward?

It's not about making poeak tariff electricity cheaper, it's about ensuring that we can meet the peaks in demand whilst reducing our reliance on carbon based energy sources.

 jkarran 31 Mar 2017
In reply to timjones:

> Surely battery life is less of an issue if you are offsetting the cost by utilising your battery in this manner?I find that this sort of smart thinking that starts to make the whole renewables/electric cars/green energy field a lot more exciting and interesting

Only if you're paid meaningfully for the wear and tear.

Perhaps it will in the future that'll happen but not today while we can just bring some more gas or even diesel power on line to fill the gaps or pay pennies to have some air-con, storage heat, car chargers etc shut down instead. I'm not dead against the idea, I actually think it's a very good one and like you I believe a tightly integrated net of EVs capable of bidirectional energy flows and renewable generators is the future but we aren't there yet and it's going to take another decade or two before economics, technology and public opinion/legislation align to make it feasible. The pressures of global warming should be forcing our politicians' hand on this but they aren't and they aren't looking likely to in the near future.
jk
 andy 31 Mar 2017
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

> It's an interesting idea, isn't it, and one I suspect can't be far away for most hybrids. I'm driving a Mitsubishi PHEV at the moment - it wouldn't be the right car for a lot of people, but for me (daily commute of ~20 miles, occasional long trips) it's basically perfect. Lifetime mpg 140-odd. But I can't help wonder how much weight you'd save by just stripping out the whole petrol engine and its associated parts, and just how much battery capacity you could fit into that space... if you could give me an electric-only version with a motorway range of, say, 150 miles (ie Oxford to North Wales with only one break needed to recharge) I'd snap it up.

That's interesting. I have one of those and I'd say my useage is perfect - 90% of journeys are well under 20 miles. I drive it 3 miles to the station Monday afternoon then drive it home Thursday night. Then drive my kids about or pop around at home at weekends. Occastionally I do a longer trip, but no more than once a month.

I have religiously recorded mileage and fill ups and after two years my average mpg is 58 (which I suspect is way better than I'd get with a similar sized IC car with the same sort of use, to be fair). I'm amazed at the difference - I don't hammer it yet you're getting twice the mpg with very similar use.

My work is apparently going to launch an EV salary sacrifice, in which case I'll probably get a Tesla, but the PHEV has been a bit of a disappointment for me, particularly as the resale value is a disaster. My mate's just got the BMW 2 series equivalent and is similarly disappointed.
 timjones 31 Mar 2017
In reply to jkarran:

> Only if you're paid meaningfully for the wear and tear.Perhaps it will in the future that'll happen but not today while we can just bring some more gas or even diesel power on line to fill the gaps or pay pennies to have some air-con, storage heat, car chargers etc shut down instead. I'm not dead against the idea, I actually think it's a very good one and like you I believe a tightly integrated net of EVs capable of bidirectional energy flows and renewable generators is the future but we aren't there yet and it's going to take another decade or two before economics, technology and public opinion/legislation align to make it feasible. The pressures of global warming should be forcing our politicians' hand on this but they aren't and they aren't looking likely to in the near future.jk

It's interesting to note that a relative that works in the field believes that progress is inhibited by subsidies propping up existing technologies and inhibiting the development and deplyment of better solutions.
 rocksol 31 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

You need to compare dust to dust costs of vehicles My understanding is hugely expensive batteries along with catalytic converters contain rare elements sourced at considerable environmental costs. Extra 12 power stations to service the demand if all cars were electric. My drive to Chamonix would take days with service stations clogged up with charging vehicles. Picture this one scenario, after dark return to parked car with no phone signal to in the Highlands, to find you left the lights on; what next? I think the technology needs to improve before a mass change to electric. One selfish point you can't compare the overrun on a big Ducati to the soulless whine of an electric motor!!
 Es Tresidder 31 Mar 2017
In reply to winhill:

> How do we know if that's a good thing or a bad thing?

You need to know the carbon intensity of the electricity and how many km you get per kWh in an EV, then you can calculate the gCO2/km and compare it directly to ICE cars. Last year the CO2 intensity of UK grid electricity was 260g/kWh (http://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=1-year&start=2016-03-3... My EV uses about 18 kWh/100km including 10% efficiency loss for charging. So that's 0.18 kWh, emitting 47 gCO2, per km. That is a little more than half the CO2 emissions of the lowest CO2 ICE cars. I've been generous to ICE cars here in that I've taken real-world performance of an EV and compared it to manufacturers performance figures for ICE cars.

