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Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 21.7%

  • Yes - preferred over petrol car if price/power/convenience similar

    Votes: 78 39.4%

  • Maybe - preference for neither, only concerned with costs etc

    Votes: 38 19.2%

  • No - prefer petrol car even if electric car has same price, power and convenience

    Votes: 25 12.6%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.1%
  • Total voters
    198
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Don't be prickly. I've never been so with you.

I've also been trained to do those cost-benefit analyses. I know just what garbage in (and therefore garbage out) they get. They have a lot of assumptions built into them - the assumptions on which the final result is determined.

I asked the questions for a reason. There's a guy here that literally runs a power station for a living. This is not as simple as just pumping some numbers into a massive spreadsheet.
 
See yah later then. I know it's difficult to face reality once you have been brainwashed.
 
Chronos-Plutus said:
Not sure I was here then. But have a read of the article I posted from the Australian energy peak association publishing the KPMG figures for Victoria. Looks like I was right all along Sprawler.
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I think everyone is on the same page, just reading it differently, smurf knows the electrical system, VC knows the electric cars and you know it is all going to take a long time and cost a lot of money.
But I think that everyone knows it will happen, whether we like it or not, there is no loss to the Government.
Infrastructure is built, new technology is developed, old infrastructure gets replaced, it all means more work and more money circulating.
Electric vehicles, have the added advantage of replacing all the old vehicles, with cars that will be very easy to monitor and fit control measures to.
The only thing that will limit their uptake, will be price and upgrading the electrical infrastructure to support them.
Most of Australia's population live in major cities, so if the price is right a lot will buy them.
As Rumpy says hybrids will be the choice for country drivers, same as it is already for taxi drivers, that leaves a sadly lacking infrastructure problem with aging coal fired power stations which smurf has pointed out endlessly.

Which takes us back, to the nuclear/gas or renewables debate, where we started.
 
trawler - what kind of bump in off-peak electricity usage (let's go really off peak here, like between midnight & 6am) could we have before we need to start upgrading the grid and/or stations?

as far as I'm aware, increases in off peak change absolutely nothing?
 
Good luck trying tell these people that we will need nuclear.


If you bothered to read the article it explains the peak and off-peak demand factoring in the required electrical capacity with the scenarios of incentives vs no incentives.

Furthermore you don't have a clue about my engineering and finance background.
 
I believe it all will be solved as was the introduction of motor cars to New York around the beginning of the last century by a different take on the problem.

The great horse manure crisis of 1894 is a notion in urban planning which stated that the greatest challenge of further urban development was a difficulty of removing horse manure from the streets. More broadly, it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies. The phrase originates from a 2004 article by Stephen Davies entitled "The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894".[1][2]

The supposed problem of excessive horse-manure collecting in the streets was solved by the proliferation of cars which replaced horses as the means of transportation in big cities. The term great horse manure crisis of 1894 is often used to denote a problem which seems to be impossible to solve because it is being looked at from the wrong direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894

gg
 
The more I think about it, batteries and plugging your car in at an electricity point is very 20th Century.

I'll go for a brainier solution when it does come along.

gg
 

Yes and the reaction to those incentives is a complete assumption - people could react very differently to what's assumed.

When my uni prof was teaching us this stuff I even asked him what we did with inputs that we simply couldn't possibly know the number(s) for and his words were, and I'm quoting him verbatim:

"In that situation, you ask the client for the figure they want you to use".


You do not need to spend a fortune upgrading a grid for an increase in off-peak demand. If you did, the internet would have collapsed this year as a result of everyone working from home during the day (which is OFF PEAK) in response to coronavirus.

Hence why you could quite literally plug five million electric cars (or their equivalents, literally kettles) in to charge between midnight & 6am and the grid wouldn't even squeak.

The calcs you've linked are assuming a big (or slightly less big under the "incentivised" option) increase in PEAK demand, which are utter bull**** assumptions anyways. Fix the peak demand increase problem and you remove the necessity to upgrade the grid. Like, at all.
 
Oh and just in case you're wondering, you can actually pay to have your connection upgraded to 15 (or more) amp or 3 phase for just a few grand. An utterly trivial expense compared to the money you'd save over decades of having an electric car.

So there's a free market/non-taxpayper-funded solution already.
 
I am training people to walk ahead of EVs with flags to warn unsuspecting folk of their presence, seeing they are silent vehicles and therefore dangerous.
I believe millions of new jobs can be created.
 
The problem with plugging in 5 million electric cars between midnight and 6am at the moment is, most of the overnight generation comes from fossil fuel, so our emissions would sky rocket.
The greenies would have kittens.
That is where it all becomes a case of staged introduction and why it will all take quite some time.
 

