as has been pointed out every kw used in an EV comes from fossil fuel in one way or another until we have infinite amounts
Even if that were true ( which it isn't, e.g. people charging overnight when wind is generating in a low demand period) at worst it's only displacing fossil fuel, er, fuel, from ICE, so carbon parity.
REE is wind and EVs achilles heel
at worst it’s only displacing fossil fuel, er, fuel, from ICE, so carbon parity.
good point - but the carbon saving with EVs is a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. We need massive reductions and then to sell that idea to developing nations along with the tech
2 degree rise is already going to happen 3 degrees is likely - thats catastrophic. the UK saving 10 % will make no difference globally - we need to be setting and example and to reduce our carbon footprint by a lot more.
REE _ I don't know the term. Can you explain?
But when I point out flaws in what you are saying then you make it personal and make personal attacks
Those weren't personal attacks. Your reasoning was deeply flawed, I called it out and explained it.
The scale of the problem cannot be met by fiddling around the edges with technological solutions.
I absolutely agree with this. I am (or was) only arguing specifically about the value of electrification for cars.
If you increase energy consumption you need more generation. the only way you have of getting that extra electricity is fossil fuel.
Why can't it come from people building more wind and solar farms?
OK molgrips its a personal attack and unhelpful if I do it and just puts folks back up but you do the same thing and its just unpicking arguements
I absolutely agree with this. I am (or was) only arguing specifically about the value of electrification for cars.
which by your own figures is an insignificant fiddling around the edges. EVs are not a significant part of the solution
.Why can’t it come from people building more wind and solar farms?
some can but not tomorrow and there are significant issues with both solar and wind - intermittent supply. there is no technological solution to this anywhere visible. Youcar batteries as storge is a good idea but cannot provide anything like enough byy your ownnumbers. Even if everyone conversts to electric and is prepared to give up 20% of their charge its still only 10 hours supply by your numbers. Both unreasonably overoptimistic anyway IMO
I think we have enough wind in the mix now that its already causing issues with intermittent supply Intermittent supply is not much use for charging EVs -again think of that winter high pressure event. 2 weeks of no wind and minimal PV genweration. More turbines does not solve this
some can but not tomorrow
Not everyone's buying an EV tomorrow.
Have you considered writing a letter to the people who are planning national grid and generating infrastructure? They may not have considered these things 😉
TJ - I got 3.5 earths - and that included my work related flights.
Stop breeding
A surgeon put paid to that many years ago. I assume you're not suggesting I euthanase the teenagers I have already? Howwever if nobody in my generation had kids I'm not sure who's looking after you in your care home (not to mention funding your pension/care costs etc).
do not use a car,
I do use a car. I haven't used one for commuting for 20 years though.
do not fly for holidays
I would be lying if I said I have never flown for holidays, I do but even without Covid certainly less than once a year. Probably once every 3 yrs. Its a token gesture but I've been carbon offsetting personal flights for 6 or 7 years, and persuaded my employer to do the same when they started travelling again after covid.
Never “upgrade” only replace when worn out
I have a 26" MTB! I'm not big buyer of stuff to replace working things. I'm probably about to replace my phone because it not holding charge for more than 2 hrs or so - its 5.5 yrs old.
Eat local food only
We probably have a little room for improvement there, but I really enjoy cooking and genuinely find fresh local stuff is nicer anyway. I'm in the fortunate position to be able to afford high quality local food.
Keep your house cold(er)
I guess we all could go yet another degree colder, I don't have ice on the inside of the windows like I did when I grew up - but compared to many people my house is cool. Compared to my inlaws its absolutely baltic.
No pets
My laziness is saving the planet here!
So I've never really considered myself a hardcore tree hugging ecowarrier (but like everyone I believe I am better than average!).
I suspect you were being "penalised" for living alone when you scored highly?
