Reply to: Alternative Fuel Cars

[Paddy]

You'll find that most of the ancient structures suffered from later people stealing the ready cut stone from them. The later, larger pyramids were clad in harder wearing stone than the interior was built from.
The outer lime stone cladding was stolen and the inner stone is more susceptible to weathering in the desert.

The pyramids fell into disrepair because the outer stones were stolen and used to build houses in Cairo. The same happened to Roman roads in the UK. Stones from Catholic Churches and monasteries were also used to build houses.

[DimPrawn]

Back to the subject in hand - I have second hand experience of Electric vehicles. I work for National Grid and they have given Mitsubishi EV's to a couple of staff. I think the basic premise is - don't plan a journey longer than 25 miles, as the range-o-meter plummets to the red, regularly inducing panic. And in the winter, half that as you have to turn on the heater, blower and electric rear window. Oh, and the car costs £37k and the batteries will last 5 years - if you're lucky. Replacement sets will cost 5 figures....
So, as an alternative to a shopping car for the missus - maybe. But you could afford to buy half a dozen Ford Ka's for the money AND throw them away after 5 years.....

How much CO2 goes into making all those batteries every 5 years? How much pollution does handling all these materials (lithium for example) cause?

FFS, get over this bulltulip about oil and gas running out, it will outlast all of us and probably our children too.

Anyway, there's always a nice green diesel car

Jeremy Clarkson Audi Q7 V12 TDI quattro review | Driving - Times Online

[Dearnla]

Do the panel have any experience in looking at 'green' energy vehicles?

As a taskforce recommends the UK to plan for another massive hike in Oil prices in the future, and bearing in mind oil is running out, would a Plan B be an alternative vehicle business?

There are some hybrid cars, electric cars etc, but does anyone own one and has anyone researched this/test driven?

Back to the subject in hand - I have second hand experience of Electric vehicles. I work for National Grid and they have given Mitsubishi EV's to a couple of staff. I think the basic premise is - don't plan a journey longer than 25 miles, as the range-o-meter plummets to the red, regularly inducing panic. And in the winter, half that as you have to turn on the heater, blower and electric rear window. Oh, and the car costs £37k and the batteries will last 5 years - if you're lucky. Replacement sets will cost 5 figures....
So, as an alternative to a shopping car for the missus - maybe. But you could afford to buy half a dozen Ford Ka's for the money AND throw them away after 5 years.....

[TimberWolf]

The Parthenon in Athens is over 2000 years old and still standing, the reason it is in bad shape is through bombing in wars. If we use the materials we have available to us now then we can easily build something that lasts that long.

There's a whole list of ancient UK buildings here, though admittedly the ones that are 4 thousand or so years old probably lost their roofs at some point.

[kandr]

The Parthenon in Athens is over 2000 years old and still standing, the reason it is in bad shape is through bombing in wars. If we use the materials we have available to us now then we can easily build something that lasts that long.

[Spacecadet]

Pyramids are just stone structures and most of them are fallen apart or in great disrepair after only a couple of 1000 years.

You'll find that most of the ancient structures suffered from later people stealing the ready cut stone from them. The later, larger pyramids were clad in harder wearing stone than the interior was built from.
The outer lime stone cladding was stolen and the inner stone is more susceptible to weathering in the desert.

[TimberWolf]

Pyramids are just stone structures and most of them are fallen apart or in great disrepair after only a couple of 1000 years. Even decent stone buildings fall apart after a while, normally a couple of centuries of wind & rain will do the trick, let alone tidal forces.

So to get it to last 10k years there's that big building cost, spread over 10k years, plus additional costs every year for 10k years. I hardly think those additional costs will be small.

Some trees last longer than 1000 years and plenty of man made structures that old exist today. Heck, even local churches are older than that and they still look brand new. Earth filled dams can't be that hard to maintain surely. Sedimentation is probably limits the life span, though I'm not sure why that can't be dealt with efficiently.

[d000hg]

Pyramids are just stone structures and most of them are fallen apart or in great disrepair after only a couple of 1000 years. Even decent stone buildings fall apart after a while, normally a couple of centuries of wind & rain will do the trick, let alone tidal forces.

So to get it to last 10k years there's that big building cost, spread over 10k years, plus additional costs every year for 10k years. I hardly think those additional costs will be small.

[TimberWolf]

You think we're going to build something that runs for 10,000 years?

It'll need maintenance. The Hoover dam is expected to be one of the last structures standing, were civilisation to fail. There are probably mills still existing that are centuries old. How hard can it be to infill concrete with earth?

[d000hg]

Not spread over 10,000 years?

You think we're going to build something that runs for 10,000 years?


I love how hyperD is so objective and unbiased

[hyperD]

But, we can't keep burning oil and our own coal supplies are essentially exhausted, so fossil fuels are going to get expensive for us and we'll need to import them from, possibly, unreliable sources.

Wind farms were only to make up a small fraction of our electrical energy supply needs. A lot of oil will still need to be imported to power industry, transport, agriculture and our electrical energy needs. The current system also has overcapacity is built in, to handle demand swings from day to night and from season to season.

I thought it was stupid not going ahead with the Severn Barrage. It's a gift from heaven. Not only could it supply energy predictably, it could have been used for load balancing too. Mind you, having been shocked at the planned lifetime of 30 years, we were better off not going there. It should be a 10,000 year structure, a wonder of the world.

