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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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Energy efficiency is why BEVs will dominate over Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle in the future. Assuming the use of renewable energy sources and limited FF use, energy efficiency will end up being the most important aspect.
Hydrogen from natural gas is more efficient than from electrolysis, but with gas being a finite resource, the correct comparison is via electrolysis.
The numbers from various sources on the web tend to indicate that BEVs are 2-3 times the efficiency of HFCVs, so we would need 2-3 times the solar/wind installation for HFCVs as for BEVs. That alone is probably a cost (in energy and resources) that the world cannot afford.

Another aspect is that homes and businesses can fill their roof with solar panels and directly charge the BEVs, you can't do that with hydrogen.

IMHO we might end up with using both. Hydrogen FC for heavy vehicles where the weight of large batteries would be a drag on both performance and range, while small commuter vehicles will be BEVs.

There are many perspectives that are often overlooked in the debate of HFCV vs BEV. One is that just as the battery has a limited life in the BEV so does the Fuel stack of a fuel cell, a costly part of the HFC vehicles.
Another point is that too many discussions revolve around just commuter vehicles, when trucks, tractors, ships, bulldozers, etc need to be included.

Currently it is obvious the world is heading down the path of BEVs, with car makers investing many billions of dollars in the technology, plus sales are rising more rapidly than all predictions. 2018 sales growth was 64% over 2017, with over 2 million BEVs (and PHEVs) sold. Meanwhile the Toyota Mirai, has sold a TOTAL of about 4,800 over 4 years. Toyota's own PHEV Prius sells over 2,000/month, yet it only hit the market in late 2016, so sales there are much higher than the HFCV.
 
sptrawler said:
Have you heard when the Tesla's will hit Aust? Or are they still filling U.S orders?
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They are doing right hand drive countries first, they are exporting them into Europe at the moment, except the UK, I am guessing when the UK imports begin this year, we shouldn't be to far behind.

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This video answers some of the questions that people have brought up a while back about maintenance, turns out very little is needed, pretty interesting

 
brty said:
Another point is that too many discussions revolve around just commuter vehicles, when trucks, tractors, ships, bulldozers, etc need to be included.
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A point I have made to many people but which generally results in blank stares is that for the foreseeable future we're going to have a mix of technologies.

That is the big trend underway in energy and it's already well established.

Not so long ago, depending on where you lived, all electricity came from either coal, oil or hydro with it being fairly uncommon to find more than one major source within any grid. The only places where that is true today are a few remote towns relying on diesel.

As recently as 20 years ago practically all cars, utes and small vans in Australia had petrol engines. Today diesel dominate for utes and is widely used for cars and vans.

The only energy interconnections between states in 1989 were NSW and SA for gas and NSW and Vic for electricity. That was it. Today we have all state except WA interconnected with gas and we have all except WA and NT interconnected for electricity.

Solar is now a significant energy source but was close to zero just a decade ago.

So there's a definite trend toward diversity and in the context of vehicles we're likely to see that continue to increase.

Yes we will have EV's.

Yes petrol and diesel will both still be around for quite some time yet. Not forever but they're not finished yet that's for sure.

Natural gas will probably play a bigger role too, especially for heavy vehicles.

The biggest mistake anyone can make in all of this is to assume that it's an all or nothing proposition. Either all EV's or no EV's. All renewable electricity or all from coal and gas. Etc.

In reality there's going to be a mix of technologies for the next few decades that's pretty much certain.
 
Theory and reality are likely to be different in the longer term.
In the short term renewables will be spent as energy additions, while FFs fill the energy gap.
In the longer term, and as renewables get successively cheaper, there will be excess renewables energy. Because the excess energy costs nothing (ie no fuel costs), and would otherwise be wasted, then it makes sense to use this "free" energy to produce hydrogen gas.
In fact, if a nation like Australia did the maths properly it has the ability to work out how much wind and solar would be required to generate total annual energy needs, then add a hydrogen capacity build from additional wind/solar to produce enough hydrogen to fill all intermittency issues. And it can easily go beyond that to produce hydrogen for export.
 

rederob said:
In the longer term, and as renewables get successively cheaper, there will be excess renewables energy.
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Renewable energy getting cheaper in the longer term is an assumption that most people make, just because that has happened for the last 20 years. However I'm not expecting that trend to continue into the future for very long for 2 reasons...

1 The cost of energy itself has been going up and it takes a lot of energy to build renewable plants in the first place. Currently we rely on fossil fuels to make and build all our solar and wind farms, plus the grid infrastructure to carry the power.
On average the world is now mining the harder to get oil and coal. If oil production was as cheap and easy to get as it was 50 years ago, there would be no fracking nor deep water rigs, nor for that matter
oil from tar sands. These sources of energy have only become possible because the cheapest and easiest oil has already been extracted.

