Quote from GFresh :

Lol, they're already getting us to cut back on electricity usage (Energy saving lamps in new builds / outlawing regular incandescent lamps in the near future) due to the fact that the National Grid is nearing capacity.

Exactly what I was thinking. The Electric Grid is nearing capacity, how can we put even more load on it? The only way for this to work is if there was some system which gave certain devices higher priority for electricity. Meaning, when the grid has too much load non-essential things would be cut off. Like charging stations for non-fire/rescue/police/military vehicles. Or start building homes with solar panels on them, which are tied into the power grid. You would then get paid for any extra electricity that you generate. Other power methods such as geothermal would work also. I think it's a great idea. Instead of forcing people to put forth tax money to solar/wind power, let individuals install solar panels/other renewable sources of energy if they want to. I'm pretty sure individual people are more efficient at hiring someone to install solar panels on their roof then the government is at convincing a private company to build a solar power station. After, of course, it goes through a bureaucracy where many people are getting paid six-figure salaries. After which a huge corporation then builds a large solar power plant. Of course, this requires finding land that can be bought, or that the government forces people off of claiming eminent domain.
Individuals choosing to install a windmill or solar panels on their property, paying a small contractor to install it, and giving electricity back to the grid and getting paid for it seems like a better solution. No-one has to install solar panels or anything if they don't want to. But once there are constant blackouts, their opinions will change.

Quote from wheel4hummer :

The Electric Grid is nearing capacity, how can we put even more load on it?

and you worked that out thanks to your extensive knowledge on daily monthly and anual electric power consumption and leveling strategies?

Mass transit is the future. The personal automobile needs to die.

Quote from Shotglass :

and you worked that out thanks to your extensive knowledge on daily monthly and anual electric power consumption and leveling strategies?

Yes, of course. I hope your power gets shut off first.

Quote from Shotglass :

and you worked that out thanks to your extensive knowledge on daily monthly and anual electric power consumption and leveling strategies?

and you managed to counter it because a German like yourself has extensive knowledge of the British national Grid?

no but i happen to have a degree in electric engineering and know a bit about what kind of power an electric grid has to be designed for and how low the average power is by comparison

what are your credentials again?

my credentials are little, but I do happen to live in the UK and know just how much strain there is on the national grid. Putting the burden of electric cars onto it would cripple the country

:munching_

My car could be electric.

Take the spark plugs out to get rid of the compression, then just turn the key and use the gears. I reckon i could get to over 30mph on the starter in 5th gear!

Plus mook is kinda right, as the UK is pretty much totally screwed at the minute anyway. Anything else would break it completely IMO.

yeah those daily nationwide power outages in the winter during breakfast must be a real bitch

what youve said about yourself so far is that you have no clue whatsoever on the efficiency of internal combustion engines and the efficiencies of their electric counterparts including the efficiency of large fossile fuel power plants and that youve probably never even heard of the name kirchhoff
just stop all you could get from this thread is ebarassment

Quote from Shotglass :

just stop all you could get from this thread is ebarassment

err, no actually. Look back through at the points I've made. You may be sitting pretty in your lovely country with more than enough electricities and your successful 'exchange old cars for monies' initiatives, but the simple fact is this country, the UK, is in such an appalling state such a system would never, ever work.

You see, the electric grid is a series of tubes...

Quote from mookie427 :

err, no actually. Look back through at the points I've made. You may be sitting pretty in your lovely country with more than enough electricities and your successful 'exchange old cars for monies' initiatives, but the simple fact is this country, the UK, is in such an appalling state such a system would never, ever work.

You know Europe shares power, right?

There are several power stations in France (can't remember the name alas) which use water to deliver power pretty much instantaneously which help to top the grid up when more is required urgently (i.e. the after-Corrie-cuppa).

