New Top Gear (2011) BBC 2 8PM!

[Abraxaz1]

So if everyone bought an EV tomorrow the national grid would be able to cope with the extra load no problem?

Not a stab at you, just a genuine question.

depends on charge time inconsistencies. if everyone charged during the day at peak periods no. But if everyone had timer units built in that charged the cars during the low charge periods i.e over night then yes.
The orgianl grid was designed during a period when briatin used to actually build stuff most of its redundatn but can easily be brought into service and because of the design additional power sources can be brought in.
I know BP is planning to use the oil rig technology to increase the number of Wind mills in the north sea, these can be feed in the grid via buffering stations which will help a lot.

The countries which will have the easiest time dealing with energy issues are those near the equator such as middle east and mexico/usa, the number of solar stills is increasing and their ablity to output massive amounts of power and use land deemed un usable is making them very popular.

 

[bam0]

So if everyone bought an EV tomorrow the national grid would be able to cope with the extra load no problem?

Not a stab at you, just a genuine question.

In terms of electricity production, I'd presume not. If you mean would the infrastructure handle the extra electricity flowing through it? I honestly don't know. I'd guess it might depending on how much power you put into the charging circuit.
Throwing some rough numbers around; Domestic ovens are on a 30A circuit (main house fuse is 60A), if you had similarly powered charging outlet for your car you could fill the 24 kWh Nissan Leaf battery pack in 3.5 hours.
If you consider the power draw a house can produce with oven, kettle, TV etc on and had a smart controller and generally charged overnight I don't see why the lines to the house wouldn't cope, couldn't guess at the substation.

btw; I'm not an electrical engineer so the above could be way off

 

[Abraxaz1]

In terms of electricity production, I'd presume not. If you mean would the infrastructure handle the extra electricity flowing through it? I honestly don't know. I'd guess it might depending on how much power you put into the charging circuit.
Throwing some rough numbers around; Domestic ovens are on a 30A circuit (main house fuse is 60A), if you had similarly powered charging outlet for your car you could fill the 24 kWh Nissan Leaf battery pack in 3.5 hours.
If you consider the power draw a house can produce with oven, kettle, TV etc on and had a smart controller and generally charged overnight I don't see why the lines to the house wouldn't cope, couldn't guess at the substation.

btw; I'm not an electrical engineer so the above could be way off

near enough only old houses have 60a service fuses most new installs are 90a, plus then you have to bring into diversity which would make the how equation really really complicated. so instead when the new nuclear power plants finally get build we should fingers crossed be ready for the power drain.

 

[NeverWinter]

Clearly the future is pure Capacitance Gel, like in Demolition Man!

 

[Abraxaz1]

Clearly the future is pure Capacitance Gel, like in Demolition Man!

well you say that, their has been extremely good research break through in super capacitors, wont be any good for a car as its too heavy but a motorcycle design will allow quick recharging.

 

[Abraxaz1]

Just found this quite a good web program
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfTiRNzbSko

 

[Dave M]

Battery - Need to have easy swap battery packs and charge them at petrol stations. This is the only sensible route because 1) nobody wants a car where the £10k battery needs replacing after 3 years and 2) It's the only way to 're-fuel' quickly. Weight is not an issue, a standardised design and mechanical assistance could even make it automatic.

Hydrogen - Need to build expensive tanks to store the Hydrogen at petrol stations, tankers no doubt more expensive too.

What is never going to happen is re-fuelling at home, apart from a few top-up chargers for people who have drive ways we are not going to see millions of people relying on the 13a socket to provide for ther daily motoring needs.

Once you get away from that fiction you can work on practical solutions.

 

[Abraxaz1]

Battery - Need to have easy swap battery packs and charge them at petrol stations. This is the only sensible route because 1) nobody wants a car where the £10k battery needs replacing after 3 years and 2) It's the only way to 're-fuel' quickly. Weight is not an issue, a standardised design and mechanical assistance could even make it automatic.

Hydrogen - Need to build expensive tanks to store the Hydrogen at petrol stations, tankers no doubt more expensive too.

What is never going to happen is re-fuelling at home, apart from a few top-up chargers for people who have drive ways we are not going to see millions of people relying on the 13a socket to provide for ther daily motoring needs.

Once you get away from that fiction you can work on practical solutions.

Um not to sod like a complete toss-pot, but if the need came you can wire a purpose built charging circuit wired directly into the consumer unit, which can handle a lot higher ampage than the standard 2.5mm power ring circuit.

Maybe we should create a topic just for the electric vs hydrogen discussion

 

[frying_pan_cat]

Um not to sod like a complete toss-pot, but if the need came you can wire a purpose built charging circuit wired directly into the consumer unit, which can handle a lot higher ampage than the standard 2.5mm power ring circuit.

That's fair enough if you have a driveway or designated parking space but I can't always park directly outside my house as it's a free for all parking wise here so I wouldn't be able to charge from there. You'd need some sort of infrastructure in place to set up charge points along on street parking which just isn't there so it isn't a viable alternative to petrol at the current time which is what top gear was saying

 

[denby]

Just poking fun at how hot under the collar some of the people in this thread get when there is a female on the television. Do you not see them very often?

stop pretending you know women

 

[Dave M]

Um not to sod like a complete toss-pot, but if the need came you can wire a purpose built charging circuit wired directly into the consumer unit, which can handle a lot higher ampage than the standard 2.5mm power ring circuit.

Maybe we should create a topic just for the electric vs hydrogen discussion

Faster charging shortens battery life, homes don't have 3-phase, most people don't have a drive.

The most laughable claim was piping hydrogen to your home - wtf - the obsession with refuelling in your front room just got past silly.

 

[Curio]

True, if I paid out £100,000+ on a supercar, I would insist that it fell to bits and was likely to kill me on every corner.

