Our anonymous blogger considers the wider ramifications of the seemingly inexorable rise of the electric car
A number of my friends are getting themselves in a bit of a tizz at the moment over one of the latest proclamations from Whitehall. Don’t panic, for a change it’s not about Brexit, rather it’s about cars – and the future of them. What is more, I have to profess that it has rather split opinion. Whereas some see the boy Gove’s announcement to ban the sale of new directly-fossil-fuelled cars by 2040 as the “coming of days”, others have embraced it with evangelical fervour. Naturally as a professional engineer I have sat back and considered the wider ramifications.
The clinical whispering hum of the electric hypercar leaves me cold
My conclusion is that I cannot decide if it’s a very clever or a very idiotic move. I know we have to do something regarding our addiction to the infernal combustion engine so I am not ideologically against it. The problem lies in everyone focussing on the electricity powered vehicle as the likely replacement. There is a very good reason for this, other technologies may exist but only the electric and electric hybrid cars are selling in numbers. I admit the clinical whispering hum of the electric hypercar leaves me cold but let me assure you that “emotional” considerations aren’t the main cause for my concern.
35,000 plug-in cars were registered in the UK during 2016
Firstly, I’m worried about the cradle to grave impact. Battery technology has come a very long way, both figuratively and literally, in the past few years but they still tend to need rather horrible materials inside them. This gives four pressure points as far as I can see regarding ecological impact: mining, processing, transportation to the point of vehicle manufacture and end of life disposal. If we are serious about saving the planet then the stated aim of reducing inner city pollution can only be seen as a convenient initiator. Any true solution must provide a holistic benefit.
Secondly there’s the minor matter of power generation and distribution. Admittedly the number of charging points is growing and it seems there is plenty of time for the network to mature. However, last I heard we were rather concerned about being able to generate enough electricity for our current needs. There is no sign of our reliance on electronic devices slowing down and, if anything, new iterations of the existing ones are getting ever more power hungry. Given that there will be a ramp up of electric vehicles by manufacturers from now until the target date: how are we going to keep up with the demand for power?
If it does all work out I suspect it will be by accident rather than design
The quick option is fossil fuel burning power stations but that merely moves the pollution problem and we are highly reliant on imported fuels for them already. Renewables are coming up but I have yet to be convinced that – again from cradle to grave – they are the leap forward that hype would have us believe. Then there is nuclear which, if the latest project is anything to go by, will take a long time and be rather expensive. Whatever happens there seems to have been a target set without any realistic idea of how to get there (N.B. – this is still not about Brexit).
But what if he’s actually been quite clever? What if the cunning little Minister sees the holes in the plan and knows that the car manufacturers will have to be more creative? Either through different technologies to power the vehicles or by moving away from relying on the National Grid? Time will tell but I wouldn’t bet on any politician having the subtlety to dream up that particular gambit. Either way, even if it does all work out I suspect it will be by accident rather than design.
These views very much echo my thoughts, especially around the grid resilience problems, there is still plenty of time for technology to evolve and I hope it does, however the current crop of electric vehicle chargers typically run at 32 Amps, which is roughly 7.2 kW (or a small shower) and can take upwards of 10 hours to fully charge an EV, I know on the road I live on if several people plugged in together it would be lights out time for every one on fed from that transformer.
National grid have released a document to clarify their own future energy scenario predictions which have been misquoted but this is all around headline figures not the practicalities of how to meet the plans of the government.
What we need is joined up thinking not shooting from the hip for tabloid headlines.
So when everyone on your street switches on an 7.5KW electric cooker and then goes for a 7.5KW shower while their dinner is cooking, are you saying that your street has electrical blackouts?
No, but if like a large number of properties in this country, yours has a main supply with a 60A sealed electricity board fuse you’ll be getting dry in the dark and probably still have a flat battery in the morning.
