No new petrol or diesel cars by 2040

[ericmark]

I had not considered those who park their car over night on the street, although in an ideal world only visitors should need to park on a street that is not going to happen in a few short years, across the road from me we have a family with 4 vehicles I would guess sons and daughters but since we see no cars during the day clearly all in use, so that one house would need 4 x 16A over night for cars, since one is a van likely more than that amount of power. We have a 60 amp supply so clearly it would require new sub-stations and new cables to nearly double the supply.

At the moment we run three cars, one only used to tow caravan, one used to carry wheel chair, and one for normal use. The problem with electric is even if car is not used, your still paying for the battery hire, so we would need to have just one vehicle which could do all functions, that would mean as it stands getting a motor caravan and using that for all functions, so instead of using a small car for most trips, we would be forced to use a large car, not convinced that helps?

In real terms I suppose we would need to alter how we go on holiday, instead of travelling around 200 miles a year we would use package tours and travel 2000 miles a year, is that really better?

Some ideas do seem flawed, the Taxi in rural areas seldom gets a return fare, so using a Taxi uses far more fuel than using your own car, yet we get the taxi classed as public transport, and allowed to do things which if you did them in a private car you would get fined for doing. Using bus lanes etc. I questioned why there were so many taxis as local supermarket and it seems they are cheaper to use than buses, and take the shopping direct to door. When the taxi is cheaper than the bus, then one has to ask what has gone wrong?

With a bus pass I will when I can catch a bus, however even when free, they require a 1/2 mile walk from mothers house because she lives on a private estate, now other side of railway line in the council estate they get buses, even though now most the houses are private owned, in my own house bus goes past the door, however it stops at 6 pm and takes a different route, OK for me retired, but useless for anyone who works.

When I come to need a new car, if there is a good bus service maybe I will not bother, and use the bus instead, however I had a hospital appointment other day, so looked at bus times, to get to hospital on time, needed to catch bus at 9 pm day before. I see that as a problem.

 

[DaveHerns]

57 properties in my road and only 3 have off street parking. Adjacent streets are little better. I did wonder if this non-starter of an idea was dropped on us to take our attention away from the Brexit negotiations.

 

[Nozzle]

What we need is the hydrogen economy. Hydrogen used as a "vector". It's not a source of energy just as electricity is not a source - but it is a store.

H2 is/can be generated from electricity direct from the grid at you own home and/or your local fueling station
H2 is/can be generated from high temperature nuclear reactor (normal reactors are not "high temperature"
H2 is/can be stored and fuel tanks charged as quickly as petrol/diesel
H2 is/can be used "in reverse" to generate electricity (for grid balancing, and running electric cars)
H2 is/can be used directly in chemical process.

To be a useful vector, the H2/Electricity must be generated in a carbon neutral way, otherwise as a society we're making the problem worse.... a bit like burning wooden fuel pellets from USA, it amplifies not reduces the CO2 emissions.

This tech exists... unfortunately the BoD of company that do it are not city people, they are scientists and gravy-train riders and so without exposure the tech is going to remain niche.

Nozzle

 

[davelx]

TBF, charging overnight is what most people will do. And TBH I hadn't thought about the fact that most people will. The filling station fuel-dispenser to charging station charging-point transition does not need to be 1:1, or anything like.

People's mileage will of course vary, and we are going to have to invest in an electricity network which can deliver the energy required.

But if everybody could wake up every morning to a car with a full fuel tank, I wonder how many would ever need to visit a filling station again?

Yes, i suspect that there are many people who, like me, only do a limited daily mileage. Working in a city it was much easier to drive to the ststion, park and get the train than it was to drive. Even now I've retired, i find my daily mileage, which has increased, is generally well within my 40 mile battery range and only ever use the engine when going on a longer journey, or if I'm away overnight and unable to charge.

I haven't bought any petrol for 5 months. If i had an ev with range of a the entry level tesla model 3, which is about 215 miles, i could cover 99% of my travel with only home charging

 

[Nozzle]

I haven't bought any petrol for 5 months.

You haven't bought petrol, but you have bought 'fuel'!
Petrol = 46.7 MJ/kg Density is ~0.75 kg/litre so 35MJ/litre.
@£1.20 per litre including tax that is 29.2MJ/£.
The same amount of energy, but in electrical form = 29.2MJ Electric = 8.1kWh.

Depening on your supplier, if you do all your charging OFF peak on economy 7 that'll cost you 76p. On-peak £1.58.. per litre equivalent. A saving to be had only when your rate is less than 14.8p/kwh. (None of these figures account for the daily standing charge or 5% tax on electric) and that pushes the break-even cost further out of your favour.