Furthermore, many (most?) EV users choose to do most of their charging overnight, when the carbon intensity of grid electricity is usually even lower than that.

> It's a very like consumers buying the latest wifi enabled white goods or HVAC devices before they need to replace their existing ones, overall wasting energy, not saving it.The problem is largely that consumption addiction rather than the goods themselves, even more so with cars where you need to be a very high consumer to see the benefits.

There is a common misconception that the embodied energy of goods is more significant than the in-use energy and therefore that replacing inefficient kit with efficient kit is not worth it. That may be the case for very small improvements in efficiency, but it simply isn't true for replacing ICE cars with EVs (or incandescent bulbs with LEDs, or old houses with PassiveHouses, or retrofitting old houses etc etc). Have a look at this great website based on a study from MIT (google 'carboncounter MIT EVs' and you'll find it. UKC wouldn't accept the link for some reason), play around with the axes to explore the relative importance of embodied and in-use energy. First of all, EVs don't look to have any more embodied energy than ICE cars (put 'vehicle emissions' on the Y axis and cost on the X and you'll see the EVs are no higher up than everything else). So if the decision is between buying a new ICE car or buying a new EV, EVs are a clear winner in terms of environmental impact.

If the decision is between keeping an old car or buying a new EV then we have to work out how long it will take to save the CO2 emissions that have been generated by building the new EV. So on that carboncounter site my car looks like ~7.5 tonnes CO2 emitted during manufacture. If my existing ICE car is emitting 150 gCO2/km (this is being quite generous to ICE cars, most old ICE cars will be a lot higher than this), and my EV is emitting 46 gCO2/km (also generous to ICE cars, since I'm mostly charging at night when the CO2 intensity is lower), and I'm driving 19,200km per year (12k miles). So per year in my old ICE car I'm generating 19200km*150g = 2880kgCO2 and in my EV I'm generating 900kg CO2 per year. So I'm saving ~2 tonnes CO2 per year, so it'll pay for it's manufacture, in CO2 terms, in under 4 years. Considerably quicker if doing bigger mileage, charging at night, and the existing ICE car is less efficient than that.
 Es Tresidder 31 Mar 2017
In reply to rocksol:
> Extra 12 power stations to service the demand if all cars were electric.

Do you have a reference for that? If you read it in the Daily Mail then you should be aware that they had to print a retraction. They miscalculated due to not understanding the difference between power (Watts) and energy (joules or Watt-hours).

General point stands though, we need to simultaneously increase electricity production and reduce its CO2 intensity in order to move transport and heating to electricity. This will be a challenge. Do you have a better idea for achieving the dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions necessary?
Post edited at 21:11
In reply to jkarran:

Yes indeed. I seem to remember about a 10% loss for that being typical although that figure is out of date. It depends on the refinery type. More complex ones doing more processes take more energy even on a per unit basis.
 Jamie Wakeham 31 Mar 2017
In reply to andy:

Do you ever have the engine kick in when on short trips? I am ridiculously careful about never allowing the engine to kick in when I could complete a trip on EV only. That means no heating in the winter (pre-heat when charging, and I have a little battery powered heater I use when it's sitting outside a client's house) and no AC in summer. And never pushing the accelerator far enough to fire the engine as supplementary power. About once a month I boot it to jump into a gap on a roundabout and I curse myself afterwards!

Remember that when your battery runs out, you're driving a 2 ton SUV carrying 500kg of useless batteries on a 2.0L petrol engine. It's about 35mpg in this state. So, if I have to drive far enough to use the ICE, I take the time to stop to recharge whenever possible. For example, Oxford to Warwick to visit my brother-in-law is about 50 miles. Unless I'm in a hurry I'll stop at a services to recharge halfway - it takes 17 minutes, which is fine to grab a coffee and stretch my legs. Then I'll recharge whilst there, and the same on the way home. If I get 20 miles from a full battery, and 15 from a fast charge, that turns what would have been perhaps 20 miles on EV and 80 on ICE into 60 on EV and 40 ICE. The trip counter reckons I get 65mpg on this run.

