2040 deadline for Diesel and Petrol cars.

Here here, NDIY! The world is full of people who can only see disadvantages, in mobile phones, 'visual disturbance' like cellphone masts, solar panels, battery technology, pollution, etc. Yesterday I heard a sensible idea for people who have to park on the street. Plug your EV into a street light! Wonderful lateral thinking! Also, charge it up whilst at work. 8 hours spent unused in the office car park, yeah? The hydrogen economy is a dead end because the i/c engine has hundreds of moving parts, an electric motor has one! Fuel cells are much more likely.

Geoff

You can buy electric chainsaws and mowers for decades, with or without a cable!

Canal boats are the ideal subject for electrification, they need ballast so big batteries don't affect them at all and there are some very successful ones out there.

I am interested in the split of opinions here.

As someone who is convinced climate change is having a real impact already, I don't think it is environmentalists like me who can 'save the world'* it's engineers.

While engineers do tend towards optimism and hubris, I don't see any impossible challenges here, just challenges.

When I was a lad, the idea of cheap, affordable, portable battery powered drills was ridiculous, and electric model aircraft were a bit of a joke that plodded round the sky...

Neil

*for 'save the world' read 'save humnan civilisation in more or less its current form'.

I'm not against Electric vehicles and am fully trained to the highest level available to repair these vehicles .

I even run a Prius myself.

My comments were aimed solely at the governments lack of thinking about a subject before jumping on a band wagon.

They should be announcing new battery manufacturing and disposal plants, and the ensuing new jobs, keeping us at the forefront of the new technology.

Instead of frightening anybody who is currently in a trade that will be severely effected by announcing cut off dates for their jobs.

on one hand making themselves look good by improving the environment whilst abolishing incentives and increasing the taxes on EV's in the background with the other

Edited By Antony Powell on 27/07/2017 09:08:33

Street light power circuits arn't good enough for charging EV's you'd have to rewire them all at great cost and disruption, plus they are still spaced out too far to safely run a charging cable to a vehicle.

you'd get the no win no fee scum doing "did you trip over a power cable in the street claims"

I am sure Neil is right about climate change having a real impact already. But when we start looking for what's to blame, everyone seems to turn to the noxious gases we pump into the atmosphere, and the energy we waste, but nobody seems to look at the amount of pure heat we waste. Just a few "for instances." Every morning wasted hot water from my shower and shave is thrown away down the drain. If it is cold and I switch the heating on, my house, like most, leaks heat into the atmosphere. My car is probably the worst offender - it needs a radiator to get rid of a huge amount of heat into the atmosphere, and every time I brake four discs shed more heat into the air. Waste heat from my kitchen goes into the outside air through the cooker hood, and almost everywhere we look, even in my countryside location, there's something pouring out pure heat as well as polluting gases. Even electric motors waste heat, and so do power stations.

All of this heat must go somewhere, and it is quite noticeable that the temperature in cities is slightly higher than in the surrounding countryside. Perhaps I'm not making this case very clearly, and maybe I am naïve as well, but I know damned well that the weather is warmer than it was when I was a child 60 years ago and the world's population was smaller and we had the sense of wrap up warmly on cold days.

Edited By Mike on 27/07/2017 09:57:32

It is also true that wine was made on Lindisfarne in the middle ages implying a warmer climate than we have now - well before the Industrial Age began

Hydrogen based automotive has not taken off (yet, if ever) due to storage challenges, though there are a few outlets in California. The biggest issue is range for electric cars, hence hybrids - but it's the oil giants who want to preserve their monopoly for as long as possible. Hydrogen just doesn't figure in their plans whereas selling oil and gas to generate electricity clearly supports battery driven cars with continuation of supply of fuel for generators in hybrid cars

Who remembers when atomic power stations were first built ? Headlines - power will be so cheap it won't be worth sending out bills. A government enquiry into the future of computers ? They thought a market of 3 or 4 a year might be feasible.

It was the same up here in Scotland when the first hydro-electric schemes came on line - so cheap, the only cost would be to pay for installation in your home..............

As an engineer (retired) I agree with you.

