68 replies to this topic

[yel327]

Anyone see the "big" news today about EV's and fuel efficiency standards?

 

I'm not opposed to clean air, more use of renewables and reduction of CO2 emissions. Better quality fuel too. All good/great things. However, this whole push for everything electrical now is beyond me. Why? Where do these idiots think the electricity is coming from at the moment? Yes, we are phasing out fossil fuel generation with Liddell in NSW shutting down right now and plans for others soon after. But to me the logical push should be to reduce peak electricity demand wherever possible for the next 5-10 years so renewables, gas fired generation and storage can catch up. Not try and increase the demand by moving everyone to electric cooking, heating, hot water and EV's where they get home at 6pm and plug the EV into the wall, turn on the heater or aircon and start cooking! That just moves the carbon emissions to the power stations.

 

Also, to me logic says there is a whole fleet of IC cars out there right now with carbon sunk into their construction. Rather than replacing them quickly, why not use them until they are no longer viable and then replace with EV's. Hopefully by then the energy storage solutions will be in place so everyone can have EV's. Remember by scrapping a good car now you are wasting the carbon it took to make it, expending carbon to scrap/recycle it plus you are using carbon to build the EV that replaces it - remembering that most of the power used to build a car now is still carbon based (this includes the carbon used to make the steel). Same argument applies to heaters, hot water, gas ovens/cooktops etc.

 

The reality is we don't even have the transmission and distribution infrastructure in place for mass change to EV's. Probably half the houses in Australia don't even have a power supply suitable for mass conversion to electric power - they probably only have a 63A single phase supply. Their cooktop, hot water and heating will all be gas, so moving all that to electric will be tough enough let alone adding on a 15A battery charger for one EV - what about the other car in the garage too?

 

How are multi-story unit blocks, especially those without car parking or only have one carpark for a two or three car family, going to charge the cars? The unit blocks won't have the power supply available to do it even if they could find somewhere for the chargers.

 

Where is the funding for roads going to come from? Once fossil fuels decline revenue from excise reduces. You can't put excise on power as it doesn't always get used by EV's or even come from the grid - plenty of people will use their own solar to charge their EV. You have no choice - there has to be a rego tax on EV's to replace the loss in fuel excise, so that makes them more expensive to own.

 

Or maybe I'm stupid and old and don't get it?

[S pack]

All good points, as usual, Byron.

I haven't heard or seen the big news today that you speak of but unless forced to switch to EV I will not be in any hurry to go down that route and I suspect there will be millions of other Aussies who either cannot afford to throw away their IC vehicles and/or just don't want an EV, yet. Our Fed Govt is just trying to appease the nut bag Greens, the Teals and be the big kid on the world stage.

 

A road tax on rego for an EV will probably be in the form of x amount per kilometre travelled. Your credit or debit card will be linked to your vehicle registration and your EV will automatically send a usage report every week or month to the Transport Dept so your payment can be automatically deducted from your card account.

Edited by S pack, 19 April 2023 - 04:02 PM.

[v6 torana]

There is currently a yearly klm travelled based EV tax in Victoria which is being challenged in The High Court...............You won't hear a word out of Boof Head Bowen about the Tax !!!

 

https://thedriven.io...different rate.

[hanra]

I imagine it’s the usual big city crowd coming up with all this stupidity.

Has anyone seen the movie Idiocracy. It’s a bit cringe. But we are certainly on the way to that outcome.

[claysummers]

Far as I'm concerned it is all about corporate profit in the guise of saving the planet. It's the latest ploy to suck in the mugs.

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[RallyRed]

Been out and about in central NSW. Don't thinkI have seen an EV charging station.
I have however come across 2 Teslas crawling along in 100km/h zones, at about 50km/h...maybe in "conserve mode" , desperate to get to the next thing with a GPO fitted to it.

[IanC]

When in our lives have batteries been good for the environment. If anything EV stands for environmental vandalism.

