Electric vehicles

[Steve Hainsworth]

Hi Everyone,
I am surprised at the generally negative responses to this topic.
My wife was given a new Nissan Leaf two years ago by her Aunt who was dependent on her for daily care and transport.
Previous to this her 2.3 litre Mazda was used for this at a cost of $50 (25 pounds ) per week for petrol.
The Leaf is charged at 15 amps from a dedicated circuit on our front verandah. It costs around $1-50 to charge at night taking 6 hours. It will  go 200 kilometers on this charge which gets her to work and back for a week.
We are nearly 200 pounds better off per month or 2400 per year.
It is very pleasant to drive being almost silent, has wonderful acceleration and  goes 30% further in heavy traffic/Jams.
We have done virtually no maintenance on it in two years /37000 kms.
When we first got it we worried about range but have never run out of charge ,it goes about as far on a 
 charge as my chummy on a full tank.
OK it may have taken some carbon credits to make but in use it is not causing any pollution in the city environment and is not using any imported fuel which is good for the economy as well as for the health of the pedestrians and cyclists using the roads.
All of our electricity is from hydro and wind  generation so there is  no fossil fuel used to charge it. At present there is no extra road tax and registration is the around 55 pounds per year and insurance 125.
The battery will probably last another 5 years so the car will have done 250,000 kms by then.
 The electric drive will still be servicable by then as the motor is brushless 3phase through an inverter. A new battery will cost about 3000 pounds or less as they are getting cheaper. The rest of the car will still be sound by then as there is no gearbox  etc to wear out. Brake pads last a very long time as the electric motor regenerates power and aids the braking  effort through the transmission.
Dont get me wrong these cars are not for everyone but as a city commuter they have much to offer. We have a large property with offroad parking and space to charge. We never fast charge, in America 80% of E vehicles charge at home ,it is so much cheaper (75%) but slower.
People living in urban areas without parking cannot do this easily.I very much doubt that more than 20% of our cars will be electric in N Z in 10 years time. We have driven from Wellington to Auckland in it and charged it 5 times on the way. So its not for that sort of use unless you can afford a Tesla and the time to charge it to get there in time.
I still drive a petrol Honda CRV and of course the  28 Top Hat which I love also.
When the Petrol cars first arrived those with (7?) horses also were negative about their impact. I agree that Hydrogen would be great but extremely expensive to establish and reticulate in a country with difficult terrain and only 5 million inhabitants.
I think electric cars are here to stay in the forseeible future here in New Zealand.

[Ian Williams]

Steve I think you need to check a few facts, your views new at best uninformed.

[Mike Costigan]

The electric car at the moment is a novelty charging stations are appearing here and there but to have a nationwide charging network would seem to be almost impossible as every on street parking space would need a charging point, to say nothing about yobs unplugging them on the way home from the pub, the only way to make EVs viable is to have replaceable battery packs, drive in replace battery and off you go...

Giovanni Moretti came to the same conclusion eighty years ago; Italy was hit by economic sanctions applied by the League of Nations because of Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, which resulted in an almost complete loss of domestic fuel supply. So Moretti designed and produced a range of electric trucks ranging from light 3-wheelers to 6-wheeled 5-tonners ... and added the nation-wide infrastructure of replacement battery stations located at most conventional fuel stations. Check out SAMEM (Societa Anonima Motocarri Elettrica Moretti) for more details. Needless to say, after the second world war Italy returned to petrol and diesel and the electric movement died overnight, and Moretti turned to manufacturing small cars, including 750cc sports cars!


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[Steve Hainsworth]

Hi Ian,
I have just spoken with Marcus who also corrected my assertion about how generation for the grid works here. I am told that 25% of our generation can be from thermal energy. He also warns that if EV numbers increase it could compromise the grid capacity. At present numbers are less than 1% of the fleet and importation is low comparatively.
I stand by my opinion they are good for our purpose and no worse than ICE powered cars in respect to the environment and very much better where the concentration of vehicles is high.
What is good is that the emergence of EV transport has raised the awareness of the effect of the motor car on the environment especially in the eastern countries who are burning fossil fuels indiscriminately , in huge quantities and the health of their population is suffering as well as the health of our ecosystem.
Regards Steve Hainsworth

[Bruce Nicholls]

Tidal power should have some future here in the (currently) UK, with the 2nd largest tidal range in the world. It is always on the move somewhere round our coast 24hrs a day so has continuity. However it is always floored by 2 things. Cost,it would cost an amazing amount to say dam the Severn estuary and no government yet will get behind it. The biggest objectors however are usually the environmental lobby which appears counter intuitive.
As others have said I just don't think we can produce enough green electricity to only have EV's.

I did listen to a very interesting radio program recently about a scheme in Shetland where they use the surplus power generated by their wind turbines when they are forced to disconnect them from the grid, to produce hydrogen. This they are using in their converted gen sets to produce electricity when there is no wind.

[Ruairidh Dunford]

In the first six months of this year Scotland produced twice it’s energy requirements purely by wind generation.

We need the big boys to get behind this, and developing alternative fuels, but I fear that so long as there is money in oil that will not happen.

[Reckless Rat]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against electric cars, but for really long runs they are not quite there. One of the problems is the difference in claimed range and that which actually is available in real terms. A good pal of mine has a part time job delivering cars for BMW all over the country. He told me of a run he had to do to take a BMW i3 from their depot in Thorne (near Doncaster) to somewhere south of Bristol.

The i3 is an electric vehicle with a 650cc twin cylinder petrol engine that kicks in when the battery runs low in order to generate electricity for the electric motors. The engine doesn't drive the wheels, well not directly anyway - it just acts as a generator. This particular journey involved a long run on the motorway network, down the M18, the M1, the M42 and the M5. As a result the car's battery pack used up its charge pretty quickly running at motorway cruising speeds and without any braking to recharge the batteries the donkey engine cut in to keep things going. OK you might think. The problem is that the i3 only has a tiny fuel tank and motorway speeds meant that the donkey engine was working flat out trying to keep pace with the demand. This meant that between Thorne and Bristol my mate had to stop several times to fill the tiny fuel tank. What the fuel consumption was for the entire journey I have no idea but it just highlights even the disadvantages with a range extending engine in certain circumstances. Nothing is pefect.

[AustinWood]

My Austin Seven is a viable form of transport here in The Scottish Borders. No motorways or dual carriageways, many narrow or single track roads. There's always someone going more slowly than I do.
I previously lived on the Isle of Skye which was a great place to live. However the distance one needed to travel would make electric cars not viable. My then partner had to attend hospital clinics every 6 months. Raigmore Hospital in Inverness is 102 miles away and no prospect of a recharge. I believe a charging point is being installed at Cluanie Inn but I doubt that would help much.
So much of Scotland involves long journeys so it is difficult to see electric being practical. Orkney is an exception. They are net exporters of electricity I believe, and journey length is limited by being on an island.
Similarly I don't see how self driving vehicles could work up here. Single track roads with passing places would be a problem. Once again a technology designed for city or main road driving.

[Nick Salmon]

I am no expert but I believe electric vehicles utilising batteries are a transient technology. The availability of the rare earth minerals needed for the batteries is already stretched and may well prove unsustainable in the long term. And don't get me started on the conditions of child labourers mining cobalt in place like the DRC. In a very few decades alternative technologies such as hydrogen power will make the current crop of electric vehicles look as ancient as a steam engine.

[Tony Griffiths]

In the first six months of this year Scotland produced twice it’s energy requirements purely by wind generation.  

We need the big boys to get behind this, and developing alternative fuels, but I fear that so long as there is money in oil that will not happen.

Although renewables are hug-a-tree-friendly, none make any commercial sense and are only built because their energy is heavily subsidised by vast amounts  tax payers' money; if the owners were paid the same as a power-station, none would be built. They are unreliable, produce nothing on a still winter's day and cannot cope with fluctuating demands; we also pay the companies who run them even when no power is produced. However, the most important fact is that they cannot generate the massive base load, the background requirement for a minimum generating capacity. As the economy expands, the base load requirement increases with it - and that's why developing countries install vast amounts of reliable, power-station generated capacity using coal, gas or nuclear.
But it gets worse, in the UK, as part of the base load compensation requirement and to balance the fluctuating loads at peak demand (and also in a claimed an effort to go "green" - the irony will not be lost on most people) we have installed hundreds of farms of diesel-powered mini power stations. One batch, owned an American company has a CEO quoted as saying, when he won the contract, "It's a licence to print money". And where does the money come from? By a direct levy on household electricity bills - so we are being charged extra for "green" energy powered by diesel. You know it makes sense. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...esel-farms