The question people should be asking is not "Does man made CO2 result in global warming?" bit "How much is it responsible?". The first has been proven beyond doubt and the second the second is very strongly suggested by the correlation between CO2 and global warming in many years of records. Anyone who doubts that needs to read and understand the scientific papers. A very good, if somewhat out of date, explanation in layman's terms is given in Bjorn Lomborg's book, "The Sceptical Environmentalist".

If petrol and diesel cars are banned from 2040 it is unlikely to affect me as I'm not likely to still be driving at 94 years of age. Also, the governments making such statements are equally unlikely to still be in power. Who knows what future governments will do?

Looking at the problem as an engineer I can see a major problems with electric cars. While particulate and NOx pollutants might be reduced, CO2 production is just moved from one place to another in countries that rely on fossil fuel power for electricity generation. When you look at the efficiency of oil fired power stations compared with cars, taking into account all the losses in distribution, battery charge/discharge, etc., there is very little to choose between them. Electric is a bit better than petrol cars but a bit worse than diesel. There is only a big decrease in CO2 emissions in countries that rely heavily on nuclear power. So we should be investing in nuclear power stations or developing "renewable" energy sources that do not rely on the unpredictable weather such as geothermal.

Russell

Edited to remove stutter!

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 27/07/2017 11:22:38

IF, we take a politician's soundbite at face value, the UK has 13 years in which to develop practical power sources for not just private transport, but for freight.

Today's Daily Telegraph quotes the best selling electric car as the Nissan Leaf, with a range of 124 miles. That won't even get me to Hereford this week end to The WaterWorks Museum, (140 miles each way) and even IF it did, it would need 12 -15 hours to recharge before I could return home. The down hill stretches off Motorway will need lots of Amps to climb (1 in 8 = 12% in places) on the return journey, so regenerative braking will be balanced out.

There is a VAST amount of work to do before political aspiration becomes practicable.

The genes of King Canute still seem to course through the veins of politicians.

No one, in power seems to be capable of thinking the process through from source to end product.

Electric power is only likely to be a pollution free source if it is generated by solar, wind, hydro or wave power.

And that ignores making all the hardware and infrastructure!

Anything which involves combustion will produce pollution.

Maybe politicians and their advisors should take extended courses in logic, and engineering, before pontificating.

Utopia is still over the horizon!

Howard

Couldn't agree more Russell, a combination of nuclear and renewables, with a lot of energy storage, seems like the way forward. No doubt the greenies will object to flooding large areas of upland Britain for hydro and pumped storage schemes, even if we could find suitable sites.

As for hydrogen, most of it is made by reacting methane with steam to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide, so hydrogen powered cars are no better than petrol unless the overall cycle produces less CO2 which I doubt. If it ever did take off, the big oil men would find a way of using other hydrocarbons, so have no interest in squashing it. The big problem as someone else said is storgae and transportation.

AND whatever machines we use, some sort of lubrication will still be needed.

No mineral oil? well use vegetable, or composites such as Nylon for bearings. Then think about the quantity of energy in producing your choice, before committing.

If only life was simple

Howard

One other problem, maybe- the Chinese seem to have bought up all the rare earths and other stuff needed , at least to make the current batteries .see what I did there!

One other problem, maybe- the Chinese seem to have bought up all the rare earths and other stuff needed , at least to make the current batteries .see what I did there!

I'm with the optimists here. Solutions will be found - maybe we'll have to do things a bit differently, but no reason to think it'll all be bad.

As a terraced house dweller I'm particularly interested in solutions to this charging problem - trailing wires over the footpath obviously being no good as a proper solution. Streetlight posts are not an option either on our street - the (widely spaced) lights are mounted direct onto house walls, and the pavements are also quite narrow. Interestingly, they've all recently been dug up and relaid for fibre - along with much of the rest of the city - so it's not hard to imagine this being done again to lay some more heavy duty power cable.

There's a trial about to start in Oxford with proposed solutions including gullies for you to lay a cable through from your house (obviously depends on you being able to get a space right outside) or smallish charging bollards.

Seems to me the most likely solution is that the equivalent of the current fibre installer companies will simply dig up our pavements again, install a charging bollard every 10m or so, then let it pay for itself in fees over the next few years. You'd maybe have to tap a contactless card onto the bollard before it lets you charge so it can bill you correctly - or maybe it will recognise your car automatically.

