Battery Powered Vehicles, The Future??

[peter scott]

It strikes me that opting to develop a network of electric charging points is the wrong way to go. Although hydrogen fuel cell cars are currently expensive their fueling is almost as rapid as petrol or diesel and they can match the performance of current cars and give range in excess of 300 miles.

Forget electric and install hydrogen service stations like are in California.

http://www.caranddriver.com/comparisons/...rison-test

Peter

[ppppenguin]

Electric and hybrid cars are available now for anyone who wants one. Hydrogen is still exotic with very little UK infrastructure. Who knows which way it will go in 5 years time let alone 20.

[Refugee]

If they are going to stick with batteries they should all be of the same type and fitted from below the car by a machine below a bay.
When the car comes in the machine reads the meter on the battery and deducts the remaining charge from a fully charged one and swaps it out as quickly as filling up with petrol. Two batteries for a sports car and eight for a 40 foot tractor trailer.
Then charge them all up over night on cheap rate ready for the next day.
Product improvements just increase range.

[Murphyv310]

LPG should be pushed for use in petrol engines. It's far cleaner easy and quick to refill and certainly at the moment cheaper.

[ppppenguin]

LPG is only cheaper due to low tax. One of the issues about going largely electric or hydrogen is the huge loss of revenue from tax on petrol and diesel. Taxing hydrogen would be easy enough but electricity? You don't want to heavily tax domestic electricty usage just to replace the revenue. Or do you? I don't think you can discriminate between domestic and car electricity. It's not like red diesel as used for marine and other off road applications.

All these problems will be worked out over the next few years, where few might mean 5 to 25. Market forces are very powerful and at the moment they are pointing strongly towards renewable electricity generation with large scale storage. Whatever plans we might have for Hinkley C (an expensive white elephant which if this is anything to go by will never be completed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_...ower_Plant) or Trump might have for coal the market will prevail. Electric cars could be part of the solution, providing large scale distributed electricity storage.

Fortunately for the world, coal won't be coming back anytime soon. Fortunately for the UK, we're not paying upfront for Hinkley C and if it never gets finished all we're left with is a rather large lump of concrete.

We live in exciting times for energy production, storage and distribution. If I were at the start of my career rather than the end I'd likely be looking at power systems. For years these were seen as dull and old fashioned. Now they're sexy.

[boater sam]

I'm astounded by the news that all internal combustion engined cars will be banned by 2040. This has not been thought through. The downturn in the industry by this blight will cause untold damage.
We have ignored the technology that is already successful, namely LPG and CNG ( compressed natural gas ) which will support petrol and diesel engines.
The pollution in Thailand has been significantly reduced by using these fuels in existing vehicles.
No mention of the problems of other liquid hydrocarbon burners, planes, boats, generators, pumps, tractors and heavy plant.
Are forest fires and volcanoes to be banned too?

[pwdrive]

I thought it was just new vehicles?

Might have used up the fossil by then anyways so maybe HMG is just doing a green credentials smoke and mirrors PR job....

Lawrence.

[Nick]

Slightly bizarrely, the RTA (Road & Transport Authority) here (Dubai) have just bought 300 Tesla S vehicles to use as taxis...

Not many charging points in the desert...

[Craig]

This http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/ is a fairly good analysis on global lithium production, accessible reserves, and how many Nissan Leaf's you could build from those. The numbers do not stack up, alas.

The Leaf has a 24kWh (24e3 x 3600 = 86MJ) battery and that gets you 300 miles if driven conservatively. Annual mileage is say 12,000 miles, or about 1 recharge per week. There are 32 million domestic cars in the UK, so it would take 86e6 x 32e6 = 2.7e15J per week to charge them. Double that for energy losses in distribution, power conversion efficiency in the charger, and battery charge efficiency and get to 5.4e15J per week of generation capacity.

Divide by the number of seconds in the week (6e5) to get generation power of 9GW. Current grid capacity is 45GW, which we use completely during the Winter.. So to deal with a complete electrification of domestic cars with Nissan Leafs would take a 20% increase in electricity generation capacity. If everyone owned a Tesla (I wish!) with an 85kWh battery we would need to almost double the energy generation capacity to charge them.

And none of those estimates takes account of commercial vehicles.

So although the aim to reduce vehicle emissions to zero is laudable, the practicalities (at this point) just don't stack up.

OK I hear you say - fuel cells. The energy equation still stands though. There is a similar energy cost associated with production of hydrogen-rich fuels. There is alas no escape from the conundrum.

Craig

[Terry]

I'm astounded by the news that all internal combustion engined cars will be banned by 2040. 

I'm with Lawrence here - I'm sure that it is only the sale  of internal combustion engined vehicles that will be banned - although, presumably, if it is a blanket ban it will also affect vehicles modified to run on LPG.

How about an LPG fuelled steam car? They certainly exist - but not new ones! Use a condenser on the exhaust to recycle as much water as possible - which, I think, might have been done before.  Certainly the one I saw in action on Isle of Man only produced a wisp of steam.