Electric cars/hybrids - a dead end?

[98elise]

Trabi601 said:

babatunde said:

Trabi601 said:

You do realise that off road parking covers all forms of parking not on a road, so it's a deeply skewed and flawed figure to use?

And when I'm sitting in a traffic queue that's longer than the average journey, I'll take comfort from the survey results which prove that I'm in a minority group!

I've got nothing, I'm done, you win and I'm going to put down you hydrogen powered car deposit /s

Physics you disagree with, statistics are of no relevance, seems you're determined to disagree for the sake of disagreeing.

Hopefully some more open minds would have gained from this discussion.

Government and people who produce energy and cars are investing in lots of different technology. I didn't once say hydrogen was the big solution - only that, as part of a range extending EV, it solves almost all the shortcomings of a BEV.

Fossil fuels are the past, they'll be with us for a while yet, but we need a clean at the point of use range extender. All the industry money is currently going towards fuel cell range extending.

It seems only one of us is blinkered, and it's not the person who can foresee the need for a clean range extending technology to compliment BEVs.

(And I've never denied that the current hydrogen plant isn't the answer - but that we are relying on the future developments in catalyst technology to make it work in an efficient way - predictions are for 60% efficiency if current research comes through - this is within 10% of BEV efficiency, at which point hydrogen starts to make sense. It has taken batteries over 100 years to get to a point where they work for some people some of the time, in 20-30 years, we may be laughing at all those battery powered cars as a technological dead end, just as we are about to do with diesel today)

Edited by Trabi601 on Saturday 4th March 16:49

You are only considering hydrogen to electricity conversion, and ignoring the energy needed to crack hydrogen. Hydrogen needs lots of energy, thats simple physics. Ypu seem to think the physics will change, it won't. Even if you could make it efficient what do you do about its other downsides?

Battery tech is getting better year on year. Graphine batteries are coming next, and flow batteries are looking promising.

[98elise]

JonV8V said:

Phunk said:

JonV8V said:

Evanivitch said:

Trabi601 said:

I see 'vast majority' often quoted. A 'vast majority' don't have access to a charge point either at home or at work or in both places.

And yet the majority of these terraced houses will have streetlights along the road, and offices have lighting too.

So the electricity is there, it's accessible. There's no need for a major innovation or redesign, just an investment in infrastructure and a change in mentality (I.e. some courtesy when using electric from ICE owners).

Would you plug your oven into a lightbulb socket? No, and for good reason.

Apart from most street lights are not at the edge of the pavement nearest the road, so you'd have to drag a cable across the pavement.

The lighting cable for street lights is no where near up to charging a car, just as your home wiring has different rated circuits.

Running a charging cable along a street is hardly difficult.

[JonV8V]

98elise said:

Running a charging cable along a street is hardly difficult.

Never said it was, I just said it wasn't already there.

But how many points? What capacity? How do you manage demand? If you put a charging point in every lamp post you have to assume a % will be in use, if you went 7kw charging, 32a, then a run of 10 lamps at 60% use would need 200A that wasn't there before. It's possible, it will happen, just don't make assumptions it's either there or trivial.

[Evanivitch]

JonV8V said:

Phunk said:

JonV8V said:

Evanivitch said:

Trabi601 said:

I see 'vast majority' often quoted. A 'vast majority' don't have access to a charge point either at home or at work or in both places.

And yet the majority of these terraced houses will have streetlights along the road, and offices have lighting too.

So the electricity is there, it's accessible. There's no need for a major innovation or redesign, just an investment in infrastructure and a change in mentality (I.e. some courtesy when using electric from ICE owners).

Would you plug your oven into a lightbulb socket? No, and for good reason.

Apart from most street lights are not at the edge of the pavement nearest the road, so you'd have to drag a cable across the pavement.

The lighting cable for street lights is no where near up to charging a car, just as your home wiring has different rated circuits.

So you upgrade the wiring, like you'd resurface a road. And if you have to add a kerb side charging bollard instead of tapping off a street lamp, is it that difficult?

Again, this isn't new infrastructure, it's upgrading existing.

When we went from steam rail to electric, did everyone say it was impossible? Great Western line is evidence it can be done, at a cost, even if it involves upgrading a Victorian era rail tunnel under a river. If we can't do on street charging then I really dispair for the future.

[98elise]

JonV8V said:

98elise said:

Running a charging cable along a street is hardly difficult.

Never said it was, I just said it wasn't already there.

But how many points? What capacity? How do you manage demand? If you put a charging point in every lamp post you have to assume a % will be in use, if you went 7kw charging, 32a, then a run of 10 lamps at 60% use would need 200A that wasn't there before. It's possible, it will happen, just don't make assumptions it's either there or trivial.

