Electric cars

[DiddlyDodds]

Actually, I got that all scrambled, reiver. In a Prius, all the electricity comes from fossil fuel. In a purely electric re-chargeable Postman Pat car ( no offense intended), it comes from the likes of the above power station.

BTW, all that white stuff in your picture actually isn't wicked carbon belching smoke. It is that evil greenhouse gas, water vapour

What is that power station running on most likely fossil fuels , Gas or coal or the hated Nuclear, anyway up not good for the environment so to say electric cars are green is rubbish.

Yes i the white stuff is steam after it has spun the turbine and after being heated by the fuels above.

Also the the energy used to make the batteries is so large if you kept a petrol car on the road till it died it would still do less damage then scrapping and making the batteries for the electric car.

The only viable way to get green electric at the moment is wind , as some one in our area found out last year, you need planning permission to put one up, and he was refused on the the grounds it impacted into other peoples peace and quality of life as it was tall and noisy.

 

[Arch]

The only viable way to get green electric at the moment is wind , as some one in our area found out last year, you need planning permission to put one up, and he was refused on the the grounds it impacted into other peoples peace and quality of life as it was tall and noisy.

Sidelining, but it's funny how people object to wind turbines. I often wonder if they'd prefer to have Drax, or Sellafield in their back yard? No, thought not...

Anyway, Colly, I don't know what sort of size of van you need, but have a look at these:

http://www.megavan.org/mega-van.htm

or

http://www.epowertrucks.co.uk/

We use an electric van at work, and she's not really fit for the job any more - she's really a warehouse vehicle, and 5 or 6 years of hard road use hasn't done her any good, so we're hoping to get a new one if we can fund it. These are two of the options we've been looking at and the Mega is on our wishlist, having visited them and spoken to a couple of current users. Of course we only do urban driving, so a top speed of 30 is all we need, and the range would cover two or three days at our current workrate.

 

[asterix]

Milk floats used to be electric. Probably not good for the image of electric cars tho'.

 

[XmisterIS]

Excellent and interesting post Night Train.

One huge future benefit of electric vs. petrol/diesel is that in reality we are only going to be able to get enough petrol/diesel for all the world's automotive needs by taking it out of the ground. Electricity, however, can be generated in a large number of different ways. Take solar power for example - when we get solar panel technology more advanced, we won't need to build nuclear power stations when we've got the mother of all nuclear reactors a mere 93 million miles away (which is incredibly close for a star).

Sure, the gov't will tax us for the electricity generated, but if everyone can generate electricity at home (e.g. using silent wind turbines - and they do exist), then all we'll be paying is tax and the installation/running costs of the machine. And if everyone wants one, there will be lots of companies making them, so competition will naturally drive the cost down (take computers as an example). It will work out a lot cheaper than buying all your energy from someone else, even with the tax. And I don't object to paying a reasonable level of tax, what I do object to is not having any choice about where my energy comes from and therefore being forced to line the already well-padded pockets of a select few incredibly rich people.

 

[marinyork]

The charging issue for electric vehicle is put in perspective by the factoid that when you put the petrol pump nozzle in the filler on your car and pull the trigger, energy is transferred into your fuel tank at a rate of 15MW compared to 3kW from your electric socket at home.

If you look at the actual charge points dotted around the UK (or the many more that are planned to be installed), the ones I've seen/heard of are there are standard ones and quicker ones. Standard charge points can do a quicker charge of about 7kW, slower of 3kw and the quick charge points (that are very rare) can do somewhere around 40kW.

 

[User482]

Where does the electricity come from that charges these green vehicles? As one wag once commented..." Feeling snug about your Prius is rather like feeling smug that you trained your dog to crap on your neighbour's lawn."

Except that the electricity for a Prius comes from its own brakes. All it does is recapture energy that would be wasted in a conventional car (slowing down) and use it to supplement a conventional petrol engine.

