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**awakened53** · (This post was last modified: 06-08-2023, 08:52 PM by awakened53.)

Rowan Atkinson: Our honeymoon with electric vehicles is over so, for now, my advice is to hang on to your old petrol motor

I love electric vehicles — and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped.

Sadly, keeping your old petrol car may be better than buying an EV. There are sound environmental reasons not to jump just yet.

Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.

Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles.

I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much.

Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

As you may know, the Government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be largely based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe.

Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different.

In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70 per cent higher than when manufacturing a petrol one.

How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of ten years.

It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better.

New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones — but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries.

Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slow in developing a truly ‘green’ way of manufacturing it. It can be used in one of two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these.

Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol.

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised over their use in heavy trucks for long distance haulage because of the weight; an alternative is to inject hydrogen into a new kind of piston engine.

JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years.

Read More: ROWAN ATKINSON: Our honeymoon with electric vehicles is over

Steve · (This post was last modified: 07-02-2023, 05:51 PM by Steve.)

Electric Cars: Inconvenient Facts, Part One

https://youtu.be/z2HneqfZGsM

**awakened53** · (This post was last modified: 07-04-2023, 08:22 PM by awakened53.)

That’s a shock! Recharging electric cars can be more expensive than a petrol refill amid surging electricity costs

Recharging electric cars at public points can now prove more expensive than a petrol refill.

Surging electricity costs has meant electric vehicle (EV) owners are no longer guaranteed a cheaper driving experience.

There are already fears that Britain’s electric car market disproportionately favours those with driveways, as the Government prepares to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in 2030.

Research last year found that 84 per cent of existing owners had access to off-street parking to charge their vehicles.

MPs, industry leaders and campaigners have warned current tax arrangements discriminate against motorists without driveways, as VAT on electricity from public chargers is still 20 per cent, whereas it is only 5 per cent if you charge at home.

Oil giant Shell, which oversees one of the biggest charging networks in the UK, now charges 85p per kWh for its ultra-rapid chargers. BP, the country’s largest provider, is not far behind on 79p per kWh.

Read more: That’s a shock! Recharging electric cars can be more expensive than a petrol refill amid surging electricity costs

Steve · (This post was last modified: 07-05-2023, 10:10 AM by Steve.)

The EV market is on fire

One of the supposed vital aspects of reaching “Net Zero” by 2050 is rapid, massive forced conversion to electric vehicles. And even though the Canadian government is determined to keep you safe from everything including your own stupidity, it nevertheless carefully fails to track the tendency of these miracles on wheels to burst into flames. These fires are no joke. Even the New York Times has written about “How E-Bike Battery Fires Became a Deadly Crisis in New York City”, adding that “City leaders are racing to regulate battery-powered mobility devices, which have been the source of over 100 fires so far this year.” Good thing fire trucks are still allowed to run on gas.
Not that governments will admit to being worried about EV fires. According to a National Research Council report, fire shmire. It said: ……

https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2023/...s-on-fire/

**awakened53** · (This post was last modified: 07-10-2023, 09:20 AM by awakened53.)

Net zero: crumbling

An entertaining piece in the Telegraph by chief city commentator Ben Marlow had it that “The electric car ‘revolution’ is a disaster before it’s begun”, with the man writing that politicians were “forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them”.

This commentary followed in the wake of the news that the car-making giant, Volkswagen, had cut back production of electric vehicles in its Emden plant in Germany because of “strong customer reluctance”.

Company executives said demand for EVs had fallen short of forecasts by 30 percent, forcing the company to lay off 300 of 1,500 employees working on EVs, while production of a range of new electric models is to be delayed.

As to the production of conventional internal combustion engine cars, Marlow reflects that an entire industry is not only being forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use but is also being bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal scale for which there simply isn’t a market.

This, Marlow describes, in a fine turn of phrase, as “industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making”, made worse, he says, by the UK government’s myopic obsession with arbitrary net zero targets, bringing forward the deadline for phasing out the sale of diesel and petrol-driven cars from 2035, set in the rest of the industrial world, to an inexplicably early 2030.

Globally, reports of increased sales are largely illusory. As the car industry breaks out from its Covid-induced slump, sales across the board are increasing but pure EVs are struggling to maintain their limited market share, while extravagent claims of increased sales need to be measured against the very low base.

Self-sabotage apart, it is perhaps just as well for us all that EV sales are not meeting expectations. Not only is battery production capacity massively short of projected need, but the charging infrastructure is woefully inadequate at several levels.

This is not just a case of insufficient public charging points, with only just over 40,000 fitted against the 2030 requirement of between 280,000 and 480,000, with councils, amongst others, failing to step up to the plate.

It is estimated that the installation programme is 20 years behind schedule yet, even if the sites and equipment could be provided at a sufficient rate – which seems unlikely – the cabling required for grid connections is inadequate and creates a major barrier to the successful completion of the programme.

According to a report from Deloitte, between £8 and £18 billion of investment is needed just to supply a projected 280,000 sites by 2030.

However, only £950 million has been committed through the government’s “Rapid Charging Fund”, a fund set up to deal with identified market failures.

At the moment, there is only a pilot under consideration, aimed at funding a portion of the cost of upgrading the electricity grid at motorway service areas (MSAs) where it is not commercially viable to do so, leaving no provision for sites throughout the rest of the country.

Should the hurdle of inadequate grid connections be overcome – which also seems unlikely – then there is the small matter of generating sufficient electricity to power the national EV fleet, estimated at almost three quarters of today’s typical household
consumption.

Much of this increase will have to come from the 50GW of offshore wind generating capacity targeted for 2030 which, at the time of the target inception, even the most optimistic of estimates raised doubts as to whether it could be achieved.

And that was before the problems to which I alluded in a post at the end of June, when I picked up reports of serious technical problems with the larger wind turbines currently being installed.

At the time, it seemed that the problems could be confined to one manufacturer, Siemens Gamesa – although even then that was a dubious proposition. But now, additional reports tend to confirm that we are experiencing an industry-wide issue.

Christoph Zipf, spokesman for industry body WindEurope, remarks that the wind industry has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, achieving significant reductions in capital costs per unit of electricity generated. But these cost reductions, Zipf says, have been achieved with innovations in turbine technology and by pushing the boundaries of engineering.

Twenty years ago, Zipf adds, what would then have been considered a large wind turbine would have 1 MW capacity. Today, manufacturers are testing 15 MW turbines.

In fact, according to another source, over the past five years, the race to scale turbine technologies has seen the leap from 8MW to 18MW turbines occurring in a fraction of the time it took to go from 3MW to 8MW.