'Hippy' energy kingpin's electric Noddy-car in epic FAIL

Actually...

part of this problem has been solved. There is a common standard plug/cable standard for electric cars -- the name escapes me but I seem to remember it as "Europlug" -- of course, standards being standards, don't expect anyone to conform to it but introduce their own "superior" standard.

Aside from that, general use electric cars don't remove emissions, they just relocate them from the street to wherever the nearest coal/gas/oil power plant is; and as you correctly identified, it'll take a lot of investment to build the required electrical infrastructure to support home charging for electric cars, provided there's another massive lapse of common sense (otherwise known as "green legislation" or "environmental targets" or equivalent) that somehow makes them more attractive to the general consumer.

Meh.

Plus ça change

What pray tell, are the "IC-powered" bretheren? Because here in the colonies, just about any hybrid you can buy will kick the cojones off the alternatives w/ respect to fuel consumption. Are there issues (battery life / disposal / weight ; the safety of nearly silent cars on city streets; cost) with them? Sure. But if minimizing fuel consumption alone were your only goal, you simply can't beat something like a Toyota Prius or first generation Honda Insight.

I used to think of hybrids as an interim technology, until we get a practical infrastructure for the electrics, but ... while waiting for the power-grid to be restored in our Chicago suburb for three days last summer I began to see the advantage of a plug-in hybrid: you can adjust your choice of energy input to market prices and availability.

OTOH...

This reminded of a well-known story which took place back in my home town: a rash engineer tried to prove that locomotives would soon make the horse & buggy obsolete, but a mechanical failure proved the "folly" of all that new-fangled technology. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Thumb_%28locomotive%29). Today I (and thousands of others in Chicago) take trains (albeit, not steam-driven ones) daily, but I know no-one who commutes by horse, here or anywhere there's an internet connection (which presumably you need to read this. :-) ).

There's more commonality than you might think; the "new" technology was basically coal-powered (and as other posters have noted, so is much of the electricity in the UK and probably even more on this side of the puddle). So I wouldn't dismiss this "Electric Joule-aid Acid Test" out of hand...

Agree & Disagree

Agree that Lewis is a rabidly right wing anti-anything-green pseudo journo.

However, attacking Vince is fair game and I think Lewis is perfectly entitled to do so. He didn't pick up on the biggest scam with regard to the very misleadingly named Ecotricity. Yes all their OWN energy projects are green ..... -BUT- only ~30% of their power requirement is generated from renewables, the rest comes from purchasing credits from the big companies who burn fossil fuels / run nuclear power stations.

Good Energy is the ONLY green electricity company in the UK - 100% of their energy comes from renewables - and they're a damn site better than the preening shill (Vince).

Checking your facts

UK Electricity grid losses are more like 7%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(UK)#Losses

DEFRA lists petrol as 0.28455kg CO2e/kWh, whereas electricity is 0.04609kg CO2e/kWh with % transmission and distribution losses as 7.4% (2008 figures); see http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/reporting/conversion-factors.htm

A Li-ion Battery charge/discharge cycle is 80-90% efficient, and EV electric motors >90%. All of which works out that electric cars are around three times more efficient than petrol cars, even when charged using a conventional fossil-fuel heavy power grid.

Whilst mining and refining the metals in batteries is not environmentally benign, the metals can be recycled at the end of the batteries life, using less energy than mining new material. Extracting and refining oil creates a large number of toxic by-products, and presents a considerable risk to the environment, as BP demonstrated this year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_refinery#Safety_and_environmental_concerns

Finally, read this article on the efficiency Hydrogen Economy, it's not as rosy as you assume, basically, electric cars win: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2003.09.024

In summary, your 'BAN battery powered cars' call may be a little wide of the mark...

and

does you 10(ish) kw shower plug in to the mains? no? that's a shame.

so you can get a special outlet for the car, but that isn't plugging in to the standard 13A socket that they would like you to believe is possible.

But let's not let little details like that spoil your anti-Lewis ramblings, eh?

Electric cookers

My electric cooker (and many electric showers) use a 30 amp (7kw+) circuit, so 6-7 hours for a 36kw battery with charging losses. OK, not a 13 amp socket, but still available in may homes.

Re: How many 13A sockets does your house have

Hmm.. without getting technical and confusing you, a 13A socket is /The/ standard way to connect portable things to the mains - the shower you mention is hard-wired; betcha can't detach yours from the wall, take it to your mates house and reconnect it, can you? Well, the same problem exists with the car: you can't go around installing specialist outlets in your house, near your office, your parents house and everywhere else you frequent without frighteningly high costs and so the logical thing to do is base your car's recharging ability on this well defined and highly available 13A socket.

*In theory, you could pull 2 x 13A from a ring main by having TWO plugs on the go - a correctly-wired ring will cope - but you're pushing your luck if you have anything else on the same ring (and most people will have one ring for the entire downstairs floor, knackering that idea) and you also have a small problem of maintaining a balanced load. It's not generally advisable!

Correct me if I'm wrong

But I don't think that's how it works. Each device you plug in draws as much electricity as it needs, using multiple sockets wouldn't really be necessary unless you were worried about overheating.

Of course once you draw more than 32/20 amps (depending on your circuit) the breaker will flip and all your sockets turn off.

So yes in theory you could draw more from your supply but I think if it ever became popular we'd have to set up a seperate circuit or something to stop it tripping everything else

I wrote a title but there was a power cut for some reason ^_^

how many 13a sockets do you have in your house that you can run at full draw before your main breaker trips?

I can wait for you to go plug stuff in, if you like.