As built in the 1960’s the houses have a 60A 240V supply in these two loads alone that’s 14.4 kW, it doesn’t allow any spare load for anything else. The transformer is around 250 kVA for upwards of 50 Houses, in reality not everyone has a shower or cooks at the same time, and neither are going to last for the best part of 10 hours or more, its even worse if a household has 2 cars , its the length of charge time required and with time of use charges likely for the UK domestic market in the not too distant future most people are going want to charge in the evening after peak charges finish & overnight.
Being a Yorkshire man.
If the true whole life cost of electric car would save me money. I would have done it a long time ago.
Only way to make it viable is by a unlevelled playing field of taxation & subsidies.
The best thing in having electric cars. Would be not having to get are energy needs from the OPEC cartels.
What about hydrogen? It does seem a far better option to me.
It’s the speed of recharge of chemical fuels that’s their real advantage over the electrical battery, and therefore I agree with Peter Cain about hydrogen – indeed I believe a concept car has already been produced and shown to be practical.
Here’s my problem list for the electric car in it’s current incarnation:
1) Speed to charge – not insurmountable at present with careful planning, but when everyone has a demand, will the national grid be able to cope?
2)Pushing pollution to the power stations – the electric car does not eliminate pollution in of itself, it merely displaces it to the power station. There may be some improvement in efficiency by doing so but it must be combined with a working carbon capture technology to have any meaningful impact.
3) Environmental impact of mining materials for batteries – It takes a hell of a lot of energy to mine and process metals from ore, as well as the energy required to dig them up and transport them.
4)The need for everyone to replace their perfectly serviceable cars – Even if replacement is unnecessary, many will rush to consume thinking that they are actually helping the environment!
Here’s my solution – why not use solar furnaces to create hydrogen directly from sea water? If we built a huge solar boiler in the desert we could also extract desalinated water and minerals from the sea. The incident solar energy on the Earths surface is more than sufficient to meet the needs of mankind, and indeed, by taking energy from the system it would have the effect of slowing, albeit very slightly, the warming of the global system. We engineers would relish the challenge – we know what has to be done – let us do it, before it’s too late!
In a word NO !!
All seems to point to increasing opportunities for large companies to charge more for the same thing. Consumer driven economy ?
Wasn’t aware we had a desert in the UK? Anywhere else leaves us far too vulnerable to outside control / attack.
Whether we go for nuclear power of other green sources, the costs are horrendous, and only direct funding of the Grid by government can push it through in the timescale proposed. So the sooner they get on with it the better.
Spain’s quite sunny though and they’re relatively friendly. Can’t remember getting any tapas hurled at me the last time I was there.
Spain has abandoned subsidies for solar power and virtually all solar development has stopped. Which proves that it is fundamentally an economic. And even more so in the UK. So why are people keeping on doing it?
Many people, especially in European towns and cities, park their cars on the road. Are we going to see cables snaking across the pavement from every house to their cars? Until re-charging of electric vehicles can be achieved within a similar time to a fossil-fueled one I see this as the major obstacle preventing most consumers switching to electric cars.
Assuming the speed of charging can be improved, then petrol stations will need to be replaced by large sub-stations with high voltage grid connections to provide enough power. Who will pay for that infrastructure to be built?
No, they’ll hang them from an upstairs bedroom window instead. If they put bunting on the cables it could look quite jolly.
As Michael Lee says, it is the speed of charging which will end up being the biggest barrier. I cannot envisage a technology which allows anything like the approx. 7MW of energy transfer which the tipping of petrol or diesel into a tank represents. If the voltage is low enough to be anything like safe, then the current will require cables of several cm in diameter, far too heavy to deal with unless we have ‘connection professionals’ on every charging point.
Exactly right. I can pump petrol into my car at a rate of 400 km per minute. Fast charging on a Tesla gives you 170 km in 30 minutes. How many service stations will you need?
We are all gonna have Elon’s batteries at home and all over….harvesting and storing solar power for these puppies … no probs… just sayin
Electricity right now has some key disadvantages for powering an electric vehicle, as the author and some comments have pointed out. However, fundamentally it’s something we already produce, and will continue to produce in huge quantities and it has a supply chain (albeit with bottlenecks) already in place almost universally (not just in the UK but in most countries worldwide). How much of that can be said for any other technology to replace the internal combustion engine?
