Apparently, what electric cars need is not better performance but better subsidies:
Australia’s electric car market was unlikely to take off beyond its current tiny niche unless the federal government introduced subsidies to encourage consumers, says Nissan’s global chairman Carlos Ghosn.
It’s a micro-mini-market for electric cars in Australia:
Despite record sales of new cars, just 219 of the 1.2 million new vehicles sold in Australia in 2016 were electric, even that was a 90 per cent drop from the previous year. Battery powered cars represented only 0.0018 per cent of the total market.
People buy cars to get places. Governments “buy” cars to change the weather.
One of the justifications for subsidies was that sales of electric cars were not driven by consumer demand, but by governments’ desire to reduce emissions.
How rich is the State of California?
In California, sales of Nissan’s Leaf Electric vehicle, which retails at US$30,680, attracts a US$2,500 clean vehicle rebate, a $7,500 federal tax credit and gets some preferential treatment on high occupancy vehicle lanes.
You know a car is bad when it is allowed to go in “bus” lanes.
h/t Dave B
4 whole cars a week. Wow, what an auspiiou start. With 4 a week, why on earth would they want subsidies? Don’t answer that, I already know. 😉
I have to wonder though, what are the weekly sales figures for new 2018 model Toyotas or Hondas (assuming they’re out by now)? And make that gas guzzling non hybrids just to clear up any ambiguity.
Don’t even mention California where all cars will soon be required to have 4 left wheels instead if 2 on each side, electric or not, such is the sad state of the State.
272
$30,680 for a Leaf. I can remember when I thought $7,000 was a ripoff price for a VW made car with an equally inane name, Rabbit.
The Leafs I can get whenever the wind blows and the whole neighborhood is overrun with feral Rabbits. You can have either or both for nothing. Just give me back my 1998 Toyota Camry in like new condition again and I’d be happy as the proverbial clam. But even with over 220,600 miles on it the last smog check passed it without complaint and I still drive it around and it will still come up the steep grade near me at 80 MPH if traffic permits. Just put it on cruise control and drop it out of overdrive just before the grade begins and you can’t tell is has more than a couple of miles on it. Now that’s an automobile worth having.
Keep your plugin cars, California.
342
If they put a fence around california and left them to it, the lights would go out and most people would die from lack of food, power and medicine within 12 months I’d reckon….which rather pseaks to the unsustainable ( oh the irony of that word, here…. ) of the green dream.
Interestingly, “the green dream” is slang name of a chemical used to put animals down….
Green Kool Aid, green dream…coincidence?
152
Green Dream = Sodium pentobarbital @ 100mg/kg intravenous.
73
What a font of knowledge you are …
10
I’ve been offline for a while Roy, but I know I’ve come back to the right place when the first thing I read is a comment that mentions ” 4 Left wheels”.
Such biting and relevant comment on the current state of news presentation and public “thinking” and leadership should not go unnoticed.
The Easter and ANZAC day holiday period has provided other distractions including music from a 60s type hippy band intent on recreating the ” summer of love ” , real groovey man.
California dreamin.
But I digress.
The relevant point is that during all of the past weeks at no time did I drive or get driven in an ELECTRIC POWERED VEHICLE.
KK
92
Hi Keith, what about a new electric SUV;
All left wheel drive!
Regards GeoffW
52
Is that the one that does right hand turns all by itself when it gets in the mud?
22
Hi Keith, what about a new electric SUV;
All left wheel drive!
Regards GeoffW
22
Me too!
20
PS:
I hope you have been equally offline re all the news that’s unfit to report but nevertheless gets reported. Otherwise your downtime would have been not worth much because Jo Nova is the least frustrating place I know of to spend some time. TV is a lost cause except for OANN.
30
Toyota has sold all its shares in Tesla.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN18U05E
193
Toyota sold them at 160 to 180 a share, Tesla shares are now around $340, poor decision by Toyota.
410
Elon Musk has “left” Trump’s team after Trump announced US withdrawal from Paris Accord. If US stops subsidising Teslas, that share price might just start dropping, like a largish gold plated brick….
251
Tesla, the only US car company that build 100% of its cars in America employing 100% Americans, why would the US govt do that? so they can give it to US car companies building cars in Mexico employing non US taxpayers?
211
Nobody is saying that Tesla has to stop building cars in America, using 100% Americans.
What is being suggested, is that the previous bribes (or subsidies, if you like) to keep manufacturing in the US, are going to be withdrawn, because the rest of the US tax payers have to pony up extra money to provide those subsidies (nee bribes) to Tesla.
The fact that Musk left the team in a high dudgeon, indicates that the subsidies were a large proportion of Tesla’s income. Musk is going to have a good look at his financial structure, and then decide where, and how, and if, he is going to design and build his products in the US. It will be his, and his Board’s decision to make. It will not be a decision made by the US Government.
This is interesting to me, because it indicates just how far the “capitalist” ethos of America has moved towards becoming a “socialist” one.
20
Elon Musk is a leftist scumbag who wants free handout from gullible taxpayers.
He can rot in hell !
125
Malcolm
But it is the righteousness of the decision rather than the money that counts isn’t it?
92
Short term, yes. Toyota are very long term investors. Things can go down as fast as they went up. This is pure speculation and then the last to invest loses.
Also electric cars are real competition to the excellent Toyota hybrids which can travel for 1000km on standard petrol with half the tank and refill in two minutes, not four hours. Plus lower overall emissions. Hybrids can even run on pure battery where necessary. Even Ferrari are producing amazing hybrids. No one wants to be stuck somewhere, which is a real prospect with pure electric cars at much higher prices.
141
I’ll bet that Toyota knows something that the market is not yet aware of. Toyota are not the biggest motor manufacturer in the world because of ignorance or bad decision making.
81
true Graham, Toyota have put their company president in charge of the Toyota electric car division. biggest
04
Hang on. That doesn’t make sense.
“Toyota have put their company president …”, i.e. The most senior executive in the company, “… in charge of the Toyota electric car division”.
Now whether or not the electric car division is the biggest, is immaterial, What is really interesting, is the implication that the electric car division is in serious difficulties. You don’t take the chief honcho from the top job, and put them to oversee part of the company, unless you absolutely have to. It sends all the wrong messages to people like me.
I just hope that Malcolm has stuffed up, or is telling fibs for effect, or trying to impress us, or whatever. A failure of Toyota (if it occurs) would be catastrophic for the whole automobile industry.
40
https://electrek.co/2017/05/19/toyota-ceo-tesla-iphone-electric-vehicles/
Below is a sentence from the linked article,
Late last year, Toyota finally took a significant step toward making electric vehicles after years of being stuck in fuel cell development. They set up a new division to build their first all-electric vehicle and they even put CEO Akio Toyoda in charge of the new team.
03
OK, Alarm over.
Dweeb Malcolm, has taken an advertising brochure, or press flyer, as being a definitive source of information. I should have guessed.
Which says one of two things: 1. Toyota cannot find a suitable person to manage the division. This could be expected, because there is not a lot of experience around. Or 2. The division will remain part of Toyota, for the time being, until such time as they can reorganise, and possibly spin off a new company, to maximise any Government largess that may be in the offing.
30
I can see lithium hitting a brick wall with regard to price.
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2016/5/27/37628986-14643272033794932_origin.jpg
I doubt that it a suitable feedstock for high volume production of battery cars.
Toyota have put a lot of development effort into hydrogen fuel cell cars and that is not so dependent on a single feedstock. However there is still considerable development on fuel cell technology and I believe there is a reluctance to back the company on any particular technology. Get into this market in a small way and see how it unfolds. Hydrogen makes sense with high penetration of intermittent power generation. When the sun is high in the sky no clouds and lots of wind put all the capital to work producing hydrogen for times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
10
Very true regarding lithium but as I have noted before hydrides are better sources of hydrogen ions than compressed hydrogen. Methane CH4 is the best renewable which can be liquefied for efficient storage.
20
Not really, it depends on the purchase price. If they walked away with a decent profit all good. People lose a lot of money thinking they know where the top is.
10
Tesla losses were US$1.3 per share.
According to Bloomberg, cash burn was the second most in the company’s history, behind only the final period of last year.
00
Its probably instructive that the only current successful enteprise Musk is involved in is the one that has nothing to do with renewables, putting stuff in orbit.
20
Another Donald Trump rebuild the US economy decision no doubt, the gravy train of subsidies is ending.
81
Two red thumbs from the human-hating left.
Say, I must be doing something right.
91
Goulburn home of the big Ram sets an example. We have 5 recharge point in the Visitors centre. 2 are for exclusive use of EV others have shared use. Saw one car recharging one day.
120
You know they are a dopey lot when they haven’t yet woken up to the fact that a battery can be swapped in half a minute if the design is right.
53
That’s the only way it can work. Something like the gas bottle swap. The problem is the amount of space they would have to have to store the number of batteries required to service the vehicles each day. Then they still have to be recharged by fossil fuelled electricity generators.
100
Tried and failed already – https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-place
A battery pack is easily damaged by misuse and the capital vs fuel cost (which is the part you can charge a premium on) is far higher than for a gas bottle
00
Thats one more than I have ever seen driving up and down the east coast 🙂 They generally just sit there like lonely sentinels
10
the electric car industry did NOT ask for subsidies, Carlos Ghosn the Nissan boss made the statement on behalf of his own company, by the way those 4 cars per week figures do not include Tesla’s that dont submit sales figures to V FACTS.
317
lets see, electric cars consume home grown power from the grid, coal that employs Australian miners and helps keep a roof over their families head, gas or other type using a grid thats already in place, the materials from electric cars can and are being sourced from Australia, Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel, the list goes on, from Australian mines employing Australians, benefitting Aussie families and the economy, the alternative is we all keep driving ICE vehicles, every year this country imports multi billions of dollars of fuel to run our passenger cars,that money is drained from Australia and goes overseas, who is that money going to? what is that money being used to support? we have a choice of going electric to support Australians or staying ICE and keep sending vast finances overseas.
431
pick the machine for the job
141
So, and correct me if I have gotten this wrong, but your justification for Oz buying electric cars is to support the Coal Industry?
231
what is the issue with supporting the home grown coal industry? isn’t that better than supporting the overseas oil industry?
72
You’re missing the point Malcolm; ‘home grown power means home grown Co2’. And that’s a joke since the aim of the exercise is to cut so called emmissions.
Regards GeoffW
171
Hang on…this is a global “problem” right?
No chance CO2 might plummet into the ocean between here and NZ for example…..no, were all in it together…like a public swimming pool…apparently…..without bright blue urea-sensetive dye added…. 🙂
40
You must have missed the memo, coal is EVIL and is being taxed out of existence as we speak. How do you plan to manufacture and then charge your EVs? Diesel gens? You are talking utter green fantasy that is costing jobs, not creating them.
202
So “Malcolm” you support the coal industry.
Excellent !
61
why not Angry, whats to not love about the Australian coal industry, so what about you do you support the foreign oil industry?
24
I support fracking in our own backyards .Perhaps Australia, like the USofA, could become energy independent?
21
We should be energy independant now, we have coal that makes electricity to charge electric cars but you lot continually bag electric cars and continually bow and scrape to the gods of overseas oil imports by filling your petrol tanks.
15
You can also make synfuels from coal, that can run in petrol engines. We have had that technology for, oh, eighty years or so.
And the nice part of that is, much fewer nasty particulates, end up the atmosphere. Think of the children!
20
…..or….fit your car to run on Australian home grown LPG. The tech now is fantastic economy with little emissions and at least another thirty years left out of bass strait alone. Malcolm, I thon you will find we send all of our crude condensate to the likes of Singapore to be refined and imported back here cheaper than paying local taxes and refine it ourselves. Watch the the few refineries left give up when the government enforces even lower sulphur content.
40
more than 24 hours since I posted 1.3.1, 26 Red thumbs but no response on why its okay to keep running Australian cars off billions of dollars per year of imported oil yet not okay to drive electric cars off home grown electricity, don’t blame the parts of society that don’t like burning coal, or gas, or building hydro dams, get ya head out of the sand and take a look around at what we have got and what we don’t.
06
Yeah, go on, I’ll bite.
EV’s means consuming electrical power from the grid, probably most of it overnight to charge the batteries, unless of course it is the Government fleet, when they will charge their batteries during the day at work on the taxpayer’s dime.
If we are to believe your thought bubble that EV’s are the car of the future, that means consuming power from the grid, and probably most of that will be a constant power draw overnight.
Australia already consumes 18,000MW overnight, and has been for the last decade I have been watching, and it has not gone down, so there’s a fail on the decreasing power consumption thought bubble.
That 18,000MW is covered (just) by currently existing power generation, nearly all of it coal fired power.
If we are to have a complete change over to EV’s, then that need for power will rise and rise considerably.
Now, while that rise is over and above that 18,000MW, that total is Australia wide.
So now, to cater for all those EV’s flooding Australia, we will need power in actual local grid areas, eg in each State.
That would necessitate the construction of at least one new large scale coal fired power plant in each State.
In this current day and age, do you ….. seriously think that will happen?
Not on your life.
Rooftop solar with so many cars, out of the question, because it is to be done overnight, so that means off grid battery solar of a scale that will cover the doubling of power consumption in the home on the days they will be charged.
Wind power is also out of the question as the power requirement is a dedicated constant need.
So, all that leaves is NEW coal fired power, which, come on, dream away, is NOT going to happen any time soon at all, if at all.
EV’s are a thought bubble which proponents will believe hand on heart, without ever going and finding out what the actual requirement for real electrical power generation to cover that actually means.
It will just be a niche market for the dreamers who want to seem green.
Tony.
70
thanks for taking time to reply, so much more constructive than a red thumb. You mention this: That would necessitate the construction of at least one new large scale coal fired power plant in each State. have you got an example of an operating one in Australia that can be compared for scale?
04
It’s all useless conjecture really, so there’s no point even giving any example.
Finkel hands down his report tomorrow and will set an emissions target of 700Kg/MWH, which, as expected for something like this totally rules out any new coal fired power plants, because a HELE USC emits just a tick over 800Kg/MWH, and hey what a surprise eh! Who would have thought he would be that accurate.
There’s no point constructing any new coal fired plant here unless it actually IS a HELE, and now, with no chance of that, then any example would be absolutely useless.
So there goes a whole of Australia shift to EV’s with no power to actually charge them. They’ll just stay as an expensive toy niche as I said.
Tony.
30
Just for old times sake give me an example of an existing coal fired station, Mr Finkel isn’t watching.
02
Willard,
can you not read what I said in 1.3.1.7.1.
All that existing power is currently being consumed.
I’m afraid you only get to use it once.
Tony.
31
Tony is reluctant to provide an example of an established coal power station so let’s pick his favourite, the Bayswater power station, central to a large population, 16,000,000Mwh per year (Tony’s figure), thats enough for a minimum of 6.5 million electric cars, that is to say a mix of various size passenger cars driving the average distance of 14,500kms per year in Australia, Tony claims we need a new power station in every state, that is incorrect, we do NOT have 39 million passenger cars in Australia we have thereabouts 14 million, Tony is almost 3 times times out in his calculations I can see why he was reluctant to provide a figure.
It’s a shame you don’t have your heart in this anymore Tony, Mr Finkel has some answering to do.
13
Oh, Willard, give up on this will you.
How many times do you need to be told to learn to read.
As I said in 1.3.1.7.1. That power coming from Bayswater is already being consumed.
You can say whatever you want to, because you obviously don’t want to be told anything that goes against your pet little thing that you do.
Power coming from Bayswater cannot be used for EV’s anyway, in WA or SA, or Victoria, or even anywhere North of Brisbane provided they humungously upgrade the Interconnectors to Queensland and to Victoria, so that effectively means at least one new power plant in every State.
How many times do you need to be told that the POWER IS ALREADY BEING CONSUMED, so you need NEW power, not existing power.
And you can change the subject all you like, and sneer at us in your snide way you do, and say things that were never even mentioned in the first place, your typical tactics when you have no answers, or are reluctant to go and check for yourself, and I understand that. All of this is way outside your level of understanding. You have theories that you then try and fit to the facts. It doesn’t work like that.
Give it away.
Enough.
Tony.
20
Bayswater power station was an example,one that you use over and over on this site, that is what I asked for, an example, you clearly understand this but avoid the initial question, you claim 6 new stations need to be built, once again Bayswater is an example not one of the 6 new power stations that you claim need to be built.
an electric car is a power consuming device that various electricity production and supply companies across Australia are taking a shine to and wont let anything get in the way of a collectively big customer, you can make all sorts of claims why it’s not possible, regardless of what you say electric vehicles will steadily replace the internal combustion passenger car market.
12
There is an old joke … The inventor of the telephone, was not that clever. It was the inventor of the second telephone who was smart.
30
Ok I’ll bite. People don’t buy EVs because clearly they don’t meet their needs for cost, rapid refueling, range, safety and performance.
It’s clear otherwise people would buy them, the market has spoken EVs are not good enough.
It doesn’t help that proponents of EVs don’t compare their favorite EV with anything approaching the state of the art in ice vehicles and fail to acknowledge the losses inherent in the delivery of the energy. Not only that, plug in EVs are charged with tariff 11 energy at circa 26c per kWh making the fuel cost about the same as diesel. No savings to speak of.
While it stays this way no-one except the most ardent activist is going to buy them.
20
” the materials from electric cars can and are being sourced from Australia, Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel, the list goes on, from Australian mines employing Australians…”
Gee I didnt realise we had become the sole source, who knew? we should charge more
20
What EV do you own as your only car, Malcolm ?
91
sold the petrol car, was getting old in the tooth and costing an arm and a leg, I can get away with no car atm, cars are convenient but they sure do gobble up money, but will need a permanent vehicle next year some time, have a Tesla 3 on order but the Renault Zoe or latest Hyundai thats hitting the showrooms late this year will probable get the vote.
412
May yoyr commute be short.
Cheers,
Dave B
120
so Andy now your turn, tell me with pride what vehicle you own and also tell me after you have paid for fuel who gets your money at the end of the chain?
38
Where were those batteries made again….?
80
Nevada now.
25
So, everything imported.
At least my V8 was mostly made here. !!
113
With Australia coal power, no less. ! 🙂
103
and steel.
93
There’s nothing as enjoyable to drive as an old carburettored V8. 🙂
81
Greggg alleged:
Depends on the individual. Your fun is not my fun, and my fun probably wouldn’t be your fun. 🙂
I run a large motorcycle. It’s even more fun than any V8.
I have an acquaintance who disagrees with me: he built a V8 powered motorcycle and happily destroys rear tyres, but that’s overkill to my mind, and I’m happy with my 1000cc two wheels.
Burns 22l of petrol every 330km (not the most economical bike) but I can cruise at speeds up to 200km/h effortlessly and maybe a little more if I work at it, if I should so want to. Dodges traffic jams with ease and can park anywhere. The fairing keeps most of the wet stuff off.
40
Andy is very proud of his V8 consuming copious amounts of imported oil.
26
“Andy is very proud of his V8 consuming copious amounts of imported oil.”
–
Andy is very proud of making you look like a fake Willard.
60
If a V8 is good, a V12 is great! Why not two V12’s? 4 turbos! My twin power scraper uses 80 litres of diesel per hour, but it moves a lot of soil in that hour…
30
cant beat the sound of a v8, v10, v12, here’s a magnificent sounding Lamborghini supercar as it gets destroyed down the 1/4 mile by a 4 door electric passenger car, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GZtTRKuE8A
47
Malcolm, I think I’d rather have a snorting , stomping , breathing vehicle with a bit of a “soul”.
I had the opportunity to drive a 458 recently, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I think anyone who loves driving, will shudder at the thought of being stuck with some electric shopping trolley, versus soemthing with a bit of go….
It also harks to the love of squeezing the max out of something – its fun, a bit raucous, and down right enjoyable. Perhaps in the socialist moind, fun is not allowed, and considering CAGW cant be proven scientiically, the fun police can take a hike. I’ll stick with a rumbling V8 any day. I guess if you dont like a V8, just drive your electric shopping trolley, and leave the fun to us…..
The joy of living in a Democracy is we have choice.
I guess too if you dont like a democracy, I’m sure Kil Ill-Fitting Suit will take you into NK happily….comrades should stick together, after all….
40
There is always a Telsa on insane mode. And quiet enough to sneak up on people as well…….
