Posts by John Robson 5250 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2008
Yield must be awful - I'd love to get a few A3/A2 displays - heck, if they were reasonably borderless I could patch them together with a raspi behind each one.
But they are multiple thousands of pounds each...
Digital signage is such an obvious use case, and doesn't require high refresh rates - doesn't necessarily need colour (though that could be a nice to have).
But if you get higher temperatures you can probably start to use the existing turbines in coal plants... and since the tech allows it from most of the planet there's a good chance they can do this at existing sites...
That's not a benefit to be overlooked... just imagine if all our dirty plants could be powered by steam from an FDH (freaking deep hole).
>>Well, they're dense, not necessarily flexible, but they're also terrible in many ways - their usage is highly inefficient.
>You continue to make assumptions and extrapolate from your own experience. Really, scaling up the current EV infrastrucure to that needed for the millions of vehicles in modern countries will bankrupt us and that's without the subdsidies. Oh, and parked cars are a great example of underused assets…
Not really all that many assumptions - they're dense but using that energy is highly wasteful, that's just the physics of the matter.
I don't see what infrastructure is going to bankrupt us, the grid is already well developed, and can carry alot of energy around the country (and further).
Parked cars are indeed massively underused assets, but you know what a parked EV can be? Part of a distributed grid scale battery (i.e. not unused).
Hydrocarbons are seriously inefficient, even in "good" thermal engines.
Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store and transport (though there are some interesting ideas in progress which could seriously change that). It probably will have a role to play for HGV sized vehicles (which can relatively easily afford the additional space and complexity) - but I don't see it as a significant contributor to our addiction to cars.
Things like Al/Air batteries (which have a "charge cycle" efficiency comparable with an ICE) look morel likely to be a useful range extender device for cars - they should be relatively cheap to implement (since it's just another power source in the HV electrical system).
"Dirtier" fuels (such as methane) exist, and are easier to store/transport, but I'm not aware of any really decent commercially viable cell designs yet.
"Commuting is likely to be several tens of miles each way."
I know there will be areas with longer than usual commutes, but the typical commute in this country is much less than ten miles (surveys suggest 75% of people have a commute under ten miles, and many of those over 10 miles will be taking the train).
"good luck getting most workplaces to install an adequate number of chargers"
Should be a requirement on any new site, and retrofitting should be strongly encouraged (and yes I do mean than it should be financially encouraged). It's really not that hard.
Rather than benefits to bricks, maybe a "right to install chargers" should be added.
"getting staff to be responsible about sharing them"
You must work with a complete bunch of imbeciles if you don't think that you'll be able to share with colleagues.
Yeah - people understand this... but house price increases have far exceeded wage increases for decades.
Rental also makes you much more mobile, which is a benefit to many since there are few "jobs for life" any more...
If you buy and then move house then you pay about £5k for the privilege:
- nearly £4k in tax (stamp duty on the median house in the UK is £3750)
- about £1k in fees (conveyancing and searches cost ~850 - 1500 first site I found)
It doesn't take very many moves before you've cost yourself more than you could hope to have paid off in terms of the mortgage in the first decade - and that's important because that's probably the decade when a) money is tightest and b) you are likely to move... training, new jobs, life changes, possibly moving in with a partner, need more space than a one bed flat... each of those changes potentially costs you £5k
No - you don't want a fuel station model for electric charging.
Because fuel and electrons are fundamentally different. You don't want or need the same infrastructure.
You want a reasonable number of ultra fast "hubs" (as they seem to be calling them) on main routes (motorways essentially) where there are maybe 25 ultra rapid chargers (350kW) and 25 merely rapid (150kW) - these are great for long journeys, with massive grid connections, and sufficient capacity to handle high throughput.
You also want at least a few of the same levels of charger at most service stations in between (because not everyone will be passing a hub on their journey, and you might want to top off just before you turn off).
