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Entries in Energy: electric cars (9)

Monday
May062019

The practical issues of installing EV charging points

A reader posted this in the comments to the previous post. It's by an electrician in Melbourne, and describes some work he had done on the feasibility of installing EV charging points in a local apartment building. I was amused.

I recently did some work for the body corporate at Dock 5 Apartment Building in Docklands to see if we could install a number of electric charging points for owners to charge their electric vehicles. We discovered:

  • Our building had no non-allocated parking spaces (i.e. public ones). This is typical of most apartment buildings so we cannot provide shared outlets. The power supply in the building was designed for the loads in the building with no spare capacity.
  • Only 5 or 6 chargers could be installed in total in a building with 188 apartments!
  • How do you allocate them as they would add value to any apartment owning one?
  • The car park sub-boards cannot carry the extra loads of even one charger and would have to be upgraded on any floors with a charger, as would the supply mains to each sub-board. The main switch board would then have to be upgraded to add the heavier circuit breakers for the sub-mains upgrade. 
  • When Docklands was designed, a limit was put on the number of apartments in each precinct and the mains and transformers in the streets were designed accordingly. This means there is no capacity in the Docklands street grid for any significant quantity of car chargers in any building in the area.

It gets better.

The whole CBD (Hoddle Grid, Docklands) and Southbank is fed by two sub-stations. One in Port Melbourne and one in West Melbourne. This was done to have two alternate feeds in case one failed or was down for maintenance. Because of the growth in the city/Docklands and Southbank, neither one is now capable of supplying the full requirement of Melbourne zone at peak usage in mid- summer if the other is out of action. The Port Melbourne 66,000 volt feeder runs on 50 or 60 year old wooden power poles above ground along Dorcas Street South Melbourne. One pole is located 40 cm from the corner Kerb at the incredibly busy Ferrars St/ Dorcas St intersection and is very vulnerable to being wiped out by a wayward vehicle.

The infrastructure expenditure required would dwarf the NBN cost excluding the new power stations required. These advocates of all electric vehicles by the year 2040 are completely bonkers. It takes 5-8 years to design and build a large coal fired power station like LoyYang and even longer for a Nuclear one (that’s after you get the political will, permits and legislative changes needed ). Wind and solar just can’t produce enough. It’s just a green silly dream in the foreseeable future other than in small wealthy countries. It will no doubt ultimately come, but not in the next 20 years. So don’t waste your upcoming vote in the federal election on the Greens or Labor because electric cars won’t be happening for a long time yet!

In related news, Lord Deben and his colleagues at the CCC foresee few problems in converting the whole country to electric vehicles in the near future.

Monday
Mar072016

Stupidity signalling

Everyone has now heard of "virtue signalling", the idea that words are uttered or actions taken simply to demonstrate membership of the group of "right-thinking people". Taken to its extreme, however, virtue signalling becomes "stupidity signalling" and here we have a truly epic example in the shape of the EP Tender, a trailer containing an electric generator, which you tow behind your electric car on longer trips.

Speechless.

 

Friday
Oct302015

Battery hype

UK readers might recall the episode of Top Gear, when Jeremy Clarkson drove from London to Edinburgh on a single tank of fuel. Today there are claims floating round that electric cars will soon be able to achieve the same feat.

A breakthrough in electrochemistry at Cambridge university could lead the way to rechargeable super-batteries that pack five times more energy into a given space than today’s best batteries, greatly extending the range of electric vehicles and potentially transforming the economics of electricity storage.

This sounds like great stuff, although if you read further, Clare Grey, the researcher whose breakthrough this is, says that there are a lot of caveats:

We haven’t solved all the problems inherent to this chemistry.

...at least another decade of work is likely to be required to turn it into a commercial battery

She also claims that the battery can be recharged 2000 times, which, if it can also take a car the 400 miles from London to Edinburgh on a single charge, would give it a theoretical lifetime range of 800,000 miles.

I'm not sure I'm going to hold my breath here.

Thursday
Oct012015

Hybrids and the cost of virtue signalling

Readers will be much amused by the recent report from consultancy firm Element Energy (see bottom of post). Prepared for Lord Deben's Committee on Climate Change, it describes the gap between real-world performance of motor vehicles and what happens in the test laboratory - a topical subject, I'm sure you will agree.

The report's main theme is that manufacturers are gaming the rules of the test procedures to make their cars appear to perform better than they will do in real life. The performance gap could be as much as 50% in a few years' time although it is expected to shrink when new performance standards come into play.

What caught my eye was the discussion of hybrids. The official tests assume that hybrids are driven in electric mode for two thirds of their mileage. The reports authors' reckon that it is rather less and suggest that, as a result, the overall carbon emissions could be as much as 50% higher than suggested by the test results.

Click to read more ...

Thursday
May282015

Greens trashing the environment part 527

How can one resist posting a video of Tesla electric cars being recharged (so it is claimed) using a diesel generator?

These people love the environment you see.

Thursday
Jan292015

No sucker like a green sucker

The Truth About Cars is a website that I haven't come across before, but its article on ownership costs of a Tesla EV is well worth a look. It seems that the aluminium bodywork, used to reduce weight, makes it startlingly expensive.

Reported estimates from Tesla’s certified shops include:

  • $10,000 to repair a “minor but long” scratch
  • $45,000 for “minor front-end damage”
  • $7,000 for repair of a small dent and scratch that required no replacement of parts
  • $30,000 for “minor fender and door damage”
  • $11,000 for a minor scrape on the rear panel, including a $155 charge to “ensure battery remains charged” during the repair

But there are also strong hints that Tesla is ripping customers off. There's no sucker like a green sucker I suppose.

Wednesday
Feb062013

Burning for you

The Scottish Bureaucracy has decided to spend £2.6 million on installing recharging points for electric (i.e. coal-powered) cars.

Reports on the number of electric cars in Scotland vary, with one estimate putting the number at 60.

Each charge takes an hour.

I'm sure readers are capable of doing their own mathematics. Even without crunching the numbers it is fairly plain that the SNP is burning your money for PR purposes. There is no scheme too idiotic for these people.

The relevant names are Transport Minister Keith Brown and Environment and Climate Change Minister Paul Wheelhouse.

Thursday
Oct182012

Driving into the future?

From Today's Moderator

An article by Andrew English on the future of hydrogen fuel-cell electric cars appeared in the Telegraph yesterday.

In January, the Government unveiled its latest hydrogen initiative which, according to Mark Prisk, the business minister, will “ensure the UK is well positioned for the commercial roll out of hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles.”

The 2007 Department of Energy white paper, Meeting the Energy Challenge, concluded that “fuel cells and hydrogen technologies face significant technical and economic challenges… A huge international effort (both public and private) is being devoted to overcoming them. This will require fundamental and applied research, development and demonstration.”

In 2008, Professor Peter P Edwards wrote in the government-commissioned study, Hydrogen and fuel cells: towards a sustainable energy future: “together, hydrogen and fuel cells have the capability of producing a green revolution in transportation by removing CO² emissions completely.”

Will it really? Three government departments (Business, Innovation and Skills, Transport and Energy and Climate Change) are involved, but have any of them ever read any of their own publications?

Wednesday
May162012

Perpetual nonsense

Holly Williams, Sky News's China correspondent, reports on a Chinese farmer who has discovered a solution to the world energy crisis. The answer, it seems, is a hybrid electric/wind powered car. Apparently, above 40mph, a wind turbine kicks in and starts to generate power for the car.

Yes, our Holly has uncovered a perpetual motion machine!

Watch the video while you can.

(H/T Niels)