Secondly, the key point about electricity is that it is hugely flexible. You can generate it in a polluting way, sure, but you can change your method of generation to a renewable source over time and it has zero impact downstream (assuming you couple intermittent energy sources
With battery buffers. Likewise, whilst battery technology right now uses some nasty / rare components, changing those components has zero impact on the charging infra required at the user end.
Flexibility is the key to the success of this product, and while I’m not evangelical about it, it has the potential to actually work, in a short time frame, world wide. government might need to do some work updating the grid to cope, but if they don’t then companies will be forced to generate at a local level to make up some of the shortfall (witness Tesla’s concept for a solar charging station, albeit in California, which is a touch more realistic than the UK).
The law of un-intended consequences surely applies! Have they thought it through?
When have non-technologists ever thought anything through properly? The list is endless and of course, it becomes more and more critical as the absolute interdependence of our activities become(s) more complete. I look forward to the recruitment of thousands of STEM educated and trained staff to sort out this nonsense. Then who will have who over the barrel?
There will be problems to be sure but some mentioned on here have already been mostly solved. A Tesla will charge in an hour. An Italian has just driven a Tesla 670 miles on a single charge. Wireless charging is already a thing.
Generation capacity is clearly an issue and extra fossil fuel capacity would be daft so it has to come from renewables. If though everybody has home solar and a big home battery as well as one in their car, that is where I believe it will come from. As does Elon Musk if you read the ‘Tesla masterplan’.
For Elon’s country, it will be easy , they have much more room; the USA is mostly uninhabited. Unfortunately, in the UK and Europe many more people will be living in stacked dwellings ( 2 or 3 high, not necessarily towers) without a roof area or garden. Where will they generate their power?
Having a universal battery is a sensible idea, until you consider that the requirements for an Audi i8 are a bit different from a Leaf- unless the World Confederacy decides that there will be only one type of car?
Why would extra fossil fuel capacity be daft? Someone has just concluded that, in effect, America has a more or less infinite supply of gas and oil from shale. And when the nuclear energy people and the regulators get themselves sorted out and realise that low-level radiation are not dangerous there is another more or less infinite supply of energy available. the last thing we need is expensive intermittent unpredictable wind and solar power that forces everyone to squander even more money on hugely expensive batteries that are resource intensive and have a relatively short life.
Quote: “An Italian has just driven a Tesla 670 miles on a single charge…”
Oh yeah. It is called Hypermiling, and to reach those “achievements” they plan carefully in advance, use everything in their favor (like removing seats and the spare tyre to carry less weight), and overinflate the tyres, drive very slowly etc. UNREALISTIC for a daily driver.
I expect that the very concept of car ownership will be challenged in time. Because we can’t charge cars anywhere, only those with off-road space stand a chance, and because the energy demand is enormous, it would surely become both financially and logistically attractive to only rent your car. Self-driving vehicles would be booked as-needed, every morning for many. This could change our towns and cities for the better. Uber, as an example, are developing self-driving technology fast. The automotive industry has to change, it knows it and Volvo are to be commended for being bold. Read German newspapers to see how deeply debated this topic is, and how abhorrent the concept of a EV future is regarded. But if the future is not in fossil fuel power for vehicles, then we are left considering such things. As with all clean-tech, there is no universal solution, so we can consider alternatives. Hydrogen is a worthy technology but is likely to cost much more.
The problem with the idea of car sharing is that most people want a car at roughly the same time, so how much are you really reducing the total number of cars required?
As far as charging and such, maybe eventually, we’ll move away from powered vehicles altogether. What if the roads were electromagnetic, and the cars had large magnets? You’d communicate with the road system, and it would move all cars in an efficient manner to get them all where they need to go.
As usual, a good article and good responses to what has been a strange piece of politics in announcing such a massive economic game changer without discussion.