Then you want destination chargers *everywhere*
So on your holiday you go to the beach, and charge whilst you're there, you go to a restaurant and charge whilst you're there, if you're in a hotel then you charge whilst you're there. You go to a museum, a concert, a show, an activity centre, a theme park, any tourist attraction at all... you charge whilst you're there.
You don't need a handful of petrol stations in every town if you have destination chargers everywhere. You might have a few 50kW chargers at supermarkets etc... but they're not what you would be using outside of "emergencies".
And your issue is... that you need lots of chargers?
That's not a significant issue.
And given that they're at a workplace... where the car will be for ~8 hours at a time, and that the average car does 20m/day they'll need to supply ~7kWh a day (got to build up some spare for the weekends) so 900W.
Minimal charge speed according to the spec is 1400W, so let's use that and just stagger the cars through the day.
Or of course you could not supply 100% of spaces, and have a scheduled system in place. We used to go and move vehicles around the car park for people quite frequently twenty years ago - wasn't hard then, and could be done easily now.
7kW will provide you with more than week's driving each day, so you only need 20% of the spaces to have a charger, less any for those who can charge elsewhere...
No off road parking isn't necessarily an issue either - kerb side charging is nearly as easy as workplace charging. Simple RFID tag to allow the user to be identified would work well in either scenario.
Oh I forgot, you're in a rural area with exclusively terraced housing, no parking anywhere, and everyone commutes at least a hundred miles each way.
Pontificate in whatever units you like...
7.5kW is closer to 30 miles (my running assumption for a reasonably achievable car efficiency is 4m/kWh, if I can get that in an MG ZS then it's widely achievable).
That same gallon contains over 33 kWh of energy available through combustion.
UK average (RAC 2020) is just under 40 mpg, so that's ~1.2 m/kWh (using a heavily refined fuel).
Though you could reasonably expect a more modern small vehicle to get 50 or 60 mpg, as high as 1.5-1.8m/kWh (of course a more modern, smaller, EV will also do better than 4m/kWh).
"The approvals process and lawsuits would likely be exactly the same as what it takes for a big power plant."
It really shouldn't be, and that's a legal process not a practical limitation. It will take political will, which seems utterly lacking at the moment.
I still want to see it looked at properly: ~100 motorway services, and ~300 off major A roads... Not all of them will be suitable, but many will be.
The advantages of the micro reactors, even over and above SMRs, is that their small size directly benefits their safety.
We know how these things operate, we've been building them into warships for decades, and they are particularly harsh environments. We don't have to make them particularly silent, or particularly small, or particularly long duration between refuelings, which keeps adding up to safer...
Just below your quoted line:
"Hopefully the charging speeds supported by the basic models of cars will increase over time - there has been little point in putting in chargers over 100kW when most vehicles couldn't take more than 50, but there is a real push in the industry for 300kW+ sustained charging."
I wonder if manufacturers will start offering different charge speeds for different tiers of each model?
= Pick battery size
= Pick DC max rate
= Pick alloys
"DC fast charging stations often incorporate power sharing that matches what power service is supplied. One car could get 350kW, but if another plugs in at the same time, each car will get half and so on if the station can only support up to 350kW of power delivery."
Most are 350kW each - no power sharing between chargers.
There are some dual capable units, but they are very much in the minority.
300kW can be sustained for a reasonable while, and this article was specifically about a battery technology which would allow for higher sustained rates - i.e. pull that 350kW for as long as you can.
"Your maths is still off as you asset that charging the car is faster than filling the tank"
In the last month I've spent under a minute charging my car - I asserted that to do that milage in an ICE vehicle would have taken longer at the pump.
You see what matters is the time it takes *me* - and whilst I am asleep the car gets charged without me having to be there.
I also said that the time spent DC charging can, and should, be very similar to a comfort/safety stop anyway. At the point where you aren't finished going to the loo before the car has charged then it again hasn't cost you any time at all. I am for the moment assuming that you don't wee into a bottle whilst driving along the motorway, and am assuming that you take regular stops as per standard advice (it's been in the highway code for many years).