The short lifespan of wind turbines (20 years) does worry me.

I'm all for nuclear too.

Unfortunately TW, there is no escaping the economic reality that we have to either build more nuclear power stations or import more gas and electricity. Until other forms of realistic base load power are available then that simply is it.

We cannot start changing our geography to support hydro power - too expensive.

We have supplies of coal but to start processing this - too expensive.

Tidal is too expensive but at least has the potential for load balancing.

Wind and solar are too expensive and due to their intermittency can only be used as peaking power sources. In order to be effective they also require fossil fuelled power stations for when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. Solar panels also need to be kept clean in order to work efficiently.

China has coal reserves around estimated at current consumption of 400 years (without taking into account of technological improvements in extraction - applies to oil and gas reserves too). They are not going to stop consuming coal when it is so abundant.

There is absolutely no reason to build a single wind turbine as it does not provide any meaningful reduction in fossil fuel dependency - it's simply a waste of taxpayer's money that could more usefully be spent on other power sources such as nuclear or gas or even helping the domestic front such as insulation and new efficient boilers.

Why people can't get their head around this simple economic fact rather than this wistful, romantic notion of saving penguins, teddy bears and aardvarks, simply defies belief (esteemed CUK members excluded of course!).

[TimberWolf]

a bloody expensive gift!!

Not spread over 10,000 years? Pretty much anything is going to be expensive compared to an energy dense substance that only has to be picked up off the ground or gushes out of the ground. That party is nearly over though, for the UK at least.

[Troll]

I thought it was stupid not going ahead with the Severn Barrage. It's a gift from heaven.

a bloody expensive gift!!

[TimberWolf]

...Good, but a bit long to quote...

But, we can't keep burning oil and our own coal supplies are essentially exhausted, so fossil fuels are going to get expensive for us and we'll need to import them from, possibly, unreliable sources.

Wind farms were only to make up a small fraction of our electrical energy supply needs. A lot of oil will still need to be imported to power industry, transport, agriculture and our electrical energy needs. The current system also has overcapacity is built in, to handle demand swings from day to night and from season to season.

I thought it was stupid not going ahead with the Severn Barrage. It's a gift from heaven. Not only could it supply energy predictably, it could have been used for load balancing too. Mind you, having been shocked at the planned lifetime of 30 years, we were better off not going there. It should be a 10,000 year structure, a wonder of the world.

The short lifespan of wind turbines (20 years) does worry me.

I'm all for nuclear too.

[hyperD]

This is what places like Dinorwig are for. It's essentially storing energy for peak times.

Yes, lets get this right. As Pondlife says, pumped-storage hydroelectric schemes such as these use cheaper electricity (during the night, for example) to pump water up a reservoir so that when there is a requirement for peak power for the National Grid (such as during the ads in Corrie, World cup etc when people are boiling kettles etc) they can harness the power of the potential energy of the water flowing through the turbines to generate electricity to the National Grid and can satisfy the easily predictable demand at short notice.

The power station makes a profit (to pay for the remaining capital cost of construction and operation) by the difference in buying cheaper electricity from the National Grid during the night (to pump the water up the reservoir) and providing more profitable peak power during the adverts in the early evening or morning.

Dinorwig CAN guarantee a source of peak demand power for the National Grid, unlike wind farms such as Thanet.

The only way wind farms can give the same high value guarantee for this source for the retail electrical spot market, is to construct an accompanying gas turbine power station that will be on at least 80% of the time for when the wind doesn't blow. In Denmark, they call this gas powered wind balancing i.e. fossil fuels are consumed more expensively and more inefficiently than base load nuclear or coal power stations (due to the rapidly changing load) to compensate for the lack of the right amount of wind (80% of the time on average).

Yes, that's right. Wind farms do not replace fossil fueled power stations. Ergo, CO2 output doesn't diminish, but by god, your take home pay does!

Dinorwig is NOT a net provider of electrical power to the National Grid.

So there we go. We build an expensive, taxpayer subsidised wind farm, and our monies go to a foreign company, such as Vattenfall in Sweden, who build these follies for £1,200,000,000 for the sake of 20 local UK jobs. We then have to build a gas turbine power station to back this up if the output from this windfarm is of any significance. If it isn't, then why build it? What exactly is it saving? Spiking random power surges into the National Grid will simply cause operational balance problems and realistically when wind farms are producing power when they are not needed, they will simply be disconnected from the National Grid or sold at well below spot market prices.

The irony being of course, why build the expensive wind farm in the first place when you could simply leave a cheaper gas powered station there to start with?

So, to all you AGW zealots out there: engage your brain, not your Marxist, knee-jerk, Chicken Licken, world's-not-fair rhetoric.

Think about the scale of debt that you are subjecting your children and your grand-children to.

Think of the number of businesses that will not be able to compete with countries that laugh at the paradigm of AGW due to our increased costs and needs of buying in more expensive electricity to compensate for the lack of coal and nuclear power stations.

Think about the effects of the inevitable power cuts that are coming our way on the sick and needy.

Wind farms will never work with the respect to the fluctuating demand of the National Grid.

Never.

Oh yes, and suddenly Vattenfall have decided to cancel an extension to the Thanet windfarm. I wonder why...