[RallyRed]

Liddell being turned off may provide a wakeup as to where we REALLY are with renewable replacement of baseload generation via coal. See how it goes....

[yel327]

I'm in no means against EV's. The simple fact is the battery tech isn't advanced enough yet for them to attract me personally for my drive car. When my wife's 2011 Lexus RX350 becomes uneconomical to own I'll replace it with an EV, but it'll be a Lexus or Toyota EV which none exist yet that will replace her car. They have a nice RX500E hybrid but not an EV. I fill her car up maybe once a month at Costco, that is how little it gets used. As an EV I could simply charge it at home on a weekend using solar, I have 13kW of solar and export heaps of it, and that would last well over a week for her. Its 12 years old now and only just hit 120,000kM. Only ever had normal wear parts like rotors, pads, oil, filter, tyres and a pair of rear shocks. It has the silky-smooth Toyota 2GR-FE 3.5L V6 and has all mod cons you expect today except for Carplay. Has another 10 years of life in it easily, and to scrap it now is just carbon wastage.

 

Liddell won't make any difference, the thing is like an EJ Holden kept running in Bali with fencing wire and Elephant dung. Not worth keeping. The thing is going to fail at some stage anyway. It is Eraring that will hurt, and I'd be betting money it will not be shut down in 2026. By then we'll have so much daytime renewables it won't be funny, the power will be free. It just has to be stored somewhere. Plus you need rotating machines to lock the grid to 50Hz, essentially to stabilise it. Hydrogen generation is probably 10+ years away in large scale. I reckon what needs to happen is large scale investment (via tax incentives) at large workplaces in EV charging made free for workers, or at least very cheap to be a no brainer. This way the excess renewable grid energy can be stored in EV's. They are big mobile batteries. So all those worker cars left parked at work during the day become an energy sponge.

[jd lj]

EV's are external combustion engines when charged with fossil fuel generated power. They're just moving the emissions upstream where the average person doesn't see it.
Then just think of how much of these cars are made from plastics, doesn't that require petrochemicals to produce? As Byron said there's no point scrapping existing cars still in good working order to then have to produce a new car to replace it.

It's just like the other night on the news (which is full of garbage and biased stories) they were talking about lab grown meat and how it's better for the environment, what a load of BS. How much emissions do you think a laboratory pumps out. Cows don't ruin the environment, people do. Then they think that people are dumb enough to eat that, eating any food that doesn't come from nature has never worked out well so far. Humans, the only species smart enough to make our own food but dumb enough to eat it.

As for the carbon dioxide plants need it to grow and the earths atmosphere has apparently had CO2 levels much higher than now in the past. Don't get me wrong, I think that lowering emissions is a good thing but there's also more to the story.

[hip6]

We're well beyond the movie "idiocracy"....the last 3 years proved that, the media and governments are owned by parasites that have zero interest in your welfare.

[Rockoz]

I'm in no means against EV's. The simple fact is the battery tech isn't advanced enough yet for them to attract me personally for my drive car. When my wife's 2011 Lexus RX350 becomes uneconomical to own I'll replace it with an EV, but it'll be a Lexus or Toyota EV which none exist yet that will replace her car. They have a nice RX500E hybrid but not an EV. I fill her car up maybe once a month at Costco, that is how little it gets used. As an EV I could simply charge it at home on a weekend using solar, I have 13kW of solar and export heaps of it, and that would last well over a week for her. Its 12 years old now and only just hit 120,000kM. Only ever had normal wear parts like rotors, pads, oil, filter, tyres and a pair of rear shocks. It has the silky-smooth Toyota 2GR-FE 3.5L V6 and has all mod cons you expect today except for Carplay. Has another 10 years of life in it easily, and to scrap it now is just carbon wastage.

