CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
stickyFrom the Guardian Editorial, above:
"
Britain’s EV boom could run out of juice before it begins. The boss of the service station operator Moto, Ken McMeikan, warned this May that by 2030 “EV charging capacity will require an incredible twelve times as much energy as we currently use today”.
"
Does he mean 12 times as much energy as is currently used on EVs today? How is that incredible?
“Does he mean 12 times as much energy as is currently used on EVs today? How is that incredible?”
“
At the end of 2016 just 0.4% of all new vehicles registered were electric, by 2022 this had risen to 16.6% of new car registrations. A further 6.3% of all new cars registered were plug-in hybrids, making the total market share for new cars registered with a plug in 2022 22.9%.
“
https://www.zap-map.com/ev-stats/ev-market
So maybe 12 times as many cars as now.
Unclear how many extra chargers would be needed.
But
How much electricity will be needed for vans, lorries and buses?
Chargers are a problem if one doesn't have a charger at home or work. Not being able to take advantage of off-peak electricity will also slow uptake at least until used EV start to come down to used ICE prices. These are individuals problems and not really for the grid or govt to "fix"
Systematically though there is often too much supply so a large fleet of ev's on the grid able to take up power instead of turning off wind production will be a good thing. I've seen some stuff that said with the death of the UK's industry there is plenty of capacity for home use, the biggest problem is the supply is too far from the demand centers.
Not sure lorries will ever work fully BEV, a PEV might be the best compromise. Though there is a company in Australia working on hot swap-able battery packs for trucks which also can be used for grid scale storage so maybe if the EU formalise a standard that would work.
“
The Brexit trade deal should not be reopened just to satisfy demands from some sectors of the UK and EU motor industry concerned about looming tariffs on electric cars,
Thierry Breton, the influential European commissioner, has said. EU leaders have come under pressure to suspend 10% tariffs on electric car exports that are expected to begin in January under the Brexit treaty.
“
“
Lithium
Material World by Ed Conway
Episode 5 of 5
In the driest place on earth the eerie salt pools of the Atacama Desert, Chile may hold the key to our future. The lithium that swirls in the prehistoric water could be capable of storing the energy we need to power our world for generations to come.
'Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Our Future', written by Ed Conway, explores which materials we have relied upon to build civilisations and how we will use them to forge our future.
“
We've now ordered an electric car, so will happily update from time to time on experience.
I can say getting funding for it has been a bit of a journey. We decided to use the Goverenment funded Energy Saving Trust 0% interest loan, which makes a massive difference in the payment, or term of loan.
Was a no brainer from a financial perspective, however compared to applying for standard car finance, where you have an instant decision and money in a few hours after a few clicks, the process seems archaic.
After problems with the website that meant we couldn't submit the application for a week until it was sorted, and then the time taken for approval. We're now 10 days in. And apparantly it could be another 3 weeks before we see the cash, and the car we ordered 2 weeks ago.
Luckily the garage is prepared to hold the car - I guess most people are using this funding for EVs so they will be used to it. It's not felt like a smooth process.
On a vaguely related note I enquired about an air source heat pump, specifically with a view to getting funding.
(I think this was with Greener Energy Group, but could be wrong).
We fell down on not having 80%+ of windows double or secondary glazed.
Fair enough, however, if this is one of the criterion for getting a grant then I simply cannot find a reference to it by searching online. I would have thought that making this information readily available would only help with heat pump uptake.
(The other criteria for the grant were cavity wall insulation (we don't have cavity walls so that's considered a tick) and our loft space having been converted into living area. That's actually incorrect for our house, we have attic space; whether that was insulated or not (it is) they were not interested in. There may be other criteria but I was not allowed to progress beyond the window point).
Essentially a grant was denied because our house would "not be warm enough". That might be true, but could easily not be.
I suppose with millions of homes needing converted there is some sense of targetting the low hanging fruit first.
New Citroën Ami in Morningside. Mean driver with shades and passenger. 6kWh motor so 24 times more powerful than an e bike with 10 times more fuel.
Or enough energy to move a fraction of a Tesla!
Very short car
Sales of cars have been halted with immediate effect after four people died
@LaidBack:
New Citroën Ami in Morningside ... 6kWh motor so 24 times more powerful than an e bike
Tut tut, I would have thought you at least would know the difference between kWh and kW. (The same mistake that some Tufton Street stooge made when attempting to demonstrate that we can't afford net zero.)
Actually, this mistake is so common that I'm beginning to think that we should ban the use of kWh and mandate the use of MJ instead. kWh is a horrible chimera of a unit anyway, being a "Joule-per-second hour" i.e. time appears both in the numerator and the denominator. It's fairly straightforward to convert from one to the other: 1kWh is 3.6MJ.
Would a "Joule-per-second hour" not be a Wh rather than a kWh?
Citreon are surprisingly coy about telling you either the power of the motor or capacity of the battery. It doesn't even appear in their FAQ from what I can see.
Wikipedia does fill in the blanks though. It's a 5.5kWh (19.8MJ) battery with a 6kW motor. Top speed is restricted to a curious 28mph (45kph) and it only comes in left hand drive which I guess keeps the cost down.
I'm vaguely recalling a youtube video I saw like two years ago, but IIRC the speed limit has something to do with it being drivable in France under the same age/experience/license conditions as the kind of scooters teens can use or something like that? I might be mixing it up with one of the other "cool new micromobility device" videos I saw(of which the Ami is the only one that ever made it into the wild, alas).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification)
A suitably-qualified 14yo could drive it in France.
The citreon site makes a big deal about it being a quadricycle but googling suggests that in the UK it's weight (485kg) means that it is categorised as a car and you need to have a full driving licence to use it.