I think we have enough wind in the mix now that its already causing issues with intermittent supply Intermittent supply is not much use for charging EVs -again think of that winter high pressure event. 2 weeks of no wind and minimal PV genweration. More turbines does not solve this
have you looked at historic data for the UK? I don't think there are any days when there was no wind gen at all, and theres a reasonably inverse relationship with solar even in winter. Most people don't need to charge (or fully charge) their car every day - intermittent supply isn't actually that bad for them (supported by some smart software that works out what to do - and tariffs that make it attractive).
once again we have the "EVs will be good once we have this new thing" ( smart charging software and tariffs)
The basic issue with EVs is they give people the impression they are doing something significant to reduce energy usage when infact the savings are minimal
The answer is to not move single people around in 2 tonne boxes not make them potentially a little less CO2 intensive. Radical solutions are needed and those solutione need to be scalable world wide
I suspect you were being “penalised” for living alone when you scored highly?
I suspect it was my answers around car driving - I usually score 1.5 ish on those things
Sorry @tjagain.
While we are still dependent on fossil fuels for electricity generation in part each kw of electricity in cars used is an extra kw of electricity produced by fossil fuel – and don’t forget transmission losses. You also have to figure in the pollution from raw materials
Even accounting for transmission losses EV's work out more efficient than ICE.
Name me one country that does not rely on fossil fuel for a significant part of its energy mix
[url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#Mode_of_production ]France[/url]
They ARE one of the highest oil importers in the world but thats mostly used for transport and very little on generation as you can see from the table. Less than 8% of their grid energy is generated by fossil fuels.
Electric car usage does not make any significant reduction in energy usage or co2 production overall
Wrong.
How can it when its still relying on fossil fuel generation?
Every extra kw used in an ev means another kw from fossil fuels. Wind can never cover 100% nor can PV
think of the winter high pressure events
Nuclear. Now I know, you're never going to agree to that, but it is a practical and viable solution. To say nothing for anaerobic digestion and similar technologies.
Nucler can never be a major player – not enough fuel – its only a few % of worldwide energy consumption and we only have 40 years of fuel at that %.
So 40 years to get our shit together and stop using fossil fuels. Doesn't sound difficult to me.
Whilst we're talking about facts, would you like those textbooks I offered you some time ago to better educate yourself on the subject? Because really, you would be doing yourself and your arguments a favour. There are so many holes, wrong assumptions and shortfalls it's not funny. I'm not trying to change your mind but at least improve the quality of your arguments!
To be fair neither of us are renewable energy engineers, however given a wide enough range of renewable energy sources (e.g. tidal, wave, wind, solar and so on) over a wide enough range, some biofuel, a lot of storage of various types, and serious reductions in consumption, I don’t think you can say that some fossil fuel usage is inevitable.
@molgrips correct.
As a user I'l add a few points on EVs.
That article up there doesn't surprise. EVs are more economically viable the more miles you do so high mileage users are more likely to find them a sensible economic choice. Most of the Tesla Model S in these parts are Taxis.
We have two vehicles between three of us, the petrol car has been used for one trip this year. In multi-car households the EV generally gets used most because it's cheaper to use and less polluting (and often the nicer drive), so yes it will do a higher mileage than either of the two ICEs we had before but the total milegage hasn't changed.
I charge mine at night off peak except on long jouneys which happen half a dozen time a year. The gas/oil part of the electricity generation mix is often zero in France at night.
I still use public transport in preference to the car when practical - my next holiday will be bus/train/walk.
The EV isn't the answer but unless you want your emergency services, district nurses, doctors, plumbers, delivery men... turning up with a horse and cart it's part of it.
As for gas, I cut it off and insulated the house years ago for pollution, CO2 and geopolitical reasons.
Nuclear. Now I know, you’re never going to agree to that, but it is a practical and viable solution
REeally - how soon can we make the UK like france and how can we expand it to the rest of the world?
two major issues. New nuclear takes at least 20 years to build. Nuclear makes for IIRC about 4% of the worlds energy consumption. Need to scale that up by a factor of five at least to make any significant savings so thats ten years of fuel
Again Squirrel king your arguement is "pie in the sky later"
however given a wide enough range of renewable energy sources (e.g. tidal, wave, wind, solar and so on) over a wide enough range, some biofuel, a lot of storage of various types, and serious reductions in consumption, I don’t think you can say that some fossil fuel usage is inevitable.