Quote from mookie427 :

this initiative will never work. Why? A G-Whizz costs upwards of £15000. For this to work there needs to be an electric car produced that can happily do 70mph and not need recharging after 40 miles.

fair enough

Quote :

And by the time the electricity reaches the plugs, going through all the substations and processing and that sort of stuff, it has produced more emissions overall than if you were using a petrol car instead!

embarrassingly wrong and showing no knowledge whatsoever of the efficiencies involved

Quote from mookie427 :

nope, from coal-fired power stations. If the windfarms we have here at the moment were put to work producing the electricity required for the electric cars, they'd still have to be heavily backed up by the coal-fired stations

fair enough but unlike petrol powered cars electric cars become gradually more environmentally sound as power plants get upgraded to different cleaner technologies without requiring to replace them and regardless of how old the electric car in question is

Quote from mookie427 :

Hydrogen is the only conceivable option. People need to get the 'electricity=instant green option' idea out of their heads.

ebarrassingly wrong again
1) hydrogen is nothing more than a highly inefficient nearly impossible to store and highly explosive battery
in other words hydrogen = electric power in fluid form
2) producing hydrogen has an efficiency somewhere below 50% in practice well below 50%
add to that the requiment of hauling it around and the again fairly low efficiency of a fuel cell somewhere in the range of 50% and youre at a point where you could have burnt the fuel needed to produce the hydrogen in the first place more efficiently inside an internal combustion engine
and thats before you even factor in the electric motors and the motor driver

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

Mass transit is the future. The personal automobile needs to die.

That sounds far too scary to me, think of having no other option apart from standing at an unsheltered bus stop in the rain, waiting for a bus that then doesn't stop because it's 'too full', or stuck on a boiling hot tube train full of people who have lethal b.o., eeek.

Maybe, like the horse, the petrol powered car will eventually become a plaything for the weekend, not everyday transport.

Running your car off mains electricity may overall be more efficient and less pollluting than running it off petrol, but it is still polluting, and a damn site less practical right now.

Maybe we should go back to horses.

Nah, thats even scarier than sticking to public tranposrt, horses are bloody frightening, one second completely docile, the next they jump 5 metres sideways across the road.

Wouldn't it be better if a large percentage of people worked from home?

We are meant to be in the information age are we not? So why do so many commute to and from work each day? I would have to think that there is huge potential to cut immissions by simply enabling/allowing information related workers to work more from home. I know some that already do but I'm sure it's only a small fraction of whats possible. There needs to be a major shift in concept of what constitutes a work environment and how we as individuals go about daily business. It has started but it has a very long way to go..

Quote from 5haz :

That sounds far too scary to me, think of having no other option apart from standing at an unsheltered bus stop in the rain, waiting for a bus that then doesn't stop because it's 'too full', or stuck on a boiling hot tube train full of people who have lethal b.o., eeek.

Maybe, like the horse, the petrol powered car will eventually become a plaything for the weekend, not everyday transport.

Running your car off mains electricity may overall be more efficient and less pollluting than running it off petrol, but it is still polluting, and a damn site less practical right now.

Obviously it would have to be a different sort of mass transportation than we currently have (probably a combination of bullet trains, subways/elevated trains, light rail, and surface transport a la busses), but when you look at what Japan has done since 1960 it's not inconceivable to think that in the next 20 or 30 years we can drastically reduce our dependence on the personal car. Like you said, it could (and should) be a weekend excursion type thing.

Our economy and the way our cities are laid out would obviously need to be restructured (gradually) to meet this change.

In the UK, your electricity comes from a very an environmentally unfriendly source. But if everyone has electric cars, it could minimize our production of CO2 in the atmosphere. Sure, the coal plant emits pollution but the use of combustion vehicles just adds more pollution to the atmosphere. ~70-80 percent of our carbon emissions come from fossil fuel combustion (probably 50 or that 70 percent is transportation), which is the major source of pollution.

You can say that batteries can also be dangerous to the environment too, but we can recycle batteries as opposed to fossil fuel. If you are worried about distance, think about this: a well-built electric car can go for around 100 miles, the average person only drives about 40 miles/day. And if youre worried about vacations, how often do you go on vacations? I would rather just rent a car. Cost? the more people buy electric cars, the less expensive it will be (Tesla will be releasing a more economy friendly car around $50k). Charging? just charge it when you get home or go to sleep. Reliability? It's getting there, the more they develop the technology, the better it gets.

Hydrogen is not the answer, it is too expensive and too complicated to make and is also ineffecient.

Quote from SR BaCkFiRe :

Hydrogen is not the answer, it is too expensive and too complicated to make and is also ineffecient.