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tesla-model-s-insane-mode-vs-ludicrous-mode-2015-9?r=US&IR=T
10
“cant beat the sound of a v8, v10, v12, here’s a magnificent sounding Lamborghini supercar as it gets destroyed down the 1/4 mile by a 4 door electric passenger car,”
happily the track is only 1/4 mile and we can turn the page and move on. Looking forward to Tesla at the 24hours of Le Mans.
30
Happy motoring Malcolm. I remain a pragmatist out bush- where we still have unsealed roads and causeways across creeks. Might get one when I turn 100.
82
dope……
32
Malcolm,
What makes you think Tesla will be around next year when you want to buy the Tesla 3?
I do hope you haven’t put down a deposit.
30
Does really matter in more, Tesla had a goal of bringing forward electric transportation, Jag, Audi, VW, Renault, Hyundai and many others are ploughing head first in to EV developement, Tesla may go next year or some time soon after that but there’s no turning back on electric cars, the path has been set.
06
*does not really matter any more.
05
Spoiler alert: The above names are brands, and not manufacturers. Would you like to share the actual manufacturer’s name and location, with us, Malcolm?
40
Rereke now nitpicking in desperation.
05
No Malcolm, I am stopping you from being overly economical with the truth.
And I notice that you didn’t answer my question. Could that be, because you don’t like telling people the answer?
40
I can see two brands there made by the same manufacturer. 😉
00
“Tesla had a goal of bringing forward electric transportation,” Lordy what naive nonsense. Tesla has a goal of farming as many subsidies as they can for as long as they can.
20
Andy do you get the impression that Wilbur has changed his name to Malcolm? He is full of the same illogical BS.
130
This has prompted a trip down memory lane, recalling the most vociferous warmists who passed through Jo’s blog over the years.
Adam Smith.
Black Adder The 4th.
Chester.
Craig Thomas.
Harry Twinotter.
Sillyfilly.
Vince Whirlwind.
WheresWallace.
Willard.
And who can forget Michael The Realist.
Good on `em for that.
80
You forgot oh, what was his name then?
00
If Malcolm is genuine in his statements that his support for EVs is because they can help substitute imported oil products by using electricity generated by Aussie coal then I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
But he has to agree that 90+% of EV supporters are doing it because they believe they are helping reduce emissions and those same people conveniently forget where the electricity for their EVs is coming from.
70
And my advice to you Ross is don’t care about why other people buy EVs, do the research, look at the reasons why they benefit yourself and the country and make your own decision with an open mind, the fact that Australia could run EVs off the local power grid instead of importing multi billion dollars of oil into Australia every year should get you inquiring.
45
Yea…..but what about all the brownouts we would have if lots of likeminded “patriots” actually started using our overstressed renewables based grid for their toy EVs????
60
electric cars can be charged at home when it suits the grid, another of the reasons AGL are keen to see them increase in numbers, what do you think 14 million cars will just arrive by ship tomorrow and blow up the grid?
35
“electric cars can be charged at home when it suits the grid, another of the reasons AGL are keen to see them increase in numbers, what do you think 14 million cars will just arrive by ship tomorrow and blow up the grid?”
Malcolm/Willard … you need to understand basic electrical engineering.
More EVs per household = more electricity needed per household.
Electricity needs wires.
Certain size wires can only carry certain ammount of electricity.
If you exceed the safe capacity of the existing wires, and sub stations and switch yards, you need to physically replace wires etc.
That costs money, lots of it.
I suspect the electricity providers will be only too happy to charge you for upgrading the supply wiring into your house, and your switch box, etc.
Now – CAGW cant be proven scientifically. Sure, electricty providers will happily supply you with bigger wires, but if you want to pay big bucks to solve a non existent problem go ahead, but you will look a bit of ( now much poorer ) goose……
81
Long winded explanation on your opinion on what CANT be done with regards to home charging when it’s actually being acheived right now by electric vehicles in Australia, I repeat you say it’s NOT possible, it’s not only possible it’s being done now and has been done for the past few years. Now tell why the Western Bulldogs can’t win the 2016 Premiership.
16
Its not an opinion. Its a logistical reality. Its really simple – it costs big bucks to upgrade infrastructure. People are not going to spend 15-20k of their own money to charge an electric shopping trolley each night. Get real.
Footscray can’t win coz they are rubbish.
50
Most people dont have the fixation about where the fuel dollars go to. They are buying for ego, function, performance etc. These days in a global economy if you get your knickers in a twist about where the $ go you wont buy anything.
By all means if it makes you feel good, but it seems a bit selective in the overall scheme of things.
10
Malcolm, at #1.3.2.2.4, managed a sleight of hand, to avoid answering OriginalSteve @ 1.3.2.2.3, because Malcolm has no answer.
Steve pointed out that multiple EV’s per household, or even multiple EV’s per electrical substation, would require upgrades to the fixed electrical distribution grid, and possibly upgrades to substations, switching gear, etc.
It is obvious that Malcolm has no idea of the engineering involved, and hence the hidden costs, in building the EV pie-in-the-sky that he recommends.
20
This isn’t remotely true, if everyone had EVs them our grid demand would double, already the southern states are in crisis because of the RET. Adding EVs to the mix would be the straw that broke the camels back. Reinforcing the grid to support 100% penetration of EVs would put the cost of the NBN to absolute shame especially if you tried to do it with unreliables. It also would make our technology too fragile imagine the added effect of a carrington event on say food availability if transport was also grid dependent.
12
Bobl, I know of one family that have two EVs in the household, no problems, and even it it did the cars can be set to charge at different times.
Also grid demand would not double, the worst case scenario is it will take 10-15 years to steadily increase to at the most 20% more than today’s total grid consumption.
Thirdly, our food availability is already dependent on a transport industry that relies on regular importation of foreign oil, do you have any idea of how long Australia’s fuel stocks will last if disrupted, there’s a lot written about it but hard to nail down a true figure.
21
Malcolm, you don’t really understand how energy systems are dimensioned. Average doesn’t come into it, now when would you expect people to plug in the car and start charging? Maybe when they get home concurrently with preparing the evening meal? EV charging won’t be an even demand and will require infrastructure. For example I doubt owning an EV is at all practical if you are at the end of a SWER line. It’s certain to be impractical in multi vehicle families. For example it would easily multiply my demand by 4 as there are 3 adults in my household with their own vehicles.
11
The majority of people have a need to get from A to B, on occasion. That need is paramount in their thinking. They don’t care how they get to B, as long as it takes the minimum amount of time, and is safe, and cheap, and above all reliable.
Reliability is the key thing. When I go on a trip, I carry a jerry can of petrol in the boot, for insurance, in exactly the same way that I carry chains and a collapsible shovel, and a couple of lengths of old carpet, in the winter. If you get stuck in snow, you can die.
In the Australian bush, you need a vehicle that you can trust, in both extreme heat and extreme cold conditions. Heat exhaustion or hypothermia? Neither a good choice.
Electric vehicles may be fine in metropolitan Europe, or commuting up the San Jose Valley, in the US. But I am not convinced that electric vehicles would cope in some of the extreme weather conditions that you get in equatorial Africa or the Ural mountains.
30
Don’t worry about it. As a biker, he is merely trialing for the Invictus games. Oh , sorry, that is for ex servos. Disabled Olympics? I, myself, am one of those proud to call ourselves temporary Australians. But when I am not off on the pushie, its an old petrol V6 paj 4WD
20
My 2c worth on EV / hybrids Malcolm.
Something like a second hand Prius is actually a useful solution. I reckon that new, they are still a bit expensive on a price / capability level. But, the second hand ones can be had in good nick and i think are good value in the right context. On the NMH batteries where all the scare stories about Prius come from? Even on the old ones (2004 on, dont go for anything earlier as they were “grey imports”) there is still enough capacity for them to operate well as hybrids. Have to consider that the Prius was never designed as an EV, but as a basically petrol vehicle (small cap batteries even in the new models) that gets way good fuel economy. 4.5-5l / 100km is actual real world consumption on the older ones.
As a car, they dont tow, and are not real good on the gravel, and forget roof racks. 🙂 However, not bad on long highway runs and a good commuter.
10
The downside is the Prius couldn’t be plugged in, Hyundai are bringing out a plug in hybrid, Good chance Toyota will soon follow, electric only during the week, petrol if needed for long trips.
03
Toyota have update the Prius in terms of actual driving dynamics for their 2017 model and have gone to a higher capacity LIB battery pack. Give about 25km EV only and fuel figures of under 4l / 100km. And it plugs in. This is the US release, not sure what Oz gets.
Old Prius cant be plugged in, but there are mod kits out there for extra battery that can. Not sure i would want to go there though.
Not for everybody , but if you have the right circumstances i think can make sense.
20
On the other hand my diesel I30 is 85kW engine and gets around 4.5l per 100 km with the AC off, and I can drive it to get 3.9l per 100km if I pretend it’s an ev, eg disengage the engine on downgrades and shutdown on stop, allow it to slow down on upgrades. If it was variable displacement and had energy recovery for ancillary power, then I reckon you could get to 3l per 100km easily beating the Prius.
10
In the USA last year, The Ford F-series outsold EVs by something like 7 to 1… all by itself !!
163
We stayed in the Scottish town of Crianlarich about 7 nights ago.
There were 3 electric car charge points. One was provided by the hotel and two by the council. All were free to use by owners of electric. cars. Free Fuel!
Despite this amazing subsidy by the public and the hotel there were no electric cars charging up.
The fact that we were about 1 1/2 hours drive north of Glasgow might have had something to do with it. Diesel powered Landrovers on the other hand seemed to be popular.
330
Landies = practical vehicles….
80
4 electric cars a week bwa ha ha ha ha. That’s gonna cut emissions.
200
We used to call them milk floats and there were lots of them about.
30
If electric vehicles have any merit that the public can perceive, or for what ever reason want them, then they will thrive in the market, and so will not require a subsidy. If they do not have the necessary virtues then they will perish with or without a subsidy; a subsidy will only delay the eventual EV market crash.
So should public money — your taxes — be wasted in this manner? That decision should be yours not any easily brißed politicians’.
390
I think we should have leaned our lesson regarding a subsidised auto industry, of whatever persuasion, when the local manufacturers decamped and moved off shore in the not too recent past.
Some bozos never learn, slow or fast!
180
Yes, the world would be so much better if everything was subsidised.
201
We could grow sugar cane in Victoria with sufficient subsidies. This would provide much needed employment with mills built to refine the sugar; rail lines built to transport the sugar to the mill; additional public servants to regulate the new and expanding industry. What’s not to like about it?
50
With sufficient subsidiezation you can create an elephant,
colour of choice,
http://drawinghowtodraw.com/stepbystepdrawinglessons/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/01-cartoon-elephants-drawingtutorials.png
20
graph of electricity costs in West and Australia https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/04/german-right-demands-climate-policy-shift/
20
it’s gone beyond subsidies: 10 states of the USA forming a climate confederacy: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266897/treasonous-secession-climate-confederacy-states-daniel-greenfield
00
I want subsidies to grow my Unicorn farm! Fair is fair.
172
Can you run a side line of rainbows & pixie dust too? That will help the green mirage stay visible for just that little bit longer….
112
Not a problem!
10
It’s all about the pitch. Elron Musk is a master at telling people what they want to hear so he has the governments subsidising his Unicorn business ensemble. You just have to be as good and convincing with heart string pulling BS as he his – not easy.
00
I always wonder with electric cars about the arithmetic of reducing CO 2 emissions when renewables make up so little of the base power generation. Surely the extra CO2 that flows from the extra power required negates the amount of CO 2 saved from not using fuel.
In fact if one looks at it in a positive way maybe because CO2 is plant food they could increase the popularity of electric cars by promoting this fact with a slogan like. Buy electric and help make Australia greener.
80
because if your concerned about reducing CO2 charging an electric car of 100% coal would still be cleaner when you compare the coal mine to car battery to the oil well-shipping-refining-shipping-servo-fuel tank and then 25-40% efficiency of an internal combustion engine.
123
So Malcolm, burning coal is OK for powering cars now? Why not then for all its other reliable, affordable uses?
201
i have no issue with burning coal, you burn the fuel that makes the most economical sense and benefits the country the most, burning foreign oil in Aussie cars is not benefiting our country.
47
or buying any new cars, any tyres for it, any consumer electronics, most clothing and footwear, most supermarket food, and I would imagine the computer you are typing on. Sorry , cant buy into your obsession.
10
… burning foreign oil in Aussie cars is not benefiting our country.
Yes it is. When purchasing foreign oil is one side of a bilateral trade deal, where Australia gets equal benefit in selling manufactured goods and farm produce in return.
20
The network and charging system losses plus the inefficiencies of electric motors mean that the overall energy efficiency of EVs is only around 14% at the drive chain output, compared to diesel at around 35 and approaching 40%. Frankly CNG or CNG + diesel would be a much better fuel.
10
I think you’ve been listen to Jon Cardogging too much.
As a matter of interest if you use the same calculating system to come up with an EVs efficiency you best you the same system to calculate the diesel efficiency, that is factor in all the losses of ocean shipping, refining, road transport, and servo energy use.
01
Or coal mining, shipping etc… electricity has supply chain inefficiencies too. From a CO2 POV coal electricity is oxidizing only carbon to CO2, hydrocarbons oxidize carbon and hydrogen in roughly the ratio of 1:3 meaning they produce under 1/2 the CO2 as EVs kw for kw. So EVs are less thermally efficient AND emit more CO2 per kilojoule. The primary reason for having them doesn’t stack up when you do the math.
PS Australia could be self sufficient in oil given the will, but there is no will. Most of oz is unexplored
10
EVs have a larger ‘carbon footprint’ than petrol cars, when full life cycle (manufacture, disposal, etc) is taken into account. You sir are an environmental vandal.
213
not true, the full cycle of two compared vehicles favours the electric car.
417
Reference to the evidence, please.
A proper longitudinal research study would be extremely useful.
10
The fact that surveys show that electric cars do have a higher carbon footprint that petrol cars is scandalous. Not that the carbon matters, that is the good part, the bit that is dreadful is that inefficient technology like electric cars and wind turbine power generation only exist because they are financed from public funds via subsidies and politically driven policies. After a fully blown world recession, things like these will disappear……
161
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-cycle-ev-emissions#.WTeBTNR95kg
electric cars are cleaner cars from cradle to grave, not that it should concern you Rob.
215
Well, carbon dioxide is a nutrient, helps plant growth for food and by so doing provides more oxygen to lengthen the time between cradle and grave. So it does concern me……I say bring on the CO2.
Anyway modern cars have come a long way in reducing particulate exhaust emissions and heavy metal missions from petrol engines. All efforts should be put into this and not trying to reduce C02 emissions.
Electric cars may eventually be a good final solution to this but so far the technology is not commercially efficient and therefore has no right to be a sponge on public funds. This is economically unproductive for society at this point in the technology.
141
you’re
20
Thank you KK. I was about to make exactly the same comment.
20
Thanks Annie,
He obviously is well educated; post 1974 style.
Lots of content, not much depth.
Probably has a degree or even a PhD in climate worrying.
KK
40
That’s right but emissions of what?
Confusion continues to reign in the ‘public mind’ due to the successful efforts of the Climate Change™ industry to conflate CO2 and city smog.
BTW electric cars in Australia merely transport CO2 emissions from one place to another and because of the extra processes involved I wouldn’t be surprised if that increases CO2 emissions overall.
271
Yes, indeed. That is a good point.
There is a production line, in capturing the source of the energy, on a 24 by 7 basis, transmitting it from the point of capture to multiple points of supply, converting that energy into useful work, and accounting for all the losses along the way.
And, that description does not include the fact that you need multiple points of supply, geographically spread across the whole country, that also need to be maintained, with facilities for payment that must be secure, and audit-able, with security surveillance systems that will discourage wilful damage.
All of this requires energy, in one form or another, and that energy must come from some existing sources, all of which, either directly or indirectly, produce CO2 as a non-toxic by-product.
190
Excellent points, RW, which goes to prove that these sorts of decisions should be made by competent engineers and not by bog ignorant pollies and bureaucrats!
100
I have never been accused of competency before. But I will take it as a complement.
60
Wouldn’t be to many charging points in SA. 🙂
60
so harsh, so very harsh
10
Before subsidies should even be mentioned, let alone considered, there has to be in depth, comprehensive research made and white papers produced and lodged, which critically examine the ozone pollution potentials of these vehicles. Bands of pollution levels must be identified and quantified with both climate and public health effects so that numbers may be controlled if necessary.
Recommendations should also be made about what is necessary to be put into place to measure and control the ozone emissions of these vehicles. Ozone is a very strong GHG (or so we are assured by those who are supposed to know) so its potential production and impacts have to be known well in advance. In this respect, ozone is known to be a danger to the climate. It is also known to be dangerous to the general public health as well, so we must apply the Precautionary Principle and institute an Ozone Tax.
Other environmental impacts of these vehicles will be subjects of later research and consideration. These are to cover such things as recycling of the cars and of the batteries at their respective ends of life.
However, all of these environmental and social impacts must be researched, considered and be prepared for well in advance.
Of course, all those reports and their research will have to be paid for by those wanting to import, manufacture and market these new-fangled things. They must be lodged with the Office of the Director of the OPFC (Ozone Purification and Filtering Commission) by the end of 2020.
(this shouldn’t be necessary: /sarc)
50
Actually, if govts buy EVs , all they do is put our taxes into the pockets of the EV manufacturers….
Oh, hang on – wouldnt that make them rent seekers?
I propose we call all EV “Windies” ( not “Landies” ) – they are subsidised “windmills on wheels”, after all….
So – who is going to buy a Windie from old mate, Elon?
30
All the electric car buyers should have their own re-charge point that uses solar or wind to generate.
NO WAY should they be allowed to use our “dirty” coal…This should go against their grain….
Long live coal fired power stations…..
280
Agreed. Electric cars are pointless if they recharge with fossil fuel. They should only be allowed to recharge on windmill and solar power.
213
The phrase “hoisted on their own petard” comes to mind….
101
why are electric cars pointless if charged by fossil fuel, I would rather drive an electric car charged by Aussie fossil fuel employing Australians than drive an ICE fueled by foreign oil that’s funding tourists.
418
lots of tourists in the UK this northern summer, I wonder if any of your petrol dollar is going towards those visits David?
211
“I would rather drive an electric car ”
Which one do you own as your only form of transport, Malcolm?
114
Malcolm Willard, we could also create oil from coal the same way they do in South Africa. The fact of the matter is that it is not economically viable (ie it is inefficient).
Electric cars are likewise not economically viable – they only exist because governments bend over backwards to provide incentives and subsidies for people to adopt them under the CAGW mantra. Whenever these government funded schemes stop, so do EV sales – see Denmark and soon, Hong Kong.
10
This sounds a lot like what the Donald was saying – and is saying – in regards to the US. And which is sending a lot of green-minded folks into spasms. Doesn’t matter what it is you drive, make sure it’s US made and US fueled.
10
Makes so much more sense charging them from foreign owned coal mines and sending $ overseas than using fuel consuming ICE engine and sending $ overseas. What?
Dont forget that if we have renewables that means we have fossil back up so we still get to send $ overseas! all good!
10
Not to mention manufacture! Production shall only occur between 12-3pm if not too cloudy or on windy days….but not too windy of course.
90
Reminds me of those little blokes chopping wood attached to backyard windmilss….the faster the wind blows, the faster they chop…
So on really windy days, manufacturing plants using wind power – their production lines could move pretty quickly – he he
30
Given the state of the australian electricity market thanks(?????) to our politicians the last thing we need is electric cars. Current legislation is aimed squarely at getting rid of coal fired generation, certainly no one in his right mind would want to build a new one (unless heavily subsidised). So the extra demand for electricity by electric cars would bring on blackouts (for SA read more frequent blackouts).
80
Yes it willbe like running head first into a brick wall, then complaining you have a headache…..
60
This is not how capitalism works.
You grow your market by producing a superior product to the competition and market forces automatically grow the market for you.
Only under socialism does the government have to force you to buy the inferior product, whether it be fundamentally defective windmill power or electric cars.
New technologies don’t need government subsidies to “get going”. The products stand on their own merits.
But I’m sure the electric car makers will enjoy harvesting any subsidies the Australian Government offers with our taxes.
173
Look at the Trabant.
40
Electric cars reached their peak acceptance around 1910. They were quieter, more reliable and much easier to start than IC cars. With cars being much taller then, the batteries in the floor made them more stable too. Their limited range wasn’t a problem as cities were more compact and travel to other towns was by rail.
