Commentaries
Now raising intellectual capital
The electric car is a technological cul-de-sac
The End Is Nigh is always an arresting headline, the end which is nigh now is the Age of Oil, following the deep thoughts of the boffins at Deutsche Bank.
They are forecasting a “game change” as a result of – wait for it – the electric car. Their thoughts are “unburdened by the conflicting forecasting agendas of government agencies, oil companies or auto makers”, so can roam the intellectual highways and byways.
They postulate a price spike to 175 dollars around 2016, followed by an “equilibrium” price around 100 dollars by 2030. The shock will be enough for the electric car to displace the conventional automobile, and OPEC will eventually be reduced to cutting prices to maintain its market share.
These projections are far enough into the future to ensure that nobody will remind Paul Sankey and his fellow authors of their words if they turn out to be hideously wrong.
Even at hundred-dollar oil, the electric car is a technological dead-end, and the battery is the roadblock. The technology is improving, but there is no sign of the “breakthrough” that might put energy storage capacity within an order of magnitude of the petrol tank. Nor is there a solution to the question of charging times – and the faster a battery is charged, the less efficient the process becomes.
The size of the problem can be simply illustrated: if a dozen cars are filling up simultaneously, the energy transfer (of fuel into the tanks) is equivalent to the output of a medium-sized power station.
Then there is the question of the cost of the exotic materials needed to squeeze more from batteries and electric motors. Rare earth elements, with unpronounceable names and mostly found in China, are crucial to modern technology, but electric and hybrid cars eat them wholesale.
UK government produces climate change mouse, fortunately
Yup, no doubt about it. The biggest threat the world faces today is international terrorism. Oh, sorry, no. The biggest threat the world faces today is from a pandemic of swine ‘flu. Nope, wrong again. The biggest threat, the moral issue of our time, is climate change. Ah, that’s more like it.
Please don’t call it global warming. The earth’s temperature has been a bitter disappointment to the climate pessimists over the last few years, because the planet has refused to follow the cook-until-done path they had mapped out when they started trying to scare us to death.
on Wednesday the UK government launched another displacement activity. To distract the population from the looming economic meltdown, it came up with legislative proposals designed to meet the self-imposed targets for reducing the amount of carbon Britain turns into carbon dioxide.
To say they are laughable rather overstates the humour content, but the proposals are an impressive cocktail of wishful thinking, trivial gestures and subsidised job creation. There is no realistic possibility of cutting Britain’s carbon burn by 40 percent by 2020. More to the point, the widespread misery which would result from trying to do so may turn out to be in vain.
So what’s Mili mi, the grandly-named Climate Change Secretary, actually proposing? Electric buses on the road “within two years” and new funding for electric cars. Well, golly gee. The world’s biggest carmakers, who know more about this subject than anyone else, are clearly struggling to make the economics work. Another bung from a struggling government is irrelevant.
Besides, the thermodynamics of electric cars is unconvincing. The fuel still has to be burnt, and the electricity transmitted to the car. To beat the overall thermal efficiency of the internal combustion engine this way is hard to do, and that only gets to the point of no increase in emissions.
Next come loans to reduce heat losses in houses, to be repaid through utility bills. Insulating the roof makes sense, although even here the payback is several years. Other measures are marginal, and for many householders the extra repayment on the bill will be more than the saving in energy for decades ahead. Perhaps the (additional) cost of adminstration is Mili’s method of creating jobs.
I have followed the climate change arguement closely for some years now and I have not yet read a supposed explanation from the alarmists as to what made the little ice age go away. I may have missed it ,of course.Could someone tell me what the theory is. Thanks.
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The Wall
Not so fast! The break-through has not been made for electric cars yet. However, further into the future, the Hydrogen car seems the most realistic bet.