Capacity is already there at street level if you can run a hob or a shower in your own home. You need to think in terms of energy not power. The average user will need 7kWh per day, so running a hob/shower for less than an hour. Its not even remotely difficult to manage demand with smart when EV's become common.

[JonV8V]

98elise said:

JonV8V said:

98elise said:

Running a charging cable along a street is hardly difficult.

Never said it was, I just said it wasn't already there.

But how many points? What capacity? How do you manage demand? If you put a charging point in every lamp post you have to assume a % will be in use, if you went 7kw charging, 32a, then a run of 10 lamps at 60% use would need 200A that wasn't there before. It's possible, it will happen, just don't make assumptions it's either there or trivial.

Capacity is already there at street level if you can run a hob or a shower in your own home. You need to think in terms of energy not power. The average user will need 7kWh per day, so running a hob/shower for less than an hour. Its not even remotely difficult to manage demand with smart when EV's become common.

FFS - it's already a DNO matter in some installations, it's also a DNO concern if you install 2 chargers at one address. It MAY be ok, just don't assume ANYTHING.

If you want to get into a discussion over property AQ values (and if you dont know what they are then it lprives the point) and network modelling then be a keyboard warrior. I've not said it's impossible, but neither will it just happen.

[otolith]

The charging points using street lighting infrastructure are already being rolled out by local authorities.

[brrapp]

I can't see why an easily swappable rechargeable battery for cars can't be made. You'd simply pull into a recharge station and swap the battery over for a full one from the bank of them sitting on charge.
This technology has revolutionised the building/joinery industry in a few years. It wouldn't be hard to do similar for a car as long as the industry gets together and adopts a universal battery/ connector type.

[otolith]

Tesla have already done it. They had a 90 second battery swap. Their supercharger network killed it.

http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-...

[rxe]

98elise said:

Running a charging cable along a street is hardly difficult.

No, not difficult, just expensive.

I'll illustrate with the street I am looking at now. Probably 30 houses, 3 "on drive" spaces, the rest on the street.

So we need 20 charging points to make it work, otherwise everyone will be doing musical chairs all evening.

How many kW a go? 10? Charge a leaf in a few hours, not fully charge a Tesla overnight. Seems reasonable.

So 200 kW worst case.

Clearly you have to dig up the street to lay bigger cables. That's not cheap at all. They've just laid it with nice paving slabs which as taken 4 blokes about 2 months to do, so probably £100K in council money. Plus the cost of the sparky.

Bigger problem - the local substation is at capacity. We know this because it was the main reason a development was turned down locally. The development was a LOT less that 200kW.

Being the middle of London, there is no space for another substation, so you're looking at compulsory purchase to get a bigger one in. I have no idea what is needed upstream.

So, not difficult in the slightest. Just really, really costly. And that's just one ickle street in the middle of London.

[Flooble]

If you are charging overnight, why do you need 10kW?

Economy 7 is as the name implies, seven hours. Most people sleep for at least that. 7 x kW = 49kWh. Enough to charge 2 Leafs (based on the 24kWh battery capacity, not rolling in on fumes, but losing some energy to charging losses).

No, not enough to fill a Tesla from Empty, but enough to give it 150 miles or so.

That takes you to 140kW, which is still massively chunky but not quite as bad.

More to point, city-dwellers are unlikely to all be hoofing 300 miles a day along the motorway in massive barges. You probably only need to fill up half-a-Leaf or less for most people overnight, statistics on commutes someone else posted suggest even less than that given the average commute, think it was about 5kWh, so over seven hours that's less than 1kW draw.


Plus there is always the option to "fill up" en-route or at the destination. Industrial parks and offices having more readily available power.

[xjay1337]

RBH58 said:

The ONLY thing holding up BEVs is recharge time. As soon as you can fast charge a BEV with 600kms worth of charge as quickly and conveniently as filling as fuel tank, it's over for the internal combustion engine. There will be an adoption landslide. BEVs will replace the IC engine as fast as the IC engine replaced the horse (and that was fast). The price of BEVs will rapidly tumble with the economies of scale because building a BEV will become massively cheaper than building a mechanically complex IC engined car. Hardly any moving parts in the engine(s). No gearbox. No differentials if you put a engine on each driven wheel. And BEVs will be massively easier to package given the relative size of their drivelines. Sorry, but the IC engined car is on borrowed time.....sadly.

(un?) fortunately that won't ever happen.

There is only a finite amount of power you can shove into a battery in any given time.
There is only so much power available - Look at our current energy usage. Imagine 5 million cars being charged at the same time.
There is only so much infrastructure. As mentioned before.

I completely agree with you that when there is a way to "fill up" your electric car in the same sort of time it takes to refill with petrol now, then we have evolved the electric idea to something that fits with our way of living.