Unfortunately a guy named Ford started making cheap automobiles and sold a lot, and intrepid drivers set out over the cart tracks to other towns, forcing the government to upgrade them to roads. The cities started to spread out into suburbs helped by the better mobility – Sydneysiders probably know that in 1947 Homebush was the outer edge of the western suburbs and Ryde was where you went bushwalking. Petrol was cheap and cars were improved e.g. the self starter. Electric vans were fairly popular in cities for deliveries because they were quiet, not emitting fumes, and their limited speed acceptable with the short range stop/start use.
The problems with current batteries are their low power to weight capacity, the discharge and recharging rate, the shorter life when heavily discharged or recharged too quickly and their adverse reaction to high and low temperatures e.g. summer and winter in most of Australia. Yes, I know that you don’t need the heavy engine, gear box and transmission as in IC vehicles but they are replaced by a greater weight of heavy batteries. For electric cars to be superior you would need to triple the power to weight ratio of the batteries. Thousands of people have been working on these problems for 40 years with limited success. There is one approach that solves some of the problems, namely flywheels. Regrettably these also have a low power to weight capacity, much lower than lithium batteries when I last looked (perhaps readers have some input).
So Malcolm you still have a 1910 answer to your wish. Electric cars are close to ideal for those living in the inner city with no wish to travel long distances and who wish to project a smug green outlook. So, if you’re an inner city dweller don’t hesitate to buy electric car. Don’t forget to get your personalised bumper sticker – I, Malcolm are more gullible than thou.
90
I am about to embark on a 1000km car trip.
Given a choice between an electric car with several recharges or thundering down the highway in my six litre V8, I know what I’d choose.
253
Has anybody seen any references, regarding how long a recharge would take, from, say 5% charge to 100% charge. How many recharge cycles are the batteries rated for?
70
the latest real world info is the Tesla battery (that has always had liquid temp moderation unlike the Nissan pack)is good for 500,000 miles.
28
Says who?
120
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/ says the drivers who own them.
46
Has the data been “homogenised”?
83
not sure David, but I guess it went pasteurize.
43
How many of them have driven them 500,000 miles?
110
Did you miss the following in the piece you linked to?
“It’s hard to get much out of the data at this point”
110
You misread my comment. I was not inquiring about the life of the battery. I was asking how long a battery would have to be on charge, in order to move the stored energy from 5% charge capacity to 100% charge capacity. Or, in lay-person’s language, from “empty” to “full”.
I also asked how many times a battery could be recharged, or cycled, before the “Full” charge point started to permanently drop below rated maximum i.e. never get to 100% full charge, no matter how long it was on charge.
70
http://gas2.org/2016/10/01/tesla-model-s-200000-miles-one-year/
try this one from September last year, 320,000kms in just over a year, treated with disrespect by fully charging and discharging on Superchargers and yet battery degradation was only 6%.
48
So 6% per year, which means in real terms probably 50% degredation in 5 years if the degredation accelerates or the battery “ages” prematurely?
Any idea if the the battery replacement cost has dropped below $15K for a Tesla?
51
no Steve, charge cycles/distance has more bearing on the loss in those packs, if the time arrived to replace a battery, look at the parts that don’t need replacing or repair and 15k doesn’t seem that much.
26
A quote from Teslarati, referenced in Malcolm’s link: “the onboard software was not properly compensating for the state of change in the battery chemistry that occurs on high mileage cars. The company was to release a software update in three months time which would address the issue, but decided to completely replace the battery instead.”
Problem solved.
20
Yes Tesla batteries are immune to the factors that affect all other Lion batteries because they have Tesla written on the outside of them.
20
Malcolm,
Again, you misread, or attempted to deflect my question. I specifically asked how long a battery would have to be on charge to change the stored energy from 5% capacity to 100% capacity.
Because you seem incapable of answering this question, we can only assume that the time period involved, in waiting for the batteries to charge,would be detrimental to the image of using electric vehicles for anything other than local travel.
90
no need to charge to 100% unless its critical to cover the distance, virtually never gets done then it comes down to the power source, on a 2016
supercharger it takes 25 minutes to go from 10% to 80%, as superchargers are only 200kms apart between Melbourne and Brisbane thats enough, the charge stations Daimler are planning will provide 300kms of range in 12 minutes, food and drink service better be sped up to keep up with car charging.
45
Malcolm,
It is up to me to decide whether I want to charge to 80, 90, or 100%, It is not up to you. You cannot simply brush off my question by seeking to change my requirements, whether it, “virtually never gets done”, or otherwise. That was your first evasion to my question.
Then you simply try to change the subject, by saying that the new chargers will go to 80% faster. I don’t care about that. That was your second evasion to my question.
So I will repeat it again, to avoid any confusion:
“How long would a battery have to remain on charge, to change the stored energy from 5% capacity to 100% capacity?”
Be careful how you answer, this site has a long archive.
20
So once to get to the charge point it may take up to 25 minutes to recharge. Who long are you going to wait in the queue. The longer the recharge time the longer you will wait before you can recharge. This.can be avoided by increasing the number of recharge points but that again becomes another item of expense. If the number of EVs is going to increase this is going to be a significant problem.
50
why wait in a queue, 95% percent of charging is done at home, fast charging is only needed for long trips, long queue’s is what you get when petrol stations discount their fuel 8 cents a litre and everyone goes into a frenzy saving 5 dollars off a tank of imported fuel.
36
I have a great marketing idea: Offer a free lunch (or dinner) while charging.
20
Curious George you provide an interesting concept that is already being used, although the offer being made in some locations is free charging with lunch or dinner.
02
500,000 miles? strange that LiOns only seem to last 7-10 years in most other applications. Those boys certainly must drive a lot. Me thinks plucked out of the air.
10
Battery temp regulation makes a big difference.
01
It certainly does, those poor sods who drive in sub zero temps for a good chunk of the year will find out no doubt. Perhaps fuel powered warmers for the batteries?
10
RW (and others)
Although not for electric vehicles, the reference below does some analysis of Tesla batteries in their Powerwall, so has some relevance to this discussion.
“Buyer beware’ should be stamped on all advertising for battery products.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/how-the-cost-of-powerwall-storage-doubled-in-11-months/
70
that’s interesting an article that is more than a year old about the Tesla powerwall 1, as a matter of fact the powerwall 1 has been replaced by the powerwall 2 that is half the cost per usable storage.
45
Malcolm,
Did you read the first line of the article?
[Update: on Oct 28 2016 Tesla announced the Powerwall 2 ]
The relevance of the article was the analysis of the warranty, which should be a good guide to what the manufacturer expects from their system
70
well you better buy the Enphase battery with 95% nominal capacity after 7300 cycles.
13
Better not buy either if you have PV – https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/powerwall-2-as4777/
10
Thanks John,
Sorry I couldn’t say thank you before. I got a bit busy.
10
which one would you choose, the thundering V8 that puts money in the pockets of foreigners who use it to fund what? go on answer the question for me.
411
Malcolm,
Where are these foreigners, of which you speak? Why do you exclude the prospect of synfuels?
60
i don’t exclude the prospect of synfuels, not sure how you came up with that notion.
23
The car that a) fulfills the function I need b) a gives me pleasure. I dont give a rats where the fuel $ go.
You do realise that most of those coal mines you are so proudly supporting are also overseas owned?
20
Those coal mines still employ Australians.
01
As do the oil companies refineries, terminals, admin, outlets. Youve switched responses (as you normally do) from sending money overseas to having some local employees.
20
Touche 🙂
20
Those Australian refineries that are closing down and leaving our shores, down to our last 4 now, how long we they continue for.
02
Yes a few have shut down, others operate, like many businesses. All the other functions are still required.
10
Did this last month with a rented Toyota hybrid in Tasmania on 32 litres of petrol. Hybrids get the same economy in the city as in the country. All the advantages of both. Still prefer the 5.2litre V10 or the 5 litre V12 for highway driving but would admit it’s a bit silly even if fun. It’s city driving which wastes the petrol and there the hybrid economy is amazing. All the advantages of electric and none of the downside. Ferrari’s La Ferrari is the ultimate hybrid, the fastest of any Ferrari road legal car. No power station required.
70
A bit disappointed you were in Tassie and didn’t look me up, TdeF.
Did you notice that Tasmania is intending to add a whole slew of new windmills?
In the paper this morning, but it didn’t say who would be paying the price.
40
Sorry Rod,
I think it’s you.
Cheers,
Dave B
20
We all are. Your local electricity retailer pays on your behalf, doubles it and then charges you for the gift of 9c kw/hr to strangers, probably 18c kw/hr on your bill. For the right to buy electricity from own own generators, whether diesel, gas or coal.
30
Must have driven past. Sorry.
30
I have just driven close to 1,000 kilometres towing a caravan, diesel engine SUV AWD 6-speed manual transmission, and still some fuel left in the fuel tank.
50
And if it is burning diesel, you can grow your own.
00
It takes a very special person to ‘believe’ driving an electric car will stop the climate from changing.
240
Being a “special” person is often used as a euphemism in mental health, so I take your point.
180
who cares about the climate, it takes a special kind of person to put foreign petrol in their Aussie fuel tank and “believe” it is not in some way part funding another country.
611
Talk about a one trick poney 🙂
You do realise that most of those coal mines you are so proudly supporting are also overseas owned?
10
Are you against Adani’s Carmichael mine Yarpos?
01
My care factor about the Adani mine is approx zero
11
Turnbull is special.
81
So is Malcolm.
30
The government subsidy for electric cars should be the same as it was for Ford Model T.
110
Yes, and at the time the Ford Model T quickly put the electric car of that time out of business, consumer’s choice turned to convenience in refuelling and range when the tank was full.
If only the US government had subsidised the electric car manufacturer, they might have remained in business a few more years.
20
Wrt the previous item
As Hitler said about subsidizing private companies in exchange for state control —
“Wir lachen den ganzen Weg zur Bank!”
10
Wrt the previous item
As Hitler said about subsidizing private companies in exchange for state control —
“Wir lachen den ganzen Weg zur Bank!”
20
The Left’s ultimate goal in all this is to reduce the personal mobilty of people currently offered by fossil fuel vehicles. Keep them at home watching fake news and they’ll be more obedient slaves to the NWO.
They know that it is not possible, in principle, to have an electric car with similar range to a petrol/gasoline/diesel car because electrochemical energy can only be stored with about one tenth the energy density as chemical fuels.
113
yes, batteries are heavier than a fuel tank but thats offset by the fact an electric vehicle saves weight by not having a heavy engine block, gearbox and many other parts.
412
The Tesla S weighs 2,205kg. My 2003 V2 Monaro with a 5.7L LS1, auto trans and many other parts weighs 1645kg with a full tank of fuel (75L).
100
Yep, and the Tesla will still absolutely flog your Monaro, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-APJLX2reUg
24
My Monaro will get about 700-800km on a full tank. And I don’t have to wait all night for it to be full.
80
And the latest Tesla has a range of over 600kms and can be recharged very cheaply at a supercharger, of course he doesn’t mind the 25 minutes of downtime because he has some extra cash to buy lunch while you pump $110 of fuel in your Monaro.
15
According to Tesla’s own web site;
Tesla S @ 110km/h, outside temp 30C, A/C on, 19″ wheels;
75 – 384km
75D – 397km
90D – 438km
100D – 508km
P100D – 488km
21″ wheels;
75 – 375km
75D – 388km
90D – 428km
100D – 496km
P100D – 468km
Don’t see any ‘over 600km’ figures there Malcolm, also, once you get away from the east coast of Oz, there are NO ‘superchargers’.
50
Let’s up the ante Malcolm to 120km/h, which my Monaro can easily do 600-700km on a tank.
75 – 344km
75D – 358km
90D – 395km
100D – 458km
P100D – 440km
21″ wheels;
75 – 335km
75D – 348km
90D – 385km
100D – 447km
P100D – 422km
BTW, my Monaro has 19″ wheels.
50
Good to see you bothered to research electric cars through the Tesla site and not at a Bunnings store like Rereke,
06
A Monaro 75 Litre tank does not get close to 700kms travelling at 110kmh (11.8 Litres per 100km).
06
Do you or have you owned a Monaro?
50
Plenty of Holden’s, I can read a spec sheet, does your 2003 Monaro have the spec 75 litre fuel tank or not?
04
So you never owned or driven a 2003 Munro?
Apart from HSV spec brakes and a free-flow 2 1/2″ exhaust system my Munro is ‘as-is’ from the factory.
At 110km/h on the freeway the trip computer shows ~9litres/100ks (between 8.9 – 9.2)
50
And yet the cars guide testers got 15 per hundred around town and 11.8 when driven with total care, 9.0 is good figure though, makes up for the fact the car has only 2 doors and 280 horsepower.
04
How about a bit of run of the mill nuisance freeway traffic 50 to 80kms an hour , the Monaro is shifting up and down gears, it has plenty of tractability but trying hard nor to choke up, maybe getting 13 per hundred, could squeeze 550 till it runs out, the Tesla 100D has no gearbox, has to slow down? No problem- regen braking, good for 700kms plus in those conditions.
05
and if you keep using fast charge you will greatly reduce your battery life
00
See post 20.3 Yarpos, Rereke made that call too, and he was wrong as well.
01
Actually no. Tesla batteries are not immune from Lion chemistry because of the label. You can cherry pick results as you wish , stage trials in ideal temps etc, but reality will prevail.
10
More problems…
It appears that original Tesla S had a bit of a problem with the drive train. Might be to do with all that torque being applied rapidly to the bearing of a stationary vehicle.
http://evtv.me/2014/07/milling-mire/
Also tire costs — https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/replacement-tires-0
I also wonder about the longevity and maintenance costs of these vehicles. Mechanical wear will affect these rich kids toys sooner if driven aggressively, and who would not test out that 0-60mph in under 5 seconds spec. every now and again?
Nice cars to rent for a special occasion but own one — no!
50
Was going to mention tyre costs, as no doubt they would be ‘run flat’ and ‘low inertia’ types. All adds to the ‘hidden’ costs.
Also, not sure about other states, but NSW rego goes on vehicle weight 😉
10
Nope Bruce, standard Michelin or Conti’s.
03
Regardless of what Malcolm says the users at this Tesla forum often get less than 10,000 miles use from their tires. Tesla recommended replacements ARE expensive.
https://forums.tesla.com/it_CH/forum/forums/replacement-tires
This long running thread (https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/negative-camber-in-the-rear-and-expensive-tires.13825/) shows what problems owners have had with the strange set-up Telsa model S has with tire wear.
30
Tomo , listen closely, that thread is circa 2011, they are discussing the Tesla Roadster 2 door sports car, 2500 built in total, last built in 2012 the first model S 4 door sedan was not delivered until mid 2012, somewhere near 200,000 built and still being produced, the Roadster and model S are vastly different cars. Tyre wear is also linked to driver behaviour, care and tyre rotation, regardless of them driving a Monaro or electric.
23
Malcolm,
Read closely — the post on that thread run to this year!
31
Read closely, one is a Roadster the other is a model S which one do you want to discuss?
13
Backed with 8 year unlimited kilometre drivetrain warranty Tom, did you miss that part?
13
“Backed with 8 year unlimited kilometre drivetrain warranty Tom, did you miss that part?”
Excuse me but a warranty regardless of the period is no indicator of reliability!
41
It’s an indicator of a company prepared to back their products Tom.
13
Has enough subsidies and profit to pay to replace it when it ceases to proceed..
62
It the Rolls Royce effect —
For many years RR reliability figures were more than excellent, this was for a good reason, all RR bought from the approved dealerships’ had a 10 year warranty period and anything that went wrong with the vehicle was fixed immediately.
As the old story goes, a RR failed with gearbox failure in the forest of Germany. The breakdown team flew out by helicopter immediately and replaced the gearbox. The owner asked if the gearbox had failed, he was informed in no uncertain terms that the Roll-Royce gearboxes have never failed in the history of the company. The bottom-line for RR was that they knew very good reliability figures help boost sales.
So Tesla is just doing the same trick, hiding the facts and thus living on unrealistic reliability figures backed the warranty. This gives them the reliability kudos well beyond normal.
READ the link I provided to see the proof of what they do (http://evtv.me/2014/07/milling-mire/ ) Or just carry-on believing in the pipe-dream of a perfect man-made mechanical device called Tesla.
30
US insurance companies increasing insurance premiums on Teslas , due to accident stats and high cost of repairs. Did you miss that part?
10
Jeez Bruce even my XK6 with 350 Chev conversion “only” weighs in at 2000kgs, mostly real 1980s steel 🙂
00
Even a fully speced Chrysler 300 SRT8 (6.4L) weighs only ~1900kg.
30
And?
03
And …….. you said, because the EV has no “heavy engine block, gearbox and many other parts” it saves weight.
Far from the truth Malcolm.
60
Okay, you’re pointing out that the mighty 500 horsepower supercharged V8 hemi that weighs 300kg less than a Tesla also gets flogged by a Tesla meaning energy density is trivial.
13
And how far will a tesla go driven like that.
When one can last say, a Bathurst 500, get back to us.
Until then, you have nothing but propaganda yapping.
32
You are confusing energy with power.
20
Flogged in what sense? There are many measures of car performance.
10
can’t think of a country less likely to take to electric cars than Australia – the tyranny of distances, sparse populations, and all that:
the free local paper recently carried a pic of this beauty…installed in SE Qld’s Logan’s Yarrabilba. can’t find any link online except this one – perhaps the “yarra” bit makes them think there’s a market for electric cars in often-derided Bogan-land!
PICS: 10 May: CB Group: These Petrol Bowsers are History! EV Charging the Future
What will servo’s look like in the future? Maybe a lot like this! Strategically placed Electric Vehicle (EV) Chargers in areas where you can just grab a coffee.
This week CB Energy installed the first EV Charger (Tritium Veefil) into a Master Planned community at Yarrabilba.
Yarabilba is Perfectly positioned between Brisbane & the Gold Coast. Just 15 kilometres from the M1 Motorway, it’s an easy drive to the region’s renowned theme parks, award winning Mount Tamborine wineries and much of South-East Queensland’s natural beauty…READ ALL
http://www.cb.com.au/news-view/these-petrol-bowsers-are-history-ev-charging-the-10
meanwhile, enjoy:
AUDIO: 20mins31secs: 6 Jun: 2GB: Clive James’ scathing climate attack
Chris Smith speaks with author, broadcaster, poet and satirist Clive James, about his essay Mass Death Dies Hard.
https://omny.fm/shows/the-chris-smith-show/clive-james-scathing-climate-attack
80
the Tritium Veefil is Australian technology, Ergon/Energex are installing 45 of these DC fast chargers between Brissie and Cairns.
38
comment just went into moderation.
5 Jun: TheStreet: Gregory Morcroft: Tesla’s US$90,000 Cars Are So Expensive to Repair That One Insurer Says Premiums Need to Rise 30%
Your new Tesla (TSLA) may take another bite out of your wallet.
National insurer AAA said the iconic carmaker’s vehicles, particularly the Model S and the Model X are so costly to repair, and so easy to total that it’s raising rates for Tesla Model S and X vehicles, according to Automotive News’ website…
Tesla rejected the claim, telling the publication that it was, “not reflective of reality,” adding, “Among other things, it compares Model S and X to cars that are not remotely peers, including even a Volvo station wagon.”…
Tesla says if it were classified to cars more similar, in its opinion to the Model S, its data would not look so bad…
Citing the Highway Loss Institute, the report said, “The rear-wheel-drive Tesla Model S is involved in 46 percent more claims than average, and those claims cost more than twice the average.”…
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14163815/1/tesla-s-are-so-expensive-to-repair-that-one-insurer-says-premiums-need-to-rise-30.html
80
Only 46% more claims than average?
That’s not bad for a cohort of drivers who are totally disconnected from reality.
70
O/T
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-06-06/sydney-markets-war-on-waste-and-queensland-failing/8572932
They want to convert vegetable waste to methane to produce electricity.
But this ignores the biological cycle. If this “waste” is not returned to the soil to fertilise it to grow more vegetables, external fertilisers have to be mined or manufactured all of which requires energy.
Using vegetable waste to make methane is not “free” energy.
92
Electric cars are just so “suitable for purpose”! I want to drive from Melbourne to Perth – where can I charge it, how long will it take?. Edward John Eyre would have been faster across the Nullabor 150 odd years ago!
110
The ultimate goal is to reduce personal mobility.
104
I was writing while you posted — with about the same idea.
