Electric Car Debate

[Heym SR20]

There needs to be some very major change in thinking. At the moment most of our Energy industry is owned by large corporates, most of which are overseas owned. Fundamentally they have one purpose and that is to drive profit out of consumers.

But go back a few decades and power generation was locally owned - yes some private owned, but a lot by village, town or city corporations.

We need to go back to thinking about local generation. With house and car being fundamental units.

With the house you solar, and heat pumps - all pretty cheap and affordable. An EV acts as fantastic buffer and battery. So do well insulated hot water tanks. When at home plug car in - it can soak lots of excess power from the solar cells, or can be charged from mains supplied power - especially acting as a buffer when there is an oversupply of mains power.

Programming the car charging to pick up low cost power or excess power is pretty simple enough. And when its full some of that power can flow back into the house.

Yes some do commute long distances daily, but for most a 20 or 30 mile range is plenty. Simple enough for the car to soak up cheap power, then give it back to you during the expensive evening power but leaving enough fir tomorrow’s journeys.

Most of us object to wind turbines on grounds of aesthetics noise etc. and that they are being planted a long way away from where the power is being used.

But if you as part of the community funded, owned and benefited from cheap power - whats not to like.

The fly in the ointment are the utilities and the stranglehold they have on the market.

It seems nuts to me that to charge your car from your own solar panels you need to sell that power and then buy it back.

The utilities should be there to provide supplemental power where your own and local generation doesn’t cover it.

And whilst I am on a rant. When are EV’s going to start paying fir the roads. I hate smug Tesla owners who talk about driving the length of the UK for £20.

Yet those of us who drive internal combustion engined cars pay road excise duty and huge amounts of tax with every litre of fuel we use - depends on the base price of fuel, but 60 to 70% of the price I pay for fuel just goes on tax.

Whilst EV owners - who are generally the ones who own larger properties with off street parking are paying bugger all.

 

[shakey jake]

There needs to be some very major change in thinking. At the moment most of our Energy industry is owned by large corporates, most of which are overseas owned. Fundamentally they have one purpose and that is to drive profit out of consumers.

But go back a few decades and power generation was locally owned - yes some private owned, but a lot by village, town or city corporations.

We need to go back to thinking about local generation. With house and car being fundamental units.

With the house you solar, and heat pumps - all pretty cheap and affordable. An EV acts as fantastic buffer and battery. So do well insulated hot water tanks. When at home plug car in - it can soak lots of excess power from the solar cells, or can be charged from mains supplied power - especially acting as a buffer when there is an oversupply of mains power.

Programming the car charging to pick up low cost power or excess power is pretty simple enough. And when its full some of that power can flow back into the house.

Yes some do commute long distances daily, but for most a 20 or 30 mile range is plenty. Simple enough for the car to soak up cheap power, then give it back to you during the expensive evening power but leaving enough fir tomorrow’s journeys.

Most of us object to wind turbines on grounds of aesthetics noise etc. and that they are being planted a long way away from where the power is being used.

But if you as part of the community funded, owned and benefited from cheap power - whats not to like.

The fly in the ointment are the utilities and the stranglehold they have on the market.

It seems nuts to me that to charge your car from your own solar panels you need to sell that power and then buy it back.

The utilities should be there to provide supplemental power where your own and local generation doesn’t cover it.

why do you think you need to sell the elec back to the grid before you can charge your car?

 

[LuckyEddie]

And whilst I am on a rant. When are EV’s going to start paying fir the roads. I hate smug Tesla owners who talk about driving the length of the UK for £20.

Yet those of us who drive internal combustion engined cars pay road excise duty and huge amounts of tax with every litre of fuel we use - depends on the base price of fuel, but 60 to 70% of the price I pay for fuel just goes on tax.

Whilst EV owners - who are generally the ones who own larger properties with off street parking are paying bugger all.

The government is going to have to review how the tax on EVs works.
The standard EV is heavier than the comparative i.c.e vehicle which means the road surfacing and shallower structures are getting faster wear than previously experienced.
Now if the government defends its stance that the any sort of taxation from vehicles goes towards roads then are totally in the dark about it.

 

[thorneyglatt]

It's been years since 'road tax' was ear-marked for road maintenance. Something does need to be done though about the fuel duty EV owners don't have to pay whilst wearing out the roads faster than ICE motorists !

 

[Jagare]

I had a CNG VW Caddy for several years. Was a great car and ran faultlessly. Even after 10000 miles the engine oil was still clean. But the expansion of CNG filling station seem to have ground too a halt here.

