Interesting Items...

grahamlthompson said:
The glaring error of course is not everybody fuels there cars at the same time.
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No, but there would be definite peaks and troughs and it's not just as simple as dividing 24 hours by 2 hours to come up with a factor of 12 reduction in peak demand.
What would happen if we all try to fill up at garages at the same time ?
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It does happen. A couple of years ago (probably on 27th Dec. in the post Xmas move) I was going up the M5 and everything around N Bristol was out of fuel. I had to go to Gloucester to fill up whilst still retaining the option of abandoning the journey and being able to get home again without having doing so.
 
Black Hole said:
As far as I know, that was a detachment of terminology. There was not, literally by meteorological terms, a hurricane in '87. What there was, was a very strong wind event of great rarity which was colloquially regarded as a "hurricane" by comparison with normal weather. It's the same as everyone around here referring to our hills as "mountains", when a geographer would not regard them as such because they are all under 3,000 feet (or whatever). To us, they are big hills and therefore mountains compared to the smaller hills.

Fish made the mistake of not recognising what the general population might regard as a hurricane.
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A hurricane is a circular storm with wind speeds exceeding 75mph (Cat 1) in the Northern hemisphere, the storm had much higher wind speeds. It was the worst storm for 300yrs, and Fish failed to even mention the wind speeds.


http://www.channel4.com/news/the-great-storm-of-1987-25-years-on


http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/16/newsid_2533000/2533219.stm
 
On the further subject of electric vehicle silliness, from Electronics Weekly 16th September 2015:

‘Convince me wireless vehicle charging on motorways is a good idea’ – Steve Bush throws down the guantlet

"The UK’s largest trial of on-the-move wireless power charging for electric and hybrid vehicles will start before the end of the year. The government has announced plans for trials of what it calls “off-road” power technology to investigate the introduction wireless charging on the country’s motorways and major A roads. This would involve charging vehicles on the move, without the need to stop and charge the car’s battery. The highways agency has produced a detailed feasibility study on in-motion wireless vehicle charging: Powering electric vehicles on England’s major roads.

"I struggle with wireless charging, for no other reason than wasted energy. No sooner had the world managed to pull together the (near) standard micro USB connector for phones with ‘five-star’ chargers (<30mW standby), than wireless phone charging arose – with just 70% connection efficiency compared with 99.% [sic] from a physical connector – that’s 30% wasted rather than a fraction of 1%. Now it is being proposed for vehicles on main roads and motorways.

"The feasibility study looks comprehensive and thorough, and I have at least scratched the surface of it. In many ways on-the-move wireless charging is a nice idea because it gets over the problem that, while they are great for local and even regional journeys, nearly no one relies solely on an electric vehicle because they can’t make occasional long journeys without careful planning and delays for charging.

"As it might be a good way to get people to adopt electric vehicles, on-motorway charging should be examined. It looks like, even with the stationary wireless charging systems being tried in Milton Keynes and Glasgow, charging efficiency is a little over 70%. That is with coils on the surface of the road where buses park.For motorways, the idea is to put coils 15cm under the road surface to allow surface maintenance without disturbing the installation.

"A coupling efficiency of 75% is used in some of the study’s calculations, based on bigger (compared with static wireless charging) vehicle coils, perhaps resonant coupling and perhaps some way to auto-align the moving vehicle. An apparent load per km of 4.04MVA is another working figure.

"So 1MVA lost per km then. That seems quite a lot to me. A 100km stretch of charger – to give an hour’s charging at 60mph – would be wasting 60MWh? Oh my word, that is the same as 20,000 patio heaters on full blast. And maybe 60MWh is not actually very much in grid terms, but it seems a lot to avoid the inconvenience of stopping for a 20-minute recharge somewhere. Then there is the cost of digging up the roads.

"A lot of effort has been put into costing in the feasibility study, so please read that for accurate information. My take on it is that someone has to dig up miles of road, bury a lot of copper or aluminium, re-route or build major power lines, add hundreds of local inverters, install fee-measuring infrastructure, and reposition existing inductive traffic monitors, to get this system working. This is going to be expensive.

"Will people be prepared to pay enough for in-motion charging to make it pay back? Or is someone hoping the government will get the scheme going with taxpayers’ cash and private companies can run it? If the later is the case – socialising the cost and privatising the profit once again – I think I would rather see a lot more rail electrification first. And maybe a decent fast rail system between Northern English towns would be a better national investment?

"There’s also the issue of bad behaviour. Only one vehicle per so-many-metres-of-road, depending on length of the installed loops, can be charged, and for good coupling the vehicle has to be centred in the lane. Either vehicles will have to automatically track the lane centre and vehicle-to-vehicle spacing, or people will have to drive accurately to maintain lateral and longitudinal position. As someone who never underestimated the stupidity of drivers, including me, I fear some people might take the opportunity to nod off in the former case, or in the latter case spend so much time checking the charge indicator light that they shunt the car in front.

"And will aggressive people in need of power cut-in and push others out? Or run low-impedance coils and tuck in behind legitimate fee-payers? Well?

"If there was already a 99% efficient wireless charging scheme installed on the inside lanes of all motorways, that drivers used safely, I would thoroughly approve of it. There are always compromises to be made when installing new things, but I remain unconvinced that a scheme with a 75% loss in the local connection is a good idea. The feasibility study is well worth a read if you want to ponder the future of mobile wireless charging, and you have a few hours to spare.