If I paid out 100,000 on a supercar I would insist it had some personality/character and wasn't like driving a video game. If I wanted something safe and reliable I would buy a Volvo. If I buy a Lambo I expect something that looks like it's from the future (the Aventador does look amazing) but also something that makes my arse twitch when I'm behind the wheel.

The Lambo badge is a raging bull - not a dairy cow!

 

[Kenai]

I am 99% sure the Aventador would probably make you **** yourself if you wanted it to.

I would take Top Gear's comments (like always) with a very very large pinch of salt.

 

[hiroofheroes]

Electrical motors driven by an efficient ICE, but with some battery for energy recovery storage is the best solution for now.

If down the line you can replace the ICE with a more efficient electric generator - be it hydrogen or something else - it's an easy change - and there is always the option for the ICE to run on biofuels if their production becomes efficient.

 

[Angilion]

I think biofuels and hybrids using small gas turbines will be the near future. Once the govt get the bee out of their ass regarding hemp, it has the potential to be far more productive for biofuel than crops like corn.

Turbine/electric (with the turbine running at a constant speed to generate electricity for motors that power the car, like a diesel/electric train) could be much more efficient than an ICE, but is it possible to turn over enough land to growing plants for enough biofuel for all vehicle use without causing widespread starvation and ruining ecosystems by monocropping on a massive scale?

 

[Simon]

Battery - Need to have easy swap battery packs and charge them at petrol stations. This is the only sensible route because 1) nobody wants a car where the £10k battery needs replacing after 3 years and 2) It's the only way to 're-fuel' quickly. Weight is not an issue, a standardised design and mechanical assistance could even make it automatic.

Hydrogen - Need to build expensive tanks to store the Hydrogen at petrol stations, tankers no doubt more expensive too.

What is never going to happen is re-fuelling at home, apart from a few top-up chargers for people who have drive ways we are not going to see millions of people relying on the 13a socket to provide for ther daily motoring needs.

Once you get away from that fiction you can work on practical solutions.

Who's gonna buy and charge all these batterys in the charging station?

 

[Angilion]

Hydrogen is certainly in the stronger position, given there's a car out there that runs on it, gives ~250 miles to a tank, and doesn't take hours to refill.

At the end of the day, that's quite simply what matters to people. That and having plenty of places to refuel it, which is something that would come with mass-market adoption.

It only appears stronger because there are so many people who have no understanding of any of the problems.

There are 10 such cars on the roads. That's it. 10. On the whole planet. There are plans to slowly scale it up to 50.

There is currently absolutely no possibility at all of mass-market adoption. The problem isn't simply a scarcity of refueling stations - that would be a problem that could be overcome with money. The problem is that hydrogen is only available in very limited quantities as a by-product of very large scale oil refining. Well, that's the main problem. Storage and transportation are also big problems and also can't be solved with just resources.

You're right that people want convenience in refueling. Well, that could be done with batteries if the charge to weight and charge to volume ratios drop enough and there are already prototype batteries close to it. The theory is there and the practice is already at the prototype stage. As opposed to hydrogen, which doesn't even have theory and which may well be fundamentally impossible to implement on a large enough scale with enough efficiency. It takes energy to break atomic bonds and that's not going to change.

Get battery size and weight down enough and swapping becomes viable. So you swap batteries in a battery station and thus disconnect the charging time from the driving time - you're in the station only long enough for the battery to be swapped, which would take no longer than filling a tank. It then doesn't matter how long batteries take to charge - you don't have to wait for it.

There are big problems with batteries as an energy carrier, but they are much smaller than the problems with hydrogen as an energy carrier and (unlike the problems with hydrogen) it appears possible to solve those problems sometime soon. Remember, hydrogen doesn't even have a theoretical solution to the core problem - breaking the atomic bonds between hydrogen and other elements requires a lot of energy.

 

[ScoobyDoo69]

How odd to have Ben Collins back..

 

[Angilion]

THIS

It makes me wonder why lion cars are so bad now when the EV1 was NIMH.

Cost. Li-ion has a higher energy density, but it's mind-bogglingly expensive. If you're trying to make a commercial product, you have to care about that. £7000 for the 24KWh pack in the Leaf, for example, and that's cheap for Li-ion. You get about 3 miles per KWh from an electric car, hence the Leaf's stated range of 70 miles. Regenerative braking can extend that to maybe 4 miles per KWh of initial charge, which is why Leaf drivers can squeeze 100 miles from a full charge. So in a best case scenario and including the effects of regenerative braking, you're looking at ~£70 battery cost per mile of range. For a lightened (and thus more expensive) car.

If you don't care about initial cost or cost of ownership or running costs, you can make pretty good electric cars. There's a road-legal EV that does 0-60 in 1.8s and a quarter mile in 10.258s, but it still has the same range per KWh as the Leaf (and about the same overall range, since it holds 22.7KWh and the Leaf holds 24KWh).

EDIT: In case anyone wants to look it up, it's called "White Zombie". It's a converted 1972 Datsun 1200. The owner does drive it on the roads - it's a genuine road car.

 

[Angilion]

[..]
I did wonder about whether it could be said to technically be explosive. Either way, my point was more that it's ludicrous to dismiss hydrogen on the basis of needing to pump it to people's houses or whatever other nonsense was being suggested. Bit of a straw man, really...

Distributing hydrogen is only one of the 3 major problems with using hydrogen as an energy carrier and it's far from a trivial problem. Even if you use the same model as with petrol and diesel, i.e. carried to stations by vehicles, you've got a lot of problems you don't have with petrol and diesel.

When you're comparing it with electricity for batteries, which is transmitted to people's houses using existing infrastructure, it's not such a ludicrous comparison.