While the technology and practicality issues are massive, the economic one is also the elephant in the room. Electric propulsion is cheap relative to internal combustion only if taxes and duties are ignored. The duties on petrol and diesel amount to about 70 % of their cost, this has to be recovered from elsewhere: maybe the Tories will start to seriously tax the ultra-wealthy…. Ha, Ha!
Initially, no doubt the intention is to tax fuels more to drive the electric initiative, a further penalty on the poorest who cannot afford Lexus and Teslas. Doubt very much whether the government will come clean on how this change over is to be financed, powered or kept fair.
Many of the grid problems could be avoided if the car industry adopted a standard battery module. Drive into the garage, swap discharged battery for a fully charged on and drive off. No more time than filling with petrol/diesel. High current services to these garages would obviate the need to charge at home.
Can’t see hydrocarbon fuelled cars fading out anytime soon though!
Obviously the tax payer.
road coils that charge as you drive will be here in 20 years …. no cables on pavements.
Wireless charging could be “Acceptable” only in small devices, like a Cellphone (where it is a fad). But magnetic coil recharging an automobile is wasteful and limited. There are additional losses when not using a heavy, copper wire with large connectors, otherwise energy is lost.
Yes, same guy paying large subsidies to the fossil fool companies.
Imagine the chaos as cars suddenly run out of power and come to a halt in the middle of a motorway with no way of moving them except by getting out and pushing; the accident rate will spiral out of control. Motorway services will need to expand as hundreds of cars arrive and need to be charged at the same time; there will be a limit to the number of charging points and therefore motorists could be stranded for days waiting for their hours of charge.
I have an EV and this has never happened to me or anyone i know for a simple reason, you get plenty of warning when you are about to run out of power, and just like when a ICE runs out of petrol it doesn’t just stop you can roll to the hard shoulder.
Even at current charging levels you don’t have to wait hours, whenever I stop to charge at the services, by the time I have grabbed a coffee and used the facilities I have had enough power to complete journey. As more EVs are made more chargers will be put in so the network will grow with the car sales. Just as you don’t see queues outside every petrol station; that’s because they work out how many pumps are needed. The same will happen for EVs.
I expect most cars manufactured by 2040 will be electric, so the Government has set a very easy goal to achieve using market forces. Electric cars are predicted to achieve cost parity with mid-size FF cars by 2022 and Small FF cars by 2025. Range will be 200 miles minimum and re-charge speeds less than 30mins. As others have commented self driving cars may reduce car ownership in the future, but it is anyone’s guess when this will happen 10 – 20 years?
There’s one other rather fundamental point that seems to have been missed so far – how are the government going to recoup the resultant loss of tax-take when we’re no longer buying massive amounts of petrol and diesel at the pumps?
Geoff, Just like Drinking and Smoking, which they want us all to renounce, however without us “poor” individuals indulging then big holes would appear in the tax take. So either the government reduces its size and therefore the amount of money it needs to raise by concentrating on the functions only it can do.
Reducing the tax needed to be raised or by massive tax hikes on everything we earn or spend our hard earnt cash on.
There is another gambit which is not being addressed in the same breath as the “Electric Vehicle ” scenario and that is “Driver-less Cars”.
If that takes hold and our obsessive H&S lobby win out then legislation will restrict the speed at which these can travel, if this is the case will there be a need for everyone to have a car?
Might the alternative be that you have a subscription service is a similar fashion to what you have for Home Entertainment now where you can dip in and out and pick what you need or want.
If you need to go 2 miles down the road to the shops you will request a basic unit. whilst there you go to the DIY store and buy timber so for the drive home you request a unit which can transport your 6 foot lengths of wood. This presupposes that Retail hasn’t totally decamped to the virtual word by then.
If you were going on a vacation or a long trip then you might want to request a communications unit so you can work or be entertained.
Your supplier would make sure your unit is sufficiently charged to get you to the main highway and join the next available road train where induction loop charging would take place to maintain the auxiliary power system to get you from the nearest highway point to your final destination.