I do agree many people could quite happily "do" with an electric car for short journeys, taking kids to school, short commute etc.
However these are expensive and not everyone can afford it.

It would not surprise me if the push towards electric cars is then turned against us, oh you've all got electric cars, but now we can't supply the power to charge them, guess you'll have to walk/cycle.

[98elise]

rxe said:

98elise said:

Running a charging cable along a street is hardly difficult.

No, not difficult, just expensive.

I'll illustrate with the street I am looking at now. Probably 30 houses, 3 "on drive" spaces, the rest on the street.

So we need 20 charging points to make it work, otherwise everyone will be doing musical chairs all evening.

How many kW a go? 10? Charge a leaf in a few hours, not fully charge a Tesla overnight. Seems reasonable.

So 200 kW worst case.

Clearly you have to dig up the street to lay bigger cables. That's not cheap at all. They've just laid it with nice paving slabs which as taken 4 blokes about 2 months to do, so probably £100K in council money. Plus the cost of the sparky.

Bigger problem - the local substation is at capacity. We know this because it was the main reason a development was turned down locally. The development was a LOT less that 200kW.

Being the middle of London, there is no space for another substation, so you're looking at compulsory purchase to get a bigger one in. I have no idea what is needed upstream.

So, not difficult in the slightest. Just really, really costly. And that's just one ickle street in the middle of London.

The average driver needs 7kWh of ENERGY per day, that's like a hob or shower running for an hour. Your hob or shower consumes POWER (somewhere between say 6 and 12kW) for in a short duration (30-60 minutes lets say), and at PEAK times.

For Charging we need the same ENERGY, but over a longer period (say 7 hours) so the POWER is much reduced (by a factor of 7).

Your substation only cares about POWER consumption, not ENERGY.

If your local substation can cope with high power at peak times, then why won't it cope with low power at off peak times? If it couldn't then you would not be able to use your hob or shower at night.

Additional housing will add more peak power consumption, that's why you can't put more houses on it.

The only restriction would be the need to throttle charging at peak power times.

[98elise]

JonV8V said:

98elise said:

JonV8V said:

98elise said:

Running a charging cable along a street is hardly difficult.

Never said it was, I just said it wasn't already there.

But how many points? What capacity? How do you manage demand? If you put a charging point in every lamp post you have to assume a % will be in use, if you went 7kw charging, 32a, then a run of 10 lamps at 60% use would need 200A that wasn't there before. It's possible, it will happen, just don't make assumptions it's either there or trivial.

Capacity is already there at street level if you can run a hob or a shower in your own home. You need to think in terms of energy not power. The average user will need 7kWh per day, so running a hob/shower for less than an hour. Its not even remotely difficult to manage demand with smart when EV's become common.

FFS - it's already a DNO matter in some installations, it's also a DNO concern if you install 2 chargers at one address. It MAY be ok, just don't assume ANYTHING.

If you want to get into a discussion over property AQ values (and if you dont know what they are then it lprives the point) and network modelling then be a keyboard warrior. I've not said it's impossible, but neither will it just happen.

You arguments started with a broad brush negative, so I counter with a broad brush positive. The answer is somewhere in the middle.

I did my Electronic and Engineering theory 30 years ago so may be rusty, but amps and volts still work in the same way they did back then

[bodhi]

98elise said:

bodhi said:

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

So instead the taxpayers get to fund the guy who founded PayPal's wet dream instead? While also giving subsidies to people spending 100K on a company car? Doesn't sound much of a better deal, so if we're funding one future option I don't have an issue with finding the other - We don't want to get 10 years down the road and find a massive gotcha that makes ev's unviable now do we?

And what is anthropomorphic climate change when it's at home? I'll assume you mean anthropogenic?

Nobody says there should be only one option. Its only hydrogen that should be dismissed as its massively flawed on every level. If you need vehicle that needs quick refills then choose one of the already available liquid or gas options which will run on a conventional ICE engine.

Personally I don't have quick refills as a must have feature (and I do 30k miles a year). If I could fill my ICE car at home I would. Having to go to a special building to fill/charge seems the worse option of the two. I wouldn't by a phone or laptop that could only be changed in special shops.

By the same token I like the current model of parking up on the drive, locking the car and going inside, and rather than mucking around with a charger every night , just popping next door to the petrol station once a week. Plus it's a lot harder to buy crisps, lighters, cigarettes etc on my drive

I could see your comparison with phones and laptops if petrol cars needed "charging" once a day, but they don't.

All fairly moot anyways, as we're one of the many people with off road parking who can't get a charger near where the car is kept, so I'll be burning petrol for quite some time yet.

[rxe]

98elise said:

The average driver needs 7kWh of ENERGY per day, that's like a hob or shower running for an hour. Your hob or shower consumes POWER (somewhere between say 6 and 12kW) for in a short duration (30-60 minutes lets say), and at PEAK times.