Again pie in the sky / future technical advances will save us
tidal - great potential, many years from actually contributing
Storage - we ave nothing on the horizon that can store the amount of energy needed not even close
Biofuel - have you worked pout how much land will be needed to grow those crops? A very ethical solution to use land to grow crops to make electricity rathe rthan food or cut down virgin forests
Squirrelking - I know you know more than me about this stuff but please stop saying " this future tech which we don't have now will save us" We need solutions using tech we have now and need to take radical action now
some can but not tomorrow and there are significant issues with both solar and wind – intermittent supply. there is no technological solution to this anywhere visible.
Sorry I admit to not reading the whole thread (but I get the immediate v medium term views being expressed here), but the UK government plans to increase offshore wind capacity 4-fold by 2030 to 40 GW. From licencing to sites going live has to be delivered within 5-years under current UK rules; so that amount of turbines going up over the next 2-10 years is going to significantly increase.
This is a cool map to look at the developing state of various OSWF https://map.4coffshore.com/offshorewind/
There is a lot of work going into the geological storage of energy e.g. putting the wind energy produced into old offshore wells, or onshore mines etc https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/how-uks-disused-mine-shafts-plan-to-store-renewable-energy Yes, it is some way off, but it is very actively being considered. Some other things in this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60066690 all of which are are some way off happening, but classic batteries are not the only thing being worked on.
Really? to provide 20+ % of the UKs energy needs? and BTW – there is no chance of a majority having EVs any time soon. Vast numbers of us have no way of charging them because we do not have off street parking
Absolutely. If you don't have off-street parking then you can have a home battery installed, or plug it into a lamp post. 0% finance etc should make it doable. Deal with hobby landlords blocking affordable housing stock and force them to fit the batteries to all their properties first.
Now for the numbers:
Peak demand in the UK is 40GW (based on yesterday's figures at 7pm), of which 15GW was provided by fossil fuels. Let's say that agile pricing and social changes cut energy use at homes at peak times by 5%, and over the next few years we increase renewable capability by 15%. So we now need to find 2GW (or ~29GWh) of electricity.
Tesla Powerwall has a capacity of 13.5kWh. Let's work on a typical home battery (or EV) having 10kWh available. This means to completely replace the fossil fuel requirements at peak times needs about three million batteries. It's a big number, but it's not unachievable. 10,000 container sized battery packs also do the same thing, so we'd have a mixture of both.
More than this this post was about reducing dependence on Russian gas, so I don't think it would be unreasonable to keep some CCGT power stations and just store the gas somewhere when it comes in by boat or something, and run them occasionally to help when we get a series of dull cold calm days in winter.
This can all be done, it just costs money and makes things inconvenient for people unwilling to change habits.
@tjagain Rare Earth Elements, neodymium etc used magnets, semiconductors and such like, requires absolutely horrendous strip minimg with overburden to ore ratios in millions to one although some are biproducts of other extractive processes
Yes this is an important point - batteries aren't great environmentally. They just move the problem elsewhere.
Absolutely. If you don’t have off-street parking then you can have a home battery installed, or plug it into a lamp post.
My block contains around 80 properties and has around 15 on street parking places and no off street. So tell me how we can all have EVs? This is not an uncommon situation
France
They ARE one of the highest oil importers in the world but thats mostly used for transport and very little on generation as you can see from the table. Less than 8% of their grid energy is generated by fossil fuels.
Sort of. Nuclear can't easily respond to demand fluctuations, and because they have so much (more than 70%) they are heavily reliant on imports and exports to balance their grid(as well as hydro). In other words, their system doesn't work unless it's connected to other systems which use a much higher proportion of fossil fuels.
It's possible that grid-scale storage developments will reduce their reliance on other grids, but the idea that we could "all do a France" doesn't stack up at present.