 

[Freeforester]

Search ‘Freemantle Highway’ - car transporter, left Bremerhaven a couple months ago with 5000 cars aboard mainly Mercs, Cathay bound; 500 Electric. Either one, or possibly a few caught the ramp as they boarded, damaging the batt packs. A couple of hours after ‘setting sail’ a fire broke out. Fatalities among crew, total loss of ship and cargo. Talk about “external combustion engines” vs internal combustion engines!

Look into realistic used EV car resale values, vs used conventional cars resale value

Look into EV insurance considerations (have a bump in the supermarket with each type and see what happens to the EV )

To suggest you ‘make money in the long run’ isn’t true, when you consider the resale ‘worth’ of the EV car when the time comes to either replace the battery (£££££) or chop it in for something else. Residual value

As to the realities of getting everyone aboard the EV bandwagon, cost of production, etc:


Remember too, the entire rationale for introducing EV’s in the first instance is based on wholly, demonstrably* erroneous thinking, CO2 is plant food and not pollution, and it is far, far ‘greener’ to maintain an existing conventional motor vehicle than consume and thereby deplete increasingly scarce resources for a misplaced feelgood/vanity demonstration. * Search Professor Murray Salby, Atmospheric carbon, 18 June 2016, London

Idiot politicians want net zero; it’s unattainable, but anyway, ask yourself: can we do without Steel (needs coal, and diesel) all Plastics (even Lego have given up on trying to find an alternative material to make their bricks out of, after trying for a few years and hundreds of lower ‘carbon
footprint’ plastic and polymer types), Concrete (production of which is energy intensive and about the most carbon dioxide emitting process we have in Europe, let alone anywhere else save volcanoes, the latter which are of course tax-exempt!) and fertilizers (the use of which has enabled the human population growth on the planet in the past century; they apparently think this is feasible, or either havent thunk their whole idiotic wheeze through, or have, and decided that it is we which are the carbon forms they largely want to do away with.

Just Stop Oil (the new hunt saboteur organisation who don’t like mud or the countryside) - do they consider what the roads will be built of if we stop oil production? Did Sturgeon and co? It may suit the “Greens”, but is it realistic?

Germany is burning more coal and lignite today than for generations, out of pure necessity to produce highly polluting though less expensive energy, that was to due to come both abundantly and cheaply from a now broken Nordstream 2 pipeline (gee, thanks Joe - what a pal!) nor Merkel’s disastrous Energiewende policy, both of which have ensured the deindustrialisation of the German economic motor, which will economically ruin both their own country and bring hardship to their people as well as much of the EU, by dint of a sheer lack of available funding.

The most efficient electric vehicles are e-bikes and electric unicycles, but they require both infrastructure (like in the Netherlands) and a cultural shift in thinking. Neither will prevent you from getting wet in the rain. To make a go of hydrogen will be akin to heating your house by burning Hermès or Louis Vuitton handbags: doable, but at a cost that most will be unable to bear.

50% appx of a barrel of oil is refined to petrol; if we don’t need it in the future, what are we meant to do with it, and what is going to replace its tax take for HMG?

How oil derivatives are made at the refining stage

 

[Steve2_1]

Professionally I'm a Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv), and even I think electric cars are not the answer to emissions from transport.

Yes they have their place if you do short journeys only, and you actually need a new car. But when you consider the resources used to build them, the impacts from lithium mining (with documented cases of slave labour) and shipping of batteries, disposal, etc, they are not as green as you may think. Then there is the increasingly concerning fire risk.

A better solution could be remanufacture perfectly good cars with engines meeting current standards, and the development of sustainable fuels, which are made from organic waste products. They are increasingly used in aviation, where are plane flying transatlantic may burn 100 tonnes of the stuff, fossil fuel free and slowly are seeing wider use.

Even if fuels are a 50-50 blend, it halves fossil fuel use, and other renewable fuel sources are in development.
The biggest contribution towards greenhouse gas is energy use in buildings, 1/3rd of all emissions in the UK.
In contrast, cars and vehicles produce very little. So if the government pulled out their fingers and accelerated fossil fuel free renewable energy production from wind, solar, nuclear, etc, and phased out gas, that would give the most dramatic drop in emissions.

Also livestock, populations of animals bred for food are tens of times what would be their natural number and the emissions from that are nuts. Whereas we stalkers would ethically shoot a natural, organic deer and make our burgers from that. Far tastier.