I suppose if one never intended to leave Canberra, an EV might do.
40
If you intended never to leave Canberra, then there would have to be something wrong with you.
60
Electric cars already travel across the continent now, no shortage of power at locations all across, as demand for charging increases the value in installing fast charges will prove worthwhile,so the choice will be drive a petrol car, take 10% longer to drive an electric car or if your in such a hurry go to the airport and catch a plane.
310
Yep, I only have to travel about 70km to the nearest recharge point. If I travel to the nearest capital city it’s about 350km to the nearest recharge point unless I take a different route which would add about 50km to the journey and there would still be 160km between recharge points.
A Nissan Leaf would need to be recharged twice on the way to the city, adding about 8 hours to the trip. A trip that would usually take 4 hours in a larger, safer and more comfortable car. 13 hours in an electric, 4 hours in a petrol car – no brainer.
90
I have crossed the Nullabour four times during the past three years and never sighted one electric vehicle, in fact there is no electricity grid for most of the trip and roadhouses run diesel generators for electricity.
But I did read about a man from Tasmania who drove his Nissan Leaf to Adelaide to a get together, he said the recharging was not a problem by arrangement with motel owners, but plenty of time must be allowed for the trip.
I have seen pedal bikes travelling slowly too.
60
Malcolm,
Do you know what fast charging does to a battery over time? The value of fast charging accrues to the battery manufacturer, who makes profit from all the replacements.
50
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/
i will quote from the linked article concerning modern electric car battery packs- “frequent supercharging (twice a week to daily)appears to actually be beneficial in preventing battery degradation”
33
you really are out of your depth here Rereke Whakkaro, do some study on modern electric cars and get back to me, it doesn’t matter what field you’re in, if you don’t make a effort you will never know.
16
SHILLY willy
Get back to us when you have owned one for 2 or 3 years.
Until then, all you have is baseless yapping.
63
In response, I would recommend the comment from Analitic
10
Willard Malcolm, have a read of this more recent article on high speed charging causing battery degradation from the EV Pravda (so it’s bound to be best case)
https://electrek.co/2017/05/07/tesla-limits-supercharging-speed-number-charges/
50
Say I got on Route 94 and connected to Route 1, headed from Perth, WA. to Port Augusta, SA.
Would this be a good idea in an electric vehicle?
I didn’t think so.
Any questions?
30
Any of those roads in an EV and you’re routed anyway.
20
Just call your local auto roadside assist – I’m sure they carry spare batteries:-) or they will tow you to the next recharge point. See my link at #20 – there do seem to be charge points at regular points across the Nullabor.
30
#22
10
Absolutely. You wouldn’t be getting your kicks on Route 66 in and EV.
20
You could put your electric powered vehicle on the fossil fuel powered train. Make sure you have plenty of money though, fares are expensive!
10
yes, been done many times.
57
Done many times? When the distance between charging points in Caiguna and Eucla is over 320km? What electric vehicles have that range? I suppose if you can find someone who doesn’t mind you plugging into their powerpoint. Maybe you can rent a room and plug your car in. Talk about making a long journey much longer.
30
any Model S WITH 70,75,85,kWh pack can cover 320kms, so can the latest Zoe, the latest Chevy and the model 3, there is also Cocklebiddy, Madura and Mundrabilla in between those locations.
but if your in a hurry just jump on a plane.
36
This guy used a Tesla P85+ to go from Perth to Brisbane.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/perth-to-brisbane.68837/page-3#post-1518363
cool story, bro.
😉
10
This is exactly the point, if you accidentally run out of fuel, what are your options? I tend to think the auto club tipping 20 litres of fuel into your tank is better than being towed 100km.
10
“many” is imprecise.
EXACTLY HOW MANY ?
41
many is more than the zero you would like to hang on to for as long as possible, its been done Angry, get over it.
67
and we are just supposed to believe you “Malcolm”.
Where is the PROOF ???????
30
Amazing how many recharge points exist – unclear whether the “fuel” is free. Some seem to be for Tesla’s, with highest recharge rate reported as 600 km/hr at supercharge locations, while for home chargers with 3.7kW rating (i.e 15 amp) and single phase supply it can take up to 12 hours.
30
I was considering that the average car recharge may well double the average houses electricity consumption ( from 20 up to say 40 kwh/day ).
Not sure how each suburb and by extension, local substations, will cope with that…. presumbaly they will install more rainbow & pixie dust generators and it will be all OK….that and print fantasy money to pay for the infrastructure upgrades too…
90
no, incorrect, the average car in Australia travels 40km per day, that works out to a maximum of 8kwh including the loss for charging. the rainbow and pixie dust generators are needed to refine oil.
413
There is no such thing as an average car.
You are resorting to numerical tricks in hypothesising something called “an average car”. We are talking about driving a car over the long distances found in Australia. Distances where there are no recharging points.
We need no further information. You have shown yourself, and what you promote, as being no more than pixie dust.
80
Agreed. My car almost never leave the garage. So I halve the average distance driven by another car. In my inner city location that is very common. So I would suggest 80 km/day, 400km/week, 20K per year might be closer to a median distance.
30
so you are saying Steve is wrong because he used the term “the average car”?
23
He used the term, “average car recharge”, that is the mean energy transferred in an unstated number of recharges.
There is no such thing as an average car.
50
Average – clearly you dont live anywhere near anything resmbling semi-rural.
As I said:
“Not sure how each suburb and by extension, local substations, will cope with that…. presumbaly they will install more rainbow & pixie dust generators and it will be all OK….that and print fantasy money to pay for the infrastructure upgrades too…”
Pixie dust generators, favoured by greenies,lefties and inner city trendy latte sippers, make all real world problems disappear …. *poof*
If your average calcs are correct, going from 20 kmh to 28 kwh is still a 40% increase. Some houses use even more power. How is the green dream going to cope with …hang on….*penny drops* …perhaps the grid isnt supposed to cope…maybe the idea is to use the green dream as amirage to crash the grid…..
Well, I guess if enough greeeies have their houses stripped of all combustible materials by ticked off normal people who cant heat their homes so they have to burn stuff to stay warm…..the reality might sink in…..cold kids will not put people in a good frame of mind, I suspect the Establishment will happily throw the greenie/socialists rank and file under the bus to achieve their aims.
I wonder if the lefties realize they will be happily “sacrificed” in the coming situation?
Lenin always said he needed lots of “useful idiots” to achieve his aims….
50
Yes I’m sure AGL, Energex and the like are in a panic over the extra 8kwh per car max, oh wait, AGL are offering $1 per day all you can charge, Energex are installing fast chargers.
15
And how long do you think a $1/day charge will last once the local grid gets too strained to cope?
30
AGL $1 per day all you can charge will last a lot longer than BPs $1 per day all the petrol you can put in your tank.
01
Coal, hydro, geo-thermal, and nuclear based power plants are required to refine aluminium and, to a lesser extent, copper. Intermittent power is useless, pot lines require great gobs of reliable electricity supply and have to be replaced when the power goes out.
Copper and aluminium will be in high demand for an increase in the electric fleet. Copper for the wiring and maybe the electric motors, and aluminium for the bodies and maybe the electric motors.
Copper and Aluminium are both much better conductors of electricity than any other commonly used industrial metals. Aluminium is steadily making inroads into relacing steel in vehicle body shells, being lighter than iron and thus improving fuel consumption and hence contributing to lowering CO2 levels.
Aluminium is the more common of the two but it has two drawbacks over copper: it has higher losses than copper, not by much, but it’s enough to be noticeable in some applications, and it can only be refined by electricity, (see Bayer process so trying to do it with unreliable mass propellor generation means replacing pot lines every time there is an outage, or the wind stops blowing. (The aluminium refiners will be soon leaving SA if they aren’t already. It is this little characteristic which made Aluminium, in the days before bulk electricity production, more valuable than gold.)
There are seemingly plentiful reserves of copper left, with Chile, Australia and Peru holding the top three places in the copper reserves table. Producing copper is a double refining process. The ore is initially refined in a pyrofurnace heating it with carbon. Impure copper is purified by electrolysis in which the anode is impure copper, the cathode is pure copper, and the electrolyte is copper sulphate solution.
CO2 output in the initial refining will be high, and electrical usage for purification (electrical use requires copper of at least 99.7% purity) is also high. Propellors might not cope with the load.
As the presently industrialised countries are forced to close down their metals refining capabilities, there is growing room for monopolies. China and India are well aware of this and are expanding their coal-powered electrical generation as fast as they can. Monopolies (or in the case of India and China, a neighborly duopoly) can charge what they wish.
As electric vehicles move towards dominance, so will the bulk prices of these two metals rise, and it won’t be because they are scarce nor because they are expensive to refine but because those producing them can.
The days of the relatively cheap automobile will be numbered. In the meantime, HC (Hydro Carbon) fuelled vehicles are more than sufficient competition to keep prices afforable.
Enjoy your half-price EV, Malcom, while you can. I would much rather try to keep the market for their competition viable.
80
Is that average derived from the number of kilometres travelled by cars, divided by cars travelling, or by summing trip lengths and averaging? Does it include weekends versus a weekday only commute?
Is the Distribution of trip length Poisson or Normal?
These things matter…
20
Okay, to compare, I can get over 1000km a tank highway. If I assume it takes me about 10 minutes to fill the MudMobile am I right in saying that my refuelling/recharging rate is 6000 km/hr? Or 10 times better than current best practice electric recharging?
60
for people like you who drive 1000kms stop for 10 minutes then drive for another 1000kms an electric car is not for you, for the vast majority of the population who drive an average of 40 kms a day and have their car sitting parked for 22 hours per day it wont be a problem.
510
Yes it would be, the cost, if a person only does that distance a day they would be financially better off in a taxi or other public transport and not to own a personal transport vehicle.
40
I agree Dennis, but yet people still own cars that cover limited distance weekly but consume large funds to keep on the road.
46
Only works if there is public transport where you want to go.
Many Australians may only cover short distances each week, commuting, but they also want to be able to actually go somewhere else on a pretty regular basis.
EVs are useless for the general public because they TAKE AWAY that go anywhere appeal.
SUV’s, Ute’s etc outsell EVs many-fold in Australia.. BECAUSE NOBODY WANTS EVs
Its a matter of CONVENIENCE.
Imagine getting home from a hard day’s work (yes, you will have to imagine, Malcolm)..
.. and you forget to plug the darn EV into the socket.
There goes your next day, down the gurgler.
Or you go for a drive that saps the battery, get home and find you have to go back out again. OOPS !!
Nah…. maybe ok for an anal retentive wannabee EV shill…
… but not for normal people.
123
Don’t hold back, Andy. Tell it like it is. 🙂
EV’s work well in the tightly-knit urban environment that is common in Europe.
People don’t drive long distances in Europe – they catch the train, which runs every half hour or so.
What we have in Malcolm, is somebody who has read the European advertising blurb, and is now trying to sell the concept to Australia, without actually understanding what is involved.
He is at least the second dweeb we have had here, who is trying to sell us something that will not work in our environment.
121
Exactly,
Malcolm, I live 100km out of the city, the nearest town is 15 km the nearest major town is. 50 odd km, I drive about 40,000 km a year with a significant number of trips (twice a month) over 300 km. Where does that come even close to 40km a day.
This would significantly test an EV but my I30 diesel does it easily and only needs refueling once a fortnight for about two minutes. That’s because it gets almost 1000 km out of a 50l tank.
10
That’s called status, one of the lesser gods whose symbols are many.
“My Bentley is more expensive than your Suzuki Swift, but I can afford it.”
That’s the purchaser the Tesla is aimed squarely at.
40
Do EVs have no rego, insurance, depreciation, etc?
OR are they subsidised to the hilt – like “renewable” energy?
40
Which EV would you suggest I use to tow the horse float, or the boat?
Are you suggesting I keep an extra car, just to look green?
10
They should be good for towing floats and boats, as they are heavy and have good torque. As long as you dont want to go too far, but you can walk the horses while its recharging! one for the Tesla brochure
10
Actually, put the horses before the ev, hitch them up and you could go an extra 25 k on a bag of oats
10
So roads are only needed for commuters in cars and if they stopped driving there would be no need for roads?
No buses, no taxis, no goods delivery vehicles, etc.
I don’t understand why fanatics can only see the tiny picture.
00
I would be one of those, I have 5 cars that do limited mileage. Its called having a hobby, maybe you should consider getting one?
20
That is assuming that taxis and buses, let alone trains, are even available in places such as we live in. They are not.
40
speaking of buses Annie, next time your in London be sure to jump on one the ever increasing number of electric buses covering public transport needs-http://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/more-fully-electric-buses-to-run-in-london-in-drive-to-clean-up-air-a3467256.html
36
London has a long association with electric buses and trams. The “Trolly Buses”, as they were called, had two overhead lines to supply the motive power. They were phased out in the 60’s in favour of the Route Master diesel buses, that were cheaper to operate, and less polluting.
How could they have been less polluting? The power station that supplied the electricity for the trams, sat on the banks of the Thames, and burnt brown coal, that was supplied by barge, that was also coal driven. You need to look at the whole supply chain.
The current generation of electric buses in London are actually part of a longitudinal trial. They may be withdrawn, if the projected long-term benefit does not outweigh the capital investment costs, and the on-going maintenance costs.
One good thing about the electric buses, is that the battery pack is very heavy, but sits very low to the ground. This makes the bus very stable. That is also a bad thing, though, because energy must be expended in overcoming the inertia of that very heavy battery, when pulling away from bus stops and traffic lights.
As they say in Lancaster, “Yer dun get owt for nowt.”
71
And energy is returned to the battery through regenerative braking every time that heavy bus smoothly slows down for a stop, unlike a diesel bus that needs it’s brakes applied, turning energy into waste and wearing down the brakes.
38
Ah, so that would have been the Wansdworth power station then……used to go past it on the train…I hope they keep the building, its very cool….
20
Adelaide had a fleet of electric trolley buses including two deckers from 1932 to 1963 [ wiki ; photos ] which used twin overhead wires with a couple of long flexible poles on the bus roof that had the wire contacters incorporated out at the ends.
I road around on them a fair bit whilst at college in Adelaide in the early 1950’s.
They would hammer along pretty fast and very quietly and could and did pull right into the curb for passengers to alight without any disconnection occurring to the middle of the road twin overhead power wires .
The drivers would regularly be getting out to grab the pole and hook from its stowage that allowed them to grab the long contactor arm[s] and haul it back to sit under the wire again when one of them came off the wire, a regular occurence.
They were of course limited to where the twin middle of the road overhead wires were installed.
Friction wear and electrical contact erosion on the overhead wires and lack of route flexibility made them too expensive to keep operating when the diesel engines became developed and refined enough for heavy vehicles.
So Adelaide switched to diesel buses in 1963.
30
That’s a fat lot of use to me as I have no intention of visiting London and there is no useful public transport where we live….get real, Malcolm/Willard.
40
It is ‘you’re’ btw, short for you are. Also, plurals do not have an apostrophe unless they are abbreviations or posessives (in the latter case the apostrophe comes after the s).
20
Thank you for pointing out my grammer errors Annie, your so kind.
11
“And energy is returned to the battery through regenerative braking every time that heavy bus smoothly slows down for a stop, unlike a diesel bus that needs it’s brakes applied, turning energy into waste and wearing down the brakes.”
The buses still of course have brakes that wear down. The also generate nice levels of toxic waste to achieve that function, but thats in someone else country so no probs.
10
This is priceless:
Annie points out that “you are” should be conflated to “you’re”. And in his very next comment, in response, Malcolm responds with, “your so kind”!
That is how much comprehension Malcolm brings to the conversation.
11
As with so many green initiatives, this attempt to mainstream will discredit a quite useful niche technology. And like so many green initiatives, this extension of old technology is hogging the resources which should go into punting on technology which is actually new and different.
Greenoids! You and your clunky “solutions” are OLD. Stop frustrating the future by strangulating the present. Let the new unfold. The spotty young kid tinkering in the garage will bring down the corporation if you leave him be and don’t decide what he should be doing and how he should be going about it.
If the new was so knowable it would not be new. It would be…well, lots of batteries.
130
I am a great believer in research.
So I went to my local Bunnings, and made some enquiries about their forklift. It transpires that they have two forklifts, both of which are used for six to eight hours a day, and are on charge for at least sixteen hours a day. They stagger the load by using one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, since these are the two busiest times for deliveries and stock movement.
In regard to operating costs, they have much the same cost profile as petrol forklifts, but have time limitations on when they can be used. They also need a total battery replacement roughly every nine months.
70
283 comments on this thread and the above from Rereke is absolute Gold, HE WENT TO BUNNINGS TO RESEARCH ELECTRIC VEHICLES, ground breaking research on electric vehicles can be found at the local hardware store, who would have thought.
28
Any lateral thinker with a working cortex could have figured it out. I am surprised that you obviously thought it was worth commenting about.
60
To be honest Malcolm, Rereke’s “ground breaking research” at Bunnings had more impact on this reader than all your contributions in the 283 above.
60
That’s a bad enough maintenance risk for a company that can no doubt write off the battery replacement as a cost of doing business. But considering the necessary size and type of the battery, it’s a terrible thing to stick some unsuspecting purchaser of a new family car with.
Are you sure the forklift – EV comparison is valid?
30
No, I am not sure, Roy. 😉
I was actually there to purchase some protective gear – kevlar gloves, no less – but the store-man was there, and the forklifts were working, so I took the opportunity to have a chat. I too was surprised at the turnover of batteries, but they do work hard, in lifting pallets of concrete blocks, anvils, and cubes of potted plants that are surprisingly heavy once they have been watered.
They each used two lead-acid truck batteries, as I could tell by just looking. That is different technology to the EV’s
But, hey, it was fun to do. 🙂
30
You went to Bunnings and asked for advice on lead acid battery electric forklifts to compare to lithium batteries in modern electric cars, did you go to then proceed to the gardening section to buy some paint?
27
What are you, 10?
10
For Rereke’s sake I hope not.
03
Care to explain that comment?
20
Malcolm, because I invest in stocks I am considering an investment in Tesla. I have made an extensive study of EV’s. You, Malcolm, don’t know what you’re writing about. The investment I’m considering is to sell short because I’m sure Tesla is going to go bankrupt. The only question is when.
40
Go for your life Stan,
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/03/tesla-short-sellers-lost-3-7-billion-2017-far/
02
Malcolm Willard, the ridiculous valuation of Tesla only ensures that when Quantitative Easing ends and the market corrects because it rediscovers fundamentals, Telsa’s crater will all be bigger and deeper as the expectations that have been built up will make disappointed investors pull out faster.
Stan, I remember you said you bought some puts a while back and congratulated you, thinking the correction was soon to come. Well the Quantitative Easing has continued far longer than I had imagined as the central bankers continue their imitation of King Canute. Unlike some others, I’m sure you know that shorting is all about timing and I’ve given up predicting then demise of Tesla beyond saying that it will be around this time next year as the impact of the Model 3 is truly felt on the company’s financials. Of course, it could be quicker than that if QE does stop or China has to face reality with it’s debt bubble.
21
No, you totally fail the tests of reading and comprehension. And you also loose points for making things up. I never said I went to the gardening section.
I went to Bunnings to buy some work gloves. That is point 1.
I happen to know the storeman, and we just had a chat about the pro’s and con’s of the forklifts they were using. I was surprised at the replacement rate of the batteries.
The implication of this is, of course that the EV technology is entirely different to the older lead-acid technology. I didn’t include that statement in my original response, because I thought it would be obvious. It obviously was not obvious, to you.
21
Your sentence below Rereke:
No, you totally fail the tests of reading and comprehension. And you also loose points for making things up. I never said I went to the gardening section.
I never said you went to the gardening section, it was a question that’s why it had a question mark at the end.
No, you totally fail the tests of reading and comprehension!
12
Malcolm, You are growing tedious.
You are arguing over a question mark on the end of a sentence about something that never happened, and only based on a throw-away line, in an off-topic comment, about the weight of plant pallets in a hardware store. Anal-retentive is the concept that comes to mind.
The sad thing is, that you may have some good points to make, regarding the current generation of EV’s, but those points get lost in the noise created by your cheap shots at other people, your plaintive bleating about money going off-shore to buy oil (which is used for many purposes over and above powering petrol or diesel engined cars), and your competitive attitude towards the other guests on Jo’s blog.
