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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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because depending on the flooding and storm damage the power can ( and HAS ) stay off for 2 weeks ( often less , but 2 weeks has NOT been unique in last 40 years )

.. so with the power OFF for say a week ( happens about every 5 years ) how is recharging that EV looking ( even if the roads are usable , they normally are out for about 3 days during heavy flooding ) ( god forbid i resort to the petrol generator to recharge the EV .. that is so NOT green )
and joy of joys this is in South EAST Queensland those folks the other side of the Great Divide have the odd additional problem ( like power poles blown flat ) as does North Queensland

even in relatively populous area ( 5 acre blocks ) one solution does not fit all
 
What a great idea -

Leftover roadhouse deep fryer oil will power the Nullarbor's first EV fast charger at Caiguna

Electric vehicle owners will be able to have their hot chips and eat them too, with a remote West Australian roadhouse planning to install fast chargers that run on leftover fryer oil.

From January, a crowdfunded 50kW DC charger at Caiguna Roadhouse in the middle of the Nullarbor will plug the 720-kilometre-wide gap between charging networks being built by the WA and SA governments.

It will mean that when the respective "electric highways" are completed, an EV owner will be able to drive from Sydney to Perth....


But what makes the Caiguna charger unique is the generator fuel.

Off-grid and unable to afford the up-front cost of solar and batteries, the roadhouse will generate low-emissions electricity through burning something it has been throwing out for years: leftover chip oil.

.....
one day in November, 66 EV owners drove out to Dowerin, where they hosted a barbecue, gave free rides to the public, and took the skeptical roadhouse owner for his first ever spin in an EV.

"He scratched his head, went for a drive and looked at the charger, and that's when I said to him, 'How much of this oil have you got?'" Mr Edwards said.

"He said, '160 to 200 litres. We throw it in the tip.'

"I said, 'You better start saving it up because we can charge cars with that.'"



'We have to filter out the crispy bits': How leftover chip oil will keep EV owners moving across the Nullarbor

EV owners are crowdfunding a fast charger in the middle of the Nullarbor — and it will run on leftover chip oil from the local roadhouse.
www.abc.net.au
 
Well if that is the worry, you could buy a PHEV with say a 14kwh battery e.g I will use last year's Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, base model around $50k equivalent ICE model $40k.
Right so you get the car for in reality the same price as the ICE car $40k, because you save the $10k on the home battery and you get a 14kwh battery instead of a 10kwh one.
Most of the time armageddon hasn't hit, but if it does, once a day you go for a run to the shops for the car to charge itself off the self contained 80kw generator, or plug it in at the shops, or just fire up the car in the car port and let it do it there.
Sounds like a reasonable plan to me, most of the time when life is normal, you are running around using no fuel, when your home your charging on solar and running the house after dark off the car, if the car occasionally ends up flat you start it up and charge it.
 
They should have been doing it years ago to run their gen sets, jeez guys have been running old diesel 4x4's for years on chip oil.lol
It's great that manufacturer's are starting to make off the shelf units.
There are some great and funny stories on the internet about people running on chip oil.
Years ago I had a 300 series Landrover Discovery TDI, I had lpg injection and was going to run it on waste vegetable oil, but the wife said she wasn't going to drive around in something that smelt like a fish and chip shop on wheels.lol
That was the down side, the exhaust does smell weird,.lol
 
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More evidence -

Ampol is entering the power retailing business because it sees that within a decade or so a large proportion of Australia’s vehicle fleet will be driven by electricity rather than petrol, so it must join the fuel switchover or it will become a redundant force in its base business. And the network of service stations must be able to charge a vehicle inside 10 minutes, or people not using home charging will charge their cars at supermarkets and stores such as Bunnings where they spend longer periods doing the shopping, allowing the car to be charged.

Selling electricity for cars means you must also enter the wider power market, particularly as many vehicles will be recharged in the home. Being successful in that electricity market will require the development of a range of new skills.

Shell has acquired the base electricity market skills from which it must develop a database marketing program. BP must be looking hard at whether it follows Ampol and Shell.

NoCookies | The Australian

www.theaustralian.com.au
 
In that situation it would be no different to petrol, because you need electricity to run petrol bowsers anyway.

but if you are talking about you local neighbourhood just having the power cut, then you would just drive to a public charger in an unaffected area and charge, just like you drive to a public petrol bowser.

if the power is off for just 1 day though, you probably wouldn’t be affected at all, because you car is charging every day, so its probably going to be close to full with a weeks worth of charge, and if you are the type of guy that drives 400km a day and needs to charge every day, then during that 400km range you will be passing public chargers, so having a local power outage doesn’t matter
 
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Value Collector said:
if the power is off for just 1 day though, you probably wouldn’t be affected at all
Click to expand...
You'd likely be better off since at any given time the average petrol tank will be nowhere near full.

