Member postings for Doubletop

We are having a similar debate here in NZ following the Christchurch tragedy. The government quickly introduced a ban on automatic weapons and will introduce gun registration. The pro-gun lobby trotted out similar arguments about criminalising law abiding people and suggested criminals wouldn’t bother handing in their weapons or registering them.

Surely the point is that everybody that registers would potentially be off the list of suspects and the authorities will only have to spend their time dealing with the small percentage that don’t comply with the regulations.

Those of us with steam engines join a club and pay subs so we can get our boilers tested and approved for public use. We do it because we have to if we want to be safe and be insured to use them in public. Surely its much the same arguments for model aircraft?

Pete

In NZ the NZTA publish the vehicle registration statistics. In 2018 there was in the order of 200,000 new vehicle registrations. Those vehicles ranged from scooters to articulated trucks and larger.

The power ratings for every vehicle is given, and the average power of all the vehicles was around 100Kw. If the average annual mileage is assumed to be 10,000 miles (or 16000km) at say an average speed of 50km/hr then the average usage is 320hrs/year. Now those vehicles aren't going to be driven at full power so let’s say they are driven at 20% of the max power.

So 20% x 100Kw x 320hrs x 200,000 vehicles = 1,280,000 Megawatt/hrs of generation would be required. That’s a 150Megawatt power station running 24x7

There are 4Million vehicles registered in NZ. If they eventually all became electric then the power generation required would be 20 times that required for the 2018 registrations. That would be a 3,000Megawatt power station. The total generation capacity in NZ is currently 9,237Megawatts.

OK I accept there will be many other factors to be taken into consideration but surely somebody in the industry is doing a detailed analysis of what will be required and coming up with answers? Particularly; if we do need to generate this additional power how do we get it to where it is needed?

I've been looking for some sort of longer term planning or strategy for NZ. I've not found one and have assumed that with a deregulated electricity industry nobody wants to be the one to put up their hand and acknowledge there could be a problem.

I have found this from the UK though which may be a start

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/739460/road-to-zero.pdf >**LINK**

At the back are links to 218 other websites or papers related to the subject.

Pete

The link V8Eng provided led to this governemet strategy document. It may well be what I've been asking for

road-to-zero

It looks like it is worth reading and right at the back 218 endnotes with links to other papers......

Edited By Doubletop on 20/05/2019 11:17:46

I think it means that if your neigbours have got home and plugged in before you you may well have to wait your turn alternatively they will load share and you may not get as much juice at the rate you expected. Broadband style.

Edited By Doubletop on 20/05/2019 11:00:29

Those of you in the IET may be interested in joining in on the discussion here. (not sure if others can access it)

**LINK**

One of the contributors provided this link

gridwatch

You may find it interesting

The previous post was made 12sec before mine but I can't modify the Scalextric reference now. However, it does look like they are on to it....

At the risk of undermining the serious debate going on here "Scalextric" rails? Stranger things have been tried.in the past. Atmospheric railways come to mind.

However, I am more interested in the planning for the immediate future rather than esoteric long-term options. It all seems a bit piecemeal at the moment, maybe Sainsburys can come up with a plan of their own?

So 174 miles at 6.2 miles per kWh is 28.06kWh from a 240v supply 116.9Ahrs. As 35amps have been quoted, as a charging rate, that's 3.35hrs to recharge.

We are not being Luddites here, we know something needs to be done and EV's look to be a promising solution. But the point being made is what is the plan to harness whatever energy source is going to be used and build the infrastructure to get the power to where people will need it?

There does seem to be a lot of “trust us” “she’ll be right” but not a lot of detail about any practical engineered solutions, short, medium or long term

We all know that electric vehicles in one form or other are here to stay. Every day we hear the virtues of this technology or that and benefits and features of one manufacturers approach as opposed to another’s

So, like any project, we’ve seen the brief, we’ve got some sort of business case, we are seeing the proof of concept, you can go and buy one. What we haven’t seen is any solid on-going forecasts or plans for how this is going to play out long term, particularly for the power infrastructure. Which is the point I’ve been making and we are now discussing.

I agree; my calculations are very ‘fag packet’ I cobbled them together from the information I had available, just to make the point. I could well be way off. I would expect that the power companies are working on this but would suspect that the answer could be too unpalatable to be made public. No doubt there are a number of our members from the power industry. Are they aware of anything in the public domain that they can share with us particularly around power consumption forecasting for the introduction of EV’s?

Maybe we should lobby the IET and get them to do an issue of Engineering and Technology (E&T) on the subject?

Once everybody in the street is charging their vehicle when they get home the peak period will be at night and the daytime will be off peak.

As pgkpgk pointed out 35amps for an hour to do 21miles. lets say charge to do 100miles thats 44Kwh being drawn at night time, for one property. The cables will be glowing in the dark in the commuter belts

Edited By Doubletop on 07/05/2019 11:34:43

Mandatory GPS trackers on vehicles opens up many possibilities

• Missing vehicle searches
• Road user charges
• Automatic speeding fines
• Automatic crash detection (tied to airbag triggers they'd know how major a crash was before anybody managed to get out of their cars)

Big Brother is certainly with us. The 'Thought Police" will be next

I had asked the same question about the government’s loss of fuel tax as everybody switches over to EV's. It was pointed out to me that we already have a system working in New Zealand. We don't pay tax on diesel fuel but diesel vehicles are subject to Road User Charges. You pay in advance depending on the type of vehicle you own. In an attempt to encourage take up EV's don’t pay RUC at the moment but it would be easy to tag them on

https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/resources/road-user-charges/docs/road-user-charges-handbook.pdf

Removing the off-peak electricity charges will be the tip of the iceberg. The generation and power transmission infrastructure will need beefing up and that will need to be paid for. That will be by all users not just the EV's owners.