You, like me, are a guest here. Neither of us are here as of right, and I apologise to Jo if I inflamed the situation, but your blatant and unsubtle attempts at marketing detracted from the core subject matter of the post, which was about Federal subsidies being required to support the market for EV’s. Perhaps that was your intent? Perhaps you did not want it widely known that EV’s are reliant on government subsidies?
I, and others here, would expect you to apologise to Jo, as I do, and, in addition also apologise for using multiple handles. That too, was not a particularly smart decision.
30
actually its not a bad idea to ask end users of a product about their real world feedback on your product instead of operating with imaginings and fantasy which you are clearly so familiar with.
30
***more posturing, more AP spin:
6 Jun: California, China sign climate deal after Trump’s Paris exit
by Matthew Brown, AP; AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
Gov. Jerry Brown told The Associated Press at an international clean energy conference in Beijing that Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement will ultimately prove only a temporary setback…
“Nobody can stay on the sidelines. We can’t afford any dropouts in the tremendous human challenge to make the transition to a sustainable future,” Brown said. “Disaster still looms and we’ve got to make the turn.”…
Tuesday’s agreement between California and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology effectively sidestepped Trump’s move, bringing about alignment on an issue of rising global importance between the world’s second-largest economy — China — and California, whose economy is the largest of any U.S. state and the sixth largest in the world.
Brown signed similar collaboration agreements over the past several days with leaders in two Chinese provinces, Jiangsu and Sichuan.
***Like the Paris accord, the deals are all nonbinding. They call for investments in low-carbon energy sources, cooperation on climate research and the commercialization of cleaner technologies. The agreements do not establish new emission reduction goals…
During a Tuesday forum devoted to capturing carbon dioxide emitted from coal plants and other large industrial sources, (Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick) Perry said his agency was pursuing an “all of the above” strategy that includes research intended to spur innovation for coal, nuclear, renewables and other fuels. He left the event without taking questions.
Without mentioning Trump by name, Brown told attendees at a forum on electric vehicles that “there are still people in powerful places who are resisting reality.”
Later, when asked by the AP what could prompt the U.S. to return to the forefront of climate change efforts, Brown replied, “Science, facts, the world, the marketplace.”
http://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article154537739.html
10
Would Jerry have been inadvertently referring to himself, by any chance, pat?
70
Freudian slip….
00
Many people seem to think that electric cars are a new development. In reality, electric cars have been around – almost – from the very beginning.
As a kid in London’s Knightsbridge, we used to get deliveries of groceries from Harrods – in ancient electric vans. They were quiet and clean and made frequent stops – which are pluses for electric vehicles. Here is a photo of one of them:
http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DDBJRF/london-england-uk-vintage-harrods-electric-van-1939-in-whitehall-DDBJRF.jpg
Their range ensured that they could only be used within a short distance of the department store. 🙂
70
There is a very good reason they were got rid of first time around. Electric cars are old technology with the same deficiencies as the original ones.
Same with windmills. There were good reasons to get rid of them first time around as well, as soon as a reliable steam engine was developed. Modern windmills still have the same deficiencies that caused them to be abandoned in the first place.
103
David if commercial sailing ships relying on the winds were cost effective and efficient they would still be in use.
Harnessing intermittent wind energy is not cost effective or efficient, and subsiding wind turbines is an admission of inability for the technology to stand alone.
90
I had forgotten that.
Milk used to be delivered to the door, and was carried on a “Milk Float”, which was a three wheeled, open-sided van, much like a large golf cart with a sun-roof.
Mind you, all of the deliveries were done between six and eleven in the morning (milk for elevenses), so lack of fuel density was not a problem. That is why Malcolm thinks they are great. He is probably a golfer.
70
6 Jun: Wheels Magazine: Carlos Ghosn: Consumers don’t want to buy electric vehicles
By Stephen Corby
The head of the world’s most successful maker of Electric Vehicles, the Nissan and Renault (plus Mitsubishi) Alliance, has admitted that no one really wants to buy EVs.
In a slap in the face for not only for Tesla, but himself, legendary company boss and straight talker Carlos Ghosn says sales are driven by a market force that simply does not exist in Australia – government incentives.
“EV sales are not driven by consumer demand, they’re not, consumer demand is very limited, they are driven by emission regulations and mainly by State and country incentives, which are pushing the consumer to buy them,” said Ghosn who is in Australia this week, partly to talk about the company’s latest tie-up with Mitsubishi.
“It’s very difficult to make an EV an attractive car without government subsidy, and people will say, ‘how can you support EVs if they’re going to depend on subsidies?’ But we need them, not for an infinite period of time, but just to jump start the sales, and when you get the scale you need then you can be on your own.
“That’s why the EVS are going well in places where the government is supporting zero-emissions vehicles. In the US, you get not only Federal but State support, which is different from one State to another, and you can see the take-up of electric cars is higher in states where the support is higher (particularly in California).”
Ghosn said he’d heard nothing during his visit that made him think EVs would be succeeding in Australia any time soon. While he was aware that the Australian Government has pledged to announce a new policy on low-emission vehicles, he would be waiting to hear the details before celebrating.
“We are selling some (Nissan) Leafs, but not many, I think 600 cars in a market of 1.15million, we cannot say it’s mass market, it’s been a small quantity for people who are passionate about electric cars,” he smiled, ruefully.
The Alliance’s global leadership in EV sales – between Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi it has now sold more than 420,000 of them globally – will come in handy as the world moves towards autonomous and connected cars, according to Ghosn, who says cars capable of driving themselves will soon be ***flooding the world’s streets.
“By 2022, most of the cars on the street will have some kind of autonomy and some kind of connectivity, and the premium market is going to be totally autonomous and totally connected.”
The connectivity he’s talking about means being able to stream movies, or Netflix, to your car to entertain the driver and passengers, or the option of video conferencing on your way to work…
Ghosn also predicts our roads will be “much, much safer” as autonomy becomes more common…
“A car which has autonomous technology is driven by a ***computer, it respects all speed limits, stops at traffic lights, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t get distracted.”…
The question is, of course, will anyone actually want a car like this, or will government incentives, and regulations, leave us with little choice?
https://www.wheelsmag.com.au/news/1706/carlos-ghosn-consumers-don%E2%80%99t-want-to-buy-electric-vehicles
***those computer thingys can create a lot of problems, Ghosn. just ask British Airways, for starters.
6 Jun: CNET: Andrew Krok: Nissan tries to sell electric vehicles… by handing out free gas?
That’s one way to do it, sure
At first, I thought the idea was slightly insane…
But then again, Nissan might be on to something…
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/nissan-tries-to-sell-electric-vehicles-by-handing-out-free-gas/
70
Amazingly, no mention of “carbon pollution” or “climate change”.
FIFA can only stand by as Qatar’s rift with Arab neighbours threatens World Cup 2022 plans
10
Were they to sell 8 cars a year we would hear that the market had expanded by 100%.
The time has come in our present recessionary period to let someone else fund start up markets in doubtful technology.
People should be free to buy electric cars, lawnmowers and kettles,however they pay for them.
No cross subsidies, our tax is bad enough.
Were there a real effort to develop more efficient renewables, rather than paying people with billion dollar green funds and subsidising inefficient technology, there would be a good argument for targeted
development.
Something like the Manhattan project.
The fact that people like Musk rely on subsidy to develop cars means there is not much in them yet.
Toyota recently cut ties and are going alone.
Then there is the narrative that CO2 is dangerous.
With the continual failure of the GCM’s this is an indefensible position.
So, its a free country, but my taxes are not won easily.
Spend them on the poor, transport, hospitals defence, but not on Muskian startups.
50
Amazingly, no mention of “carbon pollution” or “climate change”.
FIFA can only stand by as Qatar’s rift with Arab neighbours threatens World Cup 2022 plans
Not as off-topic as you might think.
30
very sad to see all those oil rich countries bickering, disappointing Qatar is being accused of funding radical tourism from the profits of selling oil to foreigners when we all really know they are just building multi billion dollar air-conditioned Soccer stadiums.
38
It is always sad to see any country bickering with another. That is how wars start.
Accusations are not proof. You will have to do better than that. Try using facts. Most people find facts beneficial to understanding what is going on.
50
are you saying its not a fact that Qatar are building air-conditioned soccer stadiums? from the proceeds of oil? some of their close neighbours believe Qatar are funding something more sinister, I’m just as shocked as you are.
34
No Malcolm, I have not mentioned Qatar at all. That is probably due to a number of reasons, one of which is that I have no current evidence at all, about what is, and what is not, going on in Qatar at this moment.
Without verifiable evidence, I only have supposition, based on the weight of previous experience and observations that are several decades out of date, juxtaposed against the dubious reportage of people who are intimately involved and heavily invested in one of several outcomes.
Given those two alternatives, which one would you consider to be the most rational?
70
who really knows, maybe some close by countries are deflecting a little attention away from their own naughty little secrets.
23
read all:
6 Jun: Forbes: Bertel Schmitt: Tesla’s Big China Chances Indefinitely On Hold
Some have believed that China is Tesla’s most lucrative opportunity. A new report makes it look like that opportunity has been lost. “China plans to halt issuing permits to produce electric vehicles because of concern additional approvals may lead to a glut in the world’s biggest auto market,”Bloomberg (LINK) reports. Without permits, no Chinese production. Without Chinese production, no chance to gain relevance in a market surrounded by high custom barriers, and subsidies that favor domestics. Without the world’s largest EV market, no chance for Tesla to maintain scale and relevance in the world…
There have been occasional rumors of Tesla starting production in China, and each time, it turned out to be wishful thinking. Chinese production never was as easy as the many — always false — rumors made it sound (LINK)…
(DETAILS OBSTACLES)
Note: As per the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers cited at Bloomberg, 507,000 plug-in vehicles were sold in China in 2016. Other frequently cited sources put the total at 351,000. The chart reflects the official CAAM data…READ ALL
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2017/06/06/teslas-big-china-chances-indefinitely-on-hold/#5dc149a7616b
6 Jun: Bloomberg: China Said to Halt New Electric Car Permits on Glut Concern
(With assistance by Tian Ying, Heng Xie, and Keith Zhai)
A suspension of new licenses may help incumbent electric-car manufacturers including BYD Co. and BAIC Motor Corp. by limiting the number of competitors to the industry…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/china-said-to-halt-new-electric-vehicle-permits-on-policy-review
10
China encourages use EVs to cut back on carbon PARTICULATE emissions (PM) thats just C, not CO2 emissions.
30
And that makes sense.
40
There is a retirement community near me that has, from its beginnings, made provisions for electric golf carts.
Most residents have one & use it for local travel, shopping, etc. Very cost effective as that “second car”.
Also works on the many golf courses. No subsidies. No hype. Some have evolved & been customized.
Many electric miles with only market forces at work.
A downtown that made options available for such vehicles might get good results as well.
A dwontown that mandated them would surely fail;
110
Toyota sells stake in Tesla as partnership dies
Financial Times-4 Jun. 2017
26 May: EconomicTimesIndia: PTI: India not yet ready for electric cars: Yoichiro Ueno, CEO Honda Cars India
Yoichiro Ueno, President and CEO of Honda Cars India said here that his company is developing electric cars but to anticipate a significant number of such cars plying on Indian roads is little early, chiefly because of infrastructure and affordability reasons.
“Honda is developing electric cars. However, we believe it is too early for India to talk about electric vehicles. One thing is infrastructure. And secondly the car price will be more than double (when compared to ordinary car),” Ueno told reporters in a press conference.
“Indian is so price sensitive. So it looks difficult (for electric cars) and also the development of infrastructure in a country as large as India will take a lot of time,” he said.
The statement assumes significance in the wake of recent announcement made by Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal that the country is looking at having an all-electric car fleet by 2030 with an express objective of lowering the fuel import bill and running cost of vehicles…
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/auto/news/india-not-yet-ready-for-electric-cars-yoichiro-ueno-ceo-honda-cars-india/articleshow/58859709.cms
10
lengthy, crazy figures, from Zeke:
6 Jun: CarbonBrief: Analysis: Meeting Paris pledges would prevent at least 1C of global warming
by Zeke Hausfather
A RARE CARBON BRIEF COMMENT:
Mark Crutchley: There will presumably be an additional impact because the US was due to provide the largest single contribution to funding emissions reduction actions by poorer countries. Without this money it has to be probable that some will miss NDC’s which they otherwise would have achieved.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-meeting-paris-pledges-would-prevent-at-least-one-celsius-global-warming
2 Jun: ClimateChangeNews: Bangladesh backtracks on carbon tax proposal ahead of election year
Mooted climate policy was dropped from the budget announced on Thursday, as energy and transport lobbies complained it would raise living costs
By Abu Siddique in Dhaka
In the run-up to the budget announcement, the idea was floated as a way of raising revenue and addressing climate change. It was hailed by ***international commentators as a sign of leadership from one of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries to global warming…
Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), said: “The government has completely avoided the environmental concern though it was urgent to tackle the negative impacts of climate change, rather it focused on election by widening the coverage of popular schemes.”
What is more, Muhith doubled an import duty on solar panels from 5% to 10%, citing the development of domestic manufacturing…
Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, an independent evaluator of Green Climate Fund, criticised the mixed messages. “The government should decide what it wants,” he told Climate home. “Sometimes it takes the initiative for tackling climate change and sometimes it goes against it, which is ridiculous.”…
The World Bank estimates that if Bangladesh imposed a tax of $5 on each tonne of carbon dioxide, it could generate $2.4 billion annually which is 1% of the country’s GDP…
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/06/02/bangladesh-backtracks-carbon-tax-proposal-ahead-election/
10
Ooh, look! He’s changed his name!
Tony.
134
a dillard is still a dillard , no matter what colour paint is used.
53
He may be considering turning over a new leaf.
Although he not showing any outward signs of doing so.
20
LOL! People buy those kinds of cars because of what they think it says about them. I agree with them. I does say something about them to me, but not what they think it does. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Prius.
As for preferential treatment? It goes beyond the roads. A few years ago I made my 5th trip to the Civil war battle field at Gettysburg, PA. They had opened their new visitor center and I noticed that electrics and hybrids got preferential parking equal to the designated handicapped spaces.
70
“parking equal to the designated handicapped spaces.”
That seems fair.. 😉
63
+1000
00
Off topic a little, but the ABC has just announced a new wind plant for Tasmania.
It will have a Nameplate of 144MW, so a (30% CF) real total of 48MW.
The cost will be around $300 Million.
Hmm! Cheap eh!
Scale that up to a HELE plant of 2000MW (2 X 1000MW Units) and that’s an equivalent cost of $12.5 Billion, and there’s absolutely no way on Earth a new HELE plant would cost that much.
Incidentally, it’s good to see an Australian Company involved in something like this eh, you know so the subsidies and the profits stay in Australia.
Hmm! Wait a minute, It’s Godwind, a Chinese Company.
When asked for comment, The State Government (Aurora Energy) spokesman said that:
$300 Million for 48MW. Give me strength.
Tony.
192
That should be Goldwind.
Tony.
82
Tony, what is the money trail for spending a staggering $300 million for a mere 48MW (which is generous because it might be produced when it is not needed)? Where is all this money coming from? It is simply unbelievable that no one (except us here at JN) is questioning any of this and the vast amounts of money spent to produce very little power.
Here is a back of the envelope calculation to consider. Suppose the 6 litre V8 in my car was used to produce power. It produces 260Kw. Suppose it was coupled to a generator. Suppose the motor cost $5000 (to be pessimistic) and the generator cost the same. This are extremely high figures if mass production is taken into account so this is a conservative calculation. So you can produce around 260kW of electrical energy with some loss. If you had multiple motor and generator sets to produce 48MW it would cost a mere $18.4 million but it would be really be much less as you would use much larger motors and have fewer of them plus my cost estimate is likely to be excessive. $18.4 million as an extremely conservative estimate with a larger number of smaller motors vs $300 million for windmills. INSANE!!!!
31
Of course, you would have to take into account fuel cost but there is already a minimum price for windmill power due to the RET.
31
….commercial in confidence.” Should read ..commercial incompetence..!
30
But Tony, 144 MW can supply x houses and that is a headline which makes Greens and Laborites (and Turnbulls)so proud. They are not going to be thwarted by little things like capacity factor and capital cost per MW installed.
40
I’ll raise you the 2GW, 250 offshore turbine wind farm proposed for Gippsland Victoria at a measly $8 BILLION
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-02/victoria-plans-to-build-australias-first-offshore-wind-farm/8582652
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/8b-plan-would-see-australias-first-offshore-wind-farm-built-in-bass-strait-20170602-gwiztg.html
Nobody mentions the 15 year lifespan, let alone the intermittency
00
They should be laughed off the stage. Lets compare shall we?
http://www.goauto.com.au/mellor/mellor.nsf/story2/DBD50308F026A940CA257D5A007CE655
Or…
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/australians-bought-more-ferraris-lamborghinis-and-toyota-corollas-than-ever-before-in-2015-2016-1
20
Electric Vehicles 2016: 208 (about)
Ferraris 2015: 167
Lamborghini 2015: nearly 1 per week (sweet:) )
20
thats interesting, 618 Tesla’s registered in NSW up until March 2017, killing Ferrari, Lamborghini in sales and acceleration.
312
Did you also find out how many Ferraris are registered?
Those cars I listed are high price special interest vehicles way outside the average buyer, yet together they exceed sales of Electric vehicles, which is affordable to the average buyer.
Clearly nobody is buying the sales pitch.
Our Council has one electric vehicle. I suggest that is who is buying them.
70
Greg,
The car pool at Newcastle University had hybrids in use.
Clearly they were making a point.
Using taxpayers money doesn’t hurt them at all …. and the virtue!!!!!!
Saving the planet AND educating the young.
KK
30
Ah yes, the Uni Newcastle EV.
I got a friend of mine to take a picture this morning.
http://s19.postimg.org/jauyuz4oj/Uni_EV2.jpg
Parked behind a building for at least a year, unregistered, flat tyre, covered in grunge.
Obviously working very well.. or at least as well as an EV can be expected to work.
72
Beautiful. Perhaps someone should snap it up, and in 60 years time it’ll be worth equal to the Edsel (i.e. still nothing).
20
how many laps can a tesla do around a race track compares with a Ferrari?
71
It depends on how long the electrical cord is ….
[wink]
50
Would take a Tesla about 36 hours to do the Bathurst 12 Hour 😉
60
no, the battery swap system would be used that’s just as quick as a racing sedan fuel stop.
411
Poor Mal-shill living in a land of make believe. !!!
72
43 models of electric highway capable cars now available.
A battery swap in a couple of minutes. and a one sized battery for everymake and model and manufacturer
Yeh! right!!!
Try smoking something a little less potent!
And I have read up on the battery swapping concept.
I have also seen the rough calculations on the sizes of the electrical cabling that would be needed to re-charge all of those swap batteries before they can be used again.
The battery swap idea has has been trialled and is dead and gone.
Five servo’s in Horsham on the Western Highway. Four of them 24 hours a day. Say an average of 15 vehicles per hour getting fuel.
Double that number for EV’s as their range is only half at best of petrol and diesel fueled vehicles so they will have to swap batteries twice as often as the petroleum fueled vehicles need to re-fuel.
—————
https://www.ergon.com.au/network/smarter-energy/electric-vehicles;
Approximate range for EVs on the market on full charge
.
Nissan Leaf—- 151km
.
BMW i3—— 190km – petrol range extender option available
.
Kia Soul—— 148km
.
Honda Fit—– 132km
.
Chevrolet Spark—– 132km
.
Ford Focus Electric—– 122km
.
BEV Electron——- 120km
.
Mitsubishi i-Miev——- 150km
.
Mitsubishi Outlander—— 50km electric only with the back-up of a 45 litre petrol engine
———————-
So to just one of Horsham’s servo’s with a battery swap set up for EV’s , EV’s per day in for a battery swap = say 360 EV’s
Volume of each Battery = say Half a cubic metre each = 180 cubic metres of batteries per day = say even at the density of water and batteries are a lot heavier than water = say 200 -300 tonnes of batteries per day for just one Small City’s servo.
————
Charging at public charging outlets
Publicly accessible ‘fast charger’ or ‘super charger’ outlets provide power to the battery at a faster rate.
The rate of charge is usually from 25 kW to 135 kW and can recharge an EV battery in around 30 minutes.
——————-
So for say an hours turnaround for each battery and thats a smooth demand type requirement, not a rush hour situation the servo would have to stock perhaps 25 to 30 batteries which would all be on a 100 Kw charging rate if they were to be of any useful availability.