I would not buy an electric car as being a consultant, I regularly do 200 miles plus a day and infrastructure for electric charging is not ideal, plus you could be in a queue with others taking 30 mins at a time. Awkward client phone call to say I'm running late. But I'd happily adapt to sustainable fuels and remanufacturing of a otherwise perfectly good car.

In summary, a grid fully powered by renewable energy is the way forward, electric cars have their limitations, remanufacture and sustainable fuels would be great, and ethically source and shoot a deer over buying other meat.

I'll stop there and get off my soap box, got a bit carried away

 

[Freeforester]

To presuppose that reducing carbon emissions is somehow a good idea and that we should be prepared to forego much of what we take for granted is a mistake. This explains the mistake (ask yourself, what do we REALLY know about carbon dioxide, and remember, 3%of annual emissions are man generated, 97% are natural):



The best solution may not be to try to hitch our cart to wind or solar, not in these latitudes; ask the Germans, and see this figure below:

sourced from Mark P Mills’ presentation to Skagen Foundation, see #46, this is why new investment in wind is now faltering.

The use of organic waste fuels may help in aviation, but may not work so well in automobiles, the former are built to far higher standards of safety/reliability than the latter, and the fuel is known to be corrosive to ICE’s, as anyone who uses a lawnmower seasonally or indeed a car infrequently may already know to their cost. As we are still in need of the tax receipts from petrol and we need everything refined from oil below the petroleum level in the diagram in #46 above, why would we be best advised to discontinue to use it, especially given the fallacy that has been built around carbon dioxide is exposed?

I’ve no issue/concern to the notion that there may/may not be more cattle or sheep than we strictly ‘need’ - the market will settle this, but the livestock emissions aspect is a total red herring, see above. Methane lasts about a week before it degrades in the atmosphere, and constitutes such a small part even in comparison to the tiny fraction of our air that is composed of man made CO2 that it is insignificant, and once again is completely dwarfed by naturally occurring methane, though the methane cloud that escaped following the destruction of Nordstream 2 pipeline by our NATO ‘friend’ did register on the global methane burp-ometer.

The BRICS countries do not see there being any problem with co2 emissions, but are very happy indeed to make and sell solar panels, wind turbine parts and other sundry feelgood nonsenses to those Western countries who do. What about the newly announced Russian embargo on diesel exports, do we reckon that will have a positive impact on EV sales? Don’t hold your breath, but do watch what happens at your forecourt…



Ps just back from the trout fishing in Slovenia, where almost every home has a wood stack outside the place, just a gentle reminder of Mark Mills’ words about wood fuel still today constituting globally around 3-4 times greater share of ‘renewable’ energy than wind and solar; the trout even get returned - wise use of a renewable resource!

 

[Freeforester]

A very detailed (and sobering) look at what our energy (near) future options are, and the realities for the Western ‘system‘ of finance vis-a-vis the emergence of the BRICS, etc. very detailed and well worth the watch, imho:

 

[ruffapuffa]

EV is a stop gap “solution” at best for the richer countries until something better comes along ( likely to be hydrogen ) as it moves most of the problems to elsewhere in the world. Us end users cannot win whatever happens though as the huge petrol / oil price increases in recent years have only served to create the biggest windfall profits ever seen by oil producing Countries and Oil Companies.

 

[Cottis]

Professionally I'm a Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv), and even I think electric cars are not the answer to emissions from transport.

Yes they have their place if you do short journeys only, and you actually need a new car. But when you consider the resources used to build them, the impacts from lithium mining (with documented cases of slave labour) and shipping of batteries, disposal, etc, they are not as green as you may think. Then there is the increasingly concerning fire risk.

A better solution could be remanufacture perfectly good cars with engines meeting current standards, and the development of sustainable fuels, which are made from organic waste products. They are increasingly used in aviation, where are plane flying transatlantic may burn 100 tonnes of the stuff, fossil fuel free and slowly are seeing wider use.

Even if fuels are a 50-50 blend, it halves fossil fuel use, and other renewable fuel sources are in development.
The biggest contribution towards greenhouse gas is energy use in buildings, 1/3rd of all emissions in the UK.
In contrast, cars and vehicles produce very little. So if the government pulled out their fingers and accelerated fossil fuel free renewable energy production from wind, solar, nuclear, etc, and phased out gas, that would give the most dramatic drop in emissions.

