Bloody battery cars again!

[excoriator]

Heard further evidence of non-joined-up thinking and equally non-joined-up reporting on 'Today' this morning in a piece on electric cars at about 8.30. It followed the news summary which informed us that Boris is 'minded' to bring forward a national ban on conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) cars by a decade, from 2040 to 2030.

This was followed by a piece from Justin Rowlatt who is a the BBCs chief environment reporter from A motor museum (sounds of classic car engines we were invited to rejoice in) It was followed by an interviews from the deputy chair of the Climate change committee, but the whole thing was about battery cars. Not a mention of hydrogen vehicles throughout the interview. All the difficulties such as two thirds of us living in homes where we cant charge and now park on the street were glossed over. "Just a matter of installing a socket" if you can part at home. The lamp-posts will be modified to have charging points and "Things like parking meter" will magically appear. Hardly a mention of the amount of recabling needed to supply the load, the new transmission lines and generating capacity needed to supply the extra demand, and no mention of the fact that often finding a parking space, let alone one with charging facilities is often a problem.

"What about charging on motorways?" Asked Rowlatt "Don't you have to go and get a coffee or something while its charging?"

"Yes" agreed the Baroness. "It may take a little longer" dismissing the problem entirely. It will take 30 minutes for an 80% charge an hour for a full charge and they will take you about 250 miles. "A little light will come on" twittered the B. "to tell you perhaps its time to charge!"

There was no mention whatsoever of the possibility of hydrogen cars, which can be parked, driven, and refilled much like ICE powered cars with no change in infrastructure required except by the oil industry having to add hydrogen dispensers, deliver the gas, and repurpose their refineries to proguce it initially from natural gas but eventually from electrolysis of water.

There were of course no questions asked or information given about the governments proposal to replace domestic gas boilers with electrical heat pumps at about the same time. The combination of extra transport electricity together wit extra heating electricity would double or treble the electricity demand and require major rebuilding of power stations and transmission grid.

There was also no mention at all of the possibility of tax on petrochemical fuels being transferred to electricity. We were all expected to accept that electricity would remain much cheaper than petrol something that seems vanishingly improbable to me given the infrastructure cost and tax.

A few harder questions might have been a lot more informative, and the triviality of the approach was unconvincing enough to count as propaganda to me anyway.

The BBC has gone very rapidly downhill in my opinion.

[jonjel]

I have only just spotted this and agree that the lunacy of the green brigade is likely to cause a lot more harm than good. Yes, the average car journey is maybe under 10 miles, but I well remember doing a minimum of 50,000 miles a year for some 20 years, and when I was on civil engineering projects I once did 76,000 miles in 10 months! I was in the office one day a fortnight, and the car was serviced in house that day.

As for hydrogen cars, until we have the magic of nuclear fusion the hydrogen will be manufactured using, yep, electricity. So all we will be doing is moving the methods of fuelling our cars to large power plants. The wind does not always blow so unless we have a damned good way of storing windy day power generation it will remain an unreliable source.

And I would love to know how people living in narrow streets or high rise buildings ae going to re-charge.

Back in the day a smallish engine returned maybe 30mpg. In my garage I have a 1958 A35, 998cc and around 30mpg. Modern engineering and technology have improved things by leaps and bounds. I now have a modern diesel, 2.2 litres and I can, and have driven that from near Bristol to Edinburgh, and back on one tank of fuel, a round trip of over 700 miles.

I used to calculate fuel costs at roughly £10/100 miles. Interestingly despite fuel going up by a staggering amount in the last 15 years that figure remains roughly the same, because modern engines are so much more efficient. And they will continue to improve.

[excoriator]

Hydrogen can be made using 'excess' wind powered electricity, Jonjel.

That is electricity which could be produced at time of low demand by windmills when there is good wind but very low demand.

At the moment the machines are switched off, but there are a growing number of cases where the power is given away free or even at negative cost - you get paid to take it. It's happened once or twices to me on Octopus. I was paid 4p a kWh, but didn't have to pay the usual 15 or 16 p a unit either. Only for a few hours but I was able to save myself a pound or two.

The nice thing about this is that hydrogen can be stockpiled and used to support the grid at times of low wind / high demand.

[jonjel]

Nov 26, 2020 17:10:45 GMT excoriator said:

Hydrogen can be made using 'excess' wind powered electricity, Jonjel.

That is electricity which could be produced at time of low demand by windmills when there is good wind but very low demand.

At the moment the machines are switched off, but there are a growing number of cases where the power is given away free or even at negative cost - you get paid to take it. It's happened once or twices to me on Octopus. I was paid 4p a kWh, but didn't have to pay the usual 15 or 16 p a unit either. Only for a few hours but I was able to save myself a pound or two.

The nice thing about this is that hydrogen can be stockpiled and used to support the grid at times of low wind / high demand.

So I assume that when they were paying you to consume power you put every electrical device you had on in addition to a couple of 3 bar electric fires and opened all the windows?

[aubrey]

Oh no, he was sitting there in his kegs and vest.

[excoriator]

No. We did a weeks wash and used the tunble drier (two kW). Mrs E, did some cooking (electric cooker).

Boring I know, but we did save a few quid.

At university one of my fellow students lived in a freezing flat - actually an uninsulated attic. On he first year he froze, but having had enough, his second winter saw him with half a dozen 3kW fan heaters. These he ran continuously, day and night. When the heat became unbearable he opened the windows and warmed the surrounding countryside.

Eventually the bill arrived. It was for more than a years grant! A suicide-inducing sum! However, unfazed, he wrote a letter back to the electricity board pointing out that there was clearly an accounting or metering error. To incur such a bill he would have had to consume about 15 kW continuously for the whole quarter, a clear nonsense.

By return he received an apology for the 'computer error' and a bill for what he'd paid the previous year. He paid up like a gentleman!

[jonjel]

I had a friend in Brighton with a student type room. It was bloody freezing. They paid for electric, but not lights. You needed sunglasses as they had four enormous wattage bulbs running and even blistered the paint behind the door! They had modified large tins around them to cut down the glare. Happy days.

[excoriator]

I guess they strengthened the fuses too. I think they normally run on 5 Amp fuses.

[aubrey]

When we lived in a squat we had a bloke living with us who decided he wanted to fiddle the electric. I left him to it; I was happy to pay - besides, it wouldn't have been him who had to explain the gadged-up meter to the man from the Electric Board when he came to read it.

He went down into the basement. After about 5 minutes there was a huge bang and the lights all went out. He'd been standing on a plastic bucket and the knife he'd been using had a deep burn across the blade (I wish I'd kept it really). He didn't try again. The bloody idiot though - I thought he'd at least have some idea of what he was doing, but I think he'd just seen something similar in another squat and thought he could reproduce it.

[jonjel]

I once rented a little chalet, in Devon I think with friends. We started to cook breakfast and the electric meter ran out. More money in, ad it went off gain. I looked and it had been set at something like 20 times the standard charge. And I looked a little closer and the lead seal holding the access door open was a tiny bit loose. We fiddled with it a bit and eventually got it through the wire, and I then reset the meter to about half the standard rate. Has a nice holiday and just before we left set the meter back to where it had been, and tightened the lead seal up with a pair of pliers and a hammer! I often wonder whether it was ever spotted.

Back in the day I worked on part of a huge power station and learnt some years later that a few of the engineers had hooked the whole of a caravan site next door up to free electricity, in exchange for a one off fee! Those were the days of huge fiddles and corruption, thankfully less so now I think.

[excoriator]

Many years ago, a colleague of mine at work suffered a heart attack and asked me to take over an evening class that he was due to run in electronics for the year, until he recovered and could take it again, so I did. It was in a pretty rough area of Liverpool, but there were about a dozen people who remained interested enough to continue the course. I borrowed some kit from work to give them some practical experience and we got through Ohms law with no real problems. I even - at their request - set them some homework which they did quite diligently.

Then we moved on to reactive components - inductors and capacitors - which is more complicated. With some more kit I'd borrowed I was able to show them how voltage and current were not in phase, but it was clearly getting more abstract than they were happy about, and I could feel a tendency to give up taking hold. Then for some reason I happened to mention that electricity meters expect the two to be in phase to read accurately, and interest more than revived. It peaked. The following week I was confronted with requests to go into complex numbers and vector multiplication. Several had borrowed quite advanced books and were trying hard to understand it.

I realised the motivation for this and said I was happy to help with the theory but I wanted no part in meter-fiddling. If it was possible, then I didn't want to know about it. We proceeded on this basis, and I think several of them became quite expert in handling reactive component calculations. I have no idea whether the region showed a dramatic reduction in electricity consumption, but who knows.

When I related the story to my colleague who had recovered well enough to resume the following year and he roared with laughter and looked forward to a throng of students for the next meter-fiddling course, but unfortunately the school in which it took place was closed down and the evening college closed. It is now a branch of Aldi Or Lidl I think. Not half as much fun!

[aubrey]

Ohm sweet Ohm, eh?


I do like the way though that this reprobate living in a squat was quite happy to pay for his electricity though, while you two were indifferent at best. For shame!

[skylark]

What a shame you re-set the meter to where it had been in that cottage, JJ. It is likely that the landlord was paying a bill and keeping everything from the meter, and it would have served him right if he ended up out of pocket.

[jonjel]

Dec 6, 2020 7:08:48 GMT skylark said:

What a shame you re-set the meter to where it had been in that cottage, JJ. It is likely that the landlord was paying a bill and keeping everything from the meter, and it would have served him right if he ended up out of pocket.

In hindsight you are right, but I did not want him to know we had fiddled it.