So maybe one of the electrical posters here can work out the KW/ hrs that each very average mid sized servo here in just Horsham would have to pull down off the grid to charge those 25 or 30 stand by for swapping batteries and the sizes of the the transformers and wiring and etc to charge them at a very fast rate to keep down costs of battery inventories.
And who in the end pays for all of this.
——————-
Australians drive an average of 15,000km per year, so an EV owner will expect to replace the batteries about every 7 years
Batteries wear out and a replacement battery will eventually be needed.
.
Nissan guarantee their batteries against defects for 96 months or 160,000 kms (whichever occurs earlier) and capacity loss for 5 years or 96,500 kms (whichever occurs earlier).
.
The average kms per annum for Australian motorists is approximately 15,000kms so an owner will expect to replace the batteries about every 7 years.
.
To allay owners fears of hefty replacement costs, vehicle manufactures are coming up with novel, inexpensive replacement plans – for example a replacement battery for the Nissan Leaf [ edit; a small car with very limited range and two thirds at best of a I30 hyundai load capacity.] will cost owners US dollars $100 per month .
.
US $ 100 / month battery replacement cost = AUD$ 132 / month = $ 1584 / year
.
$1584 = @ $1.29/ ltr diesel = 1230 ltrs
.
1230 ltrs = [ I30 Hyundai diesel auto ] @ 7 ltrs / 100kms = 17500 kms
.
Cost of diesel fuel to drive 17,500 kms ina larger vehicle is equal to the cost of a battery replacement cost of a small car Nissan Leaf driving for 15,000 kms per year using Nissans costings .
And thats without any charges for power included.
120
what a long rant from you Rom, electric vehicle drivers will only charge/swap batteries in public when they absolutely have to, charging at home, or the shopping centre, or the bowling club when the car is sitting idle for hours on end will be done the vast majority of the time, petrol drivers have no choice but to go to the servo.
secondly you are very keen to factor in the cost of a new battery after X amount of distance, would you like to compare that to engine, gearbox, starter motor, fuel injection, exhaust rebuild/replacement after X amount of distance?
but anyway you are keen to prove your math skills, how about work out how much fuel gets imported into Australia each and every year to power the 14 million passenger cars, (just the passenger cars, not large 4x4s, vans, and bigger vehicles)work out how much money departs this country each and every year.
46
You still don’t get it do you Malcom?
We are talking about EV’s that are actually used for driving somewhere, not for looking at like an expensive diamong ring that you take out to display to all and sundry to show how classy you are and to use as status symbols which it seems you regard them as.
If EV’s are driven very far from home which in Australia you don’t have to get far from home to knock up quite a lot of kilometres, EV’s already have been and lots more will be in dep doo doo half way to nowhere until their owners wake up and leave the damn things at home as they can’t go anywhere with them over a decent distance as they run out of go and electrons.
Of course if you are one of those inner city elites who own a Tesla and make sure everybody knows it, then a decent distance is probably four blocks down to that little organic shoppe .
An excellent way of showing off your Tesla [ ooops! nearly described the wrong thing there ! ] and without even getting it even dusty as well.
And you even have the range to do it.
I am curious!
Have you managed to get your ticket for that electric bike and graduated of that electric skate board thing yet?
80
So according to you, a battery swap would take about 50-55 seconds.
20
Less ranting and more calculations please Rom, I want to know how much value in oil are we importing to keep your octane addition fed?
27
Ted O’Brien.
June 7, 2017 at 10:39 am · Reply
You know they are a dopey lot when they haven’t yet woken up to the fact that a battery can be swapped in half a minute if the design is right.
Here you go Bruce, Ted answered your question.
16
ROM, those range figures are not much different to what the Baker electric vehicle was getting in 1909, 160kms. See my post below.
21
.
Malcom / Willard / AAA @ #37.1.1.2.6
I’m curious all over again!
Malcom / Willard / AAA [ 1.5 volt ] or whatever you are going to call yourself next week. Do you suffer from Dyscalculia ?
Just asking as it seems that you are incapable of doing any of your own calculations and research to butress your own arguments and are constantly demanding that someone else do your calculations and research for you.
Or maybe you are just frightened of numbers, ie; Dyscalculia and the probability that you will find out the actual real facts for yourself and destroy your own cultish level beliefs if you do any research.
On the other hand that is usually the techniques used by Trolls and Thread jackers.
Don’t bother to try and add anything of interest and value to the discussion.
Spend your entire very limited intellectual abilities on trying to twist those posters who do contribute up into knots so that you the Troll and Thread jacker can get your kicks and feel superior within your own little personal and blinkered bubble.
30
Malcolm, ROM put up the current range figures for the current crop of EVs, and you seem to just ignore the point? i dont get it, you have lost the argument for EVs already. answering with tesla figures all the time is just a red herring, they are meaningless in a discussion about viable EVs currently on the market.
600km range? for what price? 200k?
people dont buy EVs because there are NO decently priced range viable cars on the market. thats it, none of this car dealers dont want to sell it crap. that is just trash made up from the EV industry, and it makes no difference to the sales figures. when it comes to larger investments like cars/trucks etc, people spend a bit of time to research, and the research here points to the serious lack of options for refilling, range etc. there is just no point buying one for the family car.
40
I agree ROM #37.1.1.2.3 . Battery recharging should only EVER be done in the privacy of one’s home, never in public.
11
hi Rom, I got the answer I expected from you, you went off on a tangent and failed to answer the question, I know the answer and you are reluctant to research the answer because its a pretty ugly figure.
04
Malcolm Willard, the stator overheating would make the Teslas go into limp mode half way up Mt Panorama. There are numerous reports of performance throttling due to this when Teslas are used for track days – the Nurburgring lap times are not a one track abberation
20
Ever watched a Formula E race? When they do a pit stop, they change cars!
80
No, I didn’t know that! That is priceless!
60
See the youtube vid below RW. 🙂
20
This is how you do a pit stop with a proper car.
https://youtu.be/aHSUp7msCIE
11
Or this.
https://youtu.be/kc2QJmod-64
11
I believe that was in 2013 in Melbourne, Australia.
11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5cnpNRWQBU
30
I want an electric four-wheel drive off-road Utility Vehicle that can wade a metre-high river. I have a diesel one already, so it should be theoretically possible.
50
I would like to get hold of a wrecked Tesla.
The bottom part of the car, known as the skateboard contains the battery pack, the electric motor and the wheels. It could be the basis for an excellent electric glider winch.
Tesla (Australia) seems to be removing the damaged Teslas from the market.
40
I’ve built two winches and three or four glider trailers, Peter.
Flat head Dodge motors in the winches which regularly blew up some 50 years back now.
Mildura still runs the second winch i built although after all the usual opioniated gliding club level engineers have had a go at the mods they think any winch needs it is damn near unrecognisable even to its original builder.
Was tinkering a long time back with the crane type rotating coaxial arnmature and separate outer rotatoing coils assemnbly on an independent shaft which depending on the controlled flow of current allowed a full range of slip right through from stationary to full lock up between the armature and coils to provide the neccessary wire speeds for winching [ or lift speeds for cranes.]
Never built it though.
Also read a lot about an electric tractor set up in NZ with a bloody long cabl toa central suspension pole which allowed the tractor to go round and round the central pole and plough a small, very small field at a NZ university that I read a fair bit about back in the early 70’s or therebouts.
NZ of course can readily be identified from Sagittarius due to its radiation signature from all the electric fences that are used to keep those sheep inside of NZ.
30
Sheep will walk right through an electric fence, if the mood takes them. Wool is a good insulator. It is only nine strand high tension that will keep them where they are supposed to be.
The radiation signature you mention is all of the electrified three strand number eight wire which is used to stop the tourists from wandering into thermal areas, and melting their boots.
20
Unfortunately I found out about 55 years ago that sheep in a woolen coat just don’t get excited about a fence being electrified.
If they are one of those english breeds, a fence is an irresistible challenge, electrified or not, to be tested and pushed through to get to the other side at the first opportunity.
After all the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence to those bare faced crawling ?*7< @#*&^ english breeds.
Even electric fences where it near fries your gonads with the voltage and brings many tears to the eyes of both the victim and the onlookers if you are careless enough or stupid enough to get conned into trying to swing a leg over one of those single wire electrified fences.
As for the NZ hot stuff!
No sure a young red blooded aussie male would stop with some of that NZ hot stuff even if it was protected by a three strand number eight electrified barrier.
Ahhgh! My bad! You were actually talking "thermal hot stuff" I think!
30
If you were in the US there are a few wrecks for scrap here —
http://www.arfc.org/complaints/2016/tesla/model_s/suspension/problem.aspx
10
Just a question Malcolm, were are you getting your Tesla sale figures from?
30
rms.nsw.gov.au
registration figures not sales figures, that part takes some investigation.
25
So those figures could include 2nd-hand/change of ownership as well?
50
119 Tesla’s registered in NSW so far this year. (Q1 – March 31st)
20
119 Tesla cars ADDED to the NSW registry in quarter one 2017.
24
I do believe that’s what I said 😉
30
Malcolm, mate,
I suggest you give up on your sales pitch on this blog. In the main, you are dealing with scientists and engineers and academics and other folks who understand how all this stuff works.
Are you aware that the first electric cars went into production in 1908 or 1909, from, I think, the Daimler company? They failed then, and they are only marginally viable today. Battery storage has improved a lot over the last hundred years or so, but is still not a competitor for petrol, or diesel, or all of the petrochemical by-products that will still be required by the industrial world, even if the petrol and diesel was thrown away!
80
why would you want me to give up? are you not teaching me a lesson in why electric vehicles are no good? no harm in a friendly discussion, I’m sure I could learn something from you.
410
Malcolm,
I think you could learn something from everybody.
80
‘….no harm in a friendly discussion, I’m sure I could learn something from you.’
Yes, always good to see the opposite point of view, it sharpens everyones wits. Thanks for dropping in, you have helped create a lot of traffic on this thread, and dispelled the gossip that this blog is a peanut gallery and echo chamber.
My colleagues here remember a fellow named Willard who also supported the electric car, but I don’t hold much hope for the concept to take off here on earth. The Mars Rover is a whole different ball game.
Anyway my obsession is with climate change, so I’ll let you get on with yours.
50
Because you are not interested in understanding why electric vehicles are not a replacement for hydrocarbon generated energy.
You are more interested in practising your sales pitch, and learning how to field the difficult questions, and how to nullify the negative comments from the people you are trying to influence.
You don’t really care about reality, and the beauty of physics, and the wonders of chemistry. If you did, you would have learnt something. But you haven’t, so I can only conclude that your one and only driver is learning to have a counter point to any objections that your potential future customers might have.
So, as I said before, “you are dealing with scientists and engineers and academics and other folks who understand how all this stuff works. We understand the principle of energy density. You could start your private studies by looking that up in a text book. Good luck Willard.
Using people, in any activity, without their tacit consent and express permission, is simply reprehensible.
80
You very clearly don’t understand how modern electric cars work, as you stated on this thread your study consisted of going to Bunnings and asked how the electric forklifts worked, very likely lead acid battery machines that have been in operation for years, absolutely nothing in comparison to a modern electric vehicle.
By the way Willard will be p&$@ed he hasn’t seen this thread yet.
(YOU ARE WILLARD!) CTS
26
Give me the evidence upon which you base that statement.
Yes, and anybody who was a regular contributor to this blog, would know that my story, though true, was intended to be frivolous. You are obviously to dumb to recognise when you are being sent up, and right royally being made fun of.
Quite a coincidence then, that you both seem to use the same word patterns, and the same turns of phrase.
You also seem to share a mutual problem in terms of keeping up with the flow of conversation. There are two cases where that occurs. It can happen with identical twins, although that is rare. It can also happen when people are lying about changing persona on blogs. Do you have an identical twin, Malcolm?
(Malcolm is Willard) CTS
70
‘…..lying about changing persona on blogs.’
Breaking all the rules of common decency, Malcolm is a sock puppet.
(Correct,he is Willard) CTS
50
Dissapointing that you’re playing the man and not the ball el Gordo, stick to electric vehicle discussion if you have anything useful to say.
16
That is so lame!
Tony.
51
‘…..if you have anything useful to say.’
I admit to being ignorant of the Mars Rover, which is powered by a ‘radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG, RITEG) is an electrical generator that uses an array of thermocouples to convert the heat released by the decay of a suitable radioactive material into electricity by the Seebeck effect. This generator has no moving parts.’
wiki
20
anyone find a study showing how many of the electric/hybrid cars sold worldwide are the purchaser’s ONLY vehicle? I imagine the answer would be: none or very few.
2 Jun: Mashable: Brett Williams: Intel thinks self-driving cars will create a massive new $7 trillion economy
The race to create self-driving cars is on—but what happens when they’re everywhere and nobody has to drive?
That could lead to a “passenger economy” worth $7 trillion by 2050, according to a new report (LINK) by Intel and analyst firm Strategy Analytics…
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich: “This is why we started the conversation around the Passenger Economy early, to wake people up to the opportunity streams that will emerge when cars become the most powerful mobile data generating devices we use and people swap driving for riding.”…
The study also predicts that the increased safety levels that will come from autonomous vehicles will wind up saving more than $234 billion in public safety costs and save over half a million lives between 2035 and 2045, providing even more value…
Intel has certainly embraced the autonomous future; the company established a $100 million fund for self-driving development back in 2012 and made an even bigger investment with the purchase of automotive imaging company Mobileye for a whopping $15.3 billion back in March…
***While this study shouldn’t be considered a gospel truth, its projections are more than just wistful conjecture from an (extremely) invested party in the space…
http://mashable.com/2017/06/02/intel-self-driving-passenger-economy/#pgLJgosqbqq4
from 7 trillion to 7 million:
7 Jun: AFR: Greg Dickason: What will become of 7 million garages as cars disappear?
(Greg Dickason is executive general manager technology for property data company Corelogic)
Last year I bought the last car I will ever own. I made sure it was a good one, a 4X4 that I could use to explore Australia.
Soon I will be able to get around using other people’s cars, and most of those cars will be self-driving. Owned by investors or companies, they will be cheaper to use than owning my own car.
And if others do the same that will mean 7 million garages in Australia will become available to lease out as units, be sold, or even converted into pool rooms for our trophies…
With global logistics giants such as Amazon extending their ability to anticipate and meet our needs in real time, we may even rethink the need for kitchens and preparing food…
Utopia? Quite possibly, technology never delivers quite what we think it will and almost always needs legislation and society to help shape it.
But if we are the innovation nation, and if we do have a housing affordability issue, the solution may lie in encouraging utopian views of the future and finding both technical and legislative innovations to unlock those views.
http://www.afr.com/real-estate/what-will-become-of-7-million-garages-as-cars-disappear-20170606-gwlblr
10
when others are forced to pay via excessive taxation , any feeble minded idea becomes viable !
if it is such a good idea, then let stand unassisted on its own two feet…..no handouts to billionaires.
90
Exactly !
NO SUBSIDIES !
61
The basic principles of capitalism include allowing markets to pick the winners and the losers based on merit and selection by consumers.
Socialism picks winners and losers via subsidies to chosen to be winners and penalising chosen to be losers using taxpayer funded subsidies to provide profits for shareholders in the chosen winner businesses.
Christiana Figurers, UN Official, and some other fellow travellers have confirmed that collapsing the capitalist system as we have known in is their objective, not environmental concerns, the environment scare campaign is just tactics.
70
Ah yes the COMMUNIST “Christiana Figurers” from the UN…………
UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres laments U.S. democracy is ‘very detrimental’ in war on global warming — Lauds one-party ruled China for ‘doing it right’ on climate change
http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/01/14/un-climate-chief-christiana-figueres-laments-u-s-democracy-is-very-detrimental-in-war-on-global-warming-lauds-china-for-doing-it-right-on-climate-change/
Get rid of the UN !
101
I enjoyed the following comment posted a week ago, I forget who posted this …
“98 per cent of electric cars are still on the road, the other 2% made it home”.
120
Paris, as with other cities, has Autolib, which is a network of electric hire cars with ‘stations’ all over the place. I haven’t used it, but friends say they are pretty good if you need the convenience of a car, but don’t have one (I don’t own a car here)
I guess that it is much easier to install charging stations than it is to provide combustible fuel with the same city-wide footprint, but (sane) people don’t compliment them because they are electric, its just that they generally bridge the gap between actual car hire, and a taxi service.
40
a comment is in moderation which includes link to “Mashable: Brett Williams: Intel thinks self-driving cars will create a massive new $7 trillion economy”.
meanwhile, another great plan for SA?
6 Jun: Adelaide Advertiser: Plan to allow households to sell power from solar panels to highest bidder
by Sheradyn Holderhead
HOUSEHOLDS with solar panels will be able to sell power to the national grid in a way that responds to price signals, so they can make the most money, under a new proposal.
The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has proposed new market conditions that mean household will be able to sell it to whoever values it the most at a particular point in time.
This could include a local network business or the wholesale market and would mean households would not have to be paid only current feed-in tariffs.
It could also help electricity networks manage peaks in demand that threaten to cause blackouts in South Australia as soon as next summer.
By incentivising households to feed their stored energy into the grid, it could reduce the need to new and expensive large-scale generators to be built.
A separate AEMC report released last month noted that in the next 10 years, rooftop solar panels could cater for the minimum power demand in SA…READ ALL
FIRST COMMENT:
deluded: So those without solar will pay even more then. Great scheme. Pft. Or is that scam.?
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/plan-to-allow-households-to-sell-power-from-solar-panels-to-highest-bidder/news-story/7d676472baf3d99d23b842a7cb3e14fc
20
Oh great.
Hmm, after what my own home consumes during the day, I have 10KWH remaining to sell to you for today. How much am I bid? Answer – Nothing, because 10KWH is totally and utterly useless for anything at all. But, for the sake of this exercise, let’s go right over the top, and quote say 20 cents per KWH, and we then retail that same power for 34 cents per KWH, and that sees 4 cents per KWH profit, so a clear profit of a monumental amount of 40 cents. Let’s even say we will do a bulk deal for 100 homes in that area, so a clear profit of $40.
Or, for a real power plant. (say, umm, Bayswater) We have 62,400,000KWH for sale for the full 24 hours of today. How much am I bid. Say 4 cents per KWH, and, selling that at retail for 34 cents per KWH, we can make the same 4 cents per KWH clear profit on that, so there’s almost $2.5 million profit.
You be the judge on what any power retailer will be purchasing.
Tony.
72
electric cars are CRAP and a gigantic CON……….
In other words “OVERPRICED RUBBISH” !
61
Tesla suppressed an EPA research article in 2014!
More specifically, this includes Panasonic’s automotive grade li-ion batteries, which contain lithium, nickel, cobalt , and aluminum, and a proprietary cathode geometry developed jointly by Panasonic and Tesla — and are currently used in the Model S.
For any global warming potential benefit at all, electrical charge MUST come from renewable energy or natural gas!
The GREEN STUPID MACHINE!
JUST a waste of money, only politicians and Greenies can afford them!
90
lithium, Nickel, Cobalt and Aluminium, all resources available in Australia, unlike the diminishing Australian resource of oil that increasingly has to be imported from overseas, billions of dollars per year, just a waste of money.
29
LPG Gas your car up Willard!
50
Malcolm, you do leave yourself wide open ; aluminium and other metal resources available in Australia? – well yes, but pretty soon with more help from the left climate fanatic bimbos, prohibitive energy prices will make refining impossible in Aus
GeoffW
100
Plug a Tesla into a power point in South Oz and Adelaide goes black.
130
Adelaide has been black since Mike Rann graced its stage.
60
6 Jun: Breitbart: James Delingpole: ‘Global Warming’ Is a Myth, Say 58 Scientific Papers in 2017
“Global warming” is a myth — so say 80 graphs from 58 peer-reviewed scientific papers published in 2017.
In other words, the so-called “Consensus” on global warming is a massive lie. And Donald Trump was quite right to quit the Paris agreement which pretended that the massive lie was true.
By “global warming” these papers don’t, of course, mean the mild warming of around 0.8 degrees Celsius that the planet has experienced since the middle of the 19th century as the world crawled out of the Little Ice Age. Pretty much everyone, alarmists and skeptics alike, is agreed on that.
