Electric car.

[harry]

Road tax should be scrapped and the tax put on fuel. Then you pay for the amount you use the roads.

[harry]

They are running my car right now. So how are they not working?

[dennis]

No you don't, you pay for the amount of fuel used.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Can't see how you could tax electricity used for cars. Diesel etc can have a dye added so it can be identified against heating oil.

Far more likely will be road use charging, with the tax removed from petrol etc too. Quite easy to do these days.

[Adrian]

ITYM "petrol prices rise".

Hmm. I'm not sure the "saving the planet" line is quite so clear cut. (For those across other groups, where has Bollen gone with his "Greenwash" line, anyway? Did he finally kick the bucket?)

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, right?

So - the most environmentally friendly option is not buying a new or very- near-new car in the first place. That's gotta be pretty uncontentious. Especially for a low-mileage vehicle (and the very limited range of Harry's Mitsu means it can't really be anything but).

Then, of course, we get into the whole environmental impact of transporting a ton and a half/10m3 object half way across the planet. And that's before we think about the environmental impact of all those electronics and battery chemistry - either just to manufacture in the first place or the whole life-of-vehicle and end of use decommissioning and disposal.

[Tim Streater]

That doesn't amount to a hill of beans, not even a small hill. We're talking about a requirement for many GW of reliable power generation, not something that can decline to 50MW if there's a high pressure as we've had a few times this winter. Get clued up.

[Nightjar]

On 10/02/2013 18:32, harry wrote: ...

Comparing new build nuclear to wind power, including all decommissioning costs, wind power comes out at least twice as expensive as nuclear - triple for off-shore wind. That is assuming that wind power produces the

30% load factor the manufacturers claim, rather than the 19% actually achieved in Germany.

Colin Bignell

[Adrian]

And, of course, motorhomes & boats usually have gas for cooking anyway. There's also petrol Ebers, but they're a bit scarcer. They use somewhere around bollock-all fuel - I think the Eber under our (petrol) '80s VW camper is rated at about 1/3 of a litre per hour. And, of course, it doesn't run full time anyway - it's thermostatic.

Auxiliary fuel-burning heaters aren't uncommon in modern common-rail diesels, since they're so thermally efficient that the heater can be a bit crap anyway.

[DrTeeth]

Unless you work for Ryan Air - they don't even let you charge your phones.

[polygonum]

Follow harry and use a solar charger. :-)

[harry]

Not a lot of difference in the impact of any cars manufacture however powered. Just the possibility of using less polluting fuel with electric cars.

[harry]

We need many different sources of power besides wind and sun. Tidal is the next big push.

[harry]

There's some work places with free charging allowed. The local science here has one. Also some supermarkets. There's this for at home.

arger

[polygonum]

Pull, surely?

[John Williamson]

We know how much can be raised from tidal power in the UK, and even if we put barrages across all the major estuaries and turbines in all the races, it's only about 20% of what's needed, even at peak output, which only happens for an hour or two per tide.

As for the cost....

[The Natural Philosopher]

WE need a single source of power INSTEAD of wind and sun.

[tony sayer]

Wasn't that the scheme that was going to sod up the gulf stream current?..

Then we'd need to build nuclear stations like there was no tomorrow;!...

[John Williamson]

It wouldn't affect the Gulf Stream, it would however, do the wetlands in the estuaries no good at all, mainly by silting caused by reduced flow speeds. This could cause problems for many species of wading birds and some fisheries.

[The Natural Philosopher]

destroying ecosystems is what renewable energy is all about surely?

[harry]

The main capital cost could be spread/written off over a thousand years.

We all need to use less. And reduce the population.