BBC Top Story. Diesel & Petrol cars banned from 2040

Aylesbury_Duck

50Twuncle wrote: »

Lorries / Trucks put out much more pollutants than cars.....
As do coaches and buses

Your statements mean nothing unless you specify and quantify.

What do you mean by "more pollutants"? Do you mean per mile travelled? Over gross aggregated mileage? Which particular pollutants?

As an example, some lorries and buses emit more NOx than cars under similar conditions, because they are equipped with technology not always included on cars. With buses, even if they emit more pollutants per mile travelled than a car (which is not necessarily true), do they emit more than the aggregated car jounrneys they have replaced? Are you measuring by distance, by passenger mile, by kilogram hauled?

You may believe that nasty old trucks and buses are worse polluters than cars, but that isn't necessarily the case.

Even if we took your glib statements as being true, they aren't good reasons for not taking action. Unless you're one of those people who believes that until we have the perfect solution for all environmental problems we should do nothing?

maximania

Nobbie1967 wrote: »

I did and the final summary is just a guess that when you take into account every other activity connected with gasoline production, you might approach 6kw. But even this guess is not comparing like with like as it ignores all the activities associated with battery production, charging and infrastructure required for EV.

What has battary production, charging and infrastruture got to do with the amount of electricty used to produce 1 gallon of petrol?

I'm sure a few pounds was spent on Oil pipe lines, petrol stations, Tankers, oil rigs, Oil refinerys, etc.

maximania

50Twuncle wrote: »

You cannot be serious - 8GW - ie) 8,0000,0000,000 watts - for 37 million vehicles (at the moment) only allows 216 watts per vehicle -

Yes..exactly right. 216 watts every hour. It seams a silly small amount but we are talking about how many miles, on average, a single car will drive in a hour.

Lets turn that calculation around ..300 billion miles are driven by 37 million cars. Each car does (on average) less than 1 mile in every hour. (300billion/37million.. /365../24) = 0.92miles each hour

Renult zoe can do 4.5 miles/kw so it needs 0.92miles/4.5 = 204watts each hour.

So 8GW is not a bad starting point as an estimate. Agreed that losses can be quite high but we don't know in 20 years how much could be charged directly from local solar power/battary storage. None of this includes the power saving from not producing so much petrol.

I don't see why everyone is so worried about the power situation. We currently use between 20Gw (night) and 30Gw (day) so there is plenty of capacity to charge all your cars overnight.

The Department of Energy & Climate Change estimate the total reserve capacity of the Uk power generation is close on 84GW (2015) .. we only use about a third of it.

Martyn1981

maximania wrote: »

What has battary production, charging and infrastruture got to do with the amount of electricty used to produce 1 gallon of petrol?

I'm sure a few pounds was spent on Oil pipe lines, petrol stations, Tankers, oil rigs, Oil refinerys, etc.

If it helps I worked out similar numbers to yours a while back, here's an extract:

Martyn1981 wrote: »

My thoughts:

Firstly if leccy demand goes up, then we can scale up our leccy supply infrastructure (supply & demand?)
For 30m cars driving an average of 8,000 miles at 3miles/kWh we'd need around 80TWh more than the 350TWh (or so) we currently consume.

Secondly we don't really need any more capacity to meet the extra generation. About half would come from savings in refining fuel (about 6.5kWh per gallon) and the other half from the gas plants spare capacity as they currently run at low levels through the night, with 10-15GW spare for around 10hrs. So we could cope today.

Moving from low efficiency petrol/diesel to high efficiency (and cleaner) gas generation would be an instant win. Then we expand PV, wind, tidal, hydro, bio etc, to displace that additional gas generation.

[Edit: I've used a figure of 3 miles/kWh, but many people seem to be getting 4 miles/kWh, and I think the Tesla model 3 is similar at around 250Wh/mile. M.]

So 'just' for cars, we'd need to increase leccy generation by about 10%, and to put that into perspective, the percentage of generation from renewables has increased from about 5% ten years ago to 25% in 2016, and expected to reach 33% by 2020, so there's no problem building more generating capacity, we just have to have the right policies and mechanisms to encourage it.

Gas capacity is very quick to build and very cheap too, though the cost of generation is already higher than on-shore wind and PV. Off-shore wind contracts should (this year) come in at less than Hinkley Point C, so that's another 'cheap' source.

Whilst the build out of these technologies has varied, they have at times been deployed at roughly 1% of UK demand per annum each, so we could deploy PV, on-shore wind, off-shore wind and the tidal lagoon package at roughly 1% pa each over the next ten years, taking RE from 25% to 65%, and easily providing the +10% needed for EV's over the next 20+yrs.


EV vans already exist, and Tesla are building a battery semi truck, whilst Nikola are building a hydrogen truck, there are short range electric autonomous ships arriving, so none of the problems are too great.

Plus of course, the enormous achievements in EV's and batteries have been achieved so far with a relatively modest build out, similar to PV price reductions prior to 2010. But after 2010, when demand 'exploded' the prices absolutely tumbled. BNEF expect the li-ion prices of today (around $250/kWh) to fall to $73/kWh by 2030.