A bit of the already narrow pavement width would be lost, but needs must...and presumably a lot of extra work would also be needed 'upstream' to ensure the grid could cope... but all seems very do-able.

Edited By Bikepete on 27/07/2017 12:31:32

For the temperature to rise to an average of +5C globally by the end of 2100 would be disastrous, to the point where it would render some already hotter climbs of the world uninhabitable. 35C at 100% humidity for e.g is practically unbearable for a human.

It would be a miracle if we could get to a point where we level off the increases before this happens and luckily they are now starting to make some inroads into achieving this. If this means we have to say bye bye to regular usage of I.C's then fine.

By this I don't mean an outright ban, you can't effectively ban technology. So long as the regular "get about car" is replaced with a green affordable alternative then good. all power to that.

I was once a sceptic on the reasons why these changes were occurring (not necessarily doubting the occurrence of it as such),I think much of the scepticism stems from a lack of trust, when experts and what like are wheeled out in front of the public and they automatically switch off to what they say, even if it is right, because we've been lied to in the past. At that point, it no longer matters if what you say is right or wrong, because there's no trust. 

but it surely has to be common sense that artificially plugging away as many gases as you can, on an industrial scale, into your normal breathable atmosphere is bad news.

Michael W

Edited By Michael-w on 27/07/2017 12:47:56

Drive into any major city at night and all the empty office blocks are lit up like a xmas tree....start by switching half of those lights off...or all of them.

Was in Nairobi last year for work. Took 2 hours to travel from hotel to office in the morning and another 2 hours back to hotel in the evening...distance 10 miles. No one turned off their engines, ancient old buses and lorry engines continuously belching out black fumes. I am sure its taken 1 week off my life span.

Then back in olde England we worry about turning our tV's off and not leaving them on stand by....

Regards

Del

So who does know the answer Howard, and what is it? All I know is that we cannot carry on as we are.

Unfortunately politicians are our best bet. Their problem is that they have to deal with public opinion as well as party prejudices. As this is usually self-interested, ill-informed, emotional, shallow and short-sighted we get what we deserve.

No disrespect here: no-one has the time to understand money, religious fundamentalism, Chinese politics, risk analysis, economics, exhaustion of natural resources, climate change, statistics, information, consumerism, antibiotics, artificial intelligence, any of the sciences, most technologies etc. etc. Or how these might interact in future.

I do feel that most people should try harder, and am in favour of no-one over (say) 70 being allowed to vote. Not because old people are stupid, but because experienced minds fear change.

Dave

Many postings of wisdom and lateral thinking here but such are apparently sadly lacking in the politicians’ mentality.

I don’t buy that their primary motivation is the toxicity of NOx and particulates. As with tobacco related deaths, cold economics dictate – as we are now finding - that reducing premature deaths from such causes actually costs the country billions per year which can only be funded through unpopular, higher taxation and cutting services. Whilst not denigrating the value of prolonging human life, my cynicism suggests that to keep votes, all political parties subscribe to ill-conceived measures such as this latest one.

I drive a diesel car made to conform to the latest Euro cat 6 emissions regulation. AdBlue is added at minimal extra cost/mile and reduces NOx output significantly. I get about 20 to 30% more miles/gallon of fossil fuel than with my previous petrol engine. Since 1990, particulate emissions from diesel engines have been reduced by around 99 percent, while modern diesels emit some 98 percent less NOx than comparable vehicles from the early 1990s. The “problem”, however it’s defined, is the continued use of old technology on the roads.

Who can foresee that North America or Russia would follow suit? Shale oil extraction and natural reserves in those areas are primary economic activities. Trump has already flagged up his attitude to green issues. Add to that the third world's dependence on old polluting vehicles and the UK & France contribution to improving health & climate change is insignificant and disproportionate.

As for “I do feel that most people should try harder, and am in favour of no-one over (say) 70 being allowed to vote. Not because old people are stupid, but because experienced minds fear change”. I prefer the philosophy advocated by my old prof “Don’t vote – it only encourages them”.