Rather, they mean “global warming” in the sense that is most commonly used today by grant-troughing scientists, and huxter politicians, and scaremongering green activists, and brainwashed mainstream media (MSM) environmental correspondents. “Global warming” as in the scary, historically unprecedented, primarily man-made phenomenon which we must address urgently before the icecaps melt and the Pacific islands disappear beneath the waves and all the baby polar bears drown…READ ON
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/06/delingpole-global-warming-is-myth-58-scientific-papers-2017/
60
Funniest news of the week, ”
North Korea has condemned US President Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, describing the decision as “the height of egotism” and an example of the “moral vacuum” in the US leadership.
“Global warming is one of the gravest challenges that humankind is facing today”, a Foreign Ministry spokesman told the state-run KCNA news agency on Tuesday.”
So Kim Jong Un believes Donald Trump is threatening the health of the world with very slightly increased CO2? More irony than a foundry.
130
That news is an enormous thumbs up for Trump.
50
Its the Trump Effect.
Imagine a situation where Kim agrees to give up his nuclear ambitions if China lifts economic sanctions and provides North Korea with totally free renewables. This would be a great coup for Donald, yet he modestly praises Xi and Kim for bringing it off.
00
Voice from the Dark Ages …
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/561fff3edd0895d42c8b45df/this-satellite-photo-shows-just-how-blacked-out-north-korea-is-at-night.jpg
30
From Wiki:
NOTE: nothing from electric vehicles.
When we are all lying back with another cappuccino while waiting for our cars to recharge we can ponder (and complain about) why our other tax rates have gone through the roof in order to pay for the roads whether you have a vehicle or not.
40
Plus 10% GST at $1.40 adds another $0.14 a litre.
So $0.536 is the total Federal and State tax on Petrol.
Federal Excise was dropped when the State GST was introduced, however that does not mean the tax on Petrol is not 53c a litre. It is. Reducing the excise because of the GST did not drop the total taxation on petrol.
00
no problem, back in November the federal government starting planning for the introduction of a mileage tax to replace the fuel tax.
36
Another large and amorphous gathering of public servants (all expense and no revenue) that we will all be reporting to on a regular basis so that they can calculate how much mileage tax to pay.
Plus, lots of inspectors to randomly check that we are reporting correctly.
No chance of this being rorted, I suppose?
70
Which would require every vehicle to be fitted with an approved and calibrated means of independently measuring road mileage. And an army of people to do the calibration and measurement. And these people would have to travel around to do their job … possibility over long distances.
But what about distance on private property, where the property owner “owns” the roads, and does the upkeep, and runs his vehicles on methane captured from his milking herd twice a day during the milking season. How will they manage that?
So I don’t believe that the Federal government has started planning anything. This looks like another brain fart from Malcolm aka Willard. He has run out of factoids, so is going into self production. Careful there Malcolm. It could make you go blind.
60
I’ve heard this suggestion several times during my time on this planet. The first time I heard it I was still young and naïve enough to believe they were really wanted to do it.
Just like the Daylight Savings question in Queensland, they keep bringing it up hoping somebody will take up the mantle and run with it.
If ever they do make impositions like this in new vehicles, I’ll go and buy a steel bodied 34 ford hot rod and tell em’ to take a hike.
20
Rubbish
This was promoted by South Australian Greens
Thrown out into the rubbish early 2016!
Just FAKE NEWS again Willard!
30
A mileage tax does not even make sense. What about a distance walked tax? Amount eaten tax? Breathing out tax (CO2 is pollution)? If we all lose weight, we will eat less, output less CO2 pollution and save the planet. It is no worse than Obama’s eat a smaller steak suggestion.
Taxation is how a government pays for the ordinary business of government. It is not a licence to control the social behaviour of the citizens. A moving too quickly tax. A swear box tax.
The Federal government needs money for defence and customs and for processing the money it receives but really it does not do a lot.
The State governments look after the police, hospitals, mining resources, teaching, roads.
Councils look after their immediate vicinity including local roads, rubbish, some local health and baby care.
Increasingly all transport from rail to aircraft is private. Banks are private. Telephones are private. Power private.
Why should any government start forcing people to pay carbon taxes or emissions taxes or any sort of taxes which do not directly benefit the people of the country? Why are we paying $6Billion a year to non government third parties for a right to burn our own coal? Why should the government be trying to control electricity? Before the RET, we had plenty of cheap electricity. Now our politicians are saving the planet? For whom? Not us.
The idea that taxes are the mechanism to solve all social problems is just wrong, nanny state rubbish and it just fosters greed.
20
Some years back approx early 90’s I did a project on EVs (silly me) and I wasnt a greenie either. But the conclusion was that the battery problem was enormous and looking at it , it hasnt been solved since. best battery tech at that stage was sodium one but required liquid sodium..not the best for safety or environment..then hydrogen fuel cell, great but not been produced in cheap enough or big enough qty.
Me.. Ill just keep using hydrocarbons for propulsion. Theres plenty left in this planet, if that gets low just go to Titan..
51
The chemists are currently excited over “liquid sodium” power cells. Is that different to liquid salt, or just a branding change?
But they are excitable folks anyway. It all comes down to what they are sniffing this week.
20
When people tell me that we’ll run out of oil in 10 years, I ask them how Germany in the 1940’s and with one small oil well in the continent managed to mobiles the largest fleet of ocean going navy, air force and ground force the world had ever seen.
Synthetic oil. If the Germans could make it in massive quantities in the 40’s, surely its pretty basic technology today. It’s a cost comparative thing only; while it’s cheaper to pull it out of the ground, that’s what you do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel
20
Greg,
According to my source the Germans, in 1944, were meeting 25% of their needs with synthetic production.
10
Ploesti, Romania gave much natural fuel.
10
People in the USA have looked at it again. I’m not sure at what stage this project is at –maybe bogged down with red tape.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-Coal-To-Gasoline-Plant-Will-Be-The-Largest-In-The-World.html
00
SASOL knows a bit about this too
00
Peak Oil is a myth, and a false theory, propagated for similar reasons to the CO2 scam.
10
The manufactured oil from coal was never enough.
Germany stockpiled oil from Russia especially during the Molotov Ribbentrop pacts years. Stalin was convinced Germany would not invade.
ince Winston Churchill moved the British navy to oil from coal in 1912 as First Lord of the Admiralty, Britain was dependent on the Suez. The whole North African campaign was about oil, grabbing oil and denying it to the British. S
Then when the Germans quickly overran France, the French oil reserves were also available. Sweden and Switzerland and Spain and Turkey were neutral. Their biggest supplier was in Romania at Ploesti, an ally. As they overran Russia, they seized the oil. That was also the problem which doomed the last big offensive in the Ardennes, the battle of the bulge, the need to grab US oil supplies, but the Americans torched them.
Possibly the biggest mistake was in the Caucuses in operation Blue when group B finally reached the oil fields in the North Caucuses and found that not only had the Russians capped the wells, the few remaining reserves were diesel, not petrol. The Russian tanks ran on diesel and the Germans on petrol, so they had to retreat.
30
More for the warmist digest..
https://www.iceagenow.info/arctic-sea-ice-expanded-may/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-01/adelaide-shivers-through-coldest-start-to-winter/8578150
https://www.iceagenow.info/oops-polar-ice-not-receding/ In fact it may be standing at its greatest extent in at least 97 years
etc..etc..
20
People in LA drive EVs because it lets them use the transit lanes. I’d drive a Tesla as well if it saved me 2 hours of commuting a day. Of course, we can’t all do that – only the privileged few – otherwise the transit lane would also be chokkaz.
Here’s my question: Petrol engines emit lots of nasties while idling – mostly unburnt carbon – and consume fuel. EVs do nothing while sitting still in traffic. If LA City cared about the environment, shouldn’t they let petrol engines use the transit lane and make EV’s sit in the traffic?
60
People used to be able to drive in transit lanes in LA by filling unoccupied passenger seats with dummies. What happened to that?
42
The dummies became environmental advocates for electric vehicles.
50
Rerekel, with wit like that; I’d want you on my debating team, not on the oppositions…
30
🙂
20
read all:
6 Jun: Daily Caller: Andrew Follett: Economist Uncovers ‘The Latest Solar Scam’ In Minnesota
A conservative economist has said buying timeshares for solar panels is just the next “scam” to fleece environmentally friendly consumers.
Mark Perry, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, railed against “community solar gardens” in Minnesota where private companies end up pocketing taxpayer subsidies for generating relatively small amounts of green energy.
“As usual, when door-to-door salespeople present you with an offer that sounds too good to be true, and start with a pitch about ‘saving you 11% every month on your electric bill by switching to solar,’ it’s highly likely that it is too good to be true,” Perry wrote in a blog post (LINK) Sunday…
Minnesota has 195 policies and incentives offering government assistance to green energy, according to the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency. That’s more than any other state with the sole exception of California…READ ON
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/06/economist-uncovers-the-latest-solar-scam-in-minnesota/
20
This is worth watching. This is an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage “My Classic Car Season 10 Episode 14 – Jay Leno’s Baker Electric Car” where they review the 1909 Baker electric car. If you want to skip the introduction go to around the 3 minute mark. Modern electric cars are not a huge advance on this. The Baker had a range of 100 miles / 160 km and a top speed of 23mph / 37kph. Consider that in 1909 roads weren’t paved and the Model T could only do 42mph / 67kph, not a huge amount faster. 37kph was plenty for a typical dirt road of the day. They were marketed as ladies shopping carts. The attraction for electric cars was that they were not messy like steam cars and not hard to start like petrol/gasoline engines. Once gasoline engines became easy to start there was no market for these vehicles. https://youtu.be/OhnjMdzGusc
62
Nothing “green” is economically viable, not even fossil fuel substitutes such as ethanol. My wonderful 6 litre V8 which I love more because gangrenes hate such engines is capable of burning ethanol. Problem is, that because ethanol contains less energy than petrol (gasoline) it uses 30% more ethanol than petrol to make the same amount of power (with 30% less range). Second problem is that ethanol doesn’t cost 30% or greater less than petrol so there is absolutely no point in using it although I understand some people use it solely so they can pass emissions tests with highly modified engines and then revert to wonderful energy dense petrol once the test is passed.
Producing ethanol for transport fuel also comes at the cost of producing food.
Final problem with ethanol fuel is that you can’t drink it because it contains 10% gasoline. 🙁 (I think the gasoline content is to give it improved cold starting capability which is not necessary in a vast majority of Australia. In Brazil I think they use 100% ethanol.)
How much extra CO2 is generated producing ethanol compared with pumping oil out of the ground and distilling and cracking gasoline? (Of course, we all know CO2 is not a problem in the first place but just looking at it from a gangrene point of view.)
And then we have the scandals associated with the compulsory use of gasoline diluted with ethanol in NSW. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/ethanol-in-fuel-laws-linked-to-substantial-manildra-donations/7368734
62
Sorry to be off topic but the weekends are too far behind or in front of us.
This misleading article about how Heartland’s very good book is misleading the public is why we’re always playing catch-up, running behind and generally being overrun by climate change all the time.
Of course you need to understand that AOL will put up anything that will grab reader attention. True and false are irrelevant to them so they don’t bother to learn about the issues, they just post it for all to see. And how many people throughout the country and probably the world are using AOL? More than I know how to count. 🙁
97% of “scientists” agree and that’s that.
30
If the wall in some nearby public restroom offered email service and would let me keep the email address I’ve had for nearly 20 years I would use that wall rather than AOL. But Verizon sold it’s FiOS system in California to Frontier Communications last year and Frontier has no email service at all so AOL was enlisted to take over all the existing Verizon email accounts. I don’t know how that was arranged but it comes at no cost to me so I use it. The Verizon home page became even more useless after that and at least I can get directly to my email account from AOL.com.
So I get all the news that’s unfit to print along with email service.
20
It was mentioned on the radio that part of Fink’s solution will be large scale batteries.
I guess Musk will be salivating in anticipation as our idiot politicians fall for this “solution”.
Incidentally, the batteries of electric cars when not in use have been previously suggested as storage on a “smart” grid. There might be spin-off sales of subsidised electric cars as part of this.
We’ll know for sure on Friday.
12
I wonder if Finkel bothered himself to look at this bit of research re using electric vehicle batteries as Grid energy storage systems;
Science direct; 15 / 03 /17.
Measurement of power loss during electric vehicle charging and discharging
Abstract;
[ Read that last line carefully. The researchers only reduced the losses by less than ten percent after optimising every item in the charge-discharge to grid cycle.
As batteries and particularly voltage conversion AC > battery DC / DC > AC electronics age and lose some of their original efficiencies, such Grid to Battery charge- Battery to Grid discharge will become even less efficient.
Which would require a much higher price for to be paid for the battery storage power returned to the grid as against what the storage owner would have to pay to originally charge the batteries.
That or further massive subsidies again from the non storage power users to subsidise the grid / battery storage owners.
Heath Robinson would have had great difficulty in dreaming up such a convoluted, inefficient, open to fr–d, uncontrollable, unworkable, massively subsidised to no possible or percievable benefit, no engineering input, intellectually deficient climate activists and politically elitist dreamt up system.
80
read both pieces carefully (if this interests you, of course):
6 Jun: LA Times: Ivan Penn: Caifornia regulators weigh whether the state needs more power plants
(Los Angeles Times data editor Ben Welsh contributed to this report)
The scrutiny comes after a Los Angeles Times investigation found that the state is operating with an oversupply of electricity, driven largely by the construction of gas-fueleld generating plants, leading to higher rates…READ ALL
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-natural-gas-plants-20170606-story.html
5 Feb: LA Times: Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need
We’re using less electricity. Some power plants have even shut down. So why do state officials keep approving new ones?
By Ivan Penn and Ryan Menezes
(Times data editor Ben Welsh contributed to this report)
Although California uses 2.6% less electricity annually from the power grid now than in 2008, residential and business customers together pay $6.8 billion more for power than they did then. The added cost to customers will total many billions of dollars over the next two decades, because regulators have approved higher rates for years to come so utilities can recoup the expense of building and maintaining the new plants, transmission lines and related equipment, even if their power isn’t needed…
Utilities are typically guaranteed a rate of return of about 10.5% for the cost of each new plant regardless of need…
Since 2008 alone — when consumption began falling — about 30 new power plants approved by California regulators have started producing electricity. These plants account for the vast majority of the 17% increase in the potential electricity supply in the state during that period…
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/#nt=outfit
following says something about the above situation, but no need to read all, as it’s just more PR for solar/wind:
3 Jun: Financial Times: Forget Trump, there’s still money in the climate business
President cannot halt the rise of renewable energy in the US, says John Dizard
To begin with, the alliance of convenience between the gas-fired power sector and the renewables industry is fraying to breaking point. As long as both could face off against the coal industry, the gas-fired generators were fine with having green activists demanding reductions in carbon emissions. Gas barons could contribute to environmental groups, smug in the belief that the greens were helping them get market share…
10
7 Jun: Breitbart: James Delingpole: Paris – Trump Just Dodged A $2.5 Trillion Bullet
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/07/delingpole-paris-trump-just-dodged-a-2-5-trillion-bullet/
former WaPo & Vox CAGW peddler, Brad Plumer, takes up ex-BBC, Richard Black’s argument, tho it’s not necessarily convincing.
according to a lot of Americans, it’s called “the Paris Climate Deal” or “the Paris Climate Accord” and not “the Paris Climate Treaty”, because, to be legal, a treaty needs Senate approval, which it doesn’t have, so US can withdraw at any time.
7 Jun: NYT: Brad Plumer: The U.S. Can’t Leave the Paris Climate Deal Just Yet
Last week, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. But it will take more than one speech to pull out: Under the rules of the deal, which the White House says it will follow, the earliest any country can leave is Nov. 4, 2020…
January 2021
If a new president enters the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, he or she could easily submit a written notice to the United Nations that the United States would like to rejoin the Paris accord. Within 30 days, the United States could re-enter the agreement and submit a new pledge for how the country plans to tackle climate change.
If the United States does rejoin Paris, however, it could take time to regain the credibility it once had within climate discussions…
November 2023
Negotiators will meet again in 2023 to see how their second round of pledges and actions stack up against the 2-degree goal. The idea is that they will continually increase their ambitions and meet every five years to adjust accordingly…
A recent analysis by the Rhodium Group estimated that United States emissions will now most likely fall 15 to 19 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, when taking into account both the effects of Mr. Trump’s policies and initiatives that states are pursuing.
But emissions could fall further if technologies like electric cars or solar power proliferate faster than expected, or if Congress or a new administration enacts additional policies, like a price on carbon…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/climate/trump-paris-climate-timeline.html?_r=1
10
6 Jun: Reuters: Nina Chestney: World’s energy system not on track to meet climate goals: IEA
Barely one tenth of renewable energy technology is ready to meet long-term climate change targets as governments have failed to adequately support large-scale deployment, a report by the International Energy Agency showed on Tuesday…
Energy technology innovation can help achieve a cleaner energy system but strong policy signals are needed, the report said.
Only three out of 26 assessed technologies – electric vehicles, energy storage and mature variable renewables (solar PV and onshore wind) – are on track to meet climate targets, according to the IEA.
“Transformation toward a clean energy system is not in line with stated international policy goals. Many technology areas suffer from a lack of policy support and this impedes their scaled-up deployment,” the report said.
The IEA said the world’s power sector could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2060 under a goal to limit the rise in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius.
The energy sector could even become carbon neutral by 2060 to limit future temperature increase to 1.75 degrees C by 2100, if technology innovations are “pushed to the limit”.
“But to do so would require an unprecedented level of policy action and effort from all stakeholders,” the report added…
However, renewable power generation growth needs to accelerate by an additional 40 percent over 2020-25 to reach a 2 degree C limit goal.
Carbon dioxide emissions from coal must decline by around 3 percent a year to 2025, led by the retirement in the least efficient technologies and a decline in coal generation not equipped with carbon capture and storage after 2020, the IEA said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-technologies-iea-idUSKBN18X10G?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
7 June: CarbonPulse: Analysts slash EUA price forecasts by a third on new pollution rules
Analysts at Energy Aspects have slashed their long term EU carbon allowance price forecasts by a third after weighing the bearish impact of new EU-wide anti-pollution measures.
7 June: CarbonPulse: EU Market: EUAs drop further below €5 on brisk selling
EU carbon prices fell for the second straight day on Wednesday amid a sharp drop in oil prices and despite firm auction demand, with the benchmark EUA contract crashing through a number of technical supports on brisk selling.
10
fairly lengthy, but u have to pay for the full report:
6 Jun: IEA: Energy Technology Perspectives 2017
RIGHT COLUMN: PURCHASE FULL REPORT
http://www.iea.org/etp2017/summary/
PDF: 71 pages: PDF: IEA: Global EV Outlook 2017
Two million and counting
https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/GlobalEVOutlook2017.pdf
00
lol.
6 Jun: Bloomberg: Jonathan Tirone: Paris Climate Deal Needs New Rules and Clarity, Scientists Say
The Paris climate accord needs to be strengthened through new negotiations and national commitments to transparency, a study showed.
Uncertainty about the pledges made by almost 200 countries in the landmark climate deal means the world could fail to mitigate runaway global warming, according to a report by six scientists published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communication.
“In many cases the actions described in these pledges are ambiguous or imprecise,” wrote Joeri Rojelj, the lead author of the paper titled “Understanding the Origin of Paris Agreement Emission Uncertainties.” The scientists urged countries to implement a “robust process that keeps track of where emissions are heading.”…
“Some pledges focus on improving ‘emissions intensity,’ meaning reducing the emissions per dollar of economic output, but assumptions about socioeconomic growth are often implicit or unknown,” said Rojelj, who advises the United Nations and researches at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis outside of Vienna…
Countries will need to improve their reporting by 2030 or risk having to increase emission reduction targets by factors of ***four to 25 thereafter, according to the report.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/paris-climate-deal-needs-new-rules-and-clarity-scientists-say
6 Jun: Nature: Understanding the origin of Paris Agreement emission uncertainties
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15748
10
Guardian/Lowy/ANU – FakeNews for Finkel:
7 Jun: Guardian: Michael Slezak: Australians want government to focus on renewables even if it costs more: poll
Lowy Institute polling also finds 57% of people consider climate change to be a ‘critical threat’
The vast majority of Australians want the government to focus on renewable energy, even if that means more money needs to be spent on making the system reliable, according to polling by the Lowy Institute.
Of 1,200 adults polled in March, 81% agreed with the statement: “The government should focus on renewables, even if this means we may need to invest more in infrastructure to make the system more reliable.”
