Yet another Volvo thread

I’ve read a few articles on EV batteries, fast charge soild state ones are between 5 and 10 yrs away from mass production.
There’s a company in Israel that has developed a SS battery with a 400mile range that can charge in 9 minutes (doesnt say how big the vehicle is mind). Bmw say 10 yrs until they’re being produced in high volume.

As soon as charges give a 400mile range with charge times around 15 minutes im there.

Though I wonder how much of a strain this will place on the UK’s power generation infrastructure when we’re all charging cars overnight.

I imagine there is spare capacity overnight, hence economy 7 etc

It takes approx 80kWh to charge a Tesla which is about £12. Doing that just once a week would more than double my domestic electricity demand. Multiply that nationaly when theres a much greater number of EV im sure Economy 7 and lower night rates will be a thing of the past when people have to charge overnight.
No doubt a lot of charging will take place during the day in work place carparks increasing day time demand.

Hopefully by then we’ll be solar charging house batteries during the day to charge cars over night.

As a person who does 40K miles a year, and there are plenty of drivers with similar mileages, the national grid just won’t be able to cope, as well as the top-up from France disappearing due to the French de-commisioning nuclear power stations.

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Exactly. I would charge at least twice a week doing 20k a year. Domestic solar power is the way it will go.

The charging would have to be at my place of work (as a company vehicle) or I would have to get re-imbursed for power used at home or both. It opens up a minefield for a lot of organisations. You either spend quite a lot of capital to get charging places at work (£4K per car approx I was told for a commercial charger) or pay for people to get home kits at their homes and then pay for their electricity via some sort of meter. This is for company vehicles.

But the Tories have just killed the domestic solar power industry by removing the incentives.

A bigger issue, is where do you get all the rare earth metals to make the batteries from?

Mars??

There are plenty out there, it’s just how much it costs to get them.

Yes, differentiating between home, work place and off site (hotels etc) charging and mileage covered will be difficult. Will need a dedicated meter system at home for sure.

Companies with large numbers of workers covering 40,000 miles a year will need to make substantial changes to their IT infrastructure in order to get those figures down.

I agree, but stragely customers want to talk to me person to person as they don’t have the infrastructure on that site.

In the last 3 weeks I have been pottering around England looking at possible new sites in the NE, Midlands and SW. As yet, remote viewing of a empty building we don’t own or lease is beyond me.

Exceptions aside, and there will be many, do we think all other reasons for travel which could be negated by technology either have or will be fully exploited in the next 20 years?

True, without very substantial expansion it won’t. We shouldn’t forget, either, that on some timescale the use of fossil fuels for domestic heating will need to be cut back to mitigate their impact on the climate and simply because they will, eventually, run out. So heating will need to go over to electricity too.

Bob’s more-or-less right about this too - for most materials there is a sufficient supply if you’re prepared to pay. And the cost increase needn’t be enormous - factors of ‘a few’ make a huge difference. But for some materials there really is an absolute shortage. If your plan needs a lot of gold, for example, then you should worry. Nature has been unusually effective at concentrating gold into small deposits for us and we have been unusually effective at finding those deposits. I’m afraid there are no surprising discoveries left. There is essentially zero gold in sea-water, by the way. The impression that there is was the result of careless assaying (to be fair no-one ever claimed that there was more than a tiny, tiny trace, but the oceans are very, very large so it would have added up).

VB

So do you think that the energy required to build/run electric vehicles, will be a net saving over its lifetime?

I don’t know, to be honest.

Looking at the fuel use first, heat engines like the internal combustion engine are not very efficient (this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Léonard_Sadi_Carnot worked out why). So if we run a car on fossil fuels it will simply waste most of the energy in the fuel which would have stayed in storage if we hadn’t pumped and refined it. Electric motors are much more efficient. But the efficiency of the electric power plants and distribution will range from perhaps worse than internal combustion, if they’re fossil-fuelled, all the way up to very high, if they’re solar-powered (in the case of solar power the sunshine comes for free and would be 100% wasted, heating the earth, if we didn’t turn some of it into electricity).

Then there’s the question of whether building an electric car takes more energy than building an internal combustion one. I would guess that it might at the moment, given the energy needed to make batteries. But I am guessing. And I haven’t factored in any future improvements as the battery stock becomes large enough for recycling to start having an impact.

To be honest the arguments against fossils aren’t usually energy related. They’re usually based on a) the bad effects of CO2 on the climate, b) the bad effects of exhaust pollutants on health and c) the fact that sooner or later fossil fuels will run out.

VB

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So really if the electricity is generated from renewable sources, solar etc or nuclear, then there would be a benefit (energy consumed and harmful emissions).

However there probably need to be some major development of nuclear power in the near future to cope with the increased demand, and seeing that it takes donkeys years to build them, they need to start yesterday imo…!

Isn’t energy density still likely to remain an issue for a good while (in cars) with petrol having a figure still some 20x greater than that of the best batteries?

I think that the maths has been done, and electric is way more efficient, even taking into account the battery issues. No time to look it up though