 

Liddell won't make any difference, the thing is like an EJ Holden kept running in Bali with fencing wire and Elephant dung. Not worth keeping. The thing is going to fail at some stage anyway. It is Eraring that will hurt, and I'd be betting money it will not be shut down in 2026. By then we'll have so much daytime renewables it won't be funny, the power will be free. It just has to be stored somewhere. Plus you need rotating machines to lock the grid to 50Hz, essentially to stabilise it. Hydrogen generation is probably 10+ years away in large scale. I reckon what needs to happen is large scale investment (via tax incentives) at large workplaces in EV charging made free for workers, or at least very cheap to be a no brainer. This way the excess renewable grid energy can be stored in EV's. They are big mobile batteries. So all those worker cars left parked at work during the day become an energy sponge.

 

 

Apparently the key to NSW generation synching is a small power station around Adaminaby.

If the grid goes down, it is the first priority to get running again as everything else synchs to it.

I just cant get it into my head that we are heading for reliance on a power system that relies on time of day and weather conditions to operate.

Going through with all this stupidity will create even more people who will be disadvantaged.

We already have a group that can be called the working poor.

People with what would have once been considered good household incomes that are struggling to make ends meet.

So many people dont have the financial resources to buy more modern cars already.

How will they find the resources to buy EVs?

Im living in the Central West currently.

To access decent shopping and services, a 200km round trip is par for the course.

Its a different world to when I lived closer to stuff, and a 10km round trip was more usual.

Some of what is being thrust upon us seems to be to me nothing but madness.

 

Cheers

 

Rob

[yel327]

Yes and ironically, the whole push towards electric power is coming from the big cities and on the surface not a lot of thought is going into the bush. You see it at government and at corporate levels (eg banks closing country branches).

 

That concept of working poor is becoming real, almost looking like a communist State from a distance. Which in some ways we are heading towards with interest groups effectively running the government. In the past it was corporates, religious groups and big lobby groups (eg ClubsNSW) pulling the strings of the Libs and unions pulling the strings of Labor. But today to an outsider it looks like the Greens and minority groups have as much sway over Labor as unions used to.

 

In the end though, when we have more power than we need, electric everything including EV's will be the no brainer decision. What we have to remember is electric cars were around before IC vehicles. They were around when we had external combustion vehicles (steam powered). The problem has always been battery technology. Once that is solved you won't want an ICE. We'll look back at ICE's as we look back at steam vehicles and how archaic they were. IC vehicles will be a nostalgic thing. We need better batteries.

[claysummers]

Far as I'm concerned the greens and all the pollies for that matter are pretty much mug stooges of corpotate, though they don't know it.

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[Dr Terry]

I heard that in Europe there has been a bit of a 'push back' by several major manufacturers who say that they cannot comply with some of these ridiculous time contraints imposed by the EU for the compulsory intro of EVs.

 

Dr Terry

[V-SLR5000-P]

Since Australia no longer has a car industry l assume that all EVs arrive here by ship. Interesting then to note the growing reluctance of the insurance industry to insure ships transporting EVs due to the inherent fire risk. 

Consumers will no doubt carry the burden of higher insurance costs for delivery of EVs to Australia.

https://www.spglobal...nsport-69252443

[claysummers]

Electric ships? Fuel oil supposed to be one of the biggest baddies. All these woken ones buying shit offshore on eBay and flying for holidays to Byron etc. Hypocrites. Think we are all preaching to the converted on here.....

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[yel327]

Twiggy Forrest is converting his Company ships to Ammonia fuel, so that is possible. Lots of old ships should be scrapped now but there are still a lot of newer bunker oil and diesel examples around.

[ozyozyozy]

I read some motorsport magazines.
They have obviously had many articles regarding ev.
It seems the general consensus amongst these top level race engineers and teams is, EV is NOT the be all answer to it all, suits some applications.
They feel hybrid tech is prob the go to. There has also been a big call for synthetic low carbon fuels, which they are working on how to efficiently make to large scale production.

[4dabush]

Google a Canadian company called Carbon Engineering. Direct air capture producing pelletised CO2 that can then be turned into a liquid fuel that can power any liquid fuelled engine, petrol, diesel or aero.  Yep, it’s power hungry but as more cheap solar/wind gets introduced the cost to produce the fuel will come down.  I expect big corporates will keep it killed off. 