There would be no need to have super fast cars and the need for differentiation in models would not be required except for the differing levels of comfort and entertainment overhead to accommodate the duration of the trip you think you will be making. No doubt the major automobile companies will squeal and pressure the legislature to avoid such a scenario much as no doubt the cart manufacturers, wheelwrights and bicycle manufacturers did in the late 19th and early 20th century when they saw their markets being decimated by the Internal Combustion Engine.
And if “Hyperloop” is really an alternative all bets are off as you are whisked around the country in minutes and around the world in hours – who needs Cars?
This conversation about “liquid transportable fuels” vs. stored electrons has been going on for at least 30-40 years that I am aware of within the scientific and engineering community here in America. Hydrogen just simply cannot be stored at sufficient fuel density (except maybe liquid hydrogen) to get the job done, then there is the source of hydrogen (chemical or electrochemical, your choice), that has to be worked out on an even more massive scale than exists now in the petrochemical arena.
There is hope for the electric vehicle (with power and range), however, in the form of a new development in flow batteries (research at Purdue University). There are about six candidate chemistries, of which these candidates are benign in the environment, and the re-fueling only requires a minor change in infrastructure at fueling depots, namely, the addition of one more tank, and an extra (receiver) hose for spent electrolyte.
Not been thought through at all. At present the tiny number of electric cars can be coped with on the existing grid, but has anyone considered the time involved and numbers of refuelling going on at any one time in our current economy and infrastructure? This has to be replicated. Some form of transportable fuel like hydrogen is the only general purpose cost effective system available. Electric may be perfectly viable for short distance and duration journeys as in city centres and urban environments. But beyond personal transport it is completely impractical with our current state of technology.
However it should be relatively easy to create hydrogen production plants at convenient waterside locations using a mix of renewable and grid electricity supply. All we have to overcome is the safety aspects of storing large quantities of liquefied or pressurised hydrogen! This would have a short term benefit of also supplying oxygen to the atmosphere!
SE: not thought it through? # Battery come long way # minor matter of power & MB: unintended consequence :: more madness manipulation from nudgonomics materialised in naztinomics insanely imposed as regulatory regimentation: so it’s no & no to SE & MB. As for batteries long way well once factored for electrode mass density ratio, there’s not much more from Liion than Lecid managed via morphology & flowology facets directly derived from coldwar closure capabilities. As for problematic power provision, well 2GW baseloaders via 3x660MW gensets were deliverable directly via CEGB-GDCD-CERLs as recalled from firsthand familiarity at Littlebrook & Sizewell in our earlier era of elitist excellence before its egalitarian elimination spawned carbonastrophism as mantra mcluhanisation frenziedly followed by all who favour fervour andor depend for dedoling on £30B.pa pumpishment of poor old pursey public pickpocketed £1k.pa.pp for personal privilege. Indeed I’d assert arguably a 10% rule applies across this bandwaggoned board, for CO2 vs H2O on insolation, for properly proportioned physicists vs invectively institutionalised economentalists, for funding of rationality vs religiosity, for fundamental formulation vs collusional correlation in the codified caricatures excusing excesses of imPRopergandered politrickeries.
Perhaps if the apps that we are downloading, of increasing sophistication and wider abilities continue, we will not need to leave our homes at all, ever! All needs will be brought to us by ‘official’ transport, from official repositories (called shops) which will allow us to buy space therein if for some individual reason we decide to visit (socially) our families. The concept of individual journeys will disappear in a generation or two. The farming and manufacture of our needs will be performed by those who have committed crimes, as punishment. Books, art, literature, political debate, religious needs (even sector publications such as our illustrious organ) will be met from repositories of such called libraries, completely on line. A check will be kept upon what we request, and if necessary, to guarantee additional education, we will be given ‘extras’ selected by ‘them’ to bring out thinking into line. There is more I am sure, and I invite fellow bloggers to add their thoughts to mine. I for one will be joining the awkward squad: where many believe I have resided for most of my life.