I get that I'm a bit over-zealous about this (my four stops to recharge on the way to North Wales are a bit dull...), and part of the point of a hybrid is that you can just forget about it and drive using the ICE. But maybe a bit of a recalibration of how you use the car would reap dividends. Having said that, 58mpg for a car in this class is pretty bloody good already!

A last thought: I wonder if you do a high percentage of your miles on EV? 90% of trips, fine, but if a whole load of them are 3 miles, and your occasional runs are quite long, then actually the percentage of miles EV might not be that great.
 Jamie Wakeham 31 Mar 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

>There is a common misconception that the embodied energy of goods is more significant than the in-use energy and therefore that replacing inefficient kit with efficient kit is not worth it. That may be the case for very small improvements in efficiency, but it simply isn't true for replacing ICE cars with EVs ... So I'm saving ~2 tonnes CO2 per year, so it'll pay for it's manufacture, in CO2 terms, in under 4 years

That concurs with my reasonably careful research. As long as you are not scrapping a *very* fuel-efficient ICE car then you'll end up in the black pretty fast. Even faster if you charge from renewable sources - I'm lucky in that I work from home in the daytime so my PV can charge my car for free, but anyone can switch to a 100% renewable supplier. I've gone over to Ecotricity - not as user friendly as OVO, but their EV car discount plus access to free motorway charges from their electric highway network make them a no-brainer.

Yes, I get that if everyone switched to a 100% renewable supplier all at once we'd have some issues, but (sadly) that's not an immediate problem...
 pec 31 Mar 2017
In reply to Toerag:

> What do you drive that only needs filling up once every 700 miles, and whose filling up process only takes up 5 minutes when you do? >

My car does close to 700 miles between fill ups and only takes a few minutes to fill up, its also big enough to fit 5 bouldering mats AND 2 bikes in it if I really wanted. (VW Sharan 1.9Tdi)
I'm driving down to France tomorrow, goodness knows how long that journey would take having to recharge for 30 mins every 100 miles or so and drive slowly to maximise the range. Its a journey I'll be making three times this year.
Closer to home, last weekend I drove up to Wasdale, I couldn't get there without stopping to charge up and there's certainly nowhere to charge it up there, nor would I want to waste half an hour sitting around on the way home late on a Sunday evening, it was nearly 11 O'clock before I got home as it was. Most weekends I make similar journeys, i.e. too far to do on one charge and nowhere to charge it when I'm parked up to go for a walk or climb.
My car only cost me £3k and I'd expect to get at least another 100,000 miles out of it, probably 150,000. The cost of buying electrics alone rules them out for me.
Electric vehicles may be the future, but for many of us they're just not realistic yet.
 elsewhere 31 Mar 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:
Plunging price of renewable energy makes end of fossil fuels inevitable, says report.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/renewable-energy-transition-from-f...
 Paul Evans 01 Apr 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

I have recently got a Prius PHEV, so not gone full electric. Like the guys with Mitsubishi PHEVs I'm doing a mix of ICE and electric miles. I think your elec gCO2 per km figure is around right, but of course when you say this is "around half the CO2 emissions of the lowest ICE cars", that would be true - if the manufacturers were not lying about their cars CO2 emissions in exactly the same way as they are lying about their mpgs and their NOx emissions.

British company Emissions Analytics are leading the way here - see http://equaindex.com/equa-carbon-dioxide/ - basically, on average, a car manufacturer's claimed CO2 figure will be 30% lower than the actual. So a car rated at 130gm per km will generate nearer 180.
 Es Tresidder 01 Apr 2017
In reply to Paul Evans:

Interesting thanks, I knew I was being generous to ICE cars in my calcs but I didn't know by how much.

Interestingly the European testing for EVs is similarly problematic. Advertised range for my car is 155 miles, which is about 30% more than you'll get for typical driving (120 miles). The US EPA estimate is much more conservative for all EVs (107 miles for my car) and probably better for basing your expectations on before you buy.

That doesn't change my calcs above, as the numbers for EVs were real world figures (my own) rather than advertised.
 rocksol 01 Apr 2017
In reply to Es Tresidder:

As if I'd read The Mail; or if I did give it credibility!
In reply to timjones:
> Surely the whole point is that we cannot expect people to provide the resources to "smooth the grid" without adequate reward? It's not about making poeak tariff electricity cheaper, it's about ensuring that we can meet the peaks in demand whilst reducing our reliance on carbon based energy sources.