For Charging we need the same ENERGY, but over a longer period (say 7 hours) so the POWER is much reduced (by a factor of 7).

Your substation only cares about POWER consumption, not ENERGY.

If your local substation can cope with high power at peak times, then why won't it cope with low power at off peak times? If it couldn't then you would not be able to use your hob or shower at night.

Additional housing will add more peak power consumption, that's why you can't put more houses on it.

The only restriction would be the need to throttle charging at peak power times.

But that breaks the whole model.

Lets assume I have an electric car, make it a Tesla. Yesterday morning I set off on a 200 mile round trip, this is a real trip, not a made up example. No charging at the far end. I return home yesterday evening, and I need my 10 kW - ideally I need more than that, because I want my car to work this morning. Lets hope one of the lamp posts is free .... good.... it is, 10 kW please.

Imagine my upset the next morning when I get the message "sorry, your charge has been throttled, you've only got 100 miles in the tank because 3 of your neighbours wanted a charge". Throttling only works when you make low assumptions about concurrent users. As soon as concurrency rises above your set point, people aren't going to get what they expected. Some people won't care (not using the car next day) some people will (using the car later that evening).

Power showers are easy - they only run for 10 minutes. You can make assumptions about low concurrency and unlikely to be wrong. A car charging for a few hours is far more likely to get overlap.

[eldar]

rxe said:

But that breaks the whole model.

Lets assume I have an electric car, make it a Tesla. Yesterday morning I set off on a 200 mile round trip, this is a real trip, not a made up example. No charging at the far end. I return home yesterday evening, and I need my 10 kW - ideally I need more than that, because I want my car to work this morning. Lets hope one of the lamp posts is free .... good.... it is, 10 kW please.

Imagine my upset the next morning when I get the message "sorry, your charge has been throttled, you've only got 100 miles in the tank because 3 of your neighbours wanted a charge". Throttling only works when you make low assumptions about concurrent users. As soon as concurrency rises above your set point, people aren't going to get what they expected. Some people won't care (not using the car next day) some people will (using the car later that evening).

Power showers are easy - they only run for 10 minutes. You can make assumptions about low concurrency and unlikely to be wrong. A car charging for a few hours is far more likely to get overlap.

That assumes that the charging infrastructure falls far behind need. You could make the same hypothetical case for everyone cooking a turkey on Christmas morning.

[xjay1337]

eldar said:

That assumes that the charging infrastructure falls far behind need. You could make the same hypothetical case for everyone cooking a turkey on Christmas morning.

Which is why the grid imports energy and also ramps up generator production in advance of known busy periods..

[98elise]

rxe said:

98elise said:

The average driver needs 7kWh of ENERGY per day, that's like a hob or shower running for an hour. Your hob or shower consumes POWER (somewhere between say 6 and 12kW) for in a short duration (30-60 minutes lets say), and at PEAK times.

For Charging we need the same ENERGY, but over a longer period (say 7 hours) so the POWER is much reduced (by a factor of 7).

Your substation only cares about POWER consumption, not ENERGY.

If your local substation can cope with high power at peak times, then why won't it cope with low power at off peak times? If it couldn't then you would not be able to use your hob or shower at night.

Additional housing will add more peak power consumption, that's why you can't put more houses on it.

The only restriction would be the need to throttle charging at peak power times.

But that breaks the whole model.

Lets assume I have an electric car, make it a Tesla. Yesterday morning I set off on a 200 mile round trip, this is a real trip, not a made up example. No charging at the far end. I return home yesterday evening, and I need my 10 kW - ideally I need more than that, because I want my car to work this morning. Lets hope one of the lamp posts is free .... good.... it is, 10 kW please.

Imagine my upset the next morning when I get the message "sorry, your charge has been throttled, you've only got 100 miles in the tank because 3 of your neighbours wanted a charge". Throttling only works when you make low assumptions about concurrent users. As soon as concurrency rises above your set point, people aren't going to get what they expected. Some people won't care (not using the car next day) some people will (using the car later that evening).

Power showers are easy - they only run for 10 minutes. You can make assumptions about low concurrency and unlikely to be wrong. A car charging for a few hours is far more likely to get overlap.

Its all moot anyway. By the time on street charging capacity becomes a problem, cars will be autonomous and will be able to bugger off to the local supercharger and top up at night

[rxe]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

Would that be 53 mm or 90 mm diameter residential?

Diameter of an armoured cable that can carry 400 amps (100 kW at 240 V) is about 50 mm. Good luck getting it down a small duct, and good luck getting it down a big one without breaking anything else. BT might be a bit itchy about a 400 amp cable sitting next to their copper and fibre.

Actually, fully automated driving is about the only thing that makes this feasible. Let the car find a charger and queue up.