Mike, That sounds very like we are almost at 1984, after that every year is 1984 of course. My electric car and electrically heated house will operate to government codes and they will auto-cook me when they decide it is time. I’m joining the revolutionary group!
You have forgotte the credit card is maxed out anyway, so no money available from the Government, IE the Taxpayer – Us, or do you really want taxes to go up?.
Hydrogen Vehicle technology mirrors current FF fuel vehicle technology with similar overall efficiency 23% vs 21% and it is not clean as the hydrogen comes from Natural gas, Tony Seba explains it better, see link
https://youtu.be/23lz9ercqvA
The main problem I see with EV cars is that manufacturers always produce something that does 0 to 60 in 2 or 3 seconds, rather than an average of approx. 9 seconds. If they went down the latter route they could use far less powerful motors, put more built in charging systems and you could extend the range 2 or 3 times more than these superfast electric cars! Not enough is being done to conserve energy rather just go fast & gobble it up!
Have you never been to Milton Keynes (:-))
You mention the issue that EV’s simply move the problem from the tailpipe to the smokestack.
While it is true electricity has to be generated somehow, you miss the most important point. EV’s are significantly more efficient than Fossil fueled cars. So are large portion of the energy/pollution from fossil cars is *not* moved to the generation plant, most of the waste is eliminated altogether and only a fraction of the energy that is needed is supplied by the generation plant.
If the darkening of the ice on Greenland due to microbes is as bad as it sounds, we will soon be needing electric boats and a new capital city. We really should ban smokey diesels to show we made an effort when we look back.
In the 1970s scientists were saying we needed to spread coal dust on the arctic ice to prevent global cooling…
Japan has a solution to this potential problem. Japanese law requires motorists to prove they have access to a local parking space. To register a car, or when changing address, motorists need to obtain a “parking space certificate” (“garage certificate” or “Shako shomei sho”) from local police.
What we need is a law to be introduced for electric car owners to have a “home charging point certificate.”
This would be a neat way of raising the “lost” petrol and diesel taxes. Any car, van or truck parked on the public road overnight is effectively consuming public road space for private benefit. With or without any charging point a surcharge for on street parking could be a neat way of raising revenue. Vehicles parked on or across pavements should be subjected to a super fine. We are all pedestrians at some point.
Wouldn’t this – generally – be a tax on the less wealthy and the city dwellers?
Cheap oil has for decades stopped the automotive manufacturers from investing in alternative solutions so putting a time limit on current technology, however realistic it may be, has to be a good thing for innovation. I just read that the chap that co-invented lithium-ion batteries is still at it at the age of 94 and may have found a better alternative. We need more like him to solve the worlds energy problem, preferably younger to give us a fighting chance.
In the UK about 20% of the electricity generated is for light. Changing to LEDs will reduce this significantly .Has anybody estimated the car requirment.is it more or less than the saving from LEDs . Home charging will be at night when there is a lot of capacity. Areas could have different charge time zones. The main problem will be political , how will the lost tax be recovered
As to the impact of the increasing demand for raw materials for batteries, I figure we’ll be pretty good at reprocessing spent batteries by 2040. That ought to help us meet demand for it… how much depends on the market, not whether it can be done or not…
Hydrogen for fuel cells could come from splitting sea water, or syngas which could come from landfill to reduce consumption of natural gas.
I figure flow batteries will be the go when it comes to utility scale storage, with smart grids to provide a greater share of power generation… this may present a new set of problems though…
I reckon that by 2040 a significant portion of motorists, those who don’t know what model their car is, only the colour and that it gets them from A to B will get around via an app that summons a vehicle to their house, which may see the number of cars plateau in some places…
Big Oil will start diversifying to Big Hydrogen and will be promoting fuel cells as the solution, not just to emissions and global warming, but to the strain on the electrical grid from all the battery EV’s.
It is difficult to get good data about how long car batteries last. Renault will hire you a battery for a Zoe for £89/month if you do 10,500 miles a year. I do a similar mileage in a similar petrol car and my petrol bills are lower than that. Until battery lifetime costs come down electric cars will not achieve penetration of the market.