As for batteries, I think I said elsewhere, in 2019, the world was burying half a billion tonnes of lithium batteries.  Recycling lithium batteries is very hard and very expensive…only about 3% of the worlds lithium batteries get recycled.  I also read somewhere, to get to the target EV’s being proposed by most of the world by 2030, we need to extract about 100 times the rare earths that go into these batteries. To get 1 tonne of lithium requires about 5t of ore and 2 million litres of water(brine)…so we’re going to “fix the planet” by extracting 100 fold?  I think someone’s maths might be wrong. 

[yel327]

I had heard about that CO2 capture company. I'm working for one doing similar here in Australia, but making other products out of the process that can be sold and used.

 

Agree on Lithium batteries. As I've said many times, solve the batteries and EV's will be a no-brainer from a car choice perspective. But on top of that we need huge battery storage to provide power for the grid at night or when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, but luckily those batteries can take the form of pumped hydro or heat storage as well as a traditional battery. Until that time EV's will always be a big compromise. I do like the UK's system where the fleet of EV's parked at home can be used as home energy, so in essence you charge the car at work during the day and take the energy home with you which you can use or stabilise the grid with as well. I can only imagine what happens when someone with TikTok on their phone paired to the car sees their car get hacked and all sorts of funny things happen!

[LXCHEV]

Kind of related, but not directly...... I've been streaming "The Machines That Built America" series on SBS catchup. Great watching and really gets you thinking. EV is the current/next big thing as far as major evolution goes - so the companies who get this right will no doubt be stinking rich during the peak periods.

 

If you haven't watched the series - check it out, you'll learn a lot. For example, I never realised Henry Ford had also been a big player in aviation, competing with Boeing etc... he only jumped out due to a stock market crash. Just imagine if we were all flying around the skies in Fords!

[yel327]

The Bechtel story is interesting too, read about the Hoover Dam project where the Company cut its teeth.

 

That's a scary thought! Plane breaks down in the middle of the sky. Or rusts like an XA-XF commercial!

[IanC]

Battery tech is one thing. Tell me what they are going to make steel from without coal and cokeing coal. Electric ships, trucks, buildings and everything else is made from steel. And steel is made with coal. The largest developing country (China) seems to understand this. I believe there is around a million people in the air in aeroplanes. They are never going to be powered by batteries. Would anyone on this forum buy a second hand EV? I sure as hell wouldn't. Resale on ev's will be crap I reckon.

[yel327]

Green steel will come, it is possibly 10 years away. It uses Hydrogen rather than coke and coal. Same with all the reheat furnaces at the rolling mills, will switch to Hydrogen rather than Natural Gas. The technology isn't ready yet though. The Company I work for is working right now on the technology to capture the CO2 from steelmaking, cement, refractories, bricks, ammonia etc production to turn it into useful products. It is coming.

 

There are actually battery powered planes now. The industry is in its early stages but give it 10 years. Battery-powered airplanes on the way for domestic travel (thenewdaily.com.au)

 

I won't buy a used EV but I'd buy a wrecked one to convert an old Monaro, I reckon an old classic with an EV driveline will be a very cool thing in the next few years. I've been eyeing off this sort of thing:

 

Engine Swap: Company Makes Electric Motor Look Like A Small Block Chevy (motorbiscuit.com)

 

However that is for toy cars, there is still nothing available for me to buy to do what I need it to do. I need a vehicle that I can tow a 2.5-3.0tonne trainer, put cruise control on and stay at the speed limit. Use fuel that costs $160 a litre. Not towing but carrying 1/2 tonne, fill up at a cheap fuel place driving south from Lake Macquarie (eg Costco Marsden Park) and drive all the way to Melbourne without stopping for fuel. Of fill up here and drive to the Queensland border without stopping for fuel. Can't do any of that with an EV yet.