But what of CO2? The tariffs above are from SSE, and so it's right to use their own declared 2017 figures for energy mix and emissions. 304kg/MWh = 304g/kw. Therefore for each litre of fuel you DON'T put in your hybrid car, SSE generates on your behalf 2462g of CO2.

Nozzle

 

[SimonH2]

Indeed. I think that's what most of us have assumed, and the reason why threads here about EV charging almost invariably relate to installation of 'home charging' facilities. There is, however, the issue of getting one's vehicle close enough to the 'home charging connection' - which would be difficult (at least, difficult to guarantee) or impossible in a fair proportion of cases.

"fair proportion" - I think that should read "majority"

Most discussions here, and elsewhere, about electricity provision over the next few decades have related to concerns that, as things are going, there are uncertainties whether we will have the generating capacity to cope with present-day demands (i.e. with minimal EV charging), with all sorts of fears about 'rationing' etc. - so there has got to be even more uncertainty as to what would happen if there were a very substantial increase in demand due to EVs.

Exactly.

57 properties in my road and only 3 have off street parking. Adjacent streets are little better.

Ours is little better - a lot of the time we can't even get on our own street let alone outside our house.
And think about all those tower blocks of apartments (or flats as we used to call them !). Some have garages underneath, a lot don't - so are you going to have to drop an extension lead from your 15th floor flat to the car

What we need is the hydrogen economy

No, hydrogen is a terrible "fuel", it really is one of the worst. Have you noticed how many hydrogen cars are around, and the filling infrastructure to run them ? No, that's because there are (in real terms) SFA
To start with, there is no compatibility at all between storage and dispensing options for hydrogen and any current fuel. That means you need a massive investment before vehicles are practical, and that won't happen without there being lots of vehicles to use it - OR there being massive subsidies (ie we all pay for it somehow) to make it happen.

As a fuel it is really impractical. It needs massive pressures and/or incredible cold temperatures before you can get a modicum of usable fuel into a space small enough to go in a car. So you end up with massive and heavy tanks for a pittance of range, making batteries look really really good ! And for good measure, it takes MASSIVE amounts of energy to get it into such a storable condition.
And hydrogen leaks through everything. So you CANNOT park your car in a garage because it's a safety risk with the gas leaking out, and your tank will be empty in a week without even using it.

It's not even clean unless we build so many new nuclear stations that we don't know what to do with the power. Otherwise it's high-carbon whether it comes from steam reforming of coal or electrolysis from carbon fuel generated lecky. It could be practical to make hydrogen by electrolysis in equatorial latitudes where solar PV would make sense, and there are large arid areas where huge solar farms wouldn't have the land use issues we have here - but then it's not easily transportable to where we'd need it. And then there's the issue that a lot of the best land for this is in countries where "we'd rather not be reliant on them".

A "better" fuel is methanol, which can be made fairly easily (AIUI) if you have a good supply of hydrogen and atmospheric COs. The benefits there are that you could make it where the sunshine (solar PV lecky) is abundant and ship it easily to where it's needed. It has the advantage of being compatible with existing storage/distribution/dispensing infrastructure (ie it can go in the same tanks/pipes/pumps/ etc) as petrol and diesel, so incremental use is easy.
Also, with minor mods (different seals - if they aren't already compatible so as to handle ethanol) and some simple software changes, it can be used in any modern car. Such software changes are minor (almost needed for high ethanol content anyway) and would cost "almost nothing" to put in at the design stage. Cars so equipped could run on ANY mix of petrol, ethanol, methanol - literally any mix from 100% of one, to a mix of all three.

Methanol is also fairly safe.
It burns with far less radiant heat than petrol. Ever see video of the pits at some race events- where suddenly you see the pit crew going nuts with buckets of water ? That's when they've got one of those almost invisible methanol/ethanol fires and all they need to deal with it is buckets of water, and there's no heat damage away from the flames themselves ! You only need to add a little petrol and it becomes visible while burning.
And if someone ingests it, it's not too dangerous. The treatment for methanol ingestion is a large dose of ethanol (it displaces the methanol from being metabolised so it gets excreted before it does any damage) plus a large dose of calcium to deal with the decalcification caused by the ethanol. Similarly if it gets aspirated - same treatment.
Petrol/diesel on the other hand ... Ingesting either of them is "bad". And if you aspirate some ? It coats the inside of your lungs and restricts the transfer of oxygen - the only treatment for which is to put you on pure oxygen and hope it's enough to keep you alive until your body can clear it.

To be a useful vector, the H2/Electricity must be generated in a carbon neutral way

Which isn't going to happen (in sufficient quantity) in our lifetimes.