Also livestock, populations of animals bred for food are tens of times what would be their natural number and the emissions from that are nuts. Whereas we stalkers would ethically shoot a natural, organic deer and make our burgers from that. Far tastier.

I would not buy an electric car as being a consultant, I regularly do 200 miles plus a day and infrastructure for electric charging is not ideal, plus you could be in a queue with others taking 30 mins at a time. Awkward client phone call to say I'm running late. But I'd happily adapt to sustainable fuels and remanufacturing of a otherwise perfectly good car.

In summary, a grid fully powered by renewable energy is the way forward, electric cars have their limitations, remanufacture and sustainable fuels would be great, and ethically source and shoot a deer over buying other meat.

I'll stop there and get off my soap box, got a bit carried away

Absolutely right. I am about to replace my vehicle. An old PD engined Seat Leon TDI with 200k on the clock. I have had it north of a decade and despite me wanting to continue maintaining it, there is a limit on what a vehicle will take. I am a little disappointed as my previous car (A Citroen ZX) did 242,000 miles before tinworm beat it. So this 2005 car will probably go the scrapyard or maybe to someone who can do the requisite work (that would be ideal and I might consider giving it to the right person rather than getting scrap value so it can fight on a coupla three more years)

People just seem hell bent on having new shiny things all the time. I don't understand the concept of working harder or longer to raise funds for something that achieves nothing more than an older item with so much service life left in it. That seems madness. Just work less, enjoy more freedom and service and maintain your existing vehicle. Mine has taken me to every corner of this country many times over and has never let me down.

Electric cars are great in some respects. Power, less moving parts, easier to service but the biggest issue are the components required to make the batteries, where they come from, how they are extracted and by whom and how costly and destructive it is to transport these things to the end user. That is if a decent enough and clean enough energy network can be made to support mass usage which I have my doubts about.

I also don't understand why more effort is not put in to encouraging direct change in terms of easy fixes where large amounts of damage to the atmosphere takes place. That is methane emissions from global cattle farming and landfill. Both can be mitigated against to some degree. The world could easily half its beef consumption if it chose to with almost zero impact on their health or lives other than eating slightly less. There is other protein available and whilst I am a beef lover and my family are livestock farmers, it is clear that just halving cattle output would have an amazing impact on methane emitted. And landfills? Talk about a source of readily available, concentrated energy that instead of being harvested is being allowed to escape and cause mucho damage. Could this not be flared or captured somehow to create power?

Humans are very good at finding solutions but often slow to do the obvious that would measurably improve their lives.

So I will keep the old truck on the road but the car is being replaced and although I am not 100% sure, I think I am going to go back to petrol which I have not run in the thick end of 20yrs for a daily driver. Modern diesels are the work of the devil.

 

[Bavarianbrit]

Absolutely right. I am about to replace my vehicle. An old PD engined Seat Leon TDI with 200k on the clock. I have had it north of a decade and despite me wanting to continue maintaining it, there is a limit on what a vehicle will take. I am a little disappointed as my previous car (A Citroen ZX) did 242,000 miles before tinworm beat it. So this 2005 car will probably go the scrapyard or maybe to someone who can do the requisite work (that would be ideal and I might consider giving it to the right person rather than getting scrap value so it can fight on a coupla three more years)

People just seem hell bent on having new shiny things all the time. I don't understand the concept of working harder or longer to raise funds for something that achieves nothing more than an older item with so much service life left in it. That seems madness. Just work less, enjoy more freedom and service and maintain your existing vehicle. Mine has taken me to every corner of this country many times over and has never let me down.

Electric cars are great in some respects. Power, less moving parts, easier to service but the biggest issue are the components required to make the batteries, where they come from, how they are extracted and by whom and how costly and destructive it is to transport these things to the end user. That is if a decent enough and clean enough energy network can be made to support mass usage which I have my doubts about.

I also don't understand why more effort is not put in to encouraging direct change in terms of easy fixes where large amounts of damage to the atmosphere takes place. That is methane emissions from global cattle farming and landfill. Both can be mitigated against to some degree. The world could easily half its beef consumption if it chose to with almost zero impact on their health or lives other than eating slightly less. There is other protein available and whilst I am a beef lover and my family are livestock farmers, it is clear that just halving cattle output would have an amazing impact on methane emitted. And landfills? Talk about a source of readily available, concentrated energy that instead of being harvested is being allowed to escape and cause mucho damage. Could this not be flared or captured somehow to create power?