50Twuncle

maximania wrote: »

Yes..exactly right. 216 watts every hour. It seams a silly small amount but we are talking about how many miles, on average, a single car will drive in a hour.

Lets turn that calculation around ..300 billion miles are driven by 37 million cars. Each car does (on average) less than 1 mile in every hour. (300billion/37million.. /365../24) = 0.92miles each hour

Renult zoe can do 4.5 miles/kw so it needs 0.92miles/4.5 = 204watts each hour.

So 8GW is not a bad starting point as an estimate. Agreed that losses can be quite high but we don't know in 20 years how much could be charged directly from local solar power/battary storage. None of this includes the power saving from not producing so much petrol.

I don't see why everyone is so worried about the power situation. We currently use between 20Gw (night) and 30Gw (day) so there is plenty of capacity to charge all your cars overnight.

The Department of Energy & Climate Change estimate the total reserve capacity of the Uk power generation is close on 84GW (2015) .. we only use about a third of it.

See this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_Electricity_Capacity_Margin.PNG for the true energy spare capacity in the system (at present) - it looks as if it is around 20% - so I don't know where your figure of 66% comes from ...(if we only use 1/3 of our capacity)
These figures date back 7 years (2010) - which will only have got worse, since more oil and coal fired stations have gone off line since then....

Martyn1981

50Twuncle wrote: »

See this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_Electricity_Capacity_Margin.PNG for the true energy spare capacity in the system (at present) - it looks as if it is around 20% - so I don't know where your figure of 66% comes from ...(if we only use 1/3 of our capacity)
These figures date back 7 years (2010) - which will only have got worse, since more oil and coal fired stations have gone off line since then....

Whilst we have lost coal (and any significant oil generation went before 2010), we have gained renewables.

maximania's numbers are pretty much perfect. We have around 80GW of capacity, we use 40GW on average, varying from around 16GW (summer early hour minimum) to 55GW (winter evening peak) with of course some short term spikes (minutes to maybe an hour or two on rare occasions) when the peaker plants and 'diesel farms' come into play, if necessary.

During the weekday, when parked cars will be charged with people in work, demand is about 40GW, though it can appear much lower at times (25-30GW on Gridwatch) as most PV and about 1/3rd of wind appears on the LV side, so shows up as demand reduction on the NG.

At night when most cars will get most charging, demand is around 20GW, so about 1/3rd of the available capacity.

Max's numbers and mine (which are admittedly back of a fag packet) seem to match exactly at 8GW for EV's and about 4GW reduction in petrol refining. 8GW is roughly 20% of current average demand, whilst 4GW (net) is roughly 10%.

I'm not trying to belittle a 4GW increase, but between early 2017 and 2020, off-shore wind alone should add about 5% (roughly 2GW) to supplies. BTW that's 2GW average generation taking the 40-50% capacity factor into account, not 2GW of installed capacity.

Martyn1981

50Twuncle wrote: »

These figures date back 7 years (2010) - which will only have got worse, since more oil and coal fired stations have gone off line since then....

You might also be interested to know that we having a growing amount of interconnectors, about 5GW current and 10-11GW with planned new links.

An interesting HVDC interconnector is the one to Norway (expected completion 2020) this is because Norway has vast amounts of hydro generation already, and at least 20GW's of potential new hydro they could build out, if Europe wants it / is willing to buy it.

The UK could even consider paying for additional 2 way HVDC links to Norway and the financing of catchment lagoons on existing hydro facilities, so that we could use PHS (pumped hydro storage) to store excess renewable generation, as the UK doesn't have much additional potential for PHS.

So there is no shortage of possibilities, and an increased demand for leccy will naturally lead to an increased supply ...... if the price is right.

Cornucopia

Also, we will no doubt develop in-home energy storage associated with domestic PV, and even the possibility that an EV parked for a prolonged period might be able to donate, say, 10% of its stored charge back to the grid upon request.

davemorton

Pah! Nowt a bit vegie oil cant sort out!!

Martyn1981

Cornucopia wrote: »

Also, we will no doubt develop in-home energy storage associated with domestic PV, and even the possibility that an EV parked for a prolonged period might be able to donate, say, 10% of its stored charge back to the grid upon request.

Domestic storage is rolling out in Australia & Hawaii (where import prices are high) and Germany and Sweden (where the governments are supporting/subsidising them to smooth out peaks and troughs).

In the UK they are still too expensive, so rollout is very slow, but hopefully by 2020(ish) things will work out, in the meantime several DNO's are supporting domestic and commercial storage installs to investigate how this will help support the LV grid.

For V2G (vehicle to grid) the government has announced support:

Government backs vehicle to grid with £20 million competition

and recent academic research found that V2G improves battery life:

V2G found to improve the lifetime of electric vehicle batteries

academic paper:

On the possibility of extending the lifetime of lithium-ion batteries through optimal V2G facilitated by a flexible integrated vehicle and smart-grid system

just spitballing numbers, but if 10m cars just discharged 1kW each for 3 hours, then they'd wipe out the evening peak from 4pm to 7pm, taking 10GW of it, and leaving it at roughly average daytime demand.