Bit of a delayed response. I'm not saying we should "expect people to provide the resources to "smooth the grid" without adequate reward" I was saying we had looked into the business case of doing it, with no incentives (just as a thought experiment). The aim was softening peaks and filling troughs to cope with further renewable integration. The aim was never reducing peak electricity costs. (even though it would, in effect, reduce peak costs - it would slightly bring up the average cost.) The govt/national grid already has 4 or 5 measures to ensure grid stability during peak times. Unfortunately a lot of them are, at present, diesel powered gen sets & older less efficient open cycle gas turbines.

I guess all I was saying was if the business went too well it would cancel out its own revenue stream and, at that point, any further grid smoothing would have to be incentivised/funded.
Post edited at 09:46
 johncook 01 Apr 2017
In reply to UKC/UKH Articles:

Go on youtube and search for Flux Capacitor. An electric car all climbers could identify with! I will look for the link later and post it.
 kevin stephens 01 Apr 2017
In reply to johncook:

Is that the one Scotty's always having to reverse the polarity on when things get hairy?
 andy 01 Apr 2017
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

> Do you ever have the engine kick in when on short trips? I am ridiculously careful about never allowing the engine to kick in when I could complete a trip on EV only. That means no heating in the winter (pre-heat when charging, and I have a little battery powered heater I use when it's sitting outside a client's house) and no AC in summer. And never pushing the accelerator far enough to fire the engine as supplementary power. About once a month I boot it to jump into a gap on a roundabout and I curse myself afterwards!Remember that when your battery runs out, you're driving a 2 ton SUV carrying 500kg of useless batteries on a 2.0L petrol engine. It's about 35mpg in this state. So, if I have to drive far enough to use the ICE, I take the time to stop to recharge whenever possible. For example, Oxford to Warwick to visit my brother-in-law is about 50 miles. Unless I'm in a hurry I'll stop at a services to recharge halfway - it takes 17 minutes, which is fine to grab a coffee and stretch my legs. Then I'll recharge whilst there, and the same on the way home. If I get 20 miles from a full battery, and 15 from a fast charge, that turns what would have been perhaps 20 miles on EV and 80 on ICE into 60 on EV and 40 ICE. The trip counter reckons I get 65mpg on this run.I get that I'm a bit over-zealous about this (my four stops to recharge on the way to North Wales are a bit dull...), and part of the point of a hybrid is that you can just forget about it and drive using the ICE. But maybe a bit of a recalibration of how you use the car would reap dividends. Having said that, 58mpg for a car in this class is pretty bloody good already!A last thought: I wonder if you do a high percentage of your miles on EV? 90% of trips, fine, but if a whole load of them are 3 miles, and your occasional runs are quite long, then actually the percentage of miles EV might not be that great.

All good points - I do have the ICE kick in fairly frequently - sometimes when I'm trying to be very light footed! I also pre-heat but run the heater when I set off early (I sometimes leave at about 6am and it's bloody freezing!). But I thought that once it's warm the heating was off the battery? My battery never runs out on normal week-to-week driving, so assumed the heating was just electric?

As you say, I'm happy enough with only spending about £30 a month on fuel - I had a Discovery before and reckon I spent nearly three times that each month.

I think 75-80% of my mileage is probably elec (or is done with battery available!) - a long run is usually 100 miles round trip, and probably less than once a month. Suspect your first thought is the right one - I'm just a bit heavy footed!

Anyway - roll on our work scheme and Tesla Model X!
 Jamie Wakeham 01 Apr 2017
In reply to andy:

> But I thought that once it's warm the heating was off the battery? My battery never runs out on normal week-to-week driving, so assumed the heating was just electric?

Depends which model you have - the lowest spec ones have no heat pump, so the heating is always engine driven. GX3+ and higher do have a heat pump, but even then it can only run from the battery if the difference between outdoor and cabin temp is less than (I think) 8 degrees. More than that and it'll fire up.

The engine will only kick on for four reasons: low battery, accelerating harder than the battery can manage (ie going from 'ECO' to 'POWER' on the rev counter display), running the heater, or running the AC. If you're really careful to avoid all those I think you'll see your mpg increase dramatically.


>Anyway - roll on our work scheme and Tesla Model X!

That's fair; if I could get hold of a Model X I would too!

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