My block contains around 80 properties and has around 15 on street parking places and no off street. So tell me how we can all have EVs? This is not an uncommon situation
I'm guessing with a 15/80 ratio you don't all have ICE's either? So to some extent at least its the wrong premise for the question. I'm pretty convinced that on-demand cars are the solution in cities, its ultimately Uber's dream, no need to own a car you just tap the app and one the size you need appears then when you get to your destination it goes to the next customer or goes to the charging station. It needs automated vehicles to make it viable - that IS a lifestyle change. Until then - those houses are really not ideal for anyone who needs a car for commuting, whether its ICE or EV. What percentage of the population live in housing with off street parking? As a trend those areas are poorer served by public transport, further from facilities etc. You can argue about that being the mistake in the first place but its neither something an individual can directly control nor something a government can fix quickly so demanding immediate lifestyle changes to avoid commuting is pointless.
I know you are convinced the answer is for everyone to live very close to their workplace and walk or cycle and you said it before you retired, but was perhaps simpler as a nurse as then you had quite a range of choices on where you want to live. Imagine you worked in one of the manufacturing facilities in Livingston or Glenrothes? Is that where you want to live (nothing wrong with either - but you chose Leith so seems you want a different lifestyle)? Now if your partner works in a niche role in East Kilbride or Dundee - where are you living now? Who's job takes priority? And then in many sectors job security is nothing like in nursing - so if one of you loses a job can you find another one within walk/cycle distance? Since you are looking for radical change today it has to be about the housing stock and employment we have today not town planning and government strategy fixes.
once again we have the “EVs will be good once we have this new thing” ( smart charging software and tariffs)
No those things are already available today. Even the vehicle to grid stuff is available today in the UK, albeit not widely.
The basic issue with EVs is they give people the impression they are doing something significant to reduce energy usage when infact the savings are minimal
I think you are mistaken why people have EV's! We have one, I know quite a few people with one. None of them have ever suggested it was anything other than a purely economic decision!
The answer is to not move single people around in 2 tonne boxes not make them potentially a little less CO2 intensive. Radical solutions are needed and those solutione need to be scalable world wide
Well stop arguing on the internet and put your retirement to good use and get developing this instant global low CO2 people moving solution. FWIW I agree there needs to be scalable worldwide solutions - but part of that should be recognising that not every country is the same. If we have tidal power, "but what about Switzerland", is a naff reason to dismiss it, just as when Spain says - actually we do a lot with Solar we can hardly go - "no point in a Scottish winter".
BUT the thread was clearly driven by the Russian / Ukraine issue - so I'm interested in things we can/might do in March 2022 that have an impact during that war and so when eventually stability is restored we aren't just turning on a flow from russia to bring prices back down.
i would say around 40 ICEs perhaps more - the fight for parking is funny. 80 dwellings and a fair few of them are HMOs folk end up parking several hundred metres away
I chose to live in leith because thats where I was told my workplace would be moving to ( it didn't)
Both my partner and I made sure we only took jobs within muscle power of home. If i worked in glenrothes / livingston would still live within muscle power of work. this is an issue of fundamental importance to me and to Julie and we based our lives around it. She turned down jobs that were too far away.
Well stop arguing on the internet and put your retirement to good use and get developing this instant global low CO2 people moving solution
there isn't one. thats the point and pretending there is leads to the inertia that means global warming on a catastrophic scale is now going to happen
No those things are already available today. Even the vehicle to grid stuff is available today in the UK, albeit not widely.
again you make my point for me. We need solutions today not in the future.
Again pie in the sky / future technical advances will save us
I really think you are misunderstanding the argument here. We are talking about how EVs can be part of a realistic decarbonisation strategy. We ARE NOT saying that this will save us all.
No those things are already available today. Even the vehicle to grid stuff is available today in the UK, albeit not widely.
again you make my point for me. We need solutions today not in the future.
No you are arguing against EVs without actually understanding what is and isn't available today and what the barriers are to wider adoption.