"The trials are expected to last for about 18 months and, subject to the results, could be followed by on road trials. A longer-term plan is to also install plug-in charging points every 20 miles on the motorway network."

image.jpg

I still say hydrogen.
 
http://de.total.com/en-us/total-ger...-free-mobility-green-hydrogen-practical-trial
Black Hole said:
On the further subject of electric vehicle silliness, from Electronics Weekly 16th September 2015:


"So 1MVA lost per km then. That seems quite a lot to me. A 100km stretch of charger – to give an hour’s charging at 60mph – would be wasting 60MWh? Oh my word, that is the same as 20,000 patio heaters on full blast. And maybe 60MWh is not actually very much in grid terms, but it seems a lot to avoid the inconvenience of stopping for a 20-minute recharge somewhere. Then there is the cost of digging up the roads.

"A lot of effort has been put into costing in the feasibility study, so please read that for accurate information. My take on it is that someone has to dig up miles of road, bury a lot of copper or aluminium, re-route or build major power lines, add hundreds of local inverters, install fee-measuring infrastructure, and reposition existing inductive traffic monitors, to get this system working. This is going to be expensive.

"Will people be prepared to pay enough for in-motion charging to make it pay back? Or is someone hoping the government will get the scheme going with taxpayers’ cash and private companies can run it? If the later is the case – socialising the cost and privatising the profit once again – I think I would rather see a lot more rail electrification first. And maybe a decent fast rail system between Northern English towns would be a better national investment?

"There’s also the issue of bad behaviour. Only one vehicle per so-many-metres-of-road, depending on length of the installed loops, can be charged, and for good coupling the vehicle has to be centred in the lane. Either vehicles will have to automatically track the lane centre and vehicle-to-vehicle spacing, or people will have to drive accurately to maintain lateral and longitudinal position. As someone who never underestimated the stupidity of drivers, including me, I fear some people might take the opportunity to nod off in the former case, or in the latter case spend so much time checking the charge indicator light that they shunt the car in front.

"And will aggressive people in need of power cut-in and push others out? Or run low-impedance coils and tuck in behind legitimate fee-payers? Well?

"If there was already a 99% efficient wireless charging scheme installed on the inside lanes of all motorways, that drivers used safely, I would thoroughly approve of it. There are always compromises to be made when installing new things, but I remain unconvinced that a scheme with a 75% loss in the local connection is a good idea. The feasibility study is well worth a read if you want to ponder the future of mobile wireless charging, and you have a few hours to spare.

"The trials are expected to last for about 18 months and, subject to the results, could be followed by on road trials. A longer-term plan is to also install plug-in charging points every 20 miles on the motorway network."



I still say hydrogen.
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1 MVA lost per km does not equate to 1MW per km. 1 MVAr per KM equates to zero power. The copper losses in the feeding cables will be increased of course.
 
prpr said:
Where does hydrogen come from?
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Lots of places, including unused capacity in the grid. Whatever kind of energy is used, it still has to come from somewhere.

My point is that hydrogen is a lot easier to store than electricity and can be stored with a much greater energy density than current or optimistic battery technology, can provide a vehicle with a realistic range, has a refill and distribution process not dissimilar to the existing petrol/diesel supply system, current internal combustion technologies can be converted to run on it, and running an internal combustion engine on hydrogen rather than running an electric motor on stored electricity solves the problem of where you get your heating from anywhere but sunny California. I'm also not all that keen on the use of fuel cells to oxidise hydrogen and produce electricity for electric motors. The best of them seem a bit Heath-Robinson to me, and don't inspire confidence for a long service life.

What is necessary is for the Government to push the fuel supply companies to invest in a hydrogen infrastructure, the same as was done for petrol.
 
What is necessary for the financial benefit of all, is for the Government to bin all these stupid, horrendously expensive 'green' policies that are based on nothing other than the hysterical bleatings of a tiny percentage of the population. Bin the idea of ridiculous electric cars. Problem under discussion? Solved.
 
Black Hole said:
Lots of places, including unused capacity in the grid. Whatever kind of energy is used, it still has to come from somewhere.

My point is that hydrogen is a lot easier to store than electricity and can be stored with a much greater energy density than current or optimistic battery technology, can provide a vehicle with a realistic range, has a refill and distribution process not dissimilar to the existing petrol/diesel supply system, current internal combustion technologies can be converted to run on it, and running an internal combustion engine on hydrogen rather than running an electric motor on stored electricity solves the problem of where you get your heating from anywhere but sunny California. I'm also not all that keen on the use of fuel cells to oxidise hydrogen and produce electricity for electric motors. The best of them seem a bit Heath-Robinson to me, and don't inspire confidence for a long service life.

What is necessary is for the Government to push the fuel supply companies to invest in a hydrogen infrastructure, the same as was done for petrol.
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Electric motors have a massive advantage in power to weight ratios compared to conventional internal combustion engines and very much less moving parts.
 
Black Hole said:
So you don't buy the need for carbon reduction
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No, not as a single country. Why should I have to pay through my nose for so called carbon reduction in the UK, when the major carbon 'producers' are producing more and more all the time? Even if UK reduced its carbon emission to zero, this would have little more than zero percent effect globally. We are mothballing efficient coal fired power stations, or converting them to run on less efficient biomass whereas Japan, India and other countries in the EU are building them like they are going out of fashion. It makes me sick that the UK Government, both past and present, spends huge amounts of my money on things that will make absolutely no difference worldwide.
, or that oil is going to run out?
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It won't in my lifetime. And when it does let them sort it out.
grahamlthompson said:
Electric motors have a massive advantage in power to weight ratios compared to conventional internal combustion engines and very much less moving parts.
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And an efing gert battery to run it. (or a power station in the boot):)
 
It's an impressive 265 miles. :eek:
But I suspect that's probably like getting the 70MPG that the car manufacturer says you can.
Green Car Reports said:
Not only does the 85 kWh Model S
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of course--the 416-hp Model S Performance develops 443 lbs-ft
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Make up your mind. 85kW is 114 hp Not 416. And why is it 85kWh anyway? Is that how long it will run for?:)
 
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