Although other sites say it's categorised as a light quadricycle so could be driven by a 16 year old with the right paperwork.
@ejstubbs
Yes my error with 6kWh - should be 6kW. I counted (know) that average legal e-bike motor is rated at 250w (although allowed peak outputs higher than that). So Four e-bikes = 1kW, hence my figure of 24 = 6kW.
As I've said in past the fuel which can be measured in kWh is quite high on some EVs. Our biggest e-cargo bike has 1kWh (Two Bosch PowerPack 500) with a range of 60 miles. The Ami has five of these to go not as far.
An electric bus has 470kWh with a range of 220 miles. (ie the fuel for 470 long range e-cargo bikes just in one vehicle!)
Whatever way we measure motor power and the fuel/battery required it's good to spark some debate. It all has to be generated somehow and vehicle weight will increase unless we see more basic designs trending. Human power with some assist seems efficient but of course we maybe have to factor in what we eat - although many people eat while they drive of course!
For Wh being common we have to blame Bosch and Shimano etc. Danish company Promovec rate batteries in Amp Hours Ah. Then we have to multiply the voltage x Ah for watt hour equivalent.
Watt-hours is best, Ah is annoying as you say because you have to compensate for different voltages.
Our Tern has about 1kWh of 36v battery, I use mostly 18v power tool batteries which are 96Wh each. A full load of tool batteries for strimming etc. is well over the 1kWh on the bike (unfortunately we can't power the bike with the surplus tool battery capacity)
So carrying a hundred kilo payload, the power to weight ratio of an Ami is 6,000/585 = 10.25W/kg
When I'm carrying the kids on the GSD, our power to weight ratio is 250/185= 1.3W/kg
Ami must be pretty rapid away from the lights! Although a Tesla model 3 performance has 175W/kg so I suppose it's all relative...
@Laidback:
For Wh being common we have to blame Bosch and Shimano etc.
I think it predates that, back to when energy companies switched from British Thermal Units to kWh. At least BTUs didn't have such an easily confused abbreviation, though very few people knew how much energy a BTU actually was e.g. in terms of Joules (It's actually a bit more than 1kJ, to a rough approximation). Probably all because of that pesky Common Market, as it was in those days.
I bought an LED replacement for an ageing fluorescent tube today. It is F rated for energy efficiency (the ratings go from A upwards through the alphabet these days, i.e. the reverse of what they were until quite recently). I looked on the packaging for the actual wattage of the thing and finally found "22kWh per 1000 hours" - in other words, 22W. Beats me why they couldn't just have said that. Still, it's a lot better than the old 68W tube it replaced.
Danish company Promovec rate batteries in Amp Hours Ah. Then we have to multiply the voltage x Ah for watt hour equivalent.
Ah works OK-ish for single cells such as AA NiMHs and the pretty common 18650 rechargeable Lithium cells, because you know the voltage of the cell - it's defined by the chemistry. I can well see that it would be a pain for packaged batteries* because you don't necessarily know how many cells are inside (though you could probably make an educated guess).
* Back in my school days I was taught that a battery consists of multiple electrochemical cells. However, in reality more or less everyone calls anything with a + and - terminal on it a battery, even though many common batteries such as the AA and AAA are actually single cells. (I think Wikipedia fudges the issue somewhat by saying that a battery consists of "one or more electrical cells"...)
@ejstubbs
22kWh per 1000 hours" - in other words, 22W.
:-)
Probably thought 22W sounded too little for its physical size!
The 1.5m long tube has the same wattage as the GLS LED bulbs we have in our ceiling pendants, which replaced 100W incandescent bulbs. The tube is rated at 2300 lumens vs 1500 for the GLS. Hmm.
It's amazing just how much power we were using before for lighting. When I moved house, the lounge had three spotlights mounted in the corners of the ceiling, very 1970s. Each had a 150W bulb! The amount of heat that came off them was as impressive as the amount of light. Fortunately the circuit was on a dimmer.
I replaced two of them with clusters each of three GU10 dimmable LEDs, and removed the other one. So the room doesn't use more than 60W total. But day to day, I don't need anything more than two 2W LED table lamps.
The garage is almost all LED but not quite. I replaced a T8 tube with a LED batten, but it's not as bright. I still have to find a decent replacement for the five foot long, 80W fluorescent tube.
When we rewired we put various LED batten lights in a few places. The garage has 2 28W 5 foot battens and they produce a surplus of light.
Can comment that the government funded EST loan is most definitely not the way to go!!! 7 weeks after first applying they have finally sent some money. Not the right amount of money, but none the less some money. Wonder how long it will take for the error to be corrected, 1 week, 10 weeks? Who knows.
Of course on balance you can't beat 0% funding on an electric car, but my word what a journey of incompetence it has been to get here.
@Baldcyclist - yeah, we got an EST loan to help with replacing our draughty old single glazed windows. The amount of bureaucracy, duplication of work, poor communication, and general incompetence was something to behold.
We eventually got the cash about two months after we paid the final bill. Fortunately for us, we had savings we could use to cover this, but I imagine many people would not.
They emailed me a few weeks later, stating that I had to complete a feedback survey as a condition of the loan. So I told them what I thought...
The bike ones must be run by a different department then, because mine went fine. Took a few weeks, but I just didn't buy the bike until the money came through - I thought that was how all their loans worked?
@Yodhrin - that would be the obvious way to do it. For the scheme I used, you could only "claim" the cash once the work was complete. The claim process involved a great deal of form filling, telephone calls to follow up on your form filling, sending forms back and forth for a seeming endless round of form signing. Then radio silence for a few weeks, prodding via email and phone and then the cash eventually turns up.
To be clear - the claim process is separate from getting the loan, that had all been agreed months before.
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