Well I have already got a top ranking university and a multi-million dollar corporation that are in the same ball park as me; as far as electrical capacity and costs are con

Go ask your mate Peter the geostrategist, maybe he can talk some sense into you.

Well, the only people that agree with you are just a few posters here.

Not enough for governments or nations to listen to you. They listen to entities like KPMG, who conduct studies for them.

Also you aren't the only person who has been to uni. I have studied at 3 of them.
 

Nah man remember that it's way more efficient to burn fossil fuels in a power station than a car. The greenies would get on board.


You really need to calm down.

I'm trying to make two points to you: Firstly, that this number-crunching you've listed, no matter who it's from or what it tells you, has a tremendous amount of utterly unknowable assumptions built in. How do you know how the market's going to react to a change in price before you change the price? You can't. Ergo, no matter what something like this says, it's BS.

I would be saying the same thing if the conclusion was the opposite and I have no doubt there's something done out there that says that electric vehicles make sense etc etc. It will be just as BS as anything else done in the same way. I have DONE these things myself.


The other thing is that you're not interpreting it or what I'm saying correctly. It's actually saying the same thing that I have been saying all along - that it is the increase in PEAK demand that is the problem. I've been saying this the whole time!

I'm in total agreeance that an increase in peak demand would need an infrastructure buildout. That's not even a matter of opinion - it's physics. What I'm saying to you is that if we have a way to minimise (or eliminate) that increase in peak demand then we thus eliminate the need for the infrastructure buildout. Hence why I keep talking about charging the cars overnight, not at 7 in the evening.
 
First, we all know EV take-up will be incremental, so the cats are safe from Tom.
Second, there are 7 days in a week. Two of those days don't have the industrial load of weekdays. They are also the days when most people won't be driving to work, so the midnight to 6am recharge period is not going to be a big deal.
Third, EVs will be able to get signals from the grid and be able to charge when energy is cheapest: in future with high PV penetration that could be late morning/early arvo, while wind penetration might not need curtailment.
Too many here have the old mentality of energy generation and consumption. In years to come "systems" will be in place to talk to energy hungry appliances and do the best deal.
In the interim Australia needs to get the technical and grid infrastructure in place to make the inevitable road ahead less bumpy.
(edit: the "peak demand" issue is resolved by EVs communicating with the grid to feed back if and when necessary.)
 
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Doesn't even need to be that complex to get something working right now rob: Just put a timer on the charger like people do with those timers that go between the device & the powerpoint to turn a lamp or something on & off at particular times of day.
 
over9k said:
Doesn't even need to be that complex to get something working right now rob: Just put a timer on the charger like people do with those timers that go between the device & the powerpoint to turn a lamp or something on & off at particular times of day.
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Agreed. But I am not talking about what is easy today.
As renewable penetration increases the pricing/load arrangements in place now will change significantly - am thinking ahead.
 
Chronos-Plutus said:
Anyway, I have a few things to do. I will pick this back up tomorrow.
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Thank you so much for sparing your valuable time and sharing your ideas with the rest of us here on ASF on Electric cars. I will be able to tell my descendants that I once shared a comment thread with you.

I believe you to be as brilliant as you do and am much in admiration of you.

From a previous post you said you have moved sideways from what appears to have been a fitter and turner which is an admirable trade (and one pursued by many of my friends) to being from reading between the lines a real estate agent for technology.

I should warn you to stay away from dealing with .... in your pursuit of .....

You sound as if you know what I was going to say so I won't waste type on it anyway.

Do please pick it up tomorrow if you can spare us the time. It is riveting. The etymology of the word "rivet" is from Middle Dutch "wriven" to turn or grind then having been a fitter and turner you probably know that.

I do hope that my interjection in to your undoubted brilliance does not take away from your flow tomorrow. The word "flow" which you would know is from Old High German flouwen "to rinse, wash".

Which is now what I must do with the dishes as we have just had a power blackout here at Casa Gumnut.

gg
 
I bet the power grid could use the internet to communicate with your car somehow already. As soon as you get to your house the car autoconnects to the wifi and talks to the grid that way.

There's no way that the tech heads couldn't figure something out.
 
over9k said:
Doesn't even need to be that complex to get something working right now rob: Just put a timer on the charger like people do with those timers that go between the device & the powerpoint to turn a lamp or something on & off at particular times of day.
Click to expand...

you don’t even have to do that, you can schedule charging times from the Tesla app on your phone, or from the screen on the car.

I have mine scheduled for 9.30am because that is the time my solar exports start to get limited to 5kwh so if I am not using the excess my panels are idled back.
 
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