There's a review of the Renault Twizy Quadricycle in the latest AtoB.
Two seats (one in front of the other), 9.4bhp and 52mph top speed. They reckoned on an all in cost of 21p-27p per mile for people doing 9000 miles per year. Similar to many electric bikes.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Infrastructure
Plan for electric car charging points across Scotland
(45 posts)-
Posted 11 years ago #
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"Zawodny says that the most logical first application of LENR is the home reactor, which would produce heat and electricity for the home while charging the family electric car."
Posted 11 years ago # -
Another area is in transportation, with the light, portable reactors powering supersonic aircraft and flying cars without the danger or radiation. It could even be used to power a space plane capable of reaching orbit without stages or external fuel tanks.
Just as well physicists don't run transport policy. Instead, we leave it to ex-Marines...
Posted 11 years ago # -
Talking of home-generated power, has anyone else seen the house on Biggar Road at Fairmilehead?
It has had lots of lovely new PV panels installed - on a north facing roof!Posted 11 years ago # -
There was a proposal this week for a scheme for Glasgow to try and harvest the heat out of the various flooded mine workings under the suburbs to provide community heat.
The depth and extent of workings to the east of Edinburgh (particularly Newcraighall and Monktonhall) must be good for that sort of thing too.
Posted 11 years ago # -
I love all that talk about hypersonic aircraft and accessing anywhere in the world within an hour*...
What they don't tell you is that forcing your way through the atmosphere at Mach 7, or whatever, generates vast amounts of heat. 1000s of degrees C., and no way to dissipate it.
That is why they only fly for a few 10s of seconds, any more and they would melt.
* Krispy Kreme doughnut emporium excluded
Posted 11 years ago # -
Worth bearing in mind that not only can heat be pulled out from underground reservoirs but it can also be dumped there, so that all that wonderful surplus from summer month can be stashed away and only warm up the ground temperature by a degree or two.
For electric cars the answer has to be car sharing for cars mostly used on local trips and returning after use to the same car club bay, where the chargers would be located. Car clubs also offer the financial resources and facility for intensive use that can justify the greater purchase cost, and the structured regime for maintenance and renewal of batteries etc which are not guaranteed for a car in private ownership (lithium batteries, with their low internal resistance, can facilitate some spectacular fires both within the battery and in the attached circuits).
As eddie_h notes these 'initiatives' coming from the Scottish Government are only half thought through.
Posted 11 years ago # -
and efforts to shift 15 per cent of all city commutes from motor vehicles to bikes by 2020 – up from eight per cent currently – will continue to move ahead, with plans to increase the share of budgetary spend on safe cycling routes, storage areas and other schemes to seven per cent.
Something wrong with that article - no quote from Neil Greig?!
Posted 9 years ago # -
"Something wrong with that article"
8%
Posted 9 years ago # -
'Charity', 'forcing', 'UK'.
Lots of thick cables coming to pavements and streets near you then.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Posted 5 years ago #
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@IWRATS: Is it just me, or is it actually rather pathetic that someone who's spent thousands of pounds on a new leccy motah can't spend a few tens more to buy a safe extension cable to charge the blamed thing with?
I can't remember off the top of my head what the connectors that are used in caravan sites to provide "shore power" are called, but AFAIK they are left hooked up in pretty much all weathers. If caravan/motorhome users can shell out for the right gear, why can't "ordinary motorists"?
Someone living near me on Oxgangs Road has an EV and the "infrastructure" they have for charging it seems to be little more than a separate RCD-protected circuit and a weatherproof box for the outdoor socket. I'd have thought that any decent sparky should be able to put something like that in for ~1% of the purchase cost of the actual vehicle. (Then again, so many are bought on the never-never these days - including new-fangled financial tricks like PCP and PCH - that people probably look on them as a revenue item in their household budget, rather than a capital asset.)
Posted 5 years ago # -
Posted 5 years ago #
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"...the growth rate of licensed plug-in vehicles is outstripping the number of charging points available."
I'm not sure that's a bad thing and is certainly inevitable. Once there are sufficient charge points to service a steady growth no new charge points are required for a while.
I suspect the same statement has been true for ICEs for many years.
Posted 5 years ago #
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