300kW+ chargers are not going to be home use, they won't be at workplaces either. They'll be the equivalent of motorway services. And they have beefy grid connections, and install beefier connections as needed.
I'd like to see microreactors at most service stations - they're already well connected to the grid to either top up needs or to export, they're mostly far enough away from populations to get around the nimby crowd, they have a ready use for much of the waste heat (the service station buildings) and it would allow them to be net exporters of power - even with a bank of fifty or a hundred 350kW chargers.
"I routinely see lines of cars waiting to fill up at petrol stations"
So it doesn't take you only three minutes to fill up? It takes some multiple of "three minutes + however long the person in front you takes to pay, and then get back into their vehicle, adjust whatever it is some drivers seem to adjust when they have filled up with fuel and then move on".
I haven't queued to charge all year, even on the ?four? occasions I've needed DC charging (two journeys).
"But it's also nonsense to play hydrocarbons against electrics as they are undoubtedly a much better form (energy density, flexibility) than batteries."
Well, they're dense, not necessarily flexible, but they're also terrible in many ways - their usage is highly inefficient. So much so that if I burned them in a power station I'd get more miles out of my EV (after all transmission losses are accounted for) than you would burning them directly. They're also pushing durty, smelly, pollutants into highly populated areas as well as being noisy.
Using electricity, via batteries, is actually a win on all counts. You get more miles to the gallon than you would with direct burning, you get much lower local pollution. And since much of our energy is actually renewable (or nuclear) on the grid you end up with lower global pollution as well. Yes - there is a cost of mining minerals, but there is also a massive cost in pumping and moving oil.
EVs also have the capacity to be an excellent contributor to grid demand balancing.
An EV battery is typically on the order of 50kWh... we should be making EVSE equipment that can charge and discharge that battery - even if only at 7kW (i.e. through a 32A breaker) - to balance load throughout the day. Most cars spend most of their time parked - so you select a charge you don't want to dip below and allow your vehicle to supply your house with power during the day (24 hours of a typical house is only 20% of the 50kW battery) leaving you with plenty of range for daily driving, and it can charge when demand is lower than potential supply.
This will need the smart grid to be really smart, telling my car/house/EVSE when it's good to charge my battery rather than discharging it on a really granular scale - probably using a financial incentive to make it worthwhile, like the octopus Agile tariff.
One person doing this doesn't matter, but hundreds of thousands of vehicles doing it *will* make a significant difference - it's distributed grid scale storage.
A tank fills in probably about three minutes, and I already pointed out that that doesn't need to happen on every comfort/safety break - no serious errors in the maths there.
You can support plenty of 300+kW chargers on the grid, they're already being installed. In fact they are often being installed with their own demand balancing batteries to mitigate exactly the issue you are hunting for. It's almost as if the engineers and designers of these systems have managed to think about these things.
Charging takes less time than pouring liquid fuels for the vast majority of the year, and is close to comparable for the occasional long journey.
Most of the year you charge whilst doing something else (sleeping, working, shopping, whatever) - so it takes a handful of seconds to plug in and unplug - far better than liquid fuels, since you never even have to go anywhere special to charge).
On a long journey you can* DC charge at better than 300kW (charging low to ~80% with a warm battery) which is enough to get you the next two hours (140 miles at 4mkWh) in under 7 minutes. And that's just about enough time to visit the loo, probably not long enough to grab another coffee.
Filling a tank with fuel takes a few minutes, and you need to be supervising the process, then you might also need to pay in the booth (which is a whole different advantage), then you need to go and get that coffee.
Of course you also don't need to fill with fuel each time you stop for a comfort/safety break - but that doesn't really affect the time taken for those breaks.
* Depending on the car, but more and more chargers are 350kW rated.
