And of course you'd have to at least double the generating capacity of the National Grid and its distribution system. Bearing in mind that renewables don't contribute more than about 15 - 20% of our electricity supply ATM, without much prospect of that being significantly increased, battery powered vehicles aren't going to happen because there won't be the electricity to power them, regardless of the availability of the batteries.
For commuters *fast* charging is less essential - cars can be slow charged if there are enough points, which could approach 100% of parking spaces needing to be electrified.
That would be needed anyway as most commuters won't pop out of the office at 11 am to move their fast-charged car out of a charging bay so someone else can put their car in it for a couple of hours.
The government don't seem to have decided whether they want to reduce fossil fuel use in total, or reduce emissions in city centres. I don't think the two necessarily go together.
Owain
Don't confuse their pointy little heads with facts...
They don't want Facts, just Something To Believe In.
Bless!
The government haven decided either. They are just following the path of least resistance politically.
Be great if you could compel the government to compensate for you simply following their recommendation. ;-)
As regards the sort of pollution we suffer in towns? Not so. Modern petrol cars are very clean indeed.
As regards CO2, they obviously still produce that. But then so do most of the electrical generation plants in the UK.
There would be in towns.
IIRC, new London Taxis will have to be hybrids shortly. Some buses already are - but with diesel engines.
>
Eh? You are going to have to re-fuel nuclear powered cars as often?
If the object is just to reduce harmful emissions, hydrogen power can do that already, with adequate range and reasonably fast refuelling. At a cost. That is existing technology - not something Turnip read in The Eagle.
Never say never.
Which do you think will come first? A new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK - or nuclear powered cars?
Yes. Although for perhaps most, charging overnight at home would give enough range for the next day's use.
The government doesn't know their arse from their elbow when it comes down to emissions. Everyone with any knowledge of the subject knew diesels produced more harmful emissions, then as now. It's only CO2 they produce less of.
Nuclear power stations, obviously, but that assumes TPTB and the general public would be prepared to go all nuclear, and that there'd be double the capacity in both generation and transmission, neither of which will happen any time soon.
treble.
If you take climate change/renewable bollocks out of the equation, and rationalise nuclear regulation, you are looking at a ~50 year process of building nuclear and building enough grid infrastructure to replace increasingly expensive fossil with cheap nuclear electrical power wherever possible.
In the end the market will drive the process, if its allowed to.
'They' were certainly saying that more than fifty years ago to my personal knowledge. And resorting to Wikipedia shows that the Manhattan project had it on the agenda, though probably they had momentary fusion in mind, and this was weaponised not long after.
Me neither. As scientific lectures go, it falls disgracefully short of the level I'd have expected of even the more recent dumbed down Horizon programmes (and, with very few exceptions, they've generally been truly disgraceful).
The "AA "battery"" analogy is rather puerile imo lacking, as it does, any reference to a scientific energy equivalent such as the number of joules (or even watt hours) equivalency of 'the typical (presumably alkaline) AA cell'. After that, it all went rapidly downhill from then on.
I've never been impressed by any of these Xmas lectures in recent years due to the remarkable absence of 'scientific rigour' and this year's lecture series seems destined to set the bar to its lowest level ever. :-(
I'm surprised there aren't any YouTube versions where the missing data points have been added to rectify the absence of scientific content which would at least double, if not triple, the running time of each lecture session.
I guess the BBC just root out out the less reputable "scientists" to bribe them into trading whatever scientific integrity they may still have possessed for a big fat bribe in exchange for whoring themselves in this way.
Scientifically speaking, this Xmas lecture series has been the most 'content free' series I've ever seen to date. The only reason I'm recording this series at all has now been reduced to that of "evidence gathering" in the event that a criminal case of "Crimes against Scientific knowledge and learning" is ever brought against the UK's Public Service Broadcaster.
If they ever exist, which they won't, the power source will long outlast the chassis and they'd never need refuelling. That's because they have a very high power density, so you'd actually only need a very small power source to last no longer than say fifteen years. But there'd be a limit to how small you could make it. But they'll never happen anyway.
There's a table of energy densities here,
That's more like it. But you still have to overcome Joe Public's fear of hydrogen, explosions and the Hindenburg disaster, that the press resurrect whenever hydrogen is mentioned, groundless though it is. And you'd still have to supply the hydrogen, presumably by electrolysis, which would require a massive increase in generating capacity, which isn't going to happen any time soon.
Did nobody spot these 'lectures' are aimed at children? Just saying.
Tim, I'll be amazed if you can find any scientist who thinks you can get two orders of magnitude more storage in a chemical battery. The limits are down the the reaction energy of the elements involved, and these are well known.
More power for a shorter time, or more battery life (recharge more times) is quite feasible, but not more capacity.
Andy
But rather than read up on them in "The New Scientist" or similar, or check them out for yourself in Wikipaedia, you held back hoping that there'd be a TV programme about them over Christmas ? I see.
TV nowadays is primarily for entertainment; they even scrapped OU broadcasts years ago. Either pure entertainment or presenting information in an entertaining way largely for an audience who otherwise wouldn't go out of their way to research this material for themselves.
What it isn't designed for is people who are already familiar with a topic and who expect, for some unaccountable reason to actually learn something new. Or maybe they just like to show off ?
+1. I have been disappointed with these for many years, and a bit surprised given the (once) great reputation of the Royal Institution for public lectures.
The Reith Lectures, on the other hand, I generally find to be excellent. And the BBC don't do a bad job with the questions.
I did but from what I know about most of tthe children of the age they usually get, they need to be far more advanced to hold their attention. You could tell most of the time they were bored and the only bits they were interested in were the bits where he blew stuff up.
Very little new came to light even in the last one though thankfully somebody must have told hiim about his use of k instead of g on the end of words.
I'd have liked to have had more details about the reason why mobile phones gps used so much power, I mean he explained about transmitting and the screen needed a light etc, but why would a receiver need tso much power? OK he did labour power density rather a lot but to me, even the me back in the 60s this was the bleedin obvious. It was a problem back then and is still one now. Also obviously the more power dense a substance is the harder it is to store and control. Yes we did the hydrogen experiments back in the
60s too one day they said this will be the only fuel, well here we are and just like Nuclear Fusion we still are waiting.I think though the lectures were no doubt done in good faith, they were a bit of a disappointment, proobably due to the fact an awful lot of modern development is now commercially sensitive and hence not public knowledge. Brian
Most people who are suggesting banning diesels have suggested a date of 2025 for implementation.
ISTM that 9 year's notice is sufficient for people who already own one, people who buy going forward from today, are already "on notice".
The big problem with banning diesels is in lorry/van usage. This market uses diesels because of the greater longevity of the engines and forcing commercial operators to use vehicles that need scrapping sooner will push up costs
tim
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