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Reader Comments (111)
I once calculated that to convert the M1 to battery cars with a battery exchange filling station, 5 minute turn-round time, you'd need 20 such stations, each the size of Fort Dunlop, and 20 GW continuous power.
It is complete fruit cake territory, only occupied by the technologically ignorant.
NCC1701E
I've been running an electric moped as an experiment and it's made me quite suspicious of the "electric milk float transport infrastructure" promoted by the usual suspects.
If you could flesh out your 'rithmetic - I think I wouldn't be the only one here who'd find it of interest / use.....
@Tomo: the key parameter is the ration of charge time to replacement time, giving the number of charged units to be stored, therefore the size of the building. I assumed 7 hour charge time.
Anther parameter is the number of vehicles and the average journey distance = battery size.
The final parameter is the Li supply; not that plentiful.
Tom Gray
My original claim about the dominance of private investment was preceded by:
"If you think through many (if not most) of the innovations of the industrial revolution I see few that involved public investment."
I did not (and would not) claim that private investment paid for all of the developments.
The examples you show of public investment are few and far between and as exceptions go to support my proposition.
Further, you make the common mistake:
"The internal combustion engine would be a rich man's curiosity except fro the modern network of high speed roads created and paid for by government."
of assuming that government pays for anything. It doesn't, the public does. Where else does the money come from?
Markx (Apr 13, 2015 at 2:15 AM): Yes, I take your point, though I did not specifically direct it at you, more at the implications of your comment. You are also right that it is possible for governments to run things in a similar manner to private enterprise; also, it is not really a fact that private industry will do it better than the state – look at the debacle of the British railways, now. When state-run along a business mould, it was starting to get on-track (no pun intended), with subsidies down to “just” £750 million a year, and heading downwards; most people seemed to be impressed with how it was working. Then it was “privatised” – subsidies immediately went up (£2.5 billion) and have stayed there, while the service has declined to the abysmal joke it is now. The only times that it has improved is when a service has been taken back into government control, with an immediate decline when it goes “private” again. (I put “private” in quotes, as it is not, really – any and all risks are paid for by the tax-payer; the companies, however, rake in the profits.) Most people dream wistfully of the days of British Rail.
The same could be said for our other utilities, be they power or services. While it becomes increasingly obvious that the UK needs more power station, the private companies are holding out until they can make one huge, fat killing before laying a single brick (it would appear that £98/mWh – i.e. twice the present coal/gas price – is not yet enough for EDF, while the French get it at a fraction of that).
To get back on topic, as hydrogen is a bit hard to find in the wild in its naked form, we should remain with its more easily obtained form, where it has been tied down with at least one carbon atom.
Time and agan, we come back to the bottom line of energy density for large scale use.
Just as some satellites have been powered by nuclear energy devices, so will future cars be.
If you can st;ck to alpha emitters, shielding is not a problem. About 15 cm of air will shield the ones from reactors. Or a sheet of paper.
@Graeme No3
I think the membrane systems operate at around 90% Faraday efficiency. I’m not sure why intermittent use would drop the efficiency to 45% - surely the Faraday efficiency would remain the same.
As we both recognise, compression would require some additional energy, so that subtracts from the overall efficiency. That said, there are some claims out there about molecular sponges that would maybe make this aspect of things less energy intensive.
Of course since oxygen is also going to be generated, the opportunity exists to react the two together with an efficiency substantially greater that the use of air as a source of oxygen. No idea what form that would take (fuel cell or heat engine?).
I would guess also that use in vehicles would probably be uneconomic (distribution) and it would need to be used under well controlled conditions.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not trying to make a case for wind/solar etc. I would remove all subsidies and probably ban solar on agricultural land. I’m very much from GWPF view of things. It’s just that given we have a significant amount of it in place the best way of utilising it would be to smooth out its fluctuating output.
As you point out, pumped storage is a great way of ‘storing’ electricity, but I understand that potential Dinorwigs are difficult to find. Or am I out of date on that?
Most charging of all electric vehicles is going to be done at night when people are sleeping. Of course, having charging stations in parking lots for shoppers will be attractive to nearby merchants so calculations which don't take that into account are just finger exercises.
Oh, and for what it's worth engineers are looking into hypercompressed air energy storage. Mine trains have run on this far in the past.
C'mon gang
tomo said:
I've had similar thoughts myself but figured it would be more convenient to install immersion heaters in power station boilers to do the dumping. Keep consumers completely out of the loop for load balancing duties.
Rabett,
The gang you're addressing does include a great number of highly qualified engineers.
Charging electric vehicles at night: well that would depend on just what form of crazy grid supply system the environmentalists have driven us to. Taking Germany as an example of where we're going (and California?), we see solar and wind intermittency have so sliced and diced baseload that they're having to subsidise fossil plants to stay available, and they rely heavily on cross-border support for grid support. How will we recharge our cars on winter nights when Europe sits below a pan-European high pressure with nearly still air if our fossil plants have been pensioned off? And please don't raise the issue of pumped storage - we'd need so many plants with a huge storage capacity (150 GWh to cover intermittency of just 10 GW of renewables) that the place would be covered with them.
Hyper[sic]compressed air storage: yes, well apart from trains there's also the Huntorf power storage plant. If you read further down the Wiki article that mentioned those mine trains you'll discover why this doesn't sound like an up and coming winner. Ever tried recharging a compressed air tank using an electric pump? Takes an age, it's very noisy, and the compressors soon get worn out. Compressed air on an engineering facility is often one of the most expensive commodities the plant requires.
Audi E-diesel makes Extraordinary Claims, in PR cropping up on usual green dream sites eg here, eg2 here. So where's the Extraordinary Evidence ?
* Extraordinary Claim : Renewables are used to get Hydrogen from water, which is mixed with waste CO2 to make e-diesel.
“If we can make widespread use of CO2 as a raw material, we will make a crucial contribution to climate protection and the efficient use of resources"
* Extraordinary Evidence : Audi PR gives the phrase : "The efficiency of the overall process – from renewable power to liquid hydrocarbon – is very high at around 70 percent. Similarly to a fossil crude oil, blue crude can be refined to yield the end product Audi e‑diesel."
The lack of extraordinary evidence is their own calculations to back up their claim.
Bottomline : That 70% seems way too high #a. I wonder if they mean renewables to hydrogen bit only (they admit their hydrocarbon has to be refined to get it to become e-diesel.)
(#a If true it would mean it the most efficient way of storing solar/wind power as you could make diesel in the daytime and run your generator on it at night.)
They give no evidence of the real world efficiency of the process. If Audi can do this without a subsidy then it is sustainable..and if they come begging for one, it isn't.
(- The renewables people imagine the energy input is from wind and solar, .. you can't really increase hydro easily)
Let's play with numbers So how much of today's energy use not just electricity is hydrocarbon use (which still grows every year) and how much of world energy is is wind+solar ? that is about 2% of hydrocarbon
( from oil, coal, gas 4130.5 + 2987.1 + 3730.1 = 10847.7MTOE divided by 237.4MTOE in 2012 statistical_review_of_world_energy).
So if to make e-diesel you doubled today's solar/wind capacity - you cut hydrocarbon use by 2% times whatever the real world process efficiency factor is. to get a 1% or 0.5% reduction in fossil fuel use. That would harldy be the 40, 50% that greens would imagine.