I think you missed my point nippan - Hydrogen, although using extreme amounts of electricity, would be produced ‘locally’ and not require transmission through the grid nationwide.
Yes, public transport for most journeys is the optimum choice. I didn’t take-up driving and the driving test until I was around 29 yoa in 1973 but still used the local bus service for pubs, clubs, cinema etc. and trains for commuting to London. After passing my test I didn’t need to drive again until 1984 when public transport was privatised and all of the local bus services disappeared, so I got a company car, took a refresher driving course and the rest is history. If however we got a decent bus service re-instated I would have no qualms in giving up car ownership, my driving is local, low mileage and so all in all quite expensive when everything is taken into consideration.
Our buses are excellent, being TFL, and I’m happy to use the Bus Pass, it saves me the cost of a parking ticket. The only snag is the unwashed nutter who on seeing ten empty seats comes and sits next to you and tries to tell you his life history.
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Plato, more than 2600 years ago said our need will be the real creator. Or, necessity is the mother of invention. Humankind’s most inventive periods often occur during events we’d prefer to avoid. WW1, or the events immediately before it, resulted in the Haber Bosch process, a process to produce synthetic ammonia for the production of explosive on a garagantuan scale. But it also provided the basis for fertilizer production. Today, we are all familiar with the ICU, through events in the news. Intensive care medicine came about through early 20th Century Polio epidemics (and subsequent lockdowns). The Danes came up with the idea. Some brilliant engineers, almost overnight, invented the Iron Lung, which could keep afflicted kids alive. The 1930s, Fleming’s observations in the Petri dish remained a curiousity, until the Americans realised they will need antibotics for the coming liberation of Europe, so they got the British microbiologists tobether with some Australian chemists and American engineers, and a few hitherto obscure companies, such as Merck, to essentially invent the Pharmaceutical industry. With an end to WW2 in sight, fears of another Spanish flu spurred an Australian biologist to develpp a vaccine to flu, which itself had only been identified a few years earlier. The election of Franklin D Roosevelt meant the March of Dimes (what we would call today Crowdfunding), which saw a Polio vaccine being invented just 10 years later. That polio vaccine lead to the FDA being created, and proper regulated develppment of medicines. In the last 12 months, I have seen remarkable invetion in response to an emergency, whether its is a vaccine being designed in a weekend and rolled out even before the virus was isolated, or boffins at UCL getting together with Mercedes F1, to reverse engineer and modify an old Philips CPAPs device into a genuine COVID-19 life saving device. Necessity drives invention.
Whatever the solution, car makers have to come up with a solution by 2030, as long as governments hold their nerve (they might not, and there goes the invention). Because the car makers haven’t been all that inventive, its probable we will have to make do, for a while, with flawed battery powered cars that, fundementally, aren’t all that different from the electric cars from the Edwardian period
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Jasper Carrott has the same problem with the nutter on the bus…!
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If the effect of legislation, and the given reason for its enactment, on our shared passion is not to be discussed on a public forum dedicated to that common interest, then where is to be debated?
Those advocating a reduction in the human population rarely lead by example. Prince Philip soldiered on to 99 while Bill Gates is still with us.
“Maybe you’re right. The problem with not doing anything with batteries at all is that we will not really make much progress in finding new tech and ways of using it. 60 years ago we could have said, let’s stop using ICE because it’s slow and inefficient. Hell, we could have said it 30 years ago and 20 years ago. But because we kept using it, we also learned a lot to improve ICE to where we are now.”
Battery power is not new, the first car that Ferdinand Porsche designed was powered by electricity 120 years ago. ICE has proven to be incredibly resilient to all the challenges that it has faced, and for good reason, they are powered by a fuel that has a high energy density. The most modern batteries available don’t come anywhere near and even those proposed are way off the mark.
Incremental advances in design have not progressed li-ion batteries much since their inception nearly half a century ago. Meanwhile, over the same period, the ICE has changed almost beyond recognition as far as performance and emission levels are concerned.
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I have seen remarkable invetion in response to an emergency, whether its is a vaccine being designed in a weekend and rolled out even before the virus was isolated, or boffins at UCL getting together with Mercedes F1, to reverse engineer and modify an old Philips CPAPs device into a genuine COVID-19 life saving device. Necessity drives invention.
Mmmmm… Problem is that ventilators can actually exacerbate the condition so mistakes can be made along the way as well. Batteries are just that on a huge scale.
CPAP isn’t a ventilator. Normal ARDS results in the lungs losing elasticity, meaning the patient finds it harder to breath. With COVID-19, the lungs remain elastic, and the issue was debris in the lungs, blocking oxygenation.
You cannot compare ventilators to batteries. Frankly, that is ridiculous. Batteries won’t make climate change even worse. They might create some new supply chain challenges, but I am confident that invention will solve these issues. A driver will be expense.
And the fact is, many of the more seriously ill COVID-19 patients have had to end up sedated, on a mechanical ventilator. Inappropriate use of ventilators might make things worse but ventilators per se, do not make the COVID-19 illness worse. They are a useful therapeutic option.
From about 1930 to present, around 190,000 research papers have been published on Influenza. We know more about this virus than any other. By comparison, Ebola racks up about 8,000 papers. In 12 months, over 90,000 papers have been published on COVID-19/Sars-Cov-2. Literally, in December 2019 this was a completely unknown virus. Within 12 months we identified the causative agent, have started to identifyd metuational pressures (and not far using synthetic biology to predict those mutatios), developed therapeutic options, include drug based, developed a range of effective vaccines. A lot of good invention and innovation going on there, the mistakes fade into the background.
