The Royal Electric Car Feckup

[Mr Pig]

I'm assuming the world and his dog know by now that the government have announced that from 2035 the sale of diesel, petrol and even hybrid cars will be banned. Only electric cars from then on. Am I the only person who thinks this is utterly unworkable and impossible to implement?

The bods who keep our lights on say that electricity production capacity would have to double. Most electric cars can't tow a caravan and have little range if they can. Charging on a fast charger takes at least forty-five minutes so won't motorway service stations need to be the size of football pitches? Cities are full of people who live in flats and have to park in the street. How are they supposed to charge their cars?

More electric cars, ok, I can see that but I cannot see how they can work for everyone. Or even most people.

 

[andycupra]

just imagine how much other taxes will have to go up to offset the loss of income from fuel duty... unless they stick it on electricity... home bills more expensive.. but then perhaps by then have solar panels will be the norm.

we just need someone to crack the hydrogen manufacturing cost and all will be well

 

[Mr Pig]

UK Natural History Museum Head of Earth Sciences Prof Richard Herrington and fellow expert members of SoS MinErals (an interdisciplinary program of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research) recently wrote a letter to the UK Committee on Climate Change pointing out that meeting UK electric car targets for 2050 would require production of just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production.

Think about these numbers. Makes the target sound pretty ridiculous.

Also, the production of electric cars is highly polluting. Currently, you need to drive 75K miles before you cancel it out! And those batteries need replacing every few years. And then you've got the difficulty of recycling them.

And where is the power to charge them coming from?

 

[andycupra]

that's based on existing tech. Battery tech is going away from many of those, so things may get better on that front.
However I do agree that electricity is being sold as the answer to everything but it still requires massive amounts of mining and use of resources, and i am unsure how 'reusable' or recyclable these batteries are. will we have an issue as electric cars are no longer newly introduced but are also being taken out of use in a high quantity.
(not to mention where does electricity come from).

 

[Mr Pig]

that's based on existing tech. Battery tech is going away from many of those, so things may get better on that front.

Sure, but you can't build policy on 'may'. I'm sure battery technology will get better but no one knows how quickly or what the new tech might cost.

Electricity doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to a remote location. So where exactly are we going to get all this extra electricity? What we're talking about is spending billions on new infrastructure and scrapping lots of perfectly functional existing stuff for what will probably be a marginal net reduction in pollution and a quality of life improvement of zero.

 

[andycupra]

completely agree that electricity just moves the pollution out of cities, - and also agree that the resources for batteries is a concern, however it would appear that we are going to be dependent on batteries more and more, - not just vehicles, but powering homes/industry etc as we want to use cleaner electricity - which will need to be generated and stored as 'green' electricity is not available 'on demand' (Wind / tide / solar generated electricity...)

But while the policy has some potential issues, at least something is being done.
And while i accept that electricity is not the complete green option as we will still pollute via power stations etc, - it will be an improvement over petrol/diesel, certainly in terms of health.

my preferred option would be hydrogen, but then even hydrogen has its issues..

 

[Wings988]

I just hope they don't stop making petrol or price it for the very rich. I'm planning to use it until I die. Will also need engine oil too, electric cars don't use that clearly so useage will drop hugely and prices will likely go up.
I wonder how long it will take before electric is taxed like fuel duty, makes me wonder if that's why they want everyone to have smart meters so they can check when you're charging a car and tax it.

 

[Mr Pig]

.wonder.how long it will take before electric is taxed like fuel duty, makes me wonder if that's why they want everyone to have smart meters so they can check when you're charging a car and tax it.

Have to happen as they'll need to replace the money lost on fuel tax.

 

[martin j.]

As usual UK government trying to lead the world without thinking about all the ramifications, we are pretty clean in electricity production while other countries cancel out anything we do massively, it needs to be world wide but as usual it doesn’t work that way.

 

[The Daily Meme]

Sure, but you can't build policy on 'may'. I'm sure battery technology will get better but no one knows how quickly or what the new tech might cost.

Electricity doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to a remote location. So where exactly are we going to get all this extra electricity? What we're talking about is spending billions on new infrastructure and scrapping lots of perfectly functional existing stuff for what will probably be a marginal net reduction in pollution and a quality of life improvement of zero.

There is a huge amount of Offshore wind capacity starting to come online over the next 12 months. Not to mention the 5GW plus of solar generation being built this year.

The UK is actually going green on energy production pretty quick. So quick in fact that the network is only just keeping up with suitable management of unreliable energy generation.

The National grid currently has 500MW of battery storage capacity. Because renewable energy sources are inherently unreliable, sometimes the demand is not able to be met with renewable energy alone. So we top it up with batterys and gas genertors which are "cleaner" and can react quickly to demand changes. However, when the grid was 2GW in defecit in August, 500MW is not enough to support that demand. And because we have been slowly shutting down our coal, oil and gas power plants, we are unable to supply sufficient, reliable power.

The answer really is to have a base line of nuclear generation, topped up with renewable energy from hydro, wind and solar, supported by storage (batteries or other technologies like cryo and pumped hydro) to manage the network.

Unfortunately, public opinion is rather negative towards nuclear, even though it could solve so many problems.

A counter argument for nuclear is where do you put the waste? the waste generated from nuclear is minimal comapred to that produced from burning coal, and there are now nuclear waste management sites across the world that can safely dispose of used nuclear fuel. And if nuclear fusion ever becomes viable, then there is no waste.

 

[mjxn]

Living in Scotland we account for 0.01% of the world's CO2 output, these bans and changes will make no difference whatsoever to the global issue. I'm not sure what the UK figure is on the whole.

China alone is over 30% I'm sure..

 

[The Daily Meme]

Living in Scotland we account for 0.01% of the world's CO2 output, these bans and changes will make no difference whatsoever to the global issue. I'm not sure what the UK figure is on the whole.

China alone is over 30% I'm sure..

Yup

The entire world, exlcuding China, managed to reduce fossil fuel related CO2 emisions by 0.02 GTonnes in 2019. This is mostly down to rapidly declining coal use across US and Europe with India still increasing its coal use.

China alone managed to increase their production of fossil fuel emissions of CO2 by 0.26 GTonnes which resulted in a global CO2 emissions increasing by 0.6% between 2018 and 2019.

 

[Mr Pig]

China is still building coal power stations while we're not allowed decent light bulbs..

 

[mjxn]

Yup

The entire world, exlcuding China, managed to reduce fossil fuel related CO2 emisions by 0.02 GTonnes in 2019. This is mostly down to rapidly declining coal use across US and Europe with India still increasing its coal use.

China alone managed to increase their production of fossil fuel emissions of CO2 by 0.26 GTonnes which resulted in a global CO2 emissions increasing by 0.6% between 2018 and 2019.

It's mental. China could reduce their output by a few % and it would exceed anything the UK could ever achieve.

I understand that we all have to play our part however it's pretty daft when you compare the data.

 

[Mr Pig]

How do they even know what amounts of CO2 different countries put out? Has to be a guess.

 

[Legojon]

How do they even know what amounts of CO2 different countries put out? Has to be a guess.

Think they just stand roughly in the centre of the city and look up. China: