The Future Looks Electric… But So Did The Past!

[dajdosta]

I was camping near the coast a month ago and was pleasantly surprised to see lots of elder people using electric scooters inside a camp site. Last thing you want while on vacation on such a beautiful place to have noisy smelly vehicles driving around. This noise reduction is also welcomed and often overlooked but it is important as well. For instance while looking to buy new apartment I dismissed several good ones because of traffic noise. It will be really cool one day to go to cycling to the silent streets of a big city and breath normally

 

[Richard Dastardly]

EV aren't exactly silent - use one of the rubber tyre metro systems like Paris or Montreal, very far from silent. Mobility scooters have tiny motors, cars do not. I would welcome the lack of pollutant - mostly soot, honestly - in city centres from no more fossil fuel, but then I'd also be happy if there were ICE burning something cleaner - or again, put the two together so you have a much more energy dense fuel with an electric system to recover energy, so you're not constantly burning energy lugging your rather bulky energy storage around. Once again, ICE are not fossil or nothing - ICE is just a combustion chamber, you can put anything that expands rapidly when you burn in it if it's mechanically sound enough.

Offshore wind is getting there slowly - the current installed farms are pretty bad compared with the latest turbines. Maintenance of those things is a fairly big problem. You also can't rely on wind farms for your entire energy need for blindingly obvious reasons. Switching our power generation away from fossil is something that needs far more attention than private car fuel right now, IMO - the lead times on new power plant is measured in decades, currently...

 

[Turk]

Last thing you want while on vacation on such a beautiful place to have noisy smelly vehicles driving around.

I'd say the majority of sound that comes from modern cars is the tyre on the road. That might not be too bad in an urban area when cars are supposed to be travelling less than 50kph, but once they get over that speed the tyre noise seems to dominate on the average car. EV won't fix that unfortunately.

Switching our power generation away from fossil is something that needs far more attention than private car fuel right now, IMO - the lead times on new power plant is measured in decades, currently...

True, even the clean nuclear option that everyone is taking about hasn't even been developed properly yet, so they're not even in a position to build one. It looks like some in the power industry want to skip developing other forms of fission and go straight to fusion.

I don't think fossil fuels can even meet the power demands of the human race going forward. So replacing it with renewables that can't match fossils is just not practical. Renewables make sense for populations in isolated areas or too supplement another power source but it's simply not going to be enough for large population centres.

 

[Richard Dastardly]

I don't think fossil fuels can even meet the power demands of the human race going forward. So replacing it with renewables that can't match fossils is just not practical. Renewables make sense for populations in isolated areas or too supplement another power source but it's simply not going to be enough for large population centres.

What though :S. Capturing methane would be a start but that'd make a tiny dent in demand. Tidal barriers have insane environmental impacts we won't even understand until we build a big one ( I live on the coast - even doing something like walling a river mouth to stop erosion can have effects for miles ), hydro eats living space and produces methane, wind is dependent on .. the wind, obviously, solar works half the day & our solar panels are awful. I don't know much about geothermal plants, but I would assume they have fairly specific geological requirements or they'd be everywhere already. The only sure thing we can really do at the moment is build more fission plants, but half the world is scared stupid of them - absolutely dumb when the main radioactive pollutant is burning coal!

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Given how often urban road surfaces are renewed, I wonder what the cost of laying induction coils in the road would be ( to top up EV charge ). Maybe even lay them down trunk roads. Not to power vehicles like a slot car, but just to extend the range a bit.

Edit - has been actually worked on in Korea.

 

[Turk]

Given how often urban road surfaces are renewed, I wonder what the cost of laying induction coils in the road would be ( to top up EV charge ). Maybe even lay them down trunk roads. Not to power vehicles like a slot car, but just to extend the range a bit.

Edit - has been actually worked on in Korea.

I've no doubt the Koreans could make it work, I don't think it would work so well in Ireland. The problem for our roads is the land is like a sponge in boggy areas, the roads keep sinking and the county councils in charge of maintaining our roads aren't up to the task of maintaining normal roads never mind high tech induction roads. So there's the initial cost of replacing the road and the ongoing cost of more expensive retrained labour and all the equipment they're going to need to repair the road. I don't know what it's like in other countries but here you can have a water company digging up a road one week only for the telephone company to come along the next week and dig it all up again. Will they be able to repair those kind of roads? You could restrict it to motorways but the problem may be they won't want to close those roads down if they need to work on the power network.

That's the problem with a lot of these novel renewable energies, they sound simple and practical on the surface but become overly complex once rolled out in the real world. Too many moving parts, too spread out, too complex. A power station is one piece of infrastructure in one accessible place, it doesn't have to interact with the environment as much all these other methods do. If it breaks down everything is in one place and you won't have to stop traffic to fix it.

Traditional power stations have a bad reputation, but if they're done properly they are the best way to supply power to large urban areas. With some of the concept nuclear options out there we could have lots of cheap power and I think they can be quite compact units with zero harmful emissions.