Yep. I happen to take a course called Hydrogen and fuel cell technology right now. Here are some points to consider:

• Storage. Liquid and compressed hydrogen is a no-go. It's dangerous, requires too much energy and suffers from boil-off. (the content vaporizes at ~ 1% per day)
  Metal hydride storage is much safer, but the best can store ten weight percent of hydrogen. Most are in the region of 2-5 weigth percent. --> it gets very heavy. Here's a graph:
  http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/8093/utennavneen.png
  
• Hydrogen production. Electrolysis of water to form hydrogen + oxygen gas is normally ~ 50%.
  
• Fuel cell efficiency is approximately the same
  
• Transport and storage. The hydrogen must be transported somehow, most likely in compressed or liquid state. This, too, requires lots of energy for compression (again, see graph), cooling and transport, and suffers from boil-off.
  

There's lots more points to that list.. at the end, you have to multiply all the efficiencies. We did a lab where the end efficiency of the whole system from water to fuel cell was 2%.. that gives an idea.

I'm not saying that batteries are problem free... far from it. But it sure looks a lot more promising to me. (Maybe I'm biased, as I'm studying nanotechnology with emphasis on materials, energy and the environment. :shy

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

Hydrogen is the most abundant substance on earth, and how would a hydrogen vehicle need a separate battery that wouldn't be being charged from it's own circuit anyway?

I'd rather wait for 30 minutes than 8 hours, thankyou very much!

you need pure hydrogen, the element H. You don't find that anywhere on earth as a natural resource, you need to split the hydrogen element from H2O, water. That requires quite a lot of energy, four times more than the hydrogen will ever supply to your car.
You need a battery because a fuel cell reacts very slow to "user input". Ie. step on the accelerator and it will respond afer 30 seconds or so. It also needs to be carefully heated before use. So you'll need some sort of energy storate (a battery, maybe supercaps in the future) if you want a drivable car.

Quote from Shotglass :

fair enough but unlike petrol powered cars electric cars become gradually more environmentally sound as power plants get upgraded to different cleaner technologies without requiring to replace them and regardless of how old the electric car in question is

good point, but again, how long would that take? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? As the technology evolves of course the cars will get better, but in my opinion, at least for us in the UK we need to sort out the problem of where we will get the energy from to power all those electric cars, and only when we have the infrastructure in place to support them start developing cheap, reliable but fast electric cars which will appeal to the mass-market. Starting with the electric cars before the system can actually cope is only taking one step forwards two steps back.

But who knows? It will be interesting to see if when this initiative is brought in in 2011, sales of electric cars shoot up. Also it'll be interesting to see what becomes of the 25000 charging points old Boris has promised.

Quote from Jakg :

You know Europe shares power, right?

There are several power stations in France (can't remember the name alas) which use water to deliver power pretty much instantaneously which help to top the grid up when more is required urgently (i.e. the after-Corrie-cuppa).

And if we don't stop buggering about with windfarms we'll have to get even heavier back-up from France because our national grid will barely be able to produce enough power. France took the initiative and started developing new nuclear power stations whilst the ministers in this country was still falling over themselves to try and get as many windfarms as possible, a lot of which the plans have now been shelved, partly because of the credit crunch and partly because people don't want that sort of eyesore either on their front doorstep or spoiling a previously untouched area of countryside

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

Obviously it would have to be a different sort of mass transportation than we currently have (probably a combination of bullet trains, subways/elevated trains, light rail, and surface transport a la busses), but when you look at what Japan has done since 1960 it's not inconceivable to think that in the next 20 or 30 years we can drastically reduce our dependence on the personal car. Like you said, it could (and should) be a weekend excursion type thing.

Our economy and the way our cities are laid out would obviously need to be restructured (gradually) to meet this change.

Indeed, but they'd have to completely rebuild London to sort out it's public transport, 7 million people all using roads that were laid down in the Middle Ages, and using tracks that were laid down in victorian times.

A system like Japan's would be grand, one year the total time a a train on the bullet sustem was late was something mad like 30 seconds, but the UK has never been known for gettng stuff done on time and on budget.

Aanyway, right now electric cars are just too impractical for widespread, everyday use. Nuclear power is a way forward (powerstation wise, not actual cars!), but people are scared and ignorant, thinking that all reactors will do a chernobyl, when infact that incident was caused by a bad reactor design and inexperienced crews.