I have no vested interest in energy suppliers or transportation, that being said, I cringe every time I hear free lunch solar power from my rooftop and intelligent grid. The power service providers use money collected thru normal power usage fees (their bread and butter $ so to speak) to maintain the power grid infrastructure. Now rooftop solar comes along and removes all that baseline revenue during sunny hours. That lost operating cost has to be made up somewhere now doesn't it. Where do the power providers get now even more $$$$$$$$$$ to upgrade infrastructure for the crushing demand caused by EV's arriving at the workplace and plugging in, or arriving home after work, to top off there batteries near to the time when the sun goes down? Where do parking facilities get the funds for electrical system upgrades and power to provide for EV's charging? Is this going to just magically going to happen, financed by dwindling revenues? Ta dah, here comes the magic wand. SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM I SAY! What happened to the free lunch, hey let's just tax the dwindling, amount of ICE vehicles. Somehow the term dwindling keeps raising it's ugly head.
So it a case of that we like things to be as it has always been? Is that why many are so sceptical and only look at the negative sides of EV's and see it as a "threat"? Why does it always have to be "this or that"? I mean we run different fueltypes today and will continue to do so in the future. EV is just another one in the mix. I think whats more important in the future it so look at getting the right vehicle that suits the need. Sure fuel and energy has been cheap and are still cheap, but its obvious that we can't continue as we always have done. As far as I can see the use of electricity has declined since 2010 in the UK and will prob continue as lots of manufacturing continues to move overseas. When the need for oil and decreases it will add even more to the decline of electricity.
No way I'd pay anywhere near that for a bicycle, E or otherwise. Totally unjustified IMO, don't care what it's made of.
I'm not anti bicycle. Prior to retirement I rode one to work practically every working day for the last 35+ years plus numerous days out in the Peak District. My cost "question" comes from an engineering point of view. Even taking into account cost savings of mass production on automated production lines you can't compare a bicycle to a motor cycle with maybe ten times the components.
Didn't mean to imply you are anti bicycle. I could have just as well used any example, phones, cars you name it. I guess there will always be more expensive versions around no matter if its a VS thong or a car where its hard to figure out or motivate the cost. Remember that I had a friend ordering carbon fiber wheels to his bicycle for around 3k, nearly fell of the chair but he claimed it was a massive difference and said its worth every penny. If I look at a car such as Morgan I wonder how it can cost so much, I mean there R&D can't be high but I can imagine that if someone would brake down the numbers it prob would make perfect sense. When it comes to EV stuff I guess its down to many more things, all from battery tech to where they actually are getting the batteries from and how morally sound the production of the batteries are. R&D must be a biggie too.
the problems with electricity come in two main helpings, both way upstream from a consumer. the first issue is thermodynamics. you have to make the electricity first in order to use it, and there are losses in production and distribution. all the clean kilowatts expended in an electric car required somewhat more kilowatts to generate somewhere else. so buying an electric car to use cleaner energy typically just means making dirtier energy elsewhere, and more of it. we could use clean sources of electricity like wind, tides, or solar for this, but that runs into the second problem, storage, already alluded to earlier. grid systems don't have any storage capacity, and so when demand is weak, energy is not harvested, and when demand is strong, energy is insufficient. counting on manufactured sources of energy like burning clean hydrogen neglect the electrical costs that generating hydrogen entail. thermodynamics again. you have to use up energy to make the hydrogen before you can burn it. i think we're going to have to run with electricity generated from clean passive or renewable sources, either mechanical like wind or tides, or passive like solar or geothermal. but the big issue is always going to be storage, and as long as we use centralized grids, we won't solve the problem.
The use of hyper-local storage in the UK is tiny but growing and as growth happens we will probably see more adoption due to reduced costs of acquisition. My local sports centre uses 6 power walls charged by solar for all of its electricity. The use of cars as storage as well as transport is growing. This evolution is at the beginning but is moving so some of the points you raised my well be addressed over time.
Things are different in different countries, and what is common sense one place may be madness elsewhere. What is equal though, is the need to reduce CO2 emissions. Regardless of our individual beliefs concerning causes of climate changes and what may or may not save the world, our countries have committed to national and international agreements. My country is obliged to cut emissions with at least 50 pct. by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. Your countries are in a similar situation, but you can make your reductions in a wider array of sectors. Norway’s power production is 99 pct. hydro electric power. It’s cheap, and we use it for almost all our heating purposes. This means that the vast majority of our CO2 cuts will have to be in the transport sector. We’re not like Poland, where a switch from coal to gas will help a lot. This alone explains why our government has had to subsidise people’s EV purchases with huge amounts. Up until now EVs really should be subsidised, as they haven’t been attractive enough. But something is happening now. With the Volvo XC40 we could get an AWD EV with a towing capacity of 1500 kg and sufficient range without paying Audi E-Tron prices. We got a premium car for standard car money and cut our running costs with 80 pct. Other attractive models are right around the corner. It will be interesting to see what role hydrogen will play in the future. At this point I’d expect it to be more relevant for ships than for private cars. Hydrogen is very low on energy in volume and very high on energy in weight, so in a hydrogen car you’re riding around on top of a hydrogen tank at 700 bars. Hindenburg springs to mind.
Hydrogen definitely has a place, maybe not in cars but other types of transportation where storage of hydrogen isn't so much of an issue. Even if we use crappy dirty ways (such as coal) to produce electricity to our EVs is still a better option than to use fossil vehicles, if we can add in solar and windpower to the mix its great. I also think that if we can find economy in installing solarpanels on roofs in Sweden where there isn't that many hours of sun its possible in most countries. What we struggle with in Sweden currently is distribution, Ive heard of some places where they have had struggles to supply power to newly established datacenters and factories. But there is a massive investment going into it as far as I understand.