Humans are very good at finding solutions but often slow to do the obvious that would measurably improve their lives.

So I will keep the old truck on the road but the car is being replaced and although I am not 100% sure, I think I am going to go back to petrol which I have not run in the thick end of 20yrs for a daily driver. Modern diesels are the work of the devil.

Jenbacher in Jenbach Austria make huge engines that will run from the methane waste from landfill sites gets electricity for almost free they generated £35K per week of electricity sales back in 2012 which was the figure quoted to me when I worked there now they will be double that.

 

[Morkai]

EV is a stop gap “solution” at best for the richer countries until something better comes along ( likely to be hydrogen ) as it moves most of the problems to elsewhere in the world. Us end users cannot win whatever happens though as the huge petrol / oil price increases in recent years have only served to create the biggest windfall profits ever seen by oil producing Countries and Oil Companies.

Oil prices arent really a problem, fuel duty is.

 

[JTO]

The answer to global warming is in the hands of Heinz. If baked beans were banned, the gases that cause global warming would be halved immediately.

I thought farts were Butane and burps were Methane.

 

[Dickie]

Absolutely right. I am about to replace my vehicle. An old PD engined Seat Leon TDI with 200k on the clock. I have had it north of a decade and despite me wanting to continue maintaining it, there is a limit on what a vehicle will take. I am a little disappointed as my previous car (A Citroen ZX) did 242,000 miles before tinworm beat it. So this 2005 car will probably go the scrapyard or maybe to someone who can do the requisite work (that would be ideal and I might consider giving it to the right person rather than getting scrap value so it can fight on a coupla three more years)

People just seem hell bent on having new shiny things all the time. I don't understand the concept of working harder or longer to raise funds for something that achieves nothing more than an older item with so much service life left in it. That seems madness. Just work less, enjoy more freedom and service and maintain your existing vehicle. Mine has taken me to every corner of this country many times over and has never let me down.

Electric cars are great in some respects. Power, less moving parts, easier to service but the biggest issue are the components required to make the batteries, where they come from, how they are extracted and by whom and how costly and destructive it is to transport these things to the end user. That is if a decent enough and clean enough energy network can be made to support mass usage which I have my doubts about.

I also don't understand why more effort is not put in to encouraging direct change in terms of easy fixes where large amounts of damage to the atmosphere takes place. That is methane emissions from global cattle farming and landfill. Both can be mitigated against to some degree. The world could easily half its beef consumption if it chose to with almost zero impact on their health or lives other than eating slightly less. There is other protein available and whilst I am a beef lover and my family are livestock farmers, it is clear that just halving cattle output would have an amazing impact on methane emitted. And landfills? Talk about a source of readily available, concentrated energy that instead of being harvested is being allowed to escape and cause mucho damage. Could this not be flared or captured somehow to create power?

Humans are very good at finding solutions but often slow to do the obvious that would measurably improve their lives.

So I will keep the old truck on the road but the car is being replaced and although I am not 100% sure, I think I am going to go back to petrol which I have not run in the thick end of 20yrs for a daily driver. Modern diesels are the work of the devil.

Lots of landfills run generators from the methane given off and sell the electric to the grid, also in some places the gas is cleaned and sold to the grid

 

[sauer]

well.....

cows are the problem apparently ..... yet when you see amount of these in the air at a go.... I'm finding it hard to believe they kick out less than a bunch of cows .....

 

[LuckyEddie]

well.....

cows are the problem apparently ..... yet when you see amount of these in the air at a go.... I'm finding it hard to believe they kick out less than a bunch of cows .....

I calculated that one flight from Glasgow to China would give me enough fuel to run my Disco 2 for 9 years.

 

[Bavarianbrit]

I calculated that one flight from Glasgow to China would give me enough fuel to run my Disco 2 for 9 years.

With all the 350 passengers inside?

 

[Freeforester]

Does anyone bother to even determine a) how many parts per million of our atmosphere is made up of methane (single figures or teens, so hardly ‘a problem’) b) how long it lasts in the atmosphere before it is broken down (about a week, the life of co2 is about 8.6 years, so hardly ‘a problem’ eithe), or c) the (miniscule) percentage of this minuscule amount which is man made, compared to naturally emitted methane? No need for politicians to get involved, as they clearly don’t…

Apropos co2, again: hear it from one of the original ‘climate scientists’, not that he would describe himself as that these days:

 

[LuckyEddie]

With all the 350 passengers inside?

I prefer my own company on long journeys