1) Batteries are heavy. Doesn’t really matter. Mass has a small effect on economy, and even more so for an EV with a bi-directional powertrain (what actually matters is drag!) EVs are plenty fast enough already (tend to out perform ICE cars) even at their current “too heavy” weights……

2) Hydrogen Fuel cell cars also have a HV battery, because the fuel cell can’t be throttled quickly enough or put out enough power to cope with the high transient power peaks. The average “road load” for a typical passenger car is just 12kW (in the uk), but most modern cars have at least 100kW (and often a LOT more). Fitting a 100kW fuel cell would not be economically viable. And once you’ve got a battery, then the best thing to do is to ditch the fuel cell and just fit MORE battery.

I’d dispute both points. You will get significant inefficiency on charging and discharging, extra mass matters even if your braking is 100% regen braking. Extra mass in the battery (or fuel storage) means extra mass in the wheels, tyres, suspension structure, a larger footprint (which is worse for congestion and the area part of drag), safety structure. There was a bloke in the Guardian a few weeks back who is running a fleet of 20 prototype fuel cell vehicles, they get a decent range on 1.5kg of H2. They get the equivalent of 250mpg, which kicks the arse out of the efficiency of an IC or battery powered car, and matters regardless of where the power is coming from, but particularly until we are carbon free for electricity generation.
The car weighs a touch over 500kg, less than half of any comparable battery electric car. This is what enables its good efficiency. It is a two seater, but then so was the first Tesla (which was far, far heavier and less efficient)
It does away with batteries but instead uses super capacitors for transient response. This is a much more effective use as these will allow better transient response for weight than batteries.
The bloke makes some good points about the infrastructure you’d need to support motorway fast charge points if the majority of cars were to be battery powered.

Yes but on the other hand, EVs can be adopted gradually and organically, and industry can respond gradually as it sees the need.  An H infrastructure would require a huge infrastructure investment *before* anyone could do anything. As it is, without a widespread charging infrastructure large numbers of people can buy EVs and charge at home, as evidenced on this thread.  Not so with H.

Betamax was better than VHS remember.

Betamax was better than VHS remember.

So what you’re saying is buy whatever pornstars buy.

I assume the car you saw in the Guardian was the Riversimple. There is not a chance in hell that project will ever work. Yes the car is efficient (except with taxpayer’s money) but thats because its basically a moped with a roof unlike the Tesla roadster which actually went through proper NCAP crash testing etc. The Riversimple has so many flaws (like not being able to go up hills) that its become a bit of a joke. Shame really as they guy is obviously passionate and incredibly driven but he has also lost the plot.

 The most common range we see after charging is 320km.

How on earth do you manage that?! There’s a thread on SpeakEV where nobody has quite managed to take a Zoe 200 miles (~320km) at all yet; since we’ve had ours we’ve seen 180-ish miles at best, 145 miles at worst when it’s really cold and we had been doing motorway journeys beforehand.

This morning my wife was talking about replacing her car with a used Leaf. We’ll be fighting over the charger… 🙂

The riversimple car is a dead end, at least for the next 20 years.

Today, my i3, which can seat 5, has a decent sized boot, passes all current functional and crash safety tests, can be driven, serviced, and kept by anyone, and costs far less already makes it obsolete.  It returns around 160mpg in daily use.

The River simple isn’t actually THAT efficient. It has a very low consumption because it has low drag (not because it has low mass, although that helps, but it’s 70% low drag, 30% low mass at absolute best).  The RS car isn’t that efficient because it has more conversion stages to deal with and each stage, despite being pretty efficient, adds an additional loss.

Do the charging cables stretch very far or can you carry an extension around for when the lazy nob-eds park in the charging bays?

Today, my i3, which can seat 5, has a decent sized boot, passes all current functional and crash safety tests, can be driven, serviced, and kept by anyone, and costs far less already makes it obsolete. It returns around 160mpg in daily use.

Is that a genuine 160mpg or a 160mpg plus electricity? (this is a question, not argument)

My i3 is a BEV, so no range extender, and on average it consumes between 289 and 208 Wh/mile.  That’s the same amount of energy consumption as a conventional diesel car doing between 149 and 206 mpg.  Usually that energy equivalency is referred to as “eMPG”

(Of course, it doesn’t include charging losses (around 2% from a slow AC charge) and the electrical losses between power station and my house. (around 9% in the Uk on average for domestic 1ph 230v AC useage)

Denis99

We then decided that it would make some sense (although not entirely spreadsheet return on the investment) to have a Tesla Powerwall 2 battery installed.

This prevents the excess energy being exported to the grid, ( but we still get paid for this, as the calculation assumes you export 50% of the energy).

So, we can use the stored energy in the PW2, to run the home or charge the Leaf.

Hope that situation doesn’t last long, bit of a piss take tbh

bit of a piss take tbh

It sort of is – yes it’s free money, but it’s extremely unlikely to ever pay back the cost of the whole system, so there has to be some incentive for people to buy these things or it’ll take a lot longer for the technology and the industry to get off the ground. The subsidies won’t last forever, and are already greatly reduced from what they were a few years ago.

