Safe Speed Forums

Cheers Pete. Sorry. I think I misread the original perhaps?

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I can make a bit of a few contributions here as I am peripherally involved with electric vehicles.
First of all, the heaters are (often) combustion heaters that burn diesel. I have experience of EVs with 5kW diesel heaters. They have a small tank (couple of gallons) that lasts a month or so in winter. They are completely un-catalysed but at least there's not much by way of total emissions.

My big problem is that they're slow and / or expensive. Of the ones I'm involved with, 45kW of traction motor doesn't push nearly 3 tonnes along very fast! For £50k, (batteries INcluded!) it really wouldn't matter if the government gave me a £5k reduction, I still wouldn't buy one at £45k!

It's not all bad news though, they're quite a nice driving experience - serene, in fact. Not much fun on the open road but pretty good in dense urban traffic. We can get 100 miles for just over £2 - that's the real draw! If you lease (rather than buy) the battery and you do your full 100 miles a day AND you do it in London where you'd get off the congestion charge AND diesel goes up to about £1.35/litre, I guess you'd just about make money over the 5 year battery lease.

The downside is that it would take (OK it's a big MPV) about 8 hours to charge froma 3-phase supply! The battery holds 43kWh. Assuming 0.5kg of CO2 per kWh from your wall socket, it's CO2 emissions in g/km aren't too dissimilar to an equivalent doesel-powered car (driven as slowly as this one goes)! That said, charging overnight helps level out electricity demand so I think there's a net CO2 benefit!

I am sceptical as to whether the price of batteries will fall as volumes go up - I have a feeling that demand is going to outstrip supply for quite a while to come!

Given that we are a country that has rather poor energy security right now; where's the electricity going to come from?

Noticed in the budget that most of the 10.something billion set aside for Green Energy was for offshore wind development.

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Well, I have a big generator (Well two actually, One is part of a (stalled) CHP project! Maybe I should restat it (the project that is ))

I fink maybe aquiring some more "red diesel" mightnt be such a bad idea either!

(I only have 500L!)

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I hear lithium is already in short supply.

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Indeed. http://www.azom.com/news.asp?newsID=7648

The manufactures are going for lithium batteries because the technology is well developed. They don't want to get involved in the time and money developing a more suitable chemistry such as Zinc-Air ior fuel cells. Using Lithium for traction batteries is as sensible as trying to replace coal burning power stations with wind turbines.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Thanks for linking this article DCB. Unfortunately, I do have concerns with it. It doesn't start well:


So merely stopping activities will halt the onset of natural global warming? It's not like our planet hasn't experienced must more extreme warming and cooling without our help. How disingenuous!


Is it? So how did our planet manage to fall into the deep ice ages when the CO2 level was 10x higher? Where did all that CO2 go?


Since when was generation of electricity 100% CO2 free?
Of course, the report won't tell us how this compares to natural emissions, let alone how much gets re-absorbed.

Putting aside how the political commentary detracts from the technical content, it is a good article. I am all for eliminating our dependence on oil, purely because of the regimes it ends up funding.

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

And committing to LiIon technology would put is in thrall to a number of undemocratic South American regimes.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

You're probably right, but it's not like I said/hinted that we should replace hydrocarbons with LiIon

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

No, not at all. Just pursuing my point that lithium batteries are not really the answer for sustainable electrical traction

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown