Electric Cars: All You Ever Wanted To Know

The Newcastle Institution for Research on Sustainability is doing a blog that aims to answer all your questions about electric vehicles. Here are a couple of samples:

• The Real Cost of Buying
• What are they like to drive?
  

Are Electric Cars The Future?

Mitsubishi i

The other day I was watching an episode of Top Gear (A popular motoring programme hosted by 3 middle aged men who dick about whilst doing the occasional car review). One of the items was a pretty devastating assessment of electric cars.

Now, as you might guess, I've been fairly positive about electric cars in this blog (See here, here, and here) but even I had to admit after watching this, they would be a poor choice of vehicle to buy.



The headline criticisms were:

• They are considerably more expensive than a similar sized petrol engine car (Around double the price).
• Their range is poor on a full charge (100 miles or less for most), which would mean frequent 're-fuelling' stops on a long journey.
• Re-charging takes several hours (up to 13 in the review). So no quick stops like with a standard car.
• There are very few charging points around at present, so drivers risk being stranded if they don't plan their journeys carefully.
• The batteries have a short life (around 5 years according to the review) and will be even shorter if 'fast charge' outlets (which greatly reduce the charge time) are used. The cost for a replacement? In the thousands - £7000 was quoted on Top Gear.

Nissan Leaf

Of course, you could say the test was unfair as it consisted of a lengthy journey in vehicles that are clearly better suited to local commutes (You wouldn't test a family hatchback by taking it off-road, would you?). You could also say that electric vehicles (EVs) are still new technology, so you'd expect them to be expensive and have a few issues.

[Note: Top Gear got it wrong about the battery life. Nissan say that the batteries should only have lost between 20 to 30% off the full charge after 10 years. If it did fail at around 5 years it would fall under the warranty and be replaced. The battery actually consists of 48 modules, each costing about £400 to replace. Typically you'd replace the modules as they fail not the whole thing in one go. More here]

Still, as EVs stand, there's not much to recommend them. Even the zero emissions argument is a bit dodgy when you consider that the electric they use has probably been generated using mainly fossil fuels (unless you live somewhere like France where it's mostly nuclear).

This is probably why Nissan have only sold 50,000 Leafs worldwide in nearly 2 years.

So are EVs doomed to failure? Not according to this item written by the President of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Some highlights:

• EVs are inherently much more efficient than even the best vehicle based round an internal combustion engine [ICE].  EVs manage 120 miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of petrol.
• Even when run on electric from grids that use a lot of fossil fuels, their efficiency means they still have a smaller carbon footprint than an ICE vehicle.
• Range isn't that big a deal. Most people's daily mileage is less than half the actual range of an EV. Some EVs, like the Chevy Volt and Prius Plug-in have a back-up petrol energy. Incidentally, EVs will eventually have ranges up to 10 times the current ones (Tesla already have a car that has a range of 300 miles).
• Next generation vehicles, like fuel cell based ones, will need an electric drivetrain to propel them. So they'd be EVs anyway. Only the fuel source will have changed.

Basically, the biggest problems with EVs will be worked out in the near future. Battery technology will improve to the point where they will last as long as the car, be far cheaper, and will give EVs a range most ICE vehicles will envy; Charging points will be everywhere and will fast charge without shortening the battery's life; and the price of the EVs will tumble (The Nissan Leaf is already down to around £20,000 with government grants).

I still think it's optimistic to expect EVs to make up 50% of new car sales by 2020 as some expect but there's potential for a sizeable figure if things go their way. Petrol prices could be a game changer.

20% of UK Electric Could Come From Tides

The Royal Society has written a report that says that more than 20% of Britain's electric could come from tidal sources.

They also say it would be more reliable than wind energy and are optimistic that the 2 main methods being trialled in the UK will be proven "relatively soon".

They estimate that tidal barrages could provide 15% of our energy needs when rolled out and scaled up, whilst tidal stream (which is based on a kind of like underwater turbine) would provide at least 5% and probably more as the technology is improved.

So we could be getting between 40 and 50% of our electric from renewables in the next couple of decades if the government doesn't start back-peddling (again).



More here.

Climate Change: A Chance To Buy Some Time?

One of the few achievements of the UN climate talks in recent years was when all nations agreed to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees C at all costs. Presumably they'd all realised that the consequences of going above 2 degrees would be pretty disastrous. Not just for the environment but for humans and the global economy.

This goal is achievable but climate scientists have estimated that, to make it, global CO2 emissions have to reach a peak by 2020 (at the latest) and fall steeply thereafter.

Unfortunately, whilst all nations are committed to reaching a climate change agreement by 2015, it won't be implemented until 2020 at the earliest.

Considering that the 2015 agreement is likely to be a watered-down compromise that has little chance of peaking CO2 by 2020, it looks like we're not going to keep warming below 2C after all. Not good. Not good at all.

If only we could buy ourselves enough time to do the job right.

So I read with interest that climate scientists have discovered a possible window of opportunity:

One of several contributors to global warming is so-called 'black carbon' (soot) from the likes of diesel engines and wood burning. The scientists have discovered that it's actually the second largest contributor to climate change, providing two thirds the warming effect of CO2. Twice as much as they thought when the last UN report was written back in 2007.

The implications of this are potentially enormous. If global agreement could be reached to drastically reduce these emissions, it could cut warming by half a degree C very quickly (because soot has a very short life in the atmosphere), AND improve the health of millions (Wood burning in developing countries is a serious health issue).

Half a degree C would buy us a couple of decades in which to sort out climate change properly.

Luckily, cutting black carbon emissions is already on the UN agenda. This latest news should give them the best possible incentive to come to an agreement without delay.


(Click here to read about just one of a number of cheap cookers that could help save lives and cut black carbon emissions in the developing world).

Official: Climate Change Is Not A Hoax

Current CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson

Sorry if this one's not news to you but I've only just found it....but first, some background:

It's long been said that ExxonMobil fund a lot of climate denial groups (e.g. The Heartland Institution) and much of the climate sceptic science comes from scientists with links to them too.

At least, that was the case until 2006 when the new CEO, Rex Tillerson came along. Up to that point, ExxonMobil were climate deniers, but Tillerson has since admitted that climate change is not only a reality, but it's caused by humans. He even promised that the company would stop handing out tens of millions to those climate deniers. Result!

Unfortunately, it appears ExxonMobil are still funding climate denial.

Worse still, and this brings me to the subject of this post, they're now making out that climate change won't be a big deal after all. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last July, Rex Tillerson basically said climate models were making things look worse than they'd actually be, and any climate effects could be adapted to, claiming that it was just an "engineering problem" (Whatever that's supposed to mean).

So they've gone from a position of "We want business-as-usual because climate change isn't happening" to "We want business-as-usual because climate change isn't going to be that bad". Big change.

And about his 2 basic claims: 

• As any climate scientist will freely tell you, climate models are not perfect. However, those same scientists will also tell you that most models are tested against past data (to check that they work), and on current form they've made pretty accurate predictions about the future climate. If anything, they've under-estimated the actual results.

• "It's an engineering problem". Since Tillerson's speech, the U.S. has suffered it's hottest summer ever, and superstorm Sandy, Australia is being pounded by record temperatures as I type this (45.8 C in Sydney yesterday), the Arctic sea ice shrank to it's lowest extent last summer, and even the UK has had it's wettest year since records began. This is with 'just' a 0.8 C warming in global temperatures. The climate models predict there's a lot more in the pipeline.How exactly do we "engineer" out way out of failed crops (through drought and flood), people dying from heat exhaustion, superstorms, and heaven knows what else in the future?

We can't "adapt" to the scale of climate change that would result from business-as-usual. Anybody who believes that just isn't listening.

More analysis here.

Up To Half The World's Food Goes To Waste

The UK's Institute of Mechanical Engineers has written a report that says 30 - 50% of the world's food production simply gets dumped (See here). That's around 2 billion tonnes, or around 280 kilos for every human being on the planet each year.

That's obscene. Especially when you consider there nearly a billion hungry people (1 in 7) on the planet.

The reasons given for this waste are numerous, including: poor storage; over-zealous sell-by dates; special offers (encouraging people to buy more than they can use); fussy consumers; supermarkets demanding veg that look perfect; poor agricultural practises; poor engineering; and inadequate transport.

Imagine if we could put this right. We could not only feed the starving, but we'd have to capacity to feed the growing world's population without using up more land, water, or energy.

It's pathetic that we've got to the stage where we're so wasteful with everything, not just food. We are truly a throwaway society in every respect. From production to processing to transport to market to consumer to the dump. Waste all the way.

It's the reason the planet's in such a mess. Climate change, deforestation, polluted air, poisoned land and water, disappearing lakes and rivers. On and on it goes.

It doesn't have to be this way. We are better than this.