And the world steamed blithely ahead, pretending they had found a “sustainable” solution.
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One of the reasons why interest in hydrogen is picking up again.
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The longer it goes on, the more I’m persuaded that the 100% electricity solution isn’t the right approach. Electric cars are silent, that’s their most important positive in my book. As far as sustainable development is concerned, it’s wrong to go all-out on electric cars imo. The above outlined problem is serious, and there is also the issue of the amount of electricity they consume. If we have to build new nuclear plants in order to feed all these cars, is it worth it?
Just like Arminius, I’m pinning more hope on the hydrogen technology. Not that it wouldn’t cause environmental problems too (billions of individual cars will always represent an environmental problem for the planet, no matter what their propulsion mode is), but probably not in the same bracket.
In a sense, hydrogen isn’t really a combustion technology per se, since you can’t really extract hydrogen from the ground or directly from the air. It’s more like an energy storage technology, so it would simply be storing the energy used to extract the hydrogen from water or other sources, which would then be released when it gets burned. So the energy still needs to come from somewhere.
Not to mention that now you have even more inefficiency, since the hydrogen extraction is not 100% efficient.
I think there is also a lot of grey area as to how the hydrogen is produced since a lot of the current market is based around extraction from natural gas, which is, safe to say, not optimal either.
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And their most dangerous in mine. Yes we should always look before crossing the road but the sound a car makes is critical to safety as we use multiple senses to guide us about the physical world. Walking across carparks particularly.
If you can’t hear the tire noises you might have a significant problem. Also, what kind of speeds are drivers going at in your neighbourhood carparks if you’re at a huge danger from them?
A rolling tesla is almost silent, tyres specifically chosen for low rolling resistance so less energy converted to sound. Obviously never happened to you. It will and you’ll get my point.
The M3 test is a gimick but the Landrover comparison certainly isn’t.
If you’re trying to get credible test results about cars I would suggest that Top Gear isn’t the best place to look.
Yes. I’ve been in crowded cities where the ambient noise level is quite high and I’ve still managed to not get knocked over by a Tesla. Funny that.
I’ve not been hit by one but have been in a “where the hell did that come from” situation.
I don’t know how it is the UK, but here, electric cars have to possess a sound system which is active until the car reaches around 40 km/h. Then, the noise of air movement and of the tires is loud enough to warn pedestrians, and the sound system switches off. But under that speed, it’s necessary in order to avoid accidents. Especially in a city with huge noise still produced by a vast majority of explosion engines.
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Thought I’d post this in here too (it’s also in the UK Politics thread as there were discussions on whether the UK was truly a world leader in tackling climate change - *spoiler, it is).
I thought this was fairly interesting. It compares countries’ energy consumption taking into account both domestic consumption and consumer consumption, ie, how much energy goes into the production and transportation of goods that the country imports.
The UK fares fairly badly by way of proportion, consumer consumption of energy being approximately 1/4 higher than domestic consumption.
However, when you delve into the figures that is only because our domestic consumption is so relatively low. In fact, both our domestic consumption and consumer consumption of energy, per person, is one of the lowest in Europe.
So, for example, per person in the UK we consume 82 megawatts of energy per year. 36 of this is domestic consumption and 46 is consumer consumption (ie, imported energy costs) [2020 figures].
These are the energy costs of other large European nations ranked in order of total energy consumption per person per year.
Germany: 111 MW per year (52 domestic, 59 consumer)
France: 100 MW per year (46 domestic, 54 consumer)
UK: 82 MW per year (36 domestic, 46 consumer)
Italy: 72 MW per year (33 domestic, 39 consumer)
Spain: 67 MW per year (33 domestic, 34 consumer)
Those in developed countries definitely need to be reducing their energy consumption and making what energy they do consume greener.
Other countries of interest:
USA: 184 MW per year (87 domestic, 97 consumer)
Canada: 175 MW per year (93 domestic, 82 consumer)
Ireland: 172 MW per year (73 domestic, 99 consumer)
Norway: 154 MW per year (76 domestic, 78 consumer)
Netherlands: 146 MW per year (71 domestic, 75 consumer)
Australia: 112 MW per year (57 domestic, 55 consumer)
Russia: 107 MW per year (62 domestic, 45 consumer)
Japan: 105 MW per year (53 domestic, 52 consumer)
Denmark: 105 MW per year (46 domestic, 59 consumer)
Switzerland: 85 MW per year (32 domestic, 53 consumer)
Poland: 66 MW per year (33 domestic, 33 consumer)
China: 58 MW per year (30 domestic, 28 consumer)
South Africa: 54 MW per year (32 domestic, 22 consumer)
Brazil: 28 MW per year (14 domestic, 14 consumer)
India: 22 MW per year (11 domestic, 11 consumer)
*figures subject to rounding errors
Change since 2000. Countries in red, increased energy consumption per capita. Countries in green, decreased energy consumption per capita. Black font, no significant (+/-7%) change.
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As redalways notes, this is actually a larger problem with hydrogen. Round trip efficiency for lithium iron systems is ~ 95% (i.e. 95% of the energy generated is delivered for use) whereas hydrogen systems don’t reach past 50%. Most of that loss is in the process of producing the hydrogen, although there are also losses in the conversion step. The result is that whatever generation technology you use, you will need about twice the amount of electricity to do the same work.
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Some odd numbers/relationships in that trade-adjusted data, I’ll have to take a look at what that calculation actually is. UK energy use per capita is not particularly low compared to peers. The UK often messes up indices that reflect economic activity, because of the very large contribution of the financial sector to GDP. Ireland is another economy that distorts such calculations, due to the distortion of multinationals with European business domiciled in Ireland for tax purposes, and not a great deal else. Bu the Netherlands is one I can’t even think of a basis for - Canada has a proportionately huge energy sector, woeful public transport to address huge distances, and one of the coldest climates in the G20. What the hell are the Dutch doing with all that energy?!?
Note: unit is MWh
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Well then, there goes my hope as far as hydrogen goes. Thanks very much! 
I wouldn’t give up on it completely. ‘Green hydrogen’ has some hope. If we can generate cheap enough wind/PV and store it effectively, even the 50% hit is viable. There is an odd disconnect in the energy field, where somehow 50% round trip is totally unacceptable, but 40% conversion efficiency for a natural gas turbine is just normal.
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Also, still better than an internal combustion engine, if I recall correctly, not even factoring in the transport of fuels.
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Hydrogen only makes sense if you use 100% renewables to convert water into hydrogen. That’s the only truly green solution. And if you do use renewables, the efficiency loss isn’t problematic. For my money using solar power to convert water into the periodic table’s most plentiful element is the long term solution. It’s more expensive than hydrocarbons, though, and it would take a lot of political commitment to do it.
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Even the cost part has another element to it - California is one of several jurisdictions that has to shed intermittent renewable generation because it doesn’t have adequate energy storage. Diverting that otherwise wasted generation into hydrogen production makes the RTE problem irrelevant.
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