There was an interesting article in the latest MAG news from someone who used an electric scooter as his everyday transport. I have a friend who is on his second Nissan Leaf and finds it practical enough, he has young children and pointed out how often do you do more than 100-150 miles with small children without a break. Personally I do not think electric cars are quite there yet, unless they are just used for commuting. The same is true of electric motorcycles. Electric bicycle and scooters are viable but we need to rethink our towns and cities to make them more useful. More sensibly located park and ride with secure, free parking for bicycles with charging points for the electric ones would help.
Solar panels are viable and would be more so, if we insisted that all new builds had them. I have about 2.5 kw on my roof and as I got in at the right time for the tariffs, I have effectively negative fuel bills. We also have tubes which heat the hot water. Yesterday I got enough hot water to wash the bike and fill the tank up at 48c. That’s not bad in February. Usually between April and the end of September I end up using gas to heat the water about half a dozen times.
If houses were built with solar and ground source heating it would make a lot of sense. They could also have most of the electric done on 12 v. Unfortunately there does not seem the will to do any of these things on a large scale in this country.
Cheers Jak
Air and ground source are fine in principle but expensive to install. If it gets really cold, they can’t cope either, nor can they cope if you have six kids that all want a shower in the morning...a client of mine didn’t understand that.
Carla from the TRF rode her electric trail bike to Paris and was begging charges every time she stopped, which is hardly commercially viable. What do you do when you need to drive to Edinburgh? Hire an ICE car?
As ever, the rules seem to be coming before the viability. Remember California’s zero emmisdions debacle?
Prices won’t go down all the time in infrastructure is coming on in dribbles. A bit chicken and egg I suppose..
A guy I know works for Loughborough University...ironically, given what follows, he works on diesel engine technology.
His employer has a deal with Nissan/Renault. He leases an electric car, and parks and charges it for free while at work.
If he need to do a long journey, business or pleasure, there's a pool of ICE cars he can borrow.
There are some electric heavy trucks in operation now...including 32-tonne tractor units that look just like conventional ones. Range is about 100 km and they can recharge in 45 minutes...a critical time as that's the driver's mandated break time. So, they are workable for some urban distribution operations. They aren't a production vehicle yet, and their widespread use will require infrastructure work, but one possibility is to combine charging facilities with those of bus companies...electric buses are most certainly a viable thing now.
Now that’s the way to improve towns and cities at a stroke...electric buses, delivery vehicles and taxis.
To my mind that would create a huge benefit to air quality.
Charging at work is fine if they have their own car park. How many charging points does the university have though?
I used to need my car for work for anything up to 200 miles in a day but the firms offices were in an old building in Hastings old town and I could have to street park 1/4 mile away so not much use.
The principle is great but Instill don’t see where the public and private investment is coming from.
Hybrids still seem the least worse solution for now.
I was talking to a mate last night who had done 320 miles round trip for a meeting in his Mitsubishi Outlander hybrid, it was using the 2.2 litre petrol engine for all but 30 miles of that trip.
His normal daily commute is 40 miles round trip including motorway/dual carriageway and if he goes above 60 mph he doesn't have the battery range to get there and back on a single charge so has to plug in or run the engine to recharge.
He thinks he's saving the planet because his Company car tax is so little.
Open your eyes and you see what is in front of you, open your mind and you see a bigger picture but open your heart and you see a whole new World.
Tonibe63 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 21, 2019 5:02 pm
I was talking to a mate last night who had done 320 miles round trip for a meeting in his Mitsubishi Outlander hybrid, it was using the 2.2 litre petrol engine for all but 30 miles of that trip.
His normal daily commute is 40 miles round trip including motorway/dual carriageway and if he goes above 60 mph he doesn't have the battery range to get there and back on a single charge so has to plug in or run the engine to recharge.
He thinks he's saving the planet because his Company car tax is so little.
and most outlanders are sold as company cars for tax evasion, sorry avoidance, purposes.
A little while ago I used to lecture at MSc level and did one course module entitled "Energy Conversion Engineering"--and being RN based did all kinds of odd battery material combinations like sodium/sulphur, solar, small nuclear heat sources, external combustion Stirling Cycle engines, wave power, fuel cells and so on--and a couple of points
1) Always look at the "Well to Wheel " pathway and implications of your chosen prime mover--from destroying a mountain in Africa, the energy involved in shipping and refining the materials (and of course its "remote" environmental impact --NO NIMBY stuff allowed!), to disposing of the precious metals etc in used fuel cells and batteries.
2) on Hydrogen specifically--its a bitch to store and transport-apart from it being a very reactive substance its a small molecule and will permeate through steel containers and also cause embrittlement ("Embrittlement is a loss of ductility of a material, making it brittle. Various materials have different mechanisms of embrittlement. Hydrogen embrittlement is the effect of hydrogen absorption on some metals and alloys. Sulfide stress cracking is the embrittlement caused by absorption of hydrogen sulfide. "
I honestly believe, because there is a physical limit on energy storage (Kwh/m3) that we are pretty close to with Lithium iron, that "electric" cars will have a limited use only , and we will still need diesel etc to transport large quantities of goods over distance--and modern diesels are not the polluters that knee jerk politicians make out (deNOX plus particulate filters plus oxidation catalysts--look up a modern truck tailpipe and spot the soot!)
