Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Electric vehicles the answer ?

Also-bloomin'-lutely!

Is anyone interested in any 10 year old car of the standard family type? I would have thought a basically much simpler electric car would be a better proosition at 10 years than a petrol one.

Anyway, it doesnt matter. You are going that way like it or not. HMG says so.

The proposition is that the leccy used will be from wind or solar because that conversion is going on in parallel. Lithium is not one of the heavy metals - it is in fact the lightest. And no inorganic compound is non -recyclable though whether its economic is a different issue.

My nearest neighbour (we live in the country, these terms are relative) has a business recycling mobile phones, computers and batteries on a huge scale. They are first hand stripped for any valuable chipsets, then macerated and smelted for gold (phones/PCs) lithium (from batteries) & boron etc. The business is growing like topsy and is a leader in its field. His goal is to get to a scale where he can do an OEM deal with a carmaker to recycle their hybrid/electric car batteries.

There is some debate about lithium.... many regard it as a heavy metal because of the health risks attached to it.

My point is that the the manufacturing of batteries and the generation of electricity is not exactly green.

I realise that Morgan owners will have wind turbines, solar panels and, quite possibly, store their own gasses to reduce their carbon footprint. But most of the planet don't do this.

I'll just add this out of interest.
It's a conversation I witnessed between an energy engineer and a German nuclear engineer. I make no comments in it, it's just the two of them.
:

Think on this. The Hinkley Point C nuclear station will produce an average output of about 2,900 MW (it's rated at 3,200MW, but needs 3-4 weeks offline every 18 months for refuelling). The station occupies about 400 hectares, and would generate about 7% of our power usage.

To make the same average output, you need about 1,800 5 MW wind turbines (they only make about 30% of rated output in average).

Those are about 150 metres tall and have 100 meter blades. Ideally, they're spaced about 8x the blade length apart. So, if we lay them out in a square array, they'll occupy a square 32 km (21 miles) on a side.

And you still need a gas fired power station as back-up.

Solar's even worse. A 5MW (nominal) solar farm occupies 10 hectares. It actually averages about 550 KW output (200 in winter). For the same average output as Hinkley, you need 7,000 of those - which would occupy a square 25km on a side, with no space between them whatsoever. Realistically, you could double that area.

And that's before we consider storage. We'd need hundreds of large pumped storage hydro schemes.

I us really hard to see how getting most of our power from renewables without eating into wilderness areas.


And in response to a comment about future technology improving efficiency:

unlikely. The limiting factor on wind is a thermodynamic/aerodynamic factor called Betz's law - and current designs are 80-90% efficient against that limit. Similarly, the issue with solar is the available incident power - which in our latitudes and weather have inherent issues (think of the angle of incidence, weather and length of day in winter in the UK).

Finally,

Finally, this was the comment from the German bloke:

Germany's plans to switch to 100% renewable energy sources. It' scheiße.

Renewables can't generate enough power for Germany's needs and is unlikely ever to be able to. The government there makes a big deal about renewable sources, but they keep quiet about them having to import electricity from other countries. Either from France where it's mainly generated in nuclear power stations, or from Poland where it's mainly generated in coal powered stations.

The holy grail of power generation will be nuclear fusion reactors. We can already create uncontrolled fusion reactions - they're called thermonuclear bombs. The breakthrough will be when we learn to create controlled ones.

The problem with fusion power is that we are about 30 years away from a practical solution, and have been for the last 50.

Thorium fission is practical, available, proven and vastly safer than conventional uranium fission reactors, but for some bizarre reason has never proved popular with governments.

I can't possibly imagine why this would be. It wouldn't be that they can't be used to produce plutonium for weapons, would it?

Yes, certainly food for thought, but in the meantime, for those like me, who have never driven an electric car, I notice that VW are offering 48 hour test drives in an electric Golf.

I have already booked a 2 day test drive for 10 days time, which I am looking forward to, though whether it will convince me to buy one is still doubtful as I think we are still at too early a stage in the development process ie, it still isn't cost effective as has previously been discussed.

In general terms, I would be far happier to put myself out to reduce my footprint if I know that the worst polluters in the world were already doing so, but our contribution is like pi55ing onto a fire.

Be interesting to know how many on here either own an electric car or are actually about to buy one in the next 3 months ?

Three years, very probably.
Or I could take Tarka to these people...

https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk/

Has anyone else considered this option?