Hybrid Electric Vehicles

[lenaitch]

I mentioned this turn of events to a particularly green relative in Edmonton. The response was the NIMBYism can't be allowed to stop progress. Somebody has to suffer. Not Edmonton apparently.

Like most cities, I wonder how many wind turbines, or square miles of grid-level solar or, for that matter, acres of landfill, Edmonton has within its own borders.

 

[YZT580]

Similar response with respect to windmills. The Pincher Creek area used to be known as "Where the mountains meet the prairies". When I moved to Southern Alberta the first time in 1980 I thought I had truly found paradise. Now it looks like an oversized substation with the entire region criss-crossed with high tension power lines, pylons and turbines.

I mentioned this turn of events to a particularly green relative in Edmonton. The response was the NIMBYism can't be allowed to stop progress. Somebody has to suffer. Not Edmonton apparently.

there was a beautiful photo out years ago of a CF104 silhouetted against a castle in Germany on a low level training exercise. Wouldn't be possible now without running into a windmill. Every peak in Europe is covered with them and it is ugly

 

[YZT580]

Like most cities, I wonder how many wind turbines, or square miles of grid-level solar or, for that matter, acres of landfill, Edmonton has within its own borders.

while you are wondering, at least in Ontario, it seems that most windmill projects are in conservative and not liberal ridings.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I like to remind the EV virtue signalers in our network that the reason we continue to build gigantic earth dams, flooding thousands of acres of farmland etc, is partly to keep up with EV demand.

But because those nasty old dams are a thousand klicks from here they don’t seem to care much.

I disagree. The main benefit of dams is to kick in the teeth, a little bit, of the eco-purists who resent the loss of so much as a hectare of farmland. Their tears nourish the garden of my soul.

 

[Good2Golf]

Dude, they’re suffering enough just because: Edmonton

I think the City of Champions’ suffering is more attributable to not being champions for quite a while…

 

[daftandbarmy]

I think the City of Champions’ suffering is more attributable to not being champions for quite a while…

Aw c'mon... the Elks finally won one

Elks weather the storm, finally taste victory against struggling Tiger-Cats

After one of the more embarrassing weeks in the Edmonton Elks' long and storied history, the team actually won a game — in fittingly bizarre fashion — on Thursday night against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

www.sportsnet.ca

 

[GR66]

Dude, they’re suffering enough just because: Edmonton

Hope you're not suggesting that Edmonton is a "Podunk" city!

 

[daftandbarmy]

Hope you're not suggesting that Edmonton is a "Podunk" city!

More like a 'Bohunk' city

 

[Kirkhill]

More like a 'Bohunk' city

You mean Admonchuk?

 

[Brad Sallows]

Heh...anyone remember the furor after the CFL game (might have even been a Grey Cup) during which "Live from Edmonchuk" was broadcast?

 

[Fishbone Jones]

while you are wondering, at least in Ontario, it seems that most windmill projects are in conservative and not liberal ridings.

Because that's where Butts, McGuinty and Wynne put them. Heaven forbid they blight liberal ridings with them.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I think the City of Champions’ suffering is more attributable to not being champions for quite a while…

It requires more flagellation on Edmonton's part.

 

[Kirkhill]

Net Zero 2050 is Canadian law as well

Net-Zero Emissions by 2050 - Canada.ca

In late 2019, Canada announced it would begin work to develop a plan to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the decades ahead.

www.canada.ca

Fortunately in Canada, no parliament can bind another. Laws can be changed.

The electric car debacle shows the top-down economics of net zero don’t add up

Fundamentals of supply and demand are ignored by Britain’s ‘cart before the horse’ approach

www.telegraph.co.uk

The electric car debacle shows the top-down economics of net zero don’t add up​

Fundamentals of supply and demand are ignored by Britain’s ‘cart before the horse’ approach
BEN MARLOW
CHIEF CITY COMMENTATOR
1 September 2023 • 6:00am

Sadiq Khan’s Ulez scheme is the epitome of the flawed thinking that underpins much of Britain’s net zero planning CREDIT: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire

Sadiq Khan’s controversial Ultra-Low Emissions Zone scheme for London was supposed to put the rocket boosters under electric car demand.
With the Mayor pressing ahead with a highly contentious scheme that forces non-compliant petrol and diesel car drivers to pay an eye-watering £12.50 a day to drive into the capital, the expectation was that hundreds of thousands of motorists would rush out to their nearest forecourt and snap up an electric version, triggering an explosion in sales of Nissan Leafs, Teslas and other battery-powered models.
There was a spike in registrations of electric vehicles in July but otherwise the electric car boom that politicians, manufacturers, and campaigners insist is around the corner, remains something of a myth.
True, sales are steadily increasing but not in the vast numbers that proponents of electrification anticipated or would like to see.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the car industry has misjudged the scale of demand quite badly. Vertu, which is one of Britain’s biggest car dealerships, has become the latest big name to admit that the sector is already suffering from a dramatic oversupply of battery-powered vehicles.
Indeed supply is outstripping demand to such an extent, that prices are tumbling rapidly.
The warning follows the extraordinary decision of German car titan Volkswagen in July to halt electric vehicle production at its sprawling Emden factory in north-west Germany and lay off a fifth of its 1,500 employees after sales of electric models fell 30pc short of forecasts.
Unwanted electric cars are piling up on American forecourts too leaving some dealers to refuse further deliveries until the backlog has eased.
One hopes politicians the world over are paying attention because what we are witnessing is another example of how the top-down economics of net zero increasingly don’t stack up: with the introduction of an entirely arbitrary 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars, the Government is forcing manufacturers to churn out millions of vehicles, regardless of whether the market actually exists or not.
The deadline should be scrapped without further ado. This “cart before the horse” approach of trying to stimulate demand by creating supply is the wrong way round and almost never works in business.
Start-up Britishvolt tried something similar, promising to build a giant battery factory in Blythe, on the Northumbrian coast that would churn out enough batteries every year to power 300,000 cars.
Yet there was an even bigger flaw at the heart of its plans: it had failed to secure a single order – a situation that hadn’t changed by the time it ran out of money at the start of the year.
It’s hard to fault the intentions of the great net-zero crusade – a greener planet is something everyone should want to see. But far too much of it is built on hope rather than reality.

The Government’s policy on wind energy has proved to be similarly divorced from fact. The Contracts for Difference scheme, which guarantees a fixed price for the electricity that is produced for 15 years, is an effective incentive during more benign times but when overheads are surging, as they are now, it quickly becomes an impediment to progress.
With ministers showing little willingness to bend on prices in the face of rampant cost increases, major projects are being ruthlessly abandoned.
The biggest setback has come off the Norfolk coast after Vattenfall announced it would shut down construction of its Boreas wind farm. The 1.4 gigawatt development was set to power around 1.5m homes but the Swedish energy outfit insists a 40pc surge in costs, driven by inflation, supply issues and rising wages means it is no longer viable.
Without more generous state subsidies others will surely follow suit, shattering Britain’s stated ambitions to nearly quadruple offshore wind capacity from 14GW currently to 50GW by the end of the decade.


Yet perhaps nothing underlines the Alice in Wonderland disconnection of ministers more than the campaign to force the population to green their homes with heat pumps.
Even a ban on the sale of new oil boilers from 2026 has failed to convince people to make the shift largely because the cost of converting your home can be huge, so too the disruption and upheaval from having one installed, while much of the technology suffers from several major flaws.

It might explain why, in spite of a Government scheme that pays bungs of between £5,000 and £6,000 per household, less than 14,000 vouchers have been claimed since it was launched in May last year.


Naïve politicians aren’t the only ones. Virtuous investors have wasted huge sums on other ‘green’ innovations such as fake meat that have turned out to be busts.
Perhaps the venture capital industry has got better at picking winners, though that seems doubtful. At one stage it could hardly have been worse.


A study by the American academic Ben Gaddy in 2016 found that of the $25bn ploughed into so-called “clean-tech” ventures, 90pc were abject failures, and close to all of them could be considered poor investments.


Here in the UK, the problem is compounded by our willingness to remain silent as more productive hi-tech industries that Britain should be building its future on are auctioned off to the highest bidders.


The takeovers in quick succession of Cambridge-based biotech firm Abcam by an American rival and of Staffordshire drug IT specialist Instem by French private equity make a mockery of our ambition to be a life-sciences powerhouse. This country’s help-yourself attitude to opportunistic foreign raiders has to end.
Equally, perhaps the time has come to accept that the economics of net zero are more fantasy than reality.