1. I can charge my EV on an "agile tariff" - i tell an app how charged the car needs to be by what time the following day and some software works out how to do that with the least cost - ie. using "excess" power on the grid.
You said that technology was future stuff. It's not, its widely available today - many people on the forum have it. There's nothing special about the car - its the charging box/app from the power company that you need. The only issue any new EV owner faces is that switching tariff to access these type of prices is a minefield at the moment, and switching company is even harder. Those are things the government and regulator could fix quickly if they want.
2. Vehicle to grid solutions. These are available, including in the UK. As I understand it not all EVs support it, and certainly not all power companies do. Ofgem are supportive - saying it could add 15GW to UK peak capacity if all EVs support it. There are obviously issues to sort with standardisation etc - but this is really in the hands of gov, powerco's and veh mans to make happen. If we can make a vaccine in record time we can scale this up if it helps reduce oil/gas demand and stop WW3/Attrocities against civilians.
you appear to have decided EVs are bad and now finding evidence to justify the position. Nobody is suggesting they are a magic bullet, but they are clearly part of the overall solution - and bring other benefits immediately like air quality.
My block contains around 80 properties and has around 15 on street parking places and no off street. So tell me how we can all have EVs? This is not an uncommon situation
Unless I'm missing something really obvious I'm assuming that the existing car owners in your block find somewhere to park? I'm not suggesting everyone who doesn't own a car buys an EV.
Hence the argument for household batteries. Although interestingly following some explosions in Germany the manufacturer of one brand has disabled all their batteries remotely.
I can also charge mine on only renewable energy. It measures when there's an excess of renewable and charges then. Or I can set it to simply prefer renewable but charge to my target level anyway. If I do this, it increases the power when the wind blows more, and it predicts this based on short range weather forecast and it shows you when it plans to put the most charge in.
These are available, including in the UK. As I understand it not all EVs support it, and certainly not all power companies do
Yes, you need a car, a charger, a meter and a power company that supports it.
A key point, for me, is that these things are all possible, but they won't become part of the solution unless EVs are widespread. So when we get to the point we need a new car, if we buy an EV we are contributing to the uptake of the technology which will enable further solutions.
Of course, I'd prefer it wasn't dependent on market forces. I'd rather the government started producing tons of home power banks and came round and installed them for free in your house. I'd rather the government was subsidising an interconnected decarbonisation strategy, incentivising local working and public transport and all the rest of it. But it's not, so here we are.
We need solutions today
We do. But - what are they? What are you going to do *today* that will solve the problem? And don't just say 'drive less' because that is far more difficult to implement than you seem to think.
My proposals for energy reduction:
1. Really incentivise remote working where possible now that we've proved it can be done in many cases, and we even have the infrastructure now.
2. Free insulation programme for housing stock.
3. Huge investment in green PT that's actually planned properly not just left to market forces. The Welsh Government are doing something along those lines in SE Wales, for which I commend them, we'll have to see how that goes but it's for another thread. I might start one actually.
One of our biggest problems is the buying of shit manufactured in other countries. I don't have a solution for persuading people to buy less of it, short of trashing our economy so much that we cannot afford any of it. This is being worked on though...
My block contains around 80 properties and has around 15 on street parking places and no off street. So tell me how we can all have EVs?
That's going to have to change by 2030 or so. People are building on-street parking solutions right now, I'm sure we will see them being rolled out and trialled soon. If a car owner has somewhere to park, there should be a charging point there.
Article here about it https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway. It mentions a few things that I had forgotten - you don't always have to charge at home, you can charge at your destination for example. If there were banks of rapid chargers at every supermarket then you could simply top up whilst you shop. Or if your car charges fast enough you could just go out and fill up like you do with petrol. The fastest cars now can go from 10-80% in 18 minutes, so if you get down to say 50% you could put on 100 miles or so of driving in a matter of minutes, you could just sit in your car and look at your phone for 10 mins easily enough. Of all the changes we need to make this would probably be one of the easiest!
