week 16: Joining the Numpty Club (oh, and a bit about hydrog
Enviado: 25 ago 2011, 14:21
week 16: Joining the Numpty Club (oh, and a bit about hydrogen fuel cells)
"Robert goes to the circus and joins the Numpty Club
By Robert Llewellyn on August 12, 2011 9:13 AM
The other night I drove my wife, daughter and her friend to see the circus. Lights, tents, costumes, music, candyfloss, horses, a goose, a hawk and a load of doves. It was Gifford’s Circus and if you get the chance, go.
Anyway, we went in the LEAF; four people, 35 miles there and back, many steep hills between my place and Minchinhampton Common in Gloucestershire. When we left home the battery wasn’t quite full. I did notice but thought nothing of it.We made it. Just.
On the return journey, for the last four miles there were no bars showing on the battery indicator. That’s right. None. It was late at night, it was dark, we were quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
At four miles it said we had three miles of range, at two miles it said we had three miles of range. When we got home and breathed a sigh of relief, it still said we had three miles range.
So, what in fact turned out to be a 78-mile drive, (there’s always detours when you’ve got teenagers on board) at night, in the summer, with four people on board was at the very limit of what the LEAF could do given the starting battery level. If the battery had been fully charged when we’d left, I think it would have been considerably less stressful.
Without doubt, if we lived somewhere flat, it wouldn’t have been in the least stressful. Minchinhampton Common is near Stroud and as any cyclist will tell you, Stroud is hill central.
If, while we’d been at the circus, I’d had the sense to ask Totty Gifford (the man who runs the circus) if we could have plugged into his massive diesel generator, it wouldn’t have been a problem but from a CO2 perspective, it would have been the dirtiest electricity we’d ever used so I didn’t ask.
So what does this tell us? Is it, as we have heard many times, that batteries just aren’t up to the job? Is hydrogen the future as Shell and the Top Gear chaps keep telling us?
Allow me to ponder that for a moment.
I’ve driven 5,600 miles in the LEAF. So far I haven’t run the batteries down so much the car has stopped moving. I’ve got close but I haven’t even reached the ‘turtle’ stage. This is when the car is limited to 25 mph to help get you a few more miles to somewhere you can charge.
For 3,500 of those miles (the last three months) we’ve had solar panels on the roof of my office. In that time the car has used 825 kWh of electricity... I’m tempted to get mathsy here and suggest that works out at 0.23 kWh per mile, but don’t quote me on that.
The solar panels have produced 790 kWh of that total, leaving a paltry 35 kWh of national grid coal burning, right-wing-blogger-annoying-filthy-electricity going into the batteries.
I just want to remind you that this is happening today. Yes, the cars are expensive; yes, the cost of the solar panels is a big investment; yes, only a few can afford it at the moment; yes, yes, yes to all those criticisms. But it is happening today. Not next year, ten years from now or some time in 2050. So is hydrogen the answer?
What’s the current cost of a hydrogen car? Well, there are none you can buy. The ones that have been built – the Honda FCX Clarity being a fine example – can only be leased because they cost so much. We are talking millions per car by the way.
Same argument exists with battery electric cars – obviously, they would get cheaper with mass production. Same arguments exist with the materials used, except the hydrogen fuel cell needs a lot more rare materials, massive reinforced high-pressure tanks, and a colossal and expensive infrastructure that simply does not exist.
Fuel cell cars also need batteries – the FCX Clarity has a huge lithium-ion battery pack under the rear passenger seat. So all the same arguments exist with fuel cell cars, just with a few more complications added.
Yes, you can re-fill a hydrogen tank in a few minutes… it’s actually about 12, much slower than filling a petrol tank. I drove the Honda Clarity in Germany last year, and at the moment it costs the same per kilometer as it would to drive a fairly economic petrol car.
But most important of all, where would the hydrogen come from? Currently the cheapest source is extracting it in the oil refining process, clearly why big oil corporations are interested.
It’s also a by-product of chlorine production, which is why the FCX Clarity is demonstrated in Germany – they make a lot of chlorine apparently.
The other better-known method is to pump electricity into water and split the hydrogen from the oxygen. The energy losses in doing this are enormous. It’s essentially 4 to 1; you put four times more energy into the water than you get out as hydrogen. You then have to pressurize and freeze the hydrogen, which uses yet more energy.
At the moment using hydrogen is even more inefficient than using petrol.
The tanks and pipework have to be of an incredibly high standard. The tank I filled in the FCX Clarity was pressurised to 500 bar; that’s 3,500 pounds per square inch (the average car tyre is 30 psi). The metal tank is reinforced with Kevlar or carbon-fibre to hold it together.
As I say this, I accept with optimism that many of these drawbacks can be overcome, I want hydrogen to work and I think it’s a great idea. I think it could work very well in ships, trains and maybe large trucks, diggers and earthmovers. I want companies and engineers to work on developing it. I want big oil companies to invest in it. It may be the future – I hope it is – but I feel very confident in saying it won’t be in my lifetime.