2 The resources needed to build renewable energy capacity are getting to be lower grades. For example copper, that 20 years ago had an average mined grade of around 1.2%, today has an average mined grade of about 0.6%. Because you need to mine and process an average lower grade, it will take more energy to extract the amount of copper needed by the world.

I've seen many cost curves showing cheaper renewables into the future, but they all lack critical thinking about the underlying assumptions. IMHO at some point the cost of solar and wind will start to rise again as cost of manufacture, transport installation and grid connection rise.
 
As has now been shown with the solar salt storage plant to S.A, there also has to be a return on capital, to encourage the investment.
The amount of renewables required, is huge, and if the ROE isn't there, the price of the electricity produced will have to go up to cover it.
It isn't as easy as just wishing it will happened, it will take a huge amount of money and a huge amount of time.
Meanwhile we have to try and make sure, we don't become a third World country, while trying to achieve it.
 
The cost of generating energy from renewables has been consistently decreasing. Furthermore, as renewables are also increasingly important in the total energy mix, the cost of making what turns into renewables capacity also decreases.
So what - renewables are now proven significantly cheaper, and their cost curves are trending down, not up!
True, but the additional cost will be marginal at best. You might need to look at how massive mining operations are becoming more electric and autonomous as you might not be up to speed.
brty said:
I've seen many cost curves showing cheaper renewables into the future, but they all lack critical thinking about the underlying assumptions.
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Perhaps you can tell us about these assumptions.
Wind for example has yet to get to scalable production levels as technology and engineering advancements keep improving such that these advancements are reducing costs in preference to scale.
Solar technologies are capable of significantly greater capacity through "biscuits" that capture more of the solar spectrum than present mass produced solar panels. However, the issue here is that scalability is gazumping efficiency for the time being.
 
Very true.
That's a major impediment to nuclear overseas where ROI is so far out that private companies can use their capital far more efficiently.
The difference with solar thermal is that, with proper planning, it adds energy to the grid mostly at times of day where prices are highest as distinct from being an energy mainstay.
 
The problem with it is, IMO, it can be used as you say during the peak evening period.
But I would assume it requires LNG, to achieve steam conditions in the morning, untill the salt is heated.
So in reality at best it has a very limited generation window, and the capital outlay is very high, add to this the output will be considerably lower on overcast days. Be that in generation time or restricted output.
I think the technology is great, but I wouldn't be buying shares in the company that owns it. Just my opinion.
The benefit with nuclear is , it is clean and it is 24/7 available, to me it is currently the only viable way of becoming coal free.
 
sptrawler said:
The problem with it is, IMO, it can be used as you say during the peak evening period.
But I would assume it requires LNG, to achieve steam conditions in the morning, until the salt is heated.
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No, you don't spend money on "extra" energy. In fact these facilities dedicate a proportion of their generation capacity solely for running the site.
sptrawler said:
The benefit with nuclear is, it is clean and it is 24/7 available, to me it is currently the only viable way of becoming coal free.
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Cannot see anyone in Australia ever willing to put up the many billions and wait over 20 years to get a return. In any case, waste disposal remains a global problem and aside from nuclear plant nimby's, you will find nuclear waste nimby's are totally feral.

Back on topic.
There are many battery technologies being tested for greater suitability for EVs, with solid state likely to be the winner down the track. These would be safer and offer greater range. But like the solar PV race, the massive production scale of basic solar panels means that the issue of price competitiveness will rule the roost for the foreseeable future.
 

rederob said:
The cost of generating energy from renewables has been consistently decreasing.
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If that were true, then power bills would have been decreasing in real terms as the amount of renewable energy fed into the grid increases. However over the last decade or 2 the cost of electricity to the consumer has been going up in real terms across Australia.
There is a total cost of the renewables, not just the installation of separate solar and wind plants. There is also a limit on what percentage of the grid can be renewable unless there is a massive amount of storage included, because if intermittency issues. This is another cost that has to be added for a stable grid.

rederob said:
Perhaps you can tell us about these assumptions.
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We currently build everything with cheap FF, cheap in term of net energy, which most people assume means cheaper in dollar cost with scale. Just adding solar and wind to the grid will lead to instability and intermittency.
Can you make just the glass for solar panels from intermittent solar or wind energy?? Answer, NO, nor for that matter any other component!! We need a stable grid to do this that currently relies on stable FF output. Once we add enough storage to overcome intermittency issues, OR make the grid large enough to overcome any intermittency issues (transcontinental) the dollar cost and energy cost goes through the roof.
Solar and wind are only getting cheaper because they rely on fossil fuels to mine, transport, manufacture, and build, plus the grid being built to accommodate all the renewables is also being built with fossil fuels. The renewables have a lifespan of about 25 years, so will need replacing at a shorter time interval than coal or natural gas plants that tend to have 50 year (or longer) lives.