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Couldn’t agree more. I do think that some manufacturers (such as Audi with their e-tron) are being extremely hypocritical in trying to tell the consumer they are being environmentally responsible with their massive two to three tonne electric cars with ridiculous power figures and huge tyres to cope with that performance (in themselves a source of a worrying pollution). If they really want to save the planet they should be making EVs that are lighter, and smaller with adequate performance and reasonably size tyres. The owners of these vehicles are kidding themselves if they are thinking that they are saving the planet more than a small/medium sized ICE powered car.
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Really nice post. Battery power may be flawed and have several big disadvantages, at least the save a lot of CO2 output. Why electric cars are always green (and how they could get greener) - The Correspondent
Another one: Electric Vehicle Efficiency Analysis
All alternatives are flawed, as is ICE itself. If we combine in the right places and innovate, I think we might get there. I’m just not sure if we will do it in time.
You are actually right about the first electric car. Unfortunately it was unusable back then because power densities were a huge amount lower than now.
Your argument about power density does not take into account the inefficiency of a ICE. For example, one of many sources: Battery-Electric 73%, Hydrogen 22%, ICE 13%
Or Wikipedia:
Most iron engines have a thermodynamic limit of 37%. Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18–20%.
Internal combustion engine - Wikipedia
Another one:
“EVs convert about 59%–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17%–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.” An electric motor typically is between 85% and 90% efficient.
So while you are right in that petrol contains more energy, it does not mean you can actually use all that energy. So I think your statement in which you only say petrol contains a lot more energy is a bit one sided. IT suggests that we are even more off the mark than we really are.
In practice one can see that technically an EV works fine for most (I even prefer it to an ICE for daily driving). Obviously I appreciate that financial matters might be a barrier and a decent charging network needs to be in place. So while I share your view that we really should get more energy dense batteries I do not share your view/suggestion that BEV’s are not usable. As proven by the many that are already on the road, even for account managers that do bigger distances. Higher energy density will come with time, do you think we had 20% efficient ICE’s 20 years ago? Don’t think so.
Apart from that I am under the impression that you don’t really think climate change is a problem and you also seem to think we as humans probably can’t really do anything about it. So I appreciate your view is one of not wanting to do anything outside of your comfort zone for a problem you think isn’t really relevant and/or can’t be influenced by humans. Correct me if I’m wrong of course 
I think that properly motivated and funded people are capable of amazing things. It depends on who is motivating them. We currently have politicians motivated by wanting to get re-voted and looking for the most popular vote winning arguments and at the moment environmental concerns are one of their drivers. For car and energy producers it is an economic motivator. Getting a step ahead of any competition can be a winning strategy. The car manufacturers are led by buyers demands, which is why we have environmentally unsuitable cars like SUV’s - people are buying them. They are also responding to governments legislation and fines. This is why we are where we are - I am sure that we do not have the best solutions currently, but all the factors are pushing us in that direction. However there are others who look at alternatives and as long as they are funded, legislation will support them and there is an outlet for their developments, then they may be successful.
Time will tell.
I do believe that battery production is a dead end though as it is not a really good long term solution, irrespective of electricity being more efficient than petrol cars…
The elephant in the room amongst all of this talk about the electric car dealing with climate change and saving the planet is simply the fact that ICE cars are not the worst culprits - industry and power generation are, particularly in other countries (China/USA/much of Eastern Europe/Australia etc etc) that burn coal.
The motorist is simply the easy target, again…
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Hear hear !
Fair enough but that doesn’t mean we just do nothing till they stop burning coal, and it’s not as if coal’s future looks bright. Quite aside from political pressure like the secretary general of the UN calling for new coal power projects to be cancelled, the markets are way ahead of him so the politicians are kicking at an open door. In lots of countries new investment is going into photovoltaic generation not coal power because the return on investment is clearly better with PV. I recently read of 45GW of proposed coal generation in SE Asia being canned because Singapore’s banks won’t lend the cash for it for fear ending up with stranded assets. By contrast Vietnam alone installed 9GW of solar PV last year. If you’re planning a power plant in the US it’s the same story - you won’t get funding for new coal plants because the money gets better returns invested in solar. We’ve reached that tipping point and the markets and the energy companies are some way ahead of where we might imagine.
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For your information Corky, I do not have any children (not that I know of anyway)
On the other hand -
According to their study, the professors found that when you take Germany’s current energy mix and combine it with the the amount of energy used in battery production, the CO2 emissions of battery-electric vehicles are, in the best case, slightly higher than those of a diesel engine, and are otherwise much higher.
I agree we can’t just do nothing, however to have any meaningful impact we cannot continue touting stupid policies that actually increase co2 (for example) like the promotion of small ‘low emmisions’ turbocharged petrol engines, and hybrids (through BIK rates) both of which in real life are far from environmentally friendly, and can be directly linked to an increase in co2 in the UK over the last few years.
And don’t get me started on the farce that is carbon credits. That policy could have been designed by and for Tesla, one of the very few car companies whose products use virtually zero credits, so can sell them on to others who do. At least it makes the financials look better, unlike the cars themselves.
To make a real difference the world needs to come together to lower emissions, and I’m afraid whilst the likes of China and others pay lip service to environmental issues and continue to sell the west all sorts of solar/electrical products to save the planet manufactured using energy generated using coal, along with growing their economy based on fossil fuel it just isn’t going to happen.
They may take notice if everyone stopped buying stuff that isn’t manufactured in a wholly environmentally friendly manner though, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon.
Mini rant over.
Selfish, but I won’t be around by the time global warming has any meaningful impact, so I’ll continue to enjoy my ic powered bikes and cars, and my gas powered house for as long as I can.