So the question is - do I pay extra for the car to get the fastest possible charge times a few times a year, or am I happy to make the rare long journeys a little more leisurely, and have a slightly more substantial break - we take a picnic lunch for the only journey we regularly (a few times a year) do that needs DC charging. So again, the car is charging whilst we are doing something else.
Hopefully the charging speeds supported by the basic models of cars will increase over time - there has been little point in putting in chargers over 100kW when most vehicles couldn't take more than 50, but there is a real push in the industry for 300kW+ sustained charging.
"Begin to see the problem yet?"
Your problem is that there is a 30 mile journey you do without a charger?
That's really not a problem in any real sense of the word. Would you go there with only 20 miles remaining on your ICE range indicator? No, you'd top up the tank before you hit that section of road... so why is an EV any different.
Yes - they keep it at their house.
Safe enough for our purposes.
To be fair even having just a copy in the charity safe would likely be good enough - the likelihood of both me (and all my cloud systems) being made unavailable at the same time as the church safe, but *not* the secretary's house is... vanishingly small.
Good planning on behalf of the office staff... how much was triggered by their poorly condition is unknown.
Currently have two copies of the password manager master password printed out, one kept with the charity secretary, the other in the charity safe.. That means at least two buildings, and anything devastating enough to take both of those out is probably beyond reasonable scope.
Now name a car that will do the same for those who can't do their own maintenance.
What you actually need for that scenario is either a sane vehicle rental scheme, or preferably decent public transport.
Of course you could also ask to name an ev that is twenty years old that's from a cheap model in the first place...
The EV second hand market isn't yet mature... but that's ok. the ICE second hand market won't disappear the instant the new cars stop being sold.
What EV are you looking at with a 50 mile range?
The Smart EQ is bascially the only vehicle currently around with that low a range.
Even the eUp is 125 miles
"Until EVs can even attempt to match what ICEs can do, one should be cautious about outright banning them."
Newsflash - they already can... even on extremely long journeys they are already capable of making less difference to journey time than the normal variation of traffic.
Until your car can get up steps as well as my horse I won't even consider what I might be missing.
1 - And when everyone wants to park outside their house at least once a week I'll bet you get an evening vehicle shuffle. You might even meet a neighbour.
Or maybe you could hook up to each other's EVSE and have a cross charging arrangement (plenty of companies will help with that).
2 - 122 cars and 10 lamposts.. That's a trivial 12 day rotation - but I don't think most lampposts are sufficiently equipped at the moment. Not too hard to pull an extra cable to charge two off each post - that's now a 6 day rotation (and assumes that none of them can charge during the day or anywhere else)
3 - If the bloody national grid don't see an issue then why does everyone else. We could literally burn the petrol in a power station and get more vehicle miles out of it that ICE vehicles do.
4 - 17 miles - that's only a fraction further than my cycle commute, which was under 40 minutes on a good day, and 45 on a bad day. If you start cycling then you get fit, it's not the other way round (though 17 miles is a fairly steep starting curve. I'd strongly suggest e-assist for a beginner though.
5 - Or you could move house, or (more realistically) you could stop making excuses and start trying to find solutions. You're as bad as the bloody "it''ll never work, it doesn't run on oats" brigade.
Again - it's not the cycling that's the problem, but the attitude.
Ah the "oh but the battery won't last"
Really? Batteries in EVs last substantially longer than you might expect. Tesla batteries (the easiest to find figures for) can easily do 250 thousand miles, and then get reused in grid storage.
The real kicker... replacing a battery pack is fairly easy, or even just a dodgy battery module, so you get another 250k miles...
Yes, they degrade over time, guess what, so does an infernal combustion engine.
Jalopnik got hold of the service records for a 400k+ mile Tesla a couple of years ago, and it had racked up... $29k, that's 7 cents a mile.
I'll give you a hint, that's about half of the saving you make by driving on electrons.
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