Once of the best presentations I've ever seen

[Droogs]

Just took the tie to watch this as very interested in BEVs and this guy just draws you in an what he say is truly thought provoking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y916mxoio0E

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Wow!

The only thing missing from his talk is where the energy is going to come from to power all the electric vehicles. Other than that, really interesting stuff. Oil @$25 a barrel? Entirely possible, and the interesting thing with that is it leads to shortages, despite the low price. Big disruptions to the status quo over the next few years. Best not buy a new car just get.

 

[sunnybob]

Thats the one question never answered.
All the people who want to get rid of fossil fuel are the same people who want to get rid of nuclear power, and stop open mining for the rare earth elements to make the batteries with.

Solar power will not achieve whats required.

 

[RogerS]

Not had the time to watch this but am highly suspicious of all his slides with figures on as the quoted source for them is his own company ! RethinkX

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Some of his premises are reasonable: total lifetime cost for electric vehicles is lower, therefore fleets will invest heavily, because they will see the biggest gains. Competition will force others in the same field to do the same (couriers/local deliveries etc. would be first, you would think). The infrastructure is going to lag behind adoption, which may mean that these companies produce their own solar electricity (probably not in the UK, though). If your fuel costs go from X to zero plus maintenance of the solar panels, plus near zero interest on the debt to buy the panels, then it may be an even better solution. However, that's a LOT of solar panels required

It still comes back to the fact that worldwide we need to create a new nuclear power station's worth of energy output, every two days, every year until 2050 in order to be oil free by 2050. I don't see that happening at the moment, so soon it will need to be a nuclear power station or equivalent every single day. We really do use a phenomenal amount of energy, and oil is just outstanding at producing it.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Someone pointed the other day that if all trains were electric and all cars were electric, trains would only be able to run in the daytime as recharging car batteries would take the available electricity at night.
I also read that for the world to be carbon neutral by 2050 there needs to be somewhere three new nuclear power stations a DAY.

 

[MikeG.]

.......All the people who want to get rid of fossil fuel are the same people who want to get rid of nuclear power, and stop open mining for the rare earth elements to make the batteries with.........

It's not who makes the argument that counts, Bob, but the strength of the case.

 

[MikeG.]

..... the fact that worldwide we need to create a new nuclear power station's worth of energy output, every two days, every year until 2050..........

..........I also read that for the world to be carbon neutral by 2050 there needs to be somewhere three new nuclear power stations a DAY.

At least one of you has to be wrong. :wink:

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Maybe. Maybe not. He was referring to being oil free, I was referring to being carbon neutral. Both of us are only the messengers, anyway.

 

[Droogs]

Having been into the Green side of things for a very long time and being one of those that wants to get rid of oil but also one who argues for the cleanest energy source we have ie using instant sunshine in a box, the biggest, I found the most interesting part to be his order of importance of the technologies for convergence. Taking the fact that every new building in California must now be built with solar rooves it follows that (using his logic) that more US states and others will follow suite. I think therefore that there really must be one of these convergences about to happen vis vi battery technology. I read that the guy who invented the modern electric world (Prof Goodenough) has been working with Tesla for that last we while and has recently claimed to have made a new battery form that will out perform his last invention by around 200%

 

[Trainee neophyte]

..... the fact that worldwide we need to create a new nuclear power station's worth of energy output, every two days, every year until 2050..........

..........I also read that for the world to be carbon neutral by 2050 there needs to be somewhere three new nuclear power stations a DAY.

At least one of you has to be wrong. :wink:

A lot of this prognostication is questionable arithmetically, because the assumptions are iffy, but here are some fun facts:

Accommodating the 46,480 solar PV plants envisioned for the U.S. in the WWS vision would take up 650,720 square miles, almost 20% of the lower 48 states. This is close in size to the combined areas of Texas, California, Arizona, and Nevada. A 1000megawatt (MV) wind farm would use up to 360 square miles of land to produce the same amount of energy as a 1000MV nuclear plant.

To meet 8% of the U.K.’s energy needs, one would have to build 44,000 offshore wind turbines; these would have an area of 13,000 square miles, which would fill the entire 3000 km coastline of the U.K. with a strip 4 km wide.

To replace the 440 MW of U.S. generation expected to be retired over the next 25 years, it would take 29.3 billion solar PV panels and 4.4 million battery modules. The area covered by these panels would be equal to that of the state of New Jersey. To produce this many panels, it would take 929 years, assuming they could be built at the pace of one per second.

The PDF I copied from is here: https://www.friendsofscience.org/assets ... _Lyman.pdf

Oil is amazing stuff, and really hard to replace. Even more difficult than replacing oil used for transport is replacing oil in agriculture, both for the huge machinery, and much more importantly for fertilizer. Fingers crossed it doesn't run out soon.