Just hoping for new clean ways to generate electricity. Unlimited clean electricity would do away with the majority of Gas and could help to reduce carbon emissions of transport.
Read about using geothermal power, drilling 10k down or so under sites of fossil fuel burning power stations using lasers so the captured steam can utilise existing boilers and grid infrastructure. Seemed doable. More so than Nuclear fusion which still seems decades away.
But whoever argued about reducing energy of usage is on point. Just swapping fleet of vehicles to EV is not enough to reduce climate change and still results in congestion, severance etc. The cheaper transport is the more it is used providing it is still convenient. Which is why we struggle to get people out of their cars.
REeally – how soon can we make the UK like france and how can we expand it to the rest of the world?
two major issues. New nuclear takes at least 20 years to build. Nuclear makes for IIRC about 4% of the worlds energy consumption. Need to scale that up by a factor of five at least to make any significant savings so thats ten years of fuel
Again Squirrel king your arguement is “pie in the sky later”
Squirrelking – I know you know more than me about this stuff but please stop saying ” this future tech which we don’t have now will save us” We need solutions using tech we have now and need to take radical action now
So what's your solution other than an abrupt totalitarian stop?
And no, it doesn't take that long to build, especially when you have a raft of type approved designs to choose from. Not even the N4's took that long to construct. EPR's work, we know they work and we know how to build them. They were a terrible idea in as much as they were never ready for the market when they started building them but they are now running in China and Finland.
Your calculations are off as well, for a start it totally ignores reprocessing and assumes the fuel route is a completely open cycle using only virgin fuel.
As for the timing, it's been kicked down the road for years, we should have been on this 20 years ago. As it is this present tranche was started 13 years ago and we have nothing to show for it because we left it to market forces.
This isn't "future tech", it's here, now and has been for years! We could have an ABWR up inside 6 years if we had the bloody ambition.
My block contains around 80 properties and has around 15 on street parking places and no off street. So tell me how we can all have EVs? This is not an uncommon situation
Why would/should you? You live in a city so multi-modal public transport should be easy! Where I live, less so. If I lived in a city like Edinburgh I'd struggle to think of a reason to own a car if there was easy access to a car club for journeys further afield.
Sort of. Nuclear can’t easily respond to demand fluctuations, and because they have so much (more than 70%) they are heavily reliant on imports and exports to balance their grid(as well as hydro). In other words, their system doesn’t work unless it’s connected to other systems which use a much higher proportion of fossil fuels.
It’s possible that grid-scale storage developments will reduce their reliance on other grids, but the idea that we could “all do a France” doesn’t stack up at present.
You're right, that was a bit cheeky.
As for the timing, it’s been kicked down the road for years, we should have been on this 20 years ago
Tchernobyl in 86 resulted in a reduction in investment and Fukushima in 2011 turned energy policy around particularly in Germany.
https://energiewinde.orsted.de/klimawandel-umwelt/fukushima-atomausstieg-deutschland
At the time of the German nuclear plant closures they were closing plants with many years of operating life left in them while here in France we were extending the life of objectively less safe plants that posed more threat to the German population. If ever there was a time for a concerted European energy programme to be worked out it was then. But no, each country went its own way with Germany opting for imported gas and brown coal generation to replace nuclear.
Yup totally agree. Caveat being Sizewell B was built post-Chernobyl but that was still (started) under a nationalised industry.
Anyway, that doesn't actually answer the question of what we could do now. As individuals, a little, but the system is gamed against us. TJ is right in that individuals can't do much and EVs are greenwash if you are trying to maintain the same lifestyle.
What we (as a nation, I can only speak for the UK) need to do is find some ambition! TFL has a working multi-modal public transport operating system. Copy it far every city or even regions or nations and implement it immediately. I'm sure the system could cope with Scotland or Wales levels of users given how many undoubtedly use it every day now.
Regulate the transport sector, all of it, take franchises off of poor operators (Lothian is a good model), stopnspaffing money on quangos to mess about with stuff we know works from elsewhere.
Not even the start...