Stop. just stop.

right, use the tiny percentage of 'green' energy* we produce in an energy-costly process to produce a gas you need to compress and cool to store, requiring more energy, and has a pretty shitty energy density/volume compared to say; petrol.

thats without even getting into how you plan to produce said hydrogen. and if you say Carbon Sequestration Im just going to start laughing. Thermochemical processes as well as having industry-unhelpful biproducts arent really ready for industrial application and we get most of our Hydrogen from steam + methane reforming. anode-based electrolysis hasnt made it out of the lab because you're either constantly swapping out your electrodes due to oxidisation or you're running inert-metal electrodes (usually platinum) which are a) fucking expensive and b; dont solve the other problem of water electrolysis; you need pure water otherwise you're looking at salt deposits, so you have to distill out your water which requires even more energy.

Hydrogen as a 'green fuel' is decades away.

*I have my doubts about the production rate of energy from a turbine versus the energy expenditure to mine, smelt, sheet form, engineer, construct, transport, plant the turbine, and lay the line from the turbine to the grid.

I dont hate green, I hate stupid.

I hate green advocates that cant do math, or tell me to use CFTs because encouraging the replacement of tungsten and glass in a landfill with glass and mercury is a fucking great idea; they're the same people that jog to work down the side of the road, sucking down benzine and free radicals from everyone elses exhaust. Good for you. way to think it through. the people who cry about PCBs emitted from circuit board but will cheerfully hotbox themselves in freshly-painted rooms.

you want to reduce pollution in cities, use something even more energy-efficient than an EV: a GD pushbike, a bus, or the train. its as bad is the greentards in the US that urge me to turn off my lights to save power but crank their AC down to 60' and leave all their doors open inside their homes, or the greentards in the UK that yell abuse at the royals for tooling around in ancient landrovers that do 14mpg rather than buying a brand new all-aluminium POS.

I dont hate greens. I hate dumb people that cant do comparison math, dont understand the difference between compressors and lights, dont understand the idea of "production debt" in an 'energy efficient' product, dont understand how energy intensive aluminium production is, how environmentally devastating exotic mineral production is.

Seriously. before anyone should be allowed to be an advocate for "green" _anything_ they should be forced to read up on SAX and get a calculator.

They are already talking about battery systems

which can take an 80% charge in 10 minutes (just about enough time to visit the loo and grab a coffee at a service station), or battery exchange systems which will replace your pack with a fully charged one in less time than it takes to fill your tank with petrol. Stop trotting out this excuse and try to think of another.

P.S.

Your Fiat 1.1 ECO is rated at 119g/km. The Tesla roadster, a car with 5 times the power of your tin box, uses 199Wh/km from the plug (i.e. factoring in charging losses). Using official UK government figures as of 2008, including transmission losses NOX and CH4, the average CO2 equivalent production per kWh from electricity generation is 545.22g (see the DEFRA link posted above). That works out as the power needed by the Tesla causing emissions of only 108.5g/km.

What was that about efficiency and greenness?

US 'leccy...

Actually you'd be hard pressed to find a home in the US that doesn't have a 220V service with a 100A main breaker (at the minimum), split into two phases of 115V outlets that are wired as branch circuits, and some 220V outlets for devices needing more power. It's not as efficient as Europe power--US homes have thicker wiring to cope with the higher amperages needed to give the same amount of juice to power stuff on a 115V outlet as opposed to a 220V---which are primarily used for things like ranges, dryers, electric heat and air conditioning. It's not too uncommon for business (and some homes) to have dedicated 20A-115V outlets---a little better than the 15A mentioned at least, and a few 220V outlets where needed. So at least MOST US homes have the same incoming power available, just not quite as much at every wall socket as UK homes.

But it's fairly easy to add a branch 220V--30 or 50A circuit to any US home. I did just that for an A/C unit a couple of summers ago---took a couple of hours. Some homes would need an upgraded main panel or service if you did a lot of charging while running the A/C, dryer, etc. at the same time, but since most charging would likely be done overnight while the rest of the house is asleep (and at lower nighttime costs in some areas), you could fairly easily get away with it.

More worrisome in my opinion would be leaving a device that despite testing is not that far from prototype stage drawing tons of current unattended while everyone sleeps. Continuous high demand on aging house wiring in potentially unknown condition will quickly expose flaws in the wiring--so called "glow faults" where wiring and contact points can heat up enough to 'glow' without drawing enough to trip a breaker or blow a fuse. So I'd be afraid that electrical fires would be much more commonplace if everyone had one of these in their garage with existing infrastructure.

Check facts before posting garbage, please

There may well be valid arguments against massive adoption of electric vehicles (cars and vans) but lack of generation and distribution capacity is not one of them; your other more valid points are weakened by this one.

Overnight electricity consumption in the UK typically goes down to about half the daytime peak electricity consumption [1]. There is no shortage of generation or distribution capacity in any realistic scenario involving off-peak charging of a realistic number of EVs (there *is* going to be a shortage of peak-hour generation soon).

In fact the more reliant on inflexible nuclear we become, the more we *require* electric transport (cars and vans) to recharge overnight to avoid wasting the unswitchable-off nuclear electricity which otherwise would go to waste.

[1] http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/Demand8.htm

EVs could help solve peak power problems

Overnight there is a surplus of power and EVs can charge without problems. At peak demand their charging stations can be programmed to take BACK up to a certain percentage and feed it into the grid. The owner gets payed at peak rates for this power and makes a profit on however much they chose to sell back. The grid gets a large sink of rapidly available power. Win Win.