 

[MikeG.]

........To meet 8% of the U.K.’s energy needs, one would have to build 44,000 offshore wind turbines; these would have an area of 13,000 square miles, which would fill the entire 3000 km coastline of the U.K. with a strip 4 km wide..........

Someone is plucking figures from the air. The above is twaddle. Wind already produces 18% of UK power needs.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

The only constant thing is the tide. For every other source the argument comes back to batteries - how much energy do turbines produce when there is no wind? How much energy does the sun produce at night?

 

[Terry - Somerset]

Well worth a view even though there were a few glib assumptions - eg:

- personal economic benefits depend on taxation policy
- no mention of charging infrastructures
- PVs mean cheap energy in Arizona but probably not in Birmingham (UK)
- etc

But it does bring home how disruptive technologies can very quickly overwhelm existing markets once they reach a critical tipping point.

So rather than assert that there are some somehow impossible barriers to change, any change if driven by the market can happen very quickly - denial and head in sand behaviours are not going to hold back the tides.

 

[Sheffield Tony]

........To meet 8% of the U.K.’s energy needs, one would have to build 44,000 offshore wind turbines; these would have an area of 13,000 square miles, which would fill the entire 3000 km coastline of the U.K. with a strip 4 km wide..........

Someone is plucking figures from the air. The above is twaddle. Wind already produces 18% of UK power needs.

For a bit of real-time reality:

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

I know it is windy at the moment, but at the time of writing wind is the biggest contributer at 34%, outstripping nuclear by more than a factor of 2.

 

[Droogs]

But it does bring home how disruptive technologies can very quickly overwhelm existing markets once they reach a critical tipping point.

So rather than assert that there are some somehow impossible barriers to change, any change if driven by the market can happen very quickly - denial and head in sand behaviours are not going to hold back the tides.

What amazed me was how small in % terms that tipping point can actually be. The main thing I have noticed with BEVs is that the manufacturers are trying to produced an all singing all dancing fandangled bit of kit with too much extra on top. MG currently have a car with 150ml range and under an hour charging speed for normal use situations. If they get that to 200/250 miles of range with the same spec for under £20K then the tipping point is reached and that is just months away really once they do the 2020 update in July/Aug

 

[Phil Pascoe]

It's windy at the moment, so the windmills around here won't be moving.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

........To meet 8% of the U.K.’s energy needs, one would have to build 44,000 offshore wind turbines; these would have an area of 13,000 square miles, which would fill the entire 3000 km coastline of the U.K. with a strip 4 km wide..........

Someone is plucking figures from the air. The above is twaddle. Wind already produces 18% of UK power needs.

My only possible defence is that I was actually building a wall this morning, and not really paying attention when I popped into the house to five minutes.

I wonder how ridiculous the rest of those numbers are?

So to prove to myself that I haven't been quoting some equally nonsensical numbers:

According to Wikipedia, ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_e ... onsumption) total world energy usage in 2017 was 113,009TerraWatt hours. 4% is already produced by nuclear power, and another 4% is renewable energy, so we need to find the other 92%. There are perhaps 437 nuclear power station's worldwide (numbers differ, depending on how small a reactor you include) producing 4% of the total power, therefore you would need an additional 10,051 power stations to produce the other 92% (437/4*92=10,051). We have 30 years until 2050, which is 10,950 days. If we start tomorrow, and design, build and commission one nuclear power station, (or solar/wind/other renewable with the equivalent output) every single day, then we will have two and a half years spare to iron out any wrinkles, delays and planning issues, before we hit our 2050 deadline. Something tells me we are not going to make it.

Feel free to disagree with my maths - I take agricultural techniques to pretty much everything I do, including arithmetic.

 

[MikeG.]

Well, the point is that we aren't going to be making up the difference with nuclear, so using that to imply that it's impossible to build new generation capacity to replace fossil fuel is misleading. There will be some, if not lots, of new nuclear generation, but renewables are starting to fly, and it is here, rather than with nuclear, that much of the additional capacity will come from. China, USA, and much of Europe are putting in enormous amounts of wind generation. We lead the world in off-shore wind power, and have a huge programme of additional generation coming along in the next few years. Economies of scale have driven the cost down enormously, and huge advances in the engineering has seen the end of gearboxes, the major cause of expense, failure and maintenance issues of the previous generations of turbines. I predict that we will see a series of major tidal engineering projects approved in the next decade, and again, the technology there has changed beyond recognition.....but most of the new schemes are going to be relatively small scale, and involve not much more than sitting a turbine on the sea bed in a suitable location.

 

[lurker]

Surprisingly nuclear doesn’t switch on and run all the time.
There are refuel outages and statutory outages (mot and service).
In an ideal world they run about nine months of the year.

So add a few more to your calculations