Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms EV Morgan ?

I'm going ohm to find out watts wrong with my guitar amp.

The whole premise of EV is they need electricity to be generated to power them. that is not a given. The other week normally the UK electricity generation by wind fell to 1% of need on calm days.............not a question of battery storage, its more as to whether we will have the electricity to power them. How can you say they are cheap to run, with the massive investment needed to increase green electricity. The cost of running will soon turn, when tax revenues raised from ICE are levied on EV's, started with VED already, more of the tax revenues raising will fall on EV's before too long. Its going to be a very short EV summer in which to make hay.

ICE cars need electricity too, and a lot of it. To extract and refine a gallon of petrol and then transport it to a fuelling station requires around 6kWh of electricity, which is enough to take an EV over 20 miles. Now we are past the early adopter incentives, EV owners will quite rightly have to share their burden of VED costs, that’s right and proper. But the fuel and servicing costs remain very attractive for many.

Of course the ICE need electricity, but our current infrastructure could support petroleum production it wont for the increased demand of EV's'. I'm not so sure that future maintenance cost will remain low as the specialist nature of EV's . There are already requirements on the distance needed around EV's in for servicing, which reduces service area available, which will over time with less frequency of servicing force servicing costs upwards as it means less units thru a workshop, so each unit in for service will carry more of the overhead recovery on lower service hours per vehicle in other worlds labour rates will go up.



We have yet to experience an environment of greater EV density on our roads and therefore the greater incidence of EV on EV accidents, and the often catastrophic fires that ensue and how the emergency services deal with that accelerated and more intense outcome. We have all seen electric bus fires raging away, but not yet stopped to consider the potential increased fire risk to the emergency services and how they cope with it and what resultant damage and resultant cost created to the road infrastructure by intense EV fires. We may yet see a step change, once EV's become the norm.

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If we’re not using the electricity to make petrol, it’ll be available to charge EVs. Arguing that the current state of infrastructure won’t be able to supply future needs is equivalent to arguing that Edwardian chemists would never be able to meet the petroleum needs of 1950’s motorists.

As for EV fires, the data is against you. EVs are around 20 times less likely than ICE cars to burst into flames, and I’ve already posted video of an EV fire being put out in a couple of minutes using a blanket. Different technologies require different techniques but to suggest we wouldn’t be able to cope is just not true. As for carriageway damage from fires, we already see that tarmac has to be relaid after a vehicle fire, so with EVs catching fire much less frequently it would more than offset any additional cost caused by the higher temperatures involved.

We do know our current infrastructure will handle ICE needs because it's been doing it for decades ... it will need considerable improvement to service the needs of EVs ... if a gallon of fuel requires the electricity to carry an EV 20 miles and as most average ICE cars do approaching 50+ mpg then it will take over 2 times the power to service their EV replacement ... with 'non-transport' electricity useage staying the same (and likely increasing as oil and gas are phased out of the power-hungry heating market) that's a whole lot of extra infrastructure and generation to find.

I too have seen these magic blanket videos .... are they really electric car fires or are they ICE being passed off ?... I understood that EV fires produce their own conditions for combustion and the only way to deal with them is to flood them with so much water they eventually drop below the heat requied to sustain themselves .... just partly cutting off the air with a blanket won't cut it like it will with an ICE fire.

K

I don't think anyone is arguing that our electricity infrastructure doesn't need a massive upgrade to cope with future needs, that's why DNOs and the NGC are pumping millions into doing it They came round our way replacing all the single mains lines with triples a year or so back and walked everyone's power limit up from 60 to 100A. Generation capacity is also being increased as fast as possible, witness the latest encouragement to develop small scale nuclear sites.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/the-great-grid-upgrade

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c805mjxe2y9o

The way the fossil fuel lobby is talking, you'd think that nobody is doing anything about the infrastructure and doesn't plan to, whereas the opposite is true.

It's a similar story with EV fires. Nobody is trying to pretend they are not extremely difficult to deal with and that different techniques will need to be developed to handle them successfully, but the way the fossil fuel lobby is talking you'd think that nobody is doing anything about it and that any EV is a bomb waiting to off, whereas the truth is they are 20 times safer than ICE cars when it comes to fire risk.

Certainly don't consider myself part of the 'fossil-fuel lobby' having lived totally off-grid for the last 35 years. However I don't think we can gloss over the challenges of simultaneously massively upping our electricity output and distribution to accommodate EVs whilst replacing the huge heating energy demand currently met by oil and gas .... from personal experience I'm also aware of the frequency of 'gaps' in the output of renewables .... week or ten days at a time of dull windless weather with little output in the winter .... the 'renewables-lobby' answer being big batteries (currently unicorn-tech at the sort of national-demand levels and likely to stay that way) or 'interconnectors' as it's "always windy somewhere in Europe" ... aside that it isn't in extreme cases, it is pretty obvious we can't have the sort of massive redundancy of installed capacity in any given area to enable it carry big chunks of Europe when it's the only windy bit ... try living really off grid for a bit to understand how intermittency can come and bite you in the bum! ... and although we personally can exert the discipline to live within our energy means, societies don't work like that and mass power failure or brownouts just crash your economy and lead to civil unrest .... we should definitely be working towards renewable goals but reality isn't negotiable ... you can't eat 'pie in the sky' 🙂

K

The Australians are a real world example of what happens when you turn off your conventional power stations and go solely with green technology, they suffered massive power cuts and soon returned to the conventional power station backup..........

K

I'm glad its not just me, I'm not part of the oil lobby, but I can see where this is all going. Already there is discussion of individual energy /carbon budgets and to expect frequent power outages. How can any intelligent person let alone a Government even consider the acceptability of such a scenario.

I remember the impact of the 3 day week power cuts, on production processes that lost electricity during the manufacturing cycle. I worked for Grovewood Products once the biggest kitchen manufacturers in the UK trade mark Daintymaid. During the power cuts, eg any products drying in the kilns would warp once the power was cut off and the product was scrap, Within 6 months of the 3 day week, a very successful company went to the wall, along with a lot of the other furniture manufacturers all part of the Dupont Group.

Where we end up will be wonderful.

Houses with solar roof tiles integrated.
Heat pumps and ground thermal where practical.
Battery installations like the Tesla powerbank in each home which can be integrated into a local grid for surge support.
Cars with bi-directional battery which can be part of the store.
Locally integrated larger battery stacks for villages and remote regions
Solar and wind to provide the grids primary input with massive battery piles for peak.

In the meantime can they please fix my electricity meter so it does provide a blinkin remote reading, its not a lot to ask? Long way between these moments?

Seems like a step between today and the future and way too many people with their fingers in the pie to let it happen. Worryingly I have been on the side of commercialise-to-make-it-happen most of my life but I hear what I am saying and wonder. Now I watch Elon /Tramp on the edge of colossal abuse of this and begin to wonder if Singapore has it right. Odd world. Could the keystone Cops rid the US of waste and MAGA things up. If you give 100,000 fools a penknife and wood one of the them may start a bonfire?