Electric cars – OK if they can do 600 miles on a 30 minute charge, without power loss! Alternatively, a 400 mile range with a standardised battery design that would allow a quick 5 minute changeover of a spent to fully charged battery exchange pack. Develop Hydogen fuel cell further, to get a range 400 – 600 miles on a single fill of hydrogen. Current battery technology is only any good for short journey urban use – not all of us live in towns and have short commutes where public transport is an option!
Electric vehicles were also predicted to predominate by 1968, but that didn’t happen. Accurate predictions are difficult enough with a sound foundation, making predictions based on future developments is rather like hoping against hope.
Our objective as set out by Stern is to reduce CO2 emissions by 80%. This can be achieved with plug-in hybrids which can achieve 150 mpg equivalent today. These require only a very small battery and don’t have range or charging issues. We have weak government who should have outlawed high capacity / high powered cars long ago.
What about Tesla idea, to stock fully charged batteries from solar – wind power stations? Then not waiting for the charge of the battery but change the battery all together. The batteries should be the same for all cars (or at least some standard types), this will solve, somehow, the problem of wind-solar generation for the periods when there is not enough load for them on the grid.
Pretty terrible article:
Most of those points have been addressed by multiple studies and authors you just have to go read them!
1: Ecological footprint – the primary carbon footprint of a car is burning fuel powering it, well to wheels electric beat petrol on most grids and it is easier to remove carbon from the grid.
2: Its not like the electric car is a finite users of resources, once we have many of them a substantial proportion of new electric cars will be made from recycled olds one, the bits that differentiate them from petrol cars tend to be made out of prime recyclable materials like copper, nickel or lithium.
3. Timescales: You’re having a laugh, try most new cars electric within 10 years and no non hybrids by 2025 from any major manufacturer. 2040 phase out for new petrol cars is pretty pedestrian.
4: Electricity generation, see point 1 electric cars driven from a grid powered by combined cycle gas plants is still lower carbon intensity than running our cars on petrol. Secondly we only replace about 1/14 of our cars every year and at the moment only a small proportion of those are plugin or pure electric. Even if we went to 100% electric new cars the modest number of additional CCGT plants we’d need to build could easily be brought online in time. As we’d mostly charge cars at night we wouldn’t actually need that much more capacity.
5: Charging network, if you currently don’t have space for an electric charging point it means you will probably never own an electric car. However there are about 20 million households in the UK who could currently charge an electric car. Plenty to build a market without significant infrastructure. Fully self driving cars are likely here in 5 years definitely here in 10. At this point most people won’t need to own their own car, won’t need to park it next to their house and thus the amount of additional charging points we will need is pretty low. In the grand scheme of things charging points are not that expensive, electricity is all over the place!
I hope I’ve made my point:
1: Petrol cars will disappear before 2040 anyway
2: There are plenty of pathways to make this happen, even the intermediate solutions are an improvement and the direction of travel is clear.
3: Putting a stake in the ground at least gives people something to plan to, and sends a country wide signal, businesses & councils don’t have to conduct studies to try to predict the outcomes of technologies (that they know little about) in the future and then internally debate the matter. In 2040 new petrol powered cars will be illegal, end of!
Please stop mentioning hydrogen, it’s never going to be used as an energy transfer medium for personal transport!
Not really sure where to begin in answer to your rant, but I seriously wonder if you understand some of the genuine concerns raised above by other contributors. It seems you have chosen to believe the polititians’ cherry-picked arguments without considering how this will happen and where the resources and the money are coming from. You also really need to think hard about the introduction of supposed autonomous vehicles and how these are going to fit in to the current urban setup, as the changeover will take us well past 2040. This date is only the date at which you will no longer be able to buy new ICE cars, but existing cars can survive well past that date.
This is an extremely complex issue and frankly most people are unaware of the problems it will raise.
Hydrogen was overhyped in the US by a predecessor of Elon Musk, strong on promotion, less on focused delivery. Sizzle has to be sold but we expect bacon in the end.