That petrol pumps don't work without power is one of the concerns that arises in extended power outages by the way. First the power goes but in due course communications is lost as batteries run down and so too the lack of ability for locals to obtain vehicle fuel becomes a problem.
 
i was considering a petrol generator and converting it to ethanol ( at worst plenty of sticks on the property to heat up the still ) and grow some pumpkins or potatoes to turn the left-overs in ethanol .. if the US hill-billies ( moonshiners ) can do it , maybe i can as well , i just won't be making hundreds of gallons off it a year

i can't wait to see how all those 'smart systems ' work without mains power for a week ( that they hope will run our lives )
 

Fortunately week long black-outs in Australia are rarer than hen’s teeth.
 
NOT where that property is ( about once every 5 years , for the last 40 years ) yes it an anomaly but they have doubled the homes in the area in the last 5 years ( mostly 10 acre blocks chopped in 5 acre ones , and they sub-divided the old dairy farm as well )

but you can also lose power for a day or two up to 3 times a year ( normally lightning strikes and fallen branches ) ( but you can work around that even without a generator , since that is mostly in Summer/Autumn )
 
JohnDe said:
Fortunately week long black-outs in Australia are rarer than hen’s teeth.
Click to expand...
That is true and hopefully it stays that way, the biggest challenge at the moment, is allowing the orderly transition from a fossil fuel based electrical system to a renewables based system.
The only thing that can stuff it up, is pushing the speed of the changeover ahead of the technical limitations of the system, for political outcomes IMO.
Hopefully that doesn't happen, but all this talk about deadlines usually ends up with $hit or bust situations, where you end up with a poor result by cutting corners in order to meet political deadlines.
What needs to happen is as has been said on this thread, it needs to be technically driven not political or price driven, we all have to end up living with the outcome, if that ends up being a third world electrical system, not many will be happy.
For example you have just de commissioned a 2,000MW power station and next winter you have a week of poor renewable generation, but find you only have storage to carry three days.
It would be like covid, shut everything down, everyone go home and your power will be 8hrs out of every 24hrs until generation and storage returns to sustainable levels, sounds fanciful but that would be the reality and it has been done before.
From memory in the early 1960's in Perth, an East Perth power station unit caught fire or blew can't recall, but the outcome was Perth had rostered rolling blackouts for twelve months from memory.
The reality is, changing over from a system where you just press a button and the power comes on, then when you don't need it you just press the button to stop it.
To a system that you aren't in control of how much fuel you have the weather is, puts a lot of variables, into a complex equation.
Some would laugh and say that would never happen, I've worked in power generation for nearly 50 years and there has been several times where the system has got through on a wish, a prayer and a lot of luck and good fortune.
That is in a system that has at call press of a button generation, the problem is ten fold where you are relying on a fuel source you have no control over.

.
 
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Victorian Big Battery switched on​


Victorian Big Battery switched on

MELBOURNE, AAP – The biggest battery in the southern hemisphere is operating in Victoria. Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio on Wednesday officially launched the $84 million Big Battery, located at Moorabool near Geelong. Owned and operated by French renewable energy giant Neoen, the battery has...
thebull.com.au

it will be interesting to see how this survives the bush-fire season
 
What do you mean? Get the marshmallows and toasting forks ready. ?
I can't wait until the choice has to be made, Dan we can run the outer North of Melbourne for 1 day or Toorak and the inner city for 1 day, what's your call?
 
A home battery with solar is far better than a Generator.

1. in bad times it will provide back up power in exactly the same way as a generator, except without the maintenance and fuel costs.

2, Every other day it makes you money by letting you use your cheap solar instead of importing grid power.

a generator is a cost even when you don't use it, where as solar and batteries are being used every day and paying for them selves.
 
Yes but if you are on a property and you need power away from the homestead you either need a generator or a very long extension cord.
 
SirRumpole said:
Yes but if you are on a property and you need power away from the homestead you either need a generator or a very long extension cord.
Click to expand...
Most home back up generators are fixed in place and hard wired in by an electrician, at least thats how the ones I see on you tube are, I haven't had one myself.
 
Value Collector said:
These guys went off grid for 200 hours using the Tesla power walls, and they have two cars to car, and its a snowy winter.
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I don't doubt they did what they claim but:

They have 4 Tesla Powerwalls and a solar system that's substantially larger than would sensibly fit on the roof of many homes. All up, it's circa $60k AUD worth of equipment.

It was extremely cold outside and yet the electrical load remained low to the point that even a microwave oven being used lead to a visible jump in consumption. Where's the heating and where's the hot water load?

I'm not suggesting they cheated in what they did but there seems to be a bit of trickery involved here. Great big battery and solar system and seemingly no or very little heating or hot water isn't a realistic scenario for the average household.

My guess is they're burning something to keep warm and heat water. Something as in gas most likely and if not gas then probably oil.
 
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