So, what about the infrastructure to re-charge electric cars when the numpty driving one goes to a circus in the middle of a field? There is probably never going to be a solution for such a person. He is, by definition, a numpty. With a Numpty Club membership badge."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... af-16.html
"Robert goes to the circus and joins the Numpty Club
By Robert Llewellyn on August 12, 2011 9:13 AM
The other night I drove my wife, daughter and her friend to see the circus. Lights, tents, costumes, music, candyfloss, horses, a goose, a hawk and a load of doves. It was Gifford’s Circus and if you get the chance, go.
Anyway, we went in the LEAF; four people, 35 miles there and back, many steep hills between my place and Minchinhampton Common in Gloucestershire. When we left home the battery wasn’t quite full. I did notice but thought nothing of it.We made it. Just.
On the return journey, for the last four miles there were no bars showing on the battery indicator. That’s right. None. It was late at night, it was dark, we were quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
At four miles it said we had three miles of range, at two miles it said we had three miles of range. When we got home and breathed a sigh of relief, it still said we had three miles range.
So, what in fact turned out to be a 78-mile drive, (there’s always detours when you’ve got teenagers on board) at night, in the summer, with four people on board was at the very limit of what the LEAF could do given the starting battery level. If the battery had been fully charged when we’d left, I think it would have been considerably less stressful.
Without doubt, if we lived somewhere flat, it wouldn’t have been in the least stressful. Minchinhampton Common is near Stroud and as any cyclist will tell you, Stroud is hill central.
If, while we’d been at the circus, I’d had the sense to ask Totty Gifford (the man who runs the circus) if we could have plugged into his massive diesel generator, it wouldn’t have been a problem but from a CO2 perspective, it would have been the dirtiest electricity we’d ever used so I didn’t ask.
So what does this tell us? Is it, as we have heard many times, that batteries just aren’t up to the job? Is hydrogen the future as Shell and the Top Gear chaps keep telling us?
Allow me to ponder that for a moment.
I’ve driven 5,600 miles in the LEAF. So far I haven’t run the batteries down so much the car has stopped moving. I’ve got close but I haven’t even reached the ‘turtle’ stage. This is when the car is limited to 25 mph to help get you a few more miles to somewhere you can charge.
For 3,500 of those miles (the last three months) we’ve had solar panels on the roof of my office. In that time the car has used 825 kWh of electricity... I’m tempted to get mathsy here and suggest that works out at 0.23 kWh per mile, but don’t quote me on that.
The solar panels have produced 790 kWh of that total, leaving a paltry 35 kWh of national grid coal burning, right-wing-blogger-annoying-filthy-electricity going into the batteries.
I just want to remind you that this is happening today. Yes, the cars are expensive; yes, the cost of the solar panels is a big investment; yes, only a few can afford it at the moment; yes, yes, yes to all those criticisms. But it is happening today. Not next year, ten years from now or some time in 2050. So is hydrogen the answer?
What’s the current cost of a hydrogen car? Well, there are none you can buy. The ones that have been built – the Honda FCX Clarity being a fine example – can only be leased because they cost so much. We are talking millions per car by the way.
Same argument exists with battery electric cars – obviously, they would get cheaper with mass production. Same arguments exist with the materials used, except the hydrogen fuel cell needs a lot more rare materials, massive reinforced high-pressure tanks, and a colossal and expensive infrastructure that simply does not exist.
Fuel cell cars also need batteries – the FCX Clarity has a huge lithium-ion battery pack under the rear passenger seat. So all the same arguments exist with fuel cell cars, just with a few more complications added.
Yes, you can re-fill a hydrogen tank in a few minutes… it’s actually about 12, much slower than filling a petrol tank. I drove the Honda Clarity in Germany last year, and at the moment it costs the same per kilometer as it would to drive a fairly economic petrol car.
But most important of all, where would the hydrogen come from? Currently the cheapest source is extracting it in the oil refining process, clearly why big oil corporations are interested.
It’s also a by-product of chlorine production, which is why the FCX Clarity is demonstrated in Germany – they make a lot of chlorine apparently.
The other better-known method is to pump electricity into water and split the hydrogen from the oxygen. The energy losses in doing this are enormous. It’s essentially 4 to 1; you put four times more energy into the water than you get out as hydrogen. You then have to pressurize and freeze the hydrogen, which uses yet more energy.
At the moment using hydrogen is even more inefficient than using petrol.
The tanks and pipework have to be of an incredibly high standard. The tank I filled in the FCX Clarity was pressurised to 500 bar; that’s 3,500 pounds per square inch (the average car tyre is 30 psi). The metal tank is reinforced with Kevlar or carbon-fibre to hold it together.
As I say this, I accept with optimism that many of these drawbacks can be overcome, I want hydrogen to work and I think it’s a great idea. I think it could work very well in ships, trains and maybe large trucks, diggers and earthmovers. I want companies and engineers to work on developing it. I want big oil companies to invest in it. It may be the future – I hope it is – but I feel very confident in saying it won’t be in my lifetime.
So, what about the infrastructure to re-charge electric cars when the numpty driving one goes to a circus in the middle of a field? There is probably never going to be a solution for such a person. He is, by definition, a numpty. With a Numpty Club membership badge."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... af-16.html