Ah! The. I was discussing the same topic with some RAF buddies and the "Injector Seat" evolved. Back to the retinal scanning proposal. If a driver stops being attentive for extended periods a bloody great spike comes out of the seat. Rather than being a pain in the arse they get a pain in the arse....

Tesla not looking too good in the commercial sector

**LINK**

**LINK**

It is interesting to see pgk’s charging details, 35 amps per hour on a domestic power supply that’s about 7.5KWh and for only 21miles

Some time ago I wondered where all the power was going to come from and how it was going to get distributed, and did some rough estimates. The New Zealand Transport Agency publish annual spreadsheets of all the vehicles registered here. They have very comprehensive details of each vehicle including the engine size and power.

Taking 2018 as an example (the stats for 2016 and 2017 produce similar results)

There were 214,000 vehicles of all sizes, scooters to HGV’s registered in NZ in 2018, of which 164,000 were powered. The average power of the vehicles was 128Kw. If the average annual mileage is assumed to be 16,000km (10,000 miles) at, say, an average speed of 50km/hr then the average usage is 320hrs/year. Those vehicles aren't going to be driven at full power so let’s say they are driven at 20% of their max power.

Had all the vehicles been electric that would have been 164000 vehicles, 128Kw at 20% for 320hrs = 1,343,488 MWh of power consumed per annum. With 8760 hours in a year that would require a 153MWh power station running 24x7

New Zealand currently has 5 million vehicles and the government has stated that they are expecting 80% of all the vehicles to be electric by 2050. So 4000000/164000 x 153MWh = 3,732GWh of additional power generation plus the transmission line infrastructure to move the power to where it’s needed.

The real concern is what is all this going to do to consumer power prices in order to pay for the build the required infrastructure? In the UK the problem must be 10 times that of New Zealand? Then again pgk's figures seem to indicate the numbers could well be higher if it takes 7.5KWh for 21 miles 10,000 miles would need an annual consumption of 3600KWh for one vehicle.

Edited By Doubletop on 29/04/2019 11:54:04

Edited By Doubletop on 29/04/2019 11:55:01

Edited By Doubletop on 29/04/2019 11:55:30

Not random but in a way organic. Various sensors from as far back as ABS, traction control, stability control etc are being developed and tested by all the manufacturers with the long-term intent to integrate them into their autonomous vehicle programme. As part of this development programme they separately or jointly become features on new models.

The technology may well work but at times the human factors seem to be overlooked, unless what is really happening is all the owners of these vehicles are unwittingly guinea pigs. It shouldn’t be a surprise if we found out that all the usage stats for these features were being recorded and downloaded at service time as ‘engineering’ data.

The biggest issue with autonomous vehicles is going to be the legal and moral aspects particularly in the transition period from old to new, when 'gaming' AV's could become a problem.

And then there is this from Elon Musk

**LINK**

Edited By Doubletop on 29/04/2019 02:26:05

Oooo!! one of my grumpy old git topics

I think that the camera on these systems needs to be turned around and pointed at the driver. When it detects that the driver isn’t paying attention to their driving, fiddling with their, phone, satnav, radio, or just chatting to the passenger then the car slows down. That would prevent many more accidents than checking speed limts.

I’m of the opinion that the addition of these ‘features’ in the quest for autonomous vehicles is contributing to accidents. Drivers are relying on the gizmos too much and are not actually in control of the car.

The other month I watch a driver backing out of a parking space eyes glued on his reversing camera. He backed straight into the path of another vehicle coming down the down the road.

A friend of mine was telling me of a car he hired that he realised that the cruise control adjusted his speed to that of the vehicle in front. When the vehicle moved out of the way it resumed to the set speed. He got quite used to using it. When he got back into his own car and used the cruise control he nearly went into the back of another car....

If you want an insight into the technical, legal and moral questions of about autonomous vehicles have a look at this book on Amazon Free for Kindle

**LINK**

I’ll save electric vehicles for another time…..

Problems like these occur with every manufactured item.

In my RAF days the aircrew would have their favourite aircraft and go out of their way to avoid flying some. There would be aircraft that were forever in the hangar being fixed and others would go days, weeks without anything other than the regular servicing being done. No amount of changing components and fixing things would make a bad aircraft good. Maybe better but not good. The same went for the various components, some units would always be coming back in the servicing bays.

I’d suggest that very piece of equipment in our workshops is a compromise from rulers, through micrometres, callipers to the large machines. Fortunately, there’s enough info out there for us to be able to make an informed decision on what to buy within our budgets. Many of us were beginners and when we outgrew our initial choices we either fixed or replaced.

We purchase this Chinese equipment because it is cheap. If they didn’t supply the market we’d still be using vertical slides on our Myfords and probably not being as accurate or productive as we are now. Fair go to Ketan for fronting up and telling us how the supply chain works many other suppliers would shy away from making any comments.

Pete

Edited By Doubletop on 19/02/2019 20:37:59

Gary

Thanks, now I have an idea of the orientaion of the drill bit relative to the grinding wheel and be able to do some juggling to get everything in the correct position.

I also thing I picked up somewet that these machines only do split point for drills 8mm and up, or was I dreaming that?

Pete