It’s “sustainable mobility week” on The Engineer this week, which means that over the next few days – with a little help from our partner, the engineering consultancy Ricardo – we’ll be taking a close look at one of industry’s – and indeed society’s – most pressing challenges: the need to develop environmentally friendly transportation technologies.
With transport accounting for more than a quarter of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions; innovations in the systems that get us – and the goods upon which we rely – from a to b will be key to enabling the UK to achieve its 2050 net zero ambitions. And over the course of this week we’ll be looking in detail at some of the technologies that will help to propel the sector into a low carbon future: from the latest developments in hydrogen trains, to innovations in electric cars, and breakthroughs in zero carbon flight.
We’ll also be looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and examining whether it has acted as a spur for low carbon innovation. Sustainable mobility has been a growing priority for many years now, but there’s certainly a sense across industry that the current crisis has galvanised this resolve, with organisations across the board recognising that if they’re going to survive and compete in the post-COVID world, then they need to embrace low carbon innovation.
As Ricardo’s Adrian Greaney writes in his column today – the complex challenges of decarbonizing transport will require a multifaceted approach, involving different sectors, disciplines and technologies. Indeed, if we want to move towards a world where EVs are the dominant form of personal transport, then we need to make sure that our energy generation and supply infrastructure marry up with this ambition. Likewise, if we want to transform civil aviation or public transport with hydrogen, then we need to ensure that the hydrogen we use is renewably generated.
Looking beyond this we also need to be wary of the total lifecycle costs of tomorrow’s transformative transport technologies. Whilst an electric car might do wonders for your personal carbon footprint, the production of the lithium ion batteries that have enabled the EV revolution is a major source of emissions. And as EV numbers grow, addressing these kind of embedded environmental costs will be key to ushering in a true age of sustainable mobility.
Like so many other areas of engineering, achieving all of this will require unprecedented levels of collaboration and joined up thinking. And we’ll be doing our bit to encourage this process in a live panel discussion that we’re chairing later this week (Thursday 12pm) focussed specifically on electrification. Featuring engineers from Ricardo, Rolls-Royce, the Advanced Propulsion Centre, Qinetiq and UKRI it promises to be a fascinating discussion, and it’s free to attend!
As always, we look forward to hearing from all of our readers over the coming days and would like to encourage you all to join the debate and share your thoughts on this important topic.
Our partner for this week’s activities is the engineering consultancy Ricardo, an organisation at the forefront of sustainable mobility innovation. Over the course of the next few days we’ll be hearing from some its top engineers about the projects they’re involved in, and the challenges that lie ahead.
There seems to have been a recent tsunami of reports, publications etc. on various options for de-carbonization, including large ocean going ships. None as yet has the energy density to effectively propel vehicles and ships any great distance or at the required speed on a sustained basis.
Electrification of rail needs to be a key priority. In Britain a pathetically small component of the network is wired up. Belief in batteries, hydrogen and fuel cells to move long distance passenger and freight trains at the required speeds has been exposed as being hopelessly mis-guided. The key is to ensure any wiring up programmes are a lot less expensive and are delivered on time. Recent schemes have proved to be disastrous (read the NAO report on the GW line and weep!). This coloured views about genuine and better electrification projects. Some of these were summarily cancelled or cut short enforcing the use of wholly inadequate bi-modal option. Ironic since the government had flagged an intention to delete diesel powered trains. Right and left hand etc….
You note the need for extensive collaboration, this is an underestimate of the difficulties!
The design of an electric car seems straightforward and already established. The problem areas are supply of batteries and affordable power to charge these if we had them. Then there is the replacement of the massive tax-take from oil products to be replaced.
A bigger EV problem is in the van and truck area where down-time is a problem so we will need to increase the fleet if we are to move goods as we do now. The massive investment in vehicle stock and infrastructure must come at a price to other areas of the economy, unless the magic money tree can continue as it seems to be working now. All this to save a fraction of a percent of the world’s still increasing carbon dioxide emissions.
The statement : “Belief in batteries, hydrogen and fuel cells to move long distance passenger and freight trains at the required speeds has been exposed as being hopelessly mis-guided.” is more negative comments of the flat earth community. We only need to realize that the battery simply needs to be exchanged when it becomes flat, not recharged while it is in use. No different to the battery in your car, radio, and any use where a common battery is now used, you simply remove the flat battery and replace it with a fully charged battery. When to think of trains, the battery may be an individual tender, that is uncoupled and replaced while the flat battery is recharged using renewable energy.
The real issue is that not enough money is available to foster alternative energies, governments and industry are trying to pick the winners and ignoring other viable alternatives. For example the Gemini Electric Motor and Generator , a gold medal winning technology that uses both sides of the energized coil, have found it impossible to get government or industry backing, WHY ? Electric motors have always only used one side of the energized coil, if they used both sides you would expect an improved torque or electric generation, and you would be right.