However, hydrogen is a serious runner in this race. Hydrogen can be fermented from biological waste (human and farm sewage – more bacon, wheat straw, sawdust, food waste) if we can find enough of it. The University of South Wales is a front runner in this route to hydrogen. Pump some natural gas into the mix to enrich it with methane and we can supplement the feed stocks. The limit on converting methane is the other food available to the microbes.
Honda and Toyota are placing considerable bets on hydrogen for fuel cell driven electric cars. There is a UK contender. River Simple, based in LLandrindod Wells are putting 20 hydrogen fueled cars on the roads in Abergavenny next month. BMW tinkered with its own hydrogen fuelled ideas (internal combustion with, I think a Wankel engine) before licensing fuel cell technology from Toyota. London buses have run on fuel cells for some time.
One driver for fuel cells is indoor use of fork lift trucks. Battery powered trucks take time to recharge. Fuel cells can be topped up in a few minutes ready for the next shift without a skilled electrician to change the battery pack (in a union plant). City buses have also been development platforms (not only reduced fumes but less noise) and again, no recharge issues.
Do we really need our own cars anyway, why not solve the problem at source and remove cars from the road of any type. spend the money on public transport and working from home schemes and stop this madness of driving children to schools, just because they aren’t good enough in your area.Public transport need not just be buses, it could be Autonomous cabs, decent rail systems that takes freight off the roads with just local deliveries. Reduce the demand and the resources we have will last a lot longer. Plus we have shown as a species that we aren’t really safe driving cars about, we kill each other and hedgehogs, and spread more and more tarmac over the fields to meet this constant demand for more and more cars, which we don’t need but must have. Just look at the way cars have grown in size over the last 40 years for no reason other than our desire to drive a gas guzzling tank in some false hope of protecting our children from the other parents dashing to get their children to the same crowded piece of road outside the school in their even bigger tanks. Its just madness TBH.
Vehicle availability is not the problem. Consumers will buy them when suitable refueling points are provided everywhere and there is some mechanism by which whatever fuels them can be transported to locations off-grid for the evnetuality of something running out of its ‘fuel’ in a remote location. Invest in the infrastructure instead of HS2!
What most people don’t realize is that the internal combustion engine runs mainly on air. The air to fuel ratio is 15%air to 1%fuel. There is a new generation of lean burn engine that has an air to fuel ratio of over 60% air to just 1% fuel. As you know air is free. The planet has been running on it for billions of years. Need i say more.
Great thread guys. Whatever the future technology we are still going to see FF vehicles on our roads for a long time to come. The oldest one currently driving on UK roads is 114 years old! If we think we are going to eradicate them all any time soon then we’re delusional. This website is entitled The Engineer, and lots of eng issues have been well discussed. But ultimately it will be commercial and political matters that will dictate the future direction and timing.
Re: the cradle to grave impact … I agree, there’s a need to look at the whole picture, including the sourcing and disposal of Lithium. However, there is, I understand, a limit to what can be achieved with Llithium, which might be reached as far as battery development is concerned, maybe in as little as five or so years. But it is necessity (the mother of invention) that drives this. We HAVE to solve the fossil fuel replacement challenge. It’ll be a battle royal against excessively powerful lobbying forces of the oil and petro-chemical industries as well as vested interests in the establishment. As for the what the electricity grid can cope with is again driven by necessity. We have to continue to innovate (as we have done at least since the industrial and more recently technological revolutions started) and work harder (than this government seems prepared to do) at making renewable energy more viable and, in consequence, a higher proportion of what comes out of the grid. So, there’s my ten pennyworth!
Then there is nuclear
I was going to say something about nuclear power, but forgot to complete that thought process! I guess it is that nuclear, like all sources of power have their downside. Nuclear’s downside, part from development and build time scales, is of course disposal as well as the consequences and human costs of accidents … in the very long term. God knows what’s leaked into the Pacific from Fukushima and fallen (unannounced) over the whole of Europe from Chernobyl that could be an insidious grim reaper for a long time to come …