 

[John D v2.0]

@Nozzle interesting stats! So basically the only saving in co2 is down to improved efficiency of a battery and motor (60%) compared with carrying a combustion engine around (30%). Which would be more substantial in slower traffic.
However the road side pollution would be massively reduced because the no2 and particulates simply aren't produced by most power stations, although I wonder if the recent "coal free days" would be more or less likely in future!

 

[JohnW2]

57 properties in my road and only 3 have off street parking.

Indeed, I was going to make a similar comment. In my village, only 20% or so of the houses have off-street parking, and I imagine that many other areas are similar.

Even if one does have off-street parking, and can guarantee to park outside one's house (unusual!), I don't quite see how one could get electricity to the car in an acceptable fashion.

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnW2]

@Nozzle interesting stats! So basically the only saving in co2 is down to improved efficiency of a battery and motor (60%) compared with carrying a combustion engine around (30%).

You're talking about the current 'energy mix'. If this EV business were to become viable within the next few decades (not 23 years!), which I doubt, the only hope would presumably be for the additional generating capacity to be primarily nuclear? Does anyone know what is the 'effective carbon footprint' of nuclear generation? (presumably pretty low, but also presumably not 'zero').

However the road side pollution would be massively reduced because the no2 and particulates simply aren't produced by most power stations...

Agreed.

Kind Regards, John

 

[SimonH2]

When looking at "coal free" days, take that with a huge handful of salt when the leap is made to "low carbon".
To start with, CCGT stations are expensive (capital wise). If you ask the operator to ramp up/down the power a lot then they lose a lot of their efficiency and massively increase their maintenance costs. So as well as increasing the cost/unit from running them at a lower duty cycle (less units generated/capital cost employed), you increase the variable costs (maintenance) at the same time as reducing the units generated.
So that creates an incentive to build cheaper OCGT plants. These are "less intolerant" of power changes (though it still increased thermal stresses and maintenance costs), but the CO2 emissions/unit are higher.
So all these intermittent sources (especially wind) have a side effect of increasing costs and CO2 emissions from the remaining generators.
EDIT: That may seem slightly OT for coal. Coal is worse than CCGT for load following which is why they are generally used for base load when needed - with OCGT used for rapid demand response.

And of course, most of the coal stations would be shut down anyway during summer - planned maintenance while demand is low. I doubt we'll see the same sort of publicity in winter along the lines of "wind doing SFA, coal stations maxed out"

If this EV business were to become viable within the next few decades (not 23 years!), which I doubt, the only hope would presumably be for the additional generating capacity to be primarily nuclear?

I think that's not going to happen. At present it doesn't look like we'll even get replacement for what we have now in that timescale - let alone additional capacity. Sizewell seems to be looking a bit shaky again these days, and Moorside (just up the cost from me) isn't looking any better
And it's not going to improve while the greenwash purveyors can continue spewing the "misrepresentations" that the politicians fall for.

 

[John D v2.0]

Let's look at it another way. Given internal combustion engine are killing us rapidly by their fumes, what is the most viable alternative?

• Telecommuting/virtual reality travel
• Online delivery of everything by drones or whatever
• Electric cars
• Walk everywhere/horse back riding
• Keep burning the oil

The way I see it, the electric cars abstract the vehicle from the means of collecting energy to power it. That can only be a good thing for future flexibility although at the cost of infrastructure.
Any other viable alternative I've missed?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I doubt we'll see the same sort of publicity in winter along the lines of "wind doing SFA, coal stations maxed out"

Don't see why that's a problem. Surely all the solar panels which we paid people to put on their roofs will take up the slack?

I mean - they must surely be useful, or we wouldn't have paid people so much to have them, would we.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Any other viable alternative I've missed?

Cycling?

And just as viable as your list is reducing what we consume, stop thinking that "economic growth" is essential (that also means reducing population growth), stop thinking that there is nothing wrong with importing asparagus from Peru, and so on.

 

[JohnW2]

I think that's not going to happen. At present it doesn't look like we'll even get replacement for what we have now in that timescale - let alone additional capacity. Sizewell seems to be looking a bit shaky again these days, and Moorside (just up the cost from me) isn't looking any better

I wouldn't disagree with any of that.

It seems rather crazy that 'we' are trying to fantasise about ways to produce and distribute all the additional electricity which would be needed to service a mass move to EV cars (in an incredibly short time scale) when there seems to be serious concerns/doubts about our ability to maintain even current production levels over the next few decades!

Kind Regards, John

 

[John D v2.0]

It is only in doubt due to current levels of investment. If the Chinese can build cities of 10 million plus in a couple of decades and a whole high speed train network, we can build a better power network in 20 years. But it requires investment.