I'm a huge believer in the need to go to renewables as we will simply run out of oil, coal and gas eventually (excluding any global warming issues), I'm just not assuming it will be cheap, as the real numbers clearly show it will not be.
Our civilization runs on cheap net energy. We have relied on cheap, easy to extract fossil fuels for a couple of centuries, with accelerating use of these over the last 100 years.
Economic type thinking where everything is based on dollar cost, does not match with the reality of everything being energy based. I've been studying all this for decades, so could easily write a book to explain all the nuances of our current system. Impossible to go through all the assumptions quickly, apart from getting people to look at every aspect of anything to realise how dependent it is on cheap FF energy.
Our markets crashed in 2008 because of energy (FF) getting rapidly more expensive, yet most claim it was bad loans. My own analysis of energy kept me out of the stockmarket at the time. Economists do not understand why in the 10 years since the GFC, economies have not returned to previous growth, yet an energy analysis of the economy easily explains the constraints of expensive energy on growth.

Assumptions of renewable energy getting cheaper because of economies of scale etc, fail to realise the upfront energy cost in the build out. Lower quality ores require increased energy inputs to get the same quantity of raw materials out. Using renewables exclusively requires a massive increase in raw materials, simply because the energy return on energy invested is much lower in renewables than in the FF we have been using.
Think of the resources needed to build a 1Gw coal plant or gas plant with an 80% capacity factor, (produces roughly 7 million Mewawatt hours of electricity/yr) compared to the equivalent build of just solar. Solar assuming 6hr/d, would be a 3.2Gw solar plant, plus there would need to be some type of storage to allow for the intermittency. Both capital and energy cost of the solar build are much higher than for the coal or gas plant, plus if you put the solar in the bast places, there are increased grid capacity build costs.
 

Nuclear power stations as they are currently built seems totally uneconomic. The alternatives of wind/solar/batteries/ stored hydro just make more economic sense. This analysis examines what is happening in the US.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a26255413/green-new-deal-nuclear-power/
 
Australia is not indicative of the rest of the world - has highest prices of all westernised economies.
In any case, I am talking about cost to generate.
Maybe take this to a different thread - this one is for electric cars - and I will address your points, because they simply do not stack up.
 
sptrawler said:
I agree with your sentiment, it is just the amount that is required and the timeframe it is required in, that is the stumbling block for renewables. IMO
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sptrawler said:
I agree with your sentiment, it is just the amount that is required and the timeframe it is required in, that is the stumbling block for renewables. IMO
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Very little additional energy is required, assuming greater reliability of existing capacity.
However, the stress of heat on distribution infrastructure is going to get more and more problematic.
More wind plus storage will be a significantly quicker and less costly fix than the pumped hydro from Snowy.
 
Noted that this thread is about electric cars not how to generate electricity but I'll observe that with regard to the latter, it is not simply a question of resources, technology and the environment so far as cost is concerned.

Broader economic factors and industry structure lie at the heart of recent cost increases.

To that end I will point out something very basic.

AGL is a company that, apart from those living in NSW, most Australians hadn't heard of until a few years ago.

AGL is actually the 11th oldest company of any sort operating in Australia, having operated continuously since 1837. So AGL itself pre-dates any significant use of electricity in this country by about 50 years.

For the vast majority of its history AGL's sole function was supplying gas in Sydney. Or more specifically, Sydney but not including the north shore. In that role AGL was an integrated monopoly which owned and ran the whole show from gas production, pipes, meters and retail. Want gas? You can buy that from AGL and nobody else.

Now to drop the bomb on current thinking, it's a matter of historical fact that AGL's charges for the supply of gas were lower as a monopoly (using early 1990's prices for reference) than AGL's prices are today, for the same gas, in a competitive market and the extent of the increase is not explained by wholesale gas costs.

Now I've nothing against free markets as a concept or economists personally but the notion that radical reform of the energy industry during the 1990's would lead to lower prices has proven to be false in every case other than for some (but not all) electricity consumers in Victoria who have ended up as the only real beneficiaries of the whole thing.

In the context of the thread, well expensive electricity obviously isn't helpful in persuading consumers to use more of it via electric vehicles. It won't stop EV's becoming a thing, international factors will determine that, but higher than necessary costs are never helpful in persuading the masses that something's a good idea.
 
The Snowy scheme is storage. How else do you propose to store the wind energy?

It is in effect a giant battery and a hell of a lot more environmentally friendly than the battery plant in SA which has tiny storage by comparison, uses heaps of rare minerals requiring extensive mining and which will fail in the medium term.
 
I’m an Uber driver as well, and Yes I will only buy if it’s less than 30k

We also have solar panels so basically it will be free fuel for life
 
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