 

[User482]

The biggest problem with mass market electric cars hasn't been discussed here. There is no realistic scenario in which we are going to be able to generate sufficient electricity to power private transport as well as homes and businesses. The unpalatable answer is that we are all going to have to use less energy. A lot less.

It's also worth noting that in terms of carbon emissions, electric cars do not significantly outperform high-efficiency diesel or petrol cars, though that may change if the national grid increases the use of renewables.

 

[jdtate101]

The biggest problem with mass market electric cars hasn't been discussed here. There is no realistic scenario in which we are going to be able to generate sufficient electricity to power private transport as well as homes and businesses. The unpalatable answer is that we are all going to have to use less energy. A lot less.

It's also worth noting that in terms of carbon emissions, electric cars do not significantly outperform high-efficiency diesel or petrol cars, though that may change if the national grid increases the use of renewables.

Until we get a workable nuclear fusion technology, then no an all electric infrastructure would be next to impossible. With a workable fusion power station we could, in theory, have virtually limitless clean electricity. Fusion power is not so far away, but to get it on a commercial scale is still probably two decades at least. Until then we are stuck with old 'dirty' fission power , unreliable renewables or fossil fuels. Fusion power represents our best chance for a green future, just hope the eggheads get a move on.....

 

[User482]

Until we get a workable nuclear fusion technology, then no an all electric infrastructure would be next to impossible. With a workable fusion power station we could, in theory, have virtually limitless clean electricity. Fusion power is not so far away, but to get it on a commercial scale is still probably two decades at least. Until then we are stuck with old 'dirty' fission power , unreliable renewables or fossil fuels. Fusion power represents our best chance for a green future, just hope the eggheads get a move on.....

Fusion has been "two decades away" for how long now? I wouldn't hold your breath!

Better, I think, to prepare for cutting our usage, and if fusion power does come to fruition, then look at it as an unexpected bonus.

 

[Yellow Fang]

I've visited the fusion development centre at Culham near Oxford on one of their open evenings. They are pretty confident fusion will work. They've already had it working but only for about 30 secs, although it consumed more electricity than it generated. They reckon a bigger, better system will work for at least eight hours at a time. Their system is designed around a tokamak (or torus), which is a field of plasma spun around by a massive electromagnet. However, there is another approach in development based around high powered lasers. I think we'd be pretty unlucky if neither technology worked out.

 

[User482]

Accepted, but I would be extremely surprised if we had a commercial-scale fusion reactor operating within the next 40 years. Which is far too late to deal with the problems of peak oil and climate change.

 

[Yellow Fang]

I was reading an interesting article in New Scientist yesterday. It was about a new type of battery containing what the inventor referred to as Cambridge Crude (Cambridge in the US where the MIT is based). The liquid contains specks of lithium ion which holds the charge, and specks of carbon graphite which provides the electrical path. One advantage of this technology is that you could fill up your tank at a petrol station. There were still a lot of drawbacks of the technology, but there seems to be a lot of interesting developments in battery technology.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Accepted, but I would be extremely surprised if we had a commercial-scale fusion reactor operating within the next 40 years. Which is far too late to deal with the problems of peak oil and climate change.

Yes, that might be true.

 

[XmisterIS]

You want fusion? Have you seen the great big yellow ball that comes up over the horizon every day?

(I'll get me coat ...)

Seriously though, the trouble is that nuclear fusion has been given a paltry amount of state funding over the years, in all the developed nations - the cynic in me thinks that it is because viable nuclear fusion = virtually limitless cheap energy that can be produced by anyone, hence the oil companies would go bust in an instant, hence they want to strangle it out of existence, in cahoots with governments.

For example, the Tokamak has been around for decades now. As a corollary, can you imagine if hardly any money had been spent on developing cars since the days when Ford began mass-producing cars? If so, then we'd still all be driving around in Model-Ts.

 

[mickle]

Where does the electricity come from that charges these green vehicles? As one wag once commented..." Feeling snug about your Prius is rather like feeling smug that you trained your dog to crap on your neighbour's lawn."

Electric cars = pollution displacement devices.