Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Time for Electric Power?

Neilda, I think your figures demonstrate just how far ahead Tesla are of VW (in which Andrew English made his trip).
The biggest surprise he seems to have had is the range dropping off in the first few miles - from 300+ to sub 200.

Will

The UK has 40% of Europe's wind resource with the right investments in generation and storage (and the UK is investigating a lot of options here not just traditional chemical batteries) things can only improve. Battery recycling can already reuse a lot of the chemical makeup of existing batteries.

As for France, what a shocker, is anyone surprised?

'ello milligoon

I'm sorry if my summary of Andrew English's article read as being negative towards EVs - he reported the comparative costs, time and emissions (well to tailpipe). He didn't rant about the charging infrastructure, which the majority of UK EV owners would be justified in doing. Aside from Tesla & Ionity, I suspect the rest of the UK's charging networks would've gone bust if users had a choice - their networks are unreliable and hard to use. I follow a Sussex EV evangelists group on Facebook, and it's full of questions about which chargers are actually live. My own experience of trying to plug in a hybrid bears this out.

We're in the early days of a revolution, and the future is not yet evenly distributed.

Will

It appears the French not satisfied with threatening Jersey over electricity supplies, have send a naval vessel to escort French fishermen determined to blockade Jersey port...the Royal Navy now has 2 ships diverted to protect the UK waters. All of which strengthens my argument.......the UK is not planning on electricity generation independence and, as cold calm winters days as earlier this year will always be reliant upon conventional energy generation from continental Europe at vastly hiked prices. We are opening ourselves up to the economic and industrial devastation we saw in the 1970's with the oil crisis and resultant 3 day week etc. this time over electricity.

I agree, the issue is more cause than effect as well if we are going to fix it.

1m cars on the road which use less petrol 5% reduction.
500,000 BEV cars on the road displaces the smog out of the built up areas for clean living.
100,000 cars on the road due to WFH means just less of everything.

A combination of lockdown and WFH has resulted in the numbers of cars on the road shrinking vastly. Even when the lockdown eases more the WFH will have kicked in which is great.
The effect of needing to commute gone means less cars on the road, they last longer, we need fewer (two/three car households) which along with shared transport and community transport (with respect to the pandemic issues) would be a very different and better world long term.

I don't know why the government has not worked out this is a better way of doing it (other than the tax gap!)

Yes the electronic currency mining is back in the red zone again with all the other currencies being worked hard. A video board would normally drop from it's full price to 40% over a year as new ones come out. Currently even two year old cards are well over initial price. New cards are totally unobtainable or suffering a 200% price increase to buy them. Worse than the toilet roll scalping that was going on. The higher end or older video boards consume a constant 300-400w and a rig can have up to 16 of them.

I can't help feeling that we've sent in the navy so that there's jingoistic headlines in today's election day papers.
Sadly it could have the unintended consequence of losing Scotland from the British to European union.

Anyhoo... yes, the UK seems to be quite good at generating clean power, and we're only half way there.
Some 8-12% arrive via interconnectors
https://grid.iamkate.com/
We occasionally manage to run for tens of days without burning coal, but near 50% generation from gas is going to be hard to change... hopefully that'll help heating gas to become a bigger policy and media focus than cars.

As for carbon neutral generation - it's happening, but again, at around 33% there's a long way to go
https://gridwatch.co.uk/carbon-neutral

My local councillor leads our Green council: they're aiming for carbon neutrality by 2030. And are actively working to innovate with eg trialling hydrogen busses (via the local Ricardo research plant), living-roof bus shelters and (the big one!) banning single use barbecues.

Will

It is certainly a time for a rethink of our way of creating economic activity linked to greater and more flexible work environment practices to deliver that economic activity. If you don't need to come together in one work place to achieve that economic activity why incur the 'eco' cost of doing so. Down side is that WFH can be done anywhere and work will transfer to the lowest economic cost area over time.

We need to incentivise the right type of economic activity and eg reduce the dependence on commuter travel and lower the resultant environmental costs. Trouble is the impact on city centres and office space etc may be too great for certain vested interests and the dependant service sectors like restaurants, coffee shops etc .......of course all of this is hampered by lack of access to highspeed broadband outside of urban areas.........oh dear we do seem to be investing in the wrong things like HS2 when that investment if it was made in high speed broadband we would apparently achieve greater economic benefits.

Will,

Every bit helps, I've yet to get a response from my local councillor (he lives directly opposite me ) to the the UK Government reports on projected sea levels by 2050 which show where I live will be underwater, as to what action the local Council is taking to mitigate the problem. I unfortunately live in part of Lytham St Annes that does not benefit from a sea wall. Whilst they are rebuilding existing sea walls, it appears that we have to make do with Xmas trees planted in the sand to try a build up the sand dune natural defence. Unfortunately the Council sells the sand from in front of those sand dune defences and in effect there is less sand to build the defences up. Even the seawall defences have been breached in the past thru the docks and boat yards allowing the sea to come in around the sides during a heavy storm in 1952.......

Fortunately I have 2 apartments one on the ground floor the other on the first floor, I always fancied having one of those wood Riva boats, although it might be convenient to tie it upto the property at some point in the future, I doubt whether the Council will give me any Council Tax relief on the flooded ground floor apartment........,

For 20 years I've been part of a UK Government funded Committee that deals with analytical metrology.
Until COVID we met in London, twice a year.
Since COVID the meetings have been held via MS Teams: no travel, more people attend and overall a more useful meeting.
The only downside is that we don't enjoy lunch together and the associated social interaction.
The future will be a blend of virtual and physical meetings, with far less travel.
I think the way work relationships are maintained will stabilise in about 18 month, but the "New Normal" will be different from the Old Normal....

I recently read that to keep up with EV demand the UK needs to install 1,000 charge points a day.
To put that in context, the excellent Zap Map (which includes *everything*) has 15,000 locations.

We have some way to go for charger supply to keep up with demand

It's sounding like larger business' expectations are that staff will spend between 1 and 2 days per week Working From Office; commuting by any form of transport will likely become much less stressful, and much more time efficient.

Will