That said, my flabber is truly gasted by the fact that a smart meter isn’t compulsory when having a solar or storage system installed, so the meter will run backwards and totally undermine having different import / export prices.

I just drive with the flow of traffic and rarely use autoroutes Phil. It would be better if we didn’t go up and down to ski resorts as much. From new we’ve averaged 12.3 kWh/100km according to the display which assuming there are still 41kWh gives a range of 333km. The climate no doubt helps.

There’s a vid on Youtube of someone driving a Zoé around the périphérique in Paris untill it was nearly flat – 400km. The phrique is limited to 70kmh. Sticking to 50, 70 and 90kmh limits generally gets us around 320km. If the proposed 80 limit is applied we’ll get another 20-30km.

Edit to reply to the question: the charge cables are 5m long. On the domestic plug one I carry a 30m extension cable. Renault tell you not to but if you use a cable with thick enough wires there’s no problem. Never use a long extension cable tightly coiled, it will get hot enough to melt the plastic.

One of the other issues with the mass production of large battery vehicles using current technology is the mining and supply of rare earth elements such as cobalt and lithium. There is already an issue with the supply of platinum catalysts due to its use in cars. Plus the environmental costs when looking at the full life cycle of lithium batteries is not very good. Also there is a human cost of mining just look up cobalt mining in the Congo that is something we all should be worried about.

Maybe the future is producing combustible hydrocarbons through artificial photosynthesis, but probably not. Future predictions are often wrong.

Now compare this mess made by the mining of lithium with the mess made by the oil industry, kentishman.

No car is clean, no transport system is polution free, but objectively an electric car will halve the CO2 emissions per km compared with ICE, produce next to no local pollution, and achieve a very high level of recycling. Obviously this is dependent on how the electricity is produced and with an ever increasing proportion of renewables in the energy mix will improve with time.

Neither Lithium or Cobalt are Rare Earths (and Rare Earths aren’t that rare, e.g. cerium is as abundant as copper but we haven’t had much of a use for it until recently).

Lithium (an alkali metal) is widespread, we’re going for the equivalent of 19th century iron ore or coal at the moment – really pure stuff that’s cheap to process.

Cobalt is a transition metal and fairly rare. It’s still cheap at £20-26k per tonne. If the price goes higher, people will start working the waste from e.g. copper processing.

On top of that, there’s a lot of active research to substitute cheaper ingredients e.g. iron. Compared with the immediate devastation of oil production in the Niger Delta and the existential threat to out species of fossil fuel driven CO2 rises, I’m not worried by batteries.

@retro83

whats the problem?

its perfectly legal, and we have had years of exporting to the grid , where the grid has benefited greatly.

all we are doing is storing the energy we generate, and reduce the drain on the national grid.

part of this has involved our financial investment, our outlay.

£7500 solar panels – our money

£14000 EV car

£6500 Tesla battery

we did this for environmental issues, long term reduction / being subjected to increasing electricity costs.

Could have bought a diesel car and continued to pollute the local environment.

could have bought any manner of things that wouldn’t have had a direct impact on the local environment, but didn’t.

could have bought a flash bike , and Audi to drive to trail centres , but didn’t.

its about choice sometimes.

not a pisstake….

Once they find away to stabilise magnesium in a battery, lithium ion is dead in the water and the petrol engine will follow the day after.

Magnesium is very energy dense and readily available.

It’s just a matter of time.

Interesting few phrases you use “avoidance” ? we are informed by our supplier of the possibility of a TRIAD so react accordingly as it cost our firm £600,000 a few years back for 1/2 hour we ignored.

I understood it to be us helping out NG on not overloading the grid or we got shafted but your implication is its just a pure money grab?

There has been at least 1 TRIAD peak this year at 7pm which is past what I would consider usual commute time, I get that a huge swathe of the population works 9-5 so can cope with middle of the night charging

Avoidance is the correct term but it’s in no way dodgy as in tax avoidance, any energy manager worth his salt will be undertaking triad avoidance and the financial benefit is large versus the effort. It isn’t really doing the grid any favours though, the charge is there to discourage usage at that time and fund investment in the infrastructure required to deliver maximum demand, so avoidance leads to underfunding national Grid if you only cut load on triad days and it isn’t representative of your peak load at peak time. This is why they are reviewing the charging mechanism and currently in court fighting to get triad export revenue removed. From next year it looks like you won’t be allowed to use diesel generators for TRIAD avoidance, so that will force industry to adapt to better cutting load or boost grids income.

That 7pm triad call was a pain to say the least but will no doubt be more common in the future

Thanks for that greentricky.

I’m just an engineering manager who has to deal with the day to day TRIAD stuff but I am increasingly drawn into the energy management side of stuff. This TRIAD period we have managed to drop from our full demand of 1.4Mw to 24kw for the TRIAD duration, last year it was 105kw.

Yep your right the 7pm call was a pain as though our plant is set up for 24/7 running we usually only have staff on site 6am-6pm the rest of the time its a miller & engineer on call.

The added complication is with 4 TRIADS called in 1 week each covering 2 hours in a time when we have few staff available this means we loose our 8hrs planned maintenance stop on a Thursday given a 160hr a week run time. this impacts on efficiency of the plant so actually puts a greater load on at all other times.