Only 17% thought the government should focus on coal and gas…
“Even in the midst of heated debate and government rhetoric about the need for energy security following recent energy blackouts, Australians emphatically choose renewables over coal and gas,” said Alex Oliver, director of the Lowy Institute’s polling program…
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jun/07/australians-want-government-to-focus-on-renewables-even-if-it-costs-more-poll
6 Jun: Lowy Institute: Alex Oliver: ALMOST ALL AUSTRALIANS FAVOUR RENEWABLES OVER COAL AND GAS, AND WANT MORE INVESTMENT IN ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE
With the findings of the Finkel review on electricity markets and energy security to be released on 9 June 2017, the latest Lowy Institute Poll has found that Australians have a clear preference for renewables over traditional sources of energy such as coal and gas…
(These results are drawn from the 2017 Lowy Institute Poll, a nationally representative telephone survey of 1200 Australian adults, conducted on behalf of the Lowy Institute by the ***Social Research Centre between 1 and 21 March 2017)
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/almost-all-australians-favour-renewables-over-coal-and-gas-and-want-more-investment
***why not say CAGW-obsessed ANU’s Social Research Centre?
20
As long as people believe that the electricity they consume just comes out of the proverbial hole in the wall, this attitude will persist.
Until people are told the truth about renewables, they will continue to think like that.
There is no one in the MSM willing to actually do the research and then report on it, and those renewable proponents will always get away with the fact bending they have been getting away with for years. It is not in their interests to actually tell the full truth about their renewable proposals, so they just keep getting away with it.
It will take something akin to a disaster to make people begin to ask the questions which should have been asked all along.
It’s no good my saying it here, or even anywhere for that fact, because no one will actually believe it, because for so long now, they have been conditioned to believe verbatim whatever those renewable proposers tell them, without even asking any of the correct questions.
When the time comes, those renewable plants operators will shake their heads and say that we told you all this right from day one. The real truth they just hide in plain sight with the bending of engineering terms which they expect no one to actually check, and no one ever does.
Find me just one renewable proposal which even mentions Capacity Factor, and then to go on and explain what that actually means. They use green appeasing terminology that sounds good, and they just keep doing it.
If any other thing even tried to do that, they would come under far more scrutiny than any of these renewables do.
Tony.
92
Tony, Australians need to be taught that there is a difference between the alarmist position on Climate Change and “Pollution”. I think the majority of Australians want the environment to be cleaned up.CO2 is not pollution.Modern manufacturing plants can be designed to be low pollution. Coal plants can be low polluting and coal fired boilers can be made low polluting.
I hope that Trump will encourage a blue team and a red team to thoroughly study the science of the effect of CO2 and once and for all prove that CO2 is inconsequential.
Once that is settled then we can worry about controlling pollution in our environment.
10
Most people do not know that the RET is allegedly a huge $6Billion a year ‘investment’ in ‘renweables’. People should be asking why there is virtually nothing to show for all the ‘investment’ to date, not asking for more to be spent.
The trick with the RET is that no one knows they are paying. Not even the politicians. Or at least they pretend not to know.
It is not reported in the budget. It is not a tax. It is as if this massive carbon tax does not exist!
Then why would we pay Turnbull’s Emissions tax as well as the RET?
Also as the ‘certificates’ are Federal, people in Queensland are paying for wind power generated in South Australia (not power sold, just generated). How fair is that?
When Tony Abbott tosses out this faux Prime Minister, his first act should be to remove the RET. The % added later to the RET have no force in law. The RET is truly just a massive carbon Tax by overseas companies on all Australians for nothing at all. It could be removed in a day, dropping power prices instantly. Then the silly and useless windmills would just stop turning for good. They belong in a country with no coal, nowhere else.
10
might as well note this…
7 Jun: MetroUK: Harley Tamplin: Theresa May ‘set to win General Election in biggest landslide since Margaret Thatcher’
The poll by ComRes for The Independent has the Tories winning 44% of the General Election vote compared to Labour’s 34%, enough for a majority of 74 seats…
If correct, ComRes’ poll, a survey of 2,051 adults conducted this week, would give the Conservatives 362 seats, an increase of 31 on their current majority.
Labour would lose 20 seats and be left with 212, while the Liberal Democrats and SNP would also lose seats…
When given a choice between the two, 51% said they would be relieved if Mrs May won, and 55% said they would be worried about Brexit negotiations in the event of a Labour win…
The outcome of the vote is set to hinge on the turnout of 18 to 25-year-olds, who largely support Labour as a demographic.
http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/07/theresa-may-set-to-win-general-election-in-biggest-landslide-since-margaret-thatcher-6693133/
30
‘The outcome of the vote is set to hinge on the turnout of 18 to 25-year-olds ….’
Voting in the UK is not compulsory, so that particular demographic is unlikely to bother voting for old people of either political persuasion.
10
Chris Smith on 2GB radio just played a repeat of an interview with Dr Howard Brady, author of “Mirrors and Mazes: A guide to the climate debate” http://mirrorsandmazes.com.au/
The interview which was done in January is on the above web page.
23
In regard to the Fink inquiry we keep getting told how renewables are going to create lots of jobs.
Well there are real, economically justifiable jobs and made up jobs that provide no real economic value.
This was articulated in a quote often attributed to Milton Friedman, a great economist. (A lot of his lectures are on YouTube.)
QUOTE At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” END QUOTE
32
It will be amusing watching the public serpents freeze in the dark, unfortunately innocent people will suffer as well with this massive increase in gas and electricity prices.
https://amp.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/actewagl-announces-sharp-increase-in-gas-and-electricity-prices-20170607-gwmv4r.html
32
Just for laffs. 🙂
10
The politicians and media and even an engineer such as Finkel keep talking about “carbon” emissions.
That being the case, wouldn’t the best way to get rid of this solid black substance be to burn it and convert it into carbon dioxide, an invisible life-giving gas?
42
I’m afraid our Chief Fink is not even a scientist’s fly button.
I think this is one of Andrew MacRae’s comments about Colonel Fink’s conversation with Senator Roberts at a Senate hearing.
I had made some similar notes but kept these as they were my sentiments exactly.
“I’ve listened to Finkel’s evidence and he doesn’t sound like a scientist.
Apart from Finkel’s confusion about Swiss/Swedish, he conveniently ignores that Arrhenius 19th century experiments and conclusions were shown to be flawed by Ångstrom and Woods.
Finkel also confuses correlation with causation.
Finkel is all too certain that nature cannot absorb all anthroprogenic CO2 emissions; the oceans alone absorb orders of magnitude more CO2 every day; and they emit again based largely upon the ocean surface temperature; that is governed substantially by the sun shining onto the surface of the oceans. You cannot heat the oceans by blowing warm air over them.
The attribution of the “greenhouse effect” and its magnitude is based on a simplistic radiative (teaching) model of our Earth; indeed a flat Earth disc exposed continuously to a very dim sun. That model makes no allowances for the thermal capacity of matter in the system; and simply waves its hands in the air when the “observed” (guessed) global average atmospheric temperature near ground level is compared to the results yielded by the simplistic radiative balance.
Careful listeners will also note Finkel’s resort to logical fallacies such as appeal to authority and to popularity.
He does not appreciate that computer model runs are not experiments.
He also seems to be ignorant of the Principle of Falsifiability.
It’s astonishing but not surprising that Australia’s Chief Scientist is ignorant of the modern philosophy of science and indeed; what constitutes a logical, rational and evidence-based argument.”
81
These numbers are an interesting reality check. I participate in a few car forums and whenever EVs come up there are always the fanboys with the fossil dinosaur, way of the future, all autonomous EVs in 10 years type comments. Given just the global installed ICE base it seems unlikely, given current price/capability levels it seems unlikely, it seems the general buying public isnt quite convinced yet either.
50
Yes, it’s hard to understand why someone would want all electric, given that the CO2 output is higher than a normal car and much higher than a hybrid. A hybrid has all the same energy savings as an electric car but will not run out of power on a modest trip and need four hours recharging. It is easy to see everyone switching to hybrids, doubling our fuel supply whether gas or oil or diesel. If necessary a hybrid can run on battery only, but it’s hard to see why you would bother.
00
Re electric cars:
A recent report of the Tesla Model S demonstrated the cost of running this model which uses plug in charging via mains power. Dividing the cost of electricity for a full charge by the kilometre range achieved yields a figure of 5.4c per kilometre. (Using typical Sydney power prices)
An equivalent sized petrol engined sedan, say a 4 cylinder Toyota Camry, achieving 8 litres per 100 km yields 10.5c per kilomtre.
With both at 15,000 km per year the Tesla saves $765 per year.
Since the Tesla costs $140,000 and the Camry costs $35,000, the Tesla savings will give a break even point in about 137 years.
How long do you keep your car before trade in?
Remember all electric cars are coal fired via normal power stations, so their claim of nil emissions is nonsense.
Facts are very painful for the gung ho green brigade.
21
A hybrid Toyota would be comparable in economy, far cheaper to buy and own and have the same fuel economy. You also do not have to pay the RET.
00
I just did a check!
KIA Rio 2006 4 cyl petrol oldie!
Tesla S 60kWh 2016 sedan!
Well apart from the KIA having a range of 500 km plus!
The grams of CO2 per Kilometer for the KIA is: 164
The grams of CO2 per Kilometer for the Tesla is: 175
The cost of the Tesla is nearly 10 times the KIA at less than $10,000 in 2006!
The annual average cost of the KIA in fuel is $1,219 PA
The annual average cost of the Tesla in Power is $651 PA
That is without the charges to convert your house to a refill station!
So in 10 years I have saved over $30,000 not accounting for the resale of the KIA $2,000.
And not accounting for a new battery for the Tesla either!
I’ll stick to petrol thanks Willard!
The TELSA is a bigger, heavier, more expensive and has a larger carbon footprint than the KIA.
Stuff the fuel suppliers Willard, I’ll by shares in BP! It’s a GLOBAL world mate!
P.S. Jerry cans 25 litre are only $19 at Bunnings too Willard!
21
you’re comparing a small 4 cylinder Rio that had a maximum of 82kw of power when new to a full size passenger car that has a minimum of 285kw, did you think no one would notice your cherry picking if it was at the bottom of the thread?
(Malcolm/Willard, you have been caught using different names. Chose one and stick with it or you will be put into the Moderation bin) CTS
16
I was talking to Willard actually!
The Kia Rio is a 5 seater full size hatch!
It is great for living on the Sunshine Coast & commuting to Brisbane daily in the traffic!
Why would I pay $100,000 for an EV when I can invest in Shell, BP etc and have 2 KIA’s & still save money!
You’re talking FAKE NEWS Mal!
51
It doesn’t matter if you are talking to the Lord himself, you are comparing two completely different size vehicles.
23
what he is saying is that luxury is not what everybody can afford.
you are trying to make it out as if the tesla is a viable alternative to the family/commute car, which it is not. you can never recover the initial costs, and i fail to see how you can just ignore this.
you are trying to make the case for NOT subsidizing the EV market by claiming that they are viable here and now. they are NOT viable here and now, they are overpriced and in most cases lack basic functionality unless you pay the higher price, which is why they need to be subsidized.
should we subsidize them? never, we shouldnt have been bailing out manufacturers for any type of car. either they make it on the market or they dont. EVs wont until they get their price down to reasonable levels and we see some decent range numbers.
even when there is a high range, equivalent cost EV available on the market and instantly 6000 instant swap battery charge points pop up at service stations around Australia, the numbers would still be in favour of the ICE due to the fact that everybody knows that these companies lie about figures, range/consumption/lifespan etc, and that is ALL car companies, so people will go with the devil they know for a long, long time before trusting pure EV. the lie factor is especially bad in the green sector as most people find out the first time they trust a green light bulb, or batteries etc figures. in fact printing ‘green’ on a label now is guaranteed to reduce sales.
21
The lowest cost Tesla in NSW is around $110k, there are more than 30,000 cars passenger cars in NSW with a replacement cost of over $110k, these are 4 door cars that get driven around town, 30 to 150kms per day, plenty of future market for the Tesla model S. When Renault, Hyundai, Nissan start selling electric cars in Australia for 60k, 50k, 40k then 30k what will your excuse be then?
12
do i need an excuse for something? i said i would buy one if i thought it was viable. the money alone doesnt make it viable, the cost, range and ability to fill are the main factors.
so, i take it then that you are against subsidy?
20
Any subsidy is not needed in Australia, , Nissan are greedy, when other Jap, Korean or Euro brands bring lower cost, longer range electric cars to Australia, Nissan will have to stop whinging and get on with the business of selling cars.
02
I’ll stick a comment down here at the bottom of an old thread where nobody will see.
Malcolm has put up a thorough and polite defence for the EV cause. Some of his detractors have not been so thorough or polite. At no time, that I saw, did he advocate there use for “climate mitigation”. Nor did he specificaly ask for subsidies, just a fair hearing.
His good humor and thorough argument is to be commended even if many of us can’t use his product.
Thanks Malcolm for makeing this blog usefull.
Doug
30
no, you are wrong. his replies are to someone else other than the person he is replying to, and most of the time about something else. it is just plain rude to talk around people like that to sell some product.
21
Who am I replying to? I hit the reply button closest to the relevant post.
What am I trying to sell? Australian coal instead of foreign oil?
02
your posts sound like the q&a section of a tesla glossy, where they answer all the questions that they want you to ask, not the questions you really would ask.
there are a couple of different ways of looking at it, one is that you are merely trolling, which is what most will think, another is that you are just not able to see all the problems and integrate them into your thinking to come up with a reasonable reply that answers the appropriate question in an appropriate way
you answered the main question of the post ‘should there be a subsidy’, so even though you may be trolling, you still believe some of what you are trolling about. so, I will offer you some perspective that you obviously cannot see.
I recently went looking for a car, new or old to replace a LPG that has near enough economy (fuel and outlay) that that car had because I burn through them fairly fast. I first looked for another LPG, hybrids and EVs. i found one EV with a reasonable price, but the lack of range ruled it out before even considering the other downsides like lack of recharge options, so i ended up with a small diesel which has great range and was cheap.
when i found that EV, i went looking for details of EVs in Australia and just what was available, and read a fair bit about the market. I read some trash EV biased magazines that said exactly the same phrase that you mentioned ie people dont buy EVs in this country because the car sellers dont want to sell them.
when i first read that i thought, what the hell, are these people serious? they dont mention all the problems other than that? who in their right mind would take this seriously? at which point i dismissed it as some eco warrior that thinks all other think that way, but here you are saying the same thing, and claim not to be an eco warrior.
so, what is the angle here? why would anyone ignore the fact that you either spend $110k to get 400km range (probably less in winter) with the problems of not being able to fill up or spend $40k for a 180km range?
30
mobihci. Guess in my haste I didn’t study the posts but “malcom” has alot of good points and some points that were not challenged.
He talks about about making oil states rich but doesn’t note that with the current price they aren’t. When I first looked into EV oil was dear and elect cheap. Now reversed.
In a past life with short commutes I might have used a EV but now 180k wont get me to the nearest hardware store and back.
A point I notice from the comments is that our motor car is more than just a means of transportation. It’s a symbol and source of enjoyment. As such we will all work out own solution. And I shouldn’t have to subsidise someone else’s.
My point was that to many comments were “playing the man” and not the subject. OK. Point out his fault but not with venom. (This criticism does not apply to you.)
Doug
21
Your honesty is much appreciated Doug.
01
too complicated to excerpt…read all:
7 Jun: Press release: Concordia University: Electric car subsidies may do more harm than good
A Concordia study reveals that green incentives could actually be increasing Canada’s CO2 emissions
But a new study by Concordia economics professor Ian Irvine shows that subsidizing EVs in the North American context will not reduce GHG emissions in the short-term, and may even increase them — at a cost to taxpayers.
Recently published in Canadian Public Policy, Irvine’s study compared the incentives for producing EVs that are found in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, North America’s fuel-efficiency regulations, with new EV subsidy policies in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.
He found that, while the subsidies encourage the production of more EVs, they undermine the efficiency requirements of existing incentives for conventional vehicles. This results in a zero or negative near-term GHG benefit…READ ALL
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-06/cu-ecs060717.php
10
2 pages: 7 Jun: Forbes: Michael Lynch: Don’t Advocate Bad Leadership On Energy And Climate Change
The Administration’s pull out from the Paris Accord has seen any number of pundits decrying our surrender of leadership on the issue of climate change and the energy revolution. Unfortunately, what most are referring to is more faux leadership than real, more about symbolism than achieving results…
Just as Scott Adams says he’s not against management, just bad management, I’m not against leadership, just bad leadership. California is spending $40 million in the current budget to build charging stations for electric vehicles, a giveaway to the upper classes who can afford electric vehicles. And using tax dollars to subsidize the wealthy’s purchase of electric sports cars is obscene, not leadership…
California has a long history of promoting energy policies that have proved costly for residents and business, without regard for the actual results, in part because the costs are hidden or at least not imposed on the state budget. Mandating electric vehicles in the 1990s was a complete failure but policy-makers shrug it off as costless—because the costs were borne by the automakers. Similarly, the current imbalance in the power sector caused by poor constructed renewable energy policies (look up California duck) inflicts significant costs with minimal benefit on the public…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2017/06/07/dont-advocate-bad-leadership-on-energy-and-climate-change/#3ce8ac9f10a0
10
8 Jun: Courier Mail: Claire Bickers: Dr Alan Finkel set to unveil plan for Australia’s electricity as political fight over power heats up
AUSTRALIA’S chief scientist is set to deliver Malcolm Turnbull and state and territory leaders a blueprint for keeping the lights on while easing pressure on power prices and cutting carbon emissions…
Coal-fired power station operators will need to give three years’ notice before closure to ensure ongoing electricity reliability and workers can find others jobs…
The Australian reports new rules will be imposed on wind farms and solar power generators in the wake of the report.
Operators would have to install their own battery or pumped-hydro systems which would cut in if their primary energy supply failed.
But the new rules would add to the start up cost of new projects, which could be passed on to customers.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/bluescope-steel-backs-clean-energy-target-as-political-fight-over-power-heats-up/news-story/f41a04669271fe32155d0a5afb935ecd
8 Jun: Chinchilla News: Matthew Newton: Residents left in the dark over solar projects
With a 264ha 100-megawatt solar project proposed in close proximity to his home, it’s an issue Chinchilla melon farmer Darryl O’Leary believes the community needs to be aware of.
As it stands, solar projects proposed outside industrial areas are code assessable under the new Western Downs Planning Scheme, adopted by the Western Downs Regional Council in March.
This means there is no public notification required – regardless of a development’s size – and residents have no right to appeal once a development application is approved.
That is something MrO’Leary said needed to change.
Although he is happy with how the council and councillors listened to his concerns and he’s had the opportunity to work through his issues with First Solar’s proposed solar project, he still believes future projects – especially those as large as First Solar’s – should be impact assessable…
Making it easy for renewable development was essential, he said, because with the Federal Government’s Renewable Energy Target to generate 33,000gigawatt hours of additional renewable energy by 2020, time was of the essence.
Cr McVeigh said if development applications took too long, developers would go elsewhere, which was why the council switched to code assessing the renewable energy facilities…
The mayor also noted the impact of renewable energy facilities was “very minimal compared to other major infrastructure that is impact assessable”…
Mr O’Leary said there should be a requirement for solar farms to be a minimum distance from houses, along with buffer zones around the perimeter, and any developments should not impact on waterways…
“Who’s going to want to live next to a great big industrial electricity plant?”
When the Chinchilla News put it to the mayor that residents had a right to know what was going on in their own backyard and should be made aware of any large solar projects proposed near their homes, he said it was up to the development applicants to initiate a conversation with residents.
“Council certainly encourages applicants to have discussions with residents neighbouring their proposed developments,” CrMcVeigh said.
https://www.chinchillanews.com.au/news/residents-left-in-the-dark-over-solar-projects/3187312/
00
8 Jun: RenewEconomy: Press release: Financial adviser mandated for Kidston solar phase II
Financial close is expected towards the end of 2017. A power purchase agreement (PPA) should be signed in the next few months. The source said that the firm is hoping to agree a long-term PPA with a local government entity…
Genex Power signed a long-term, fixed-price, 20-year power purchase agreement with the Queensland government for supply of power generated from the solar farm in September 2016 for Phase I. Financial closure for the 50MW project was reached in December 2016.
For Phase I, The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) provided debt. Genex Power also secured an initial grant of A$8.85 million from ARENA and debt finance of A$54 million from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/financial-adviser-mandated-kidston-solar-phase-ii-84881/
00