 

[Kirkhill]

There are more fundamental issues, too. Is it really energy-efficient to drive around with a half-ton battery?

The clamour for oil and gas will drown out cries for green policies

Calls to scale back various net zero commitments have been getting louder in Britain

www.telegraph.co.uk

The clamour for oil and gas will drown out cries for green policies​

Calls to scale back various net zero commitments have been getting louder in Britain
LIAM HALLIGAN3 September 2023 • 6:00am

The UK car industry seems to be motoring. In July, 76,451 passenger vehicles rolled off factory lines, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders – 31pc up on the same month last year. British carmakers are on course to deliver 860,000 units in 2023, an 11pc annual rise.
More accurately, that should be “carmakers in Britain”, of course.
Our biggest vehicle manufacturers – including Vauxhall and Jaguar Land Rover – have long been foreign-owned. And while car production is sharply up, that’s from last year’s 30-year low. In 2019 – the last full pre-pandemic year – Britain made 1.3m cars, half as many again as this year’s estimate.
Still, our automotive sector provides well-paid work for close to a million directly and in related industries, in parts of the UK where such jobs are scarce, while generating 10pc of British exports.
Commercial vehicle manufacturing is also surging, up 9.3pc in July, reaching 8,853 units. As lockdown-related supply-chain blockages and computer chip shortages have eased, UK carmakers have fought back. There are hopes that Britain could soon again be producing a million-plus vehicles per year.

Yet the really stark trend is the acceleration of electric vehicle (EV) production. Two fifths of UK car production is now fully electric or hybrid – a conventional engine charging EV batteries.
That’s up from a third last year and just a tenth in 2020. That’s good news – if you accept that EVs are the key to the world’s automotive future, then low-emission technology will ultimately prevail. But is that really true?
The Government is determined to ban new petrol and diesel cars in 2030. From then on, all new car and van sales will apparently be EVs, plus whatever hydrogen-powered cars that then exist.
The European Union and US have announced similar rules, with a less ambitious timeframe.
I’d bet heavily that, for a combination of technical, financial and political reasons, these EV-only targets, above all the UK’s 2030 deadline, will be pushed back.
I’ve been arguing this for years but, as the debate over net zero intensifies, shifting beyond near-compulsory virtue signalling to more detailed analysis of how we move away from fossil fuels, who pays and over what timeframe, increasing doubts are being raised about whether EVs really are the answer to low-emission transport.
With these deadlines in place for now, manufacturers have lately turned the rush towards EV production into a stampede.
That’s why the future of UK carmaking is now said to hinge on domestic battery production, given the need to make cars and their power source in close proximity, given the high cost of transporting heavy EV batteries long distances.
Britain has just one such battery-making facility – next to Nissan’s car plant in Sunderland – a “gigafactory” producing annually fuel cells that can hold 1.7 gigawatt hours of energy. That’s just a fraction of the estimated 100-150 GWh needed by the mid-2030s, if the UK is to produce a million-plus electric cars a year.
India’s Tata Motors recently committed to build a major EV battery plant in Somerset to supply its UK-based Jaguar Land Rover factories – but only after undisclosed amounts of government subsidy.
State cash is also available to establish a 30 GWh battery-plant in Cambois, just north of Newcastle. But a succession of investors have had trouble raising enough private capital to get the factory built.
It seems the motoring public isn’t convinced about EVs either. Across the world, far more electric cars and vans are being built than the market can sustain.

Here in Britain, dealers are heavily discounting EV prices, trying to shift stock.
Bloated inventories in the US have prompted Elon Musk’s Tesla empire to slash prices of top-selling models. Drone footage doing the rounds on the internet shows fields next to car factories in China packed full of unsold electric vehicles.
For many, EVs remain prohibitively expensive. Rising interest rates, and a broader cost-of-living crisis doesn’t help.
There’s also a lack of charging facilities, not least in the UK.
We built just 9,000 additional charging points in 2022 – a year when Britain produced almost quarter of a million EVs, albeit some were exported. This increases “range anxiety”, with drivers averse to waiting for long periods before being able to recharge en route.
There are more fundamental issues, too. Is it really energy-efficient to drive around with a half-ton battery?
If the required electricity is generated using fossil fuels, EVs solve nothing. And can the UK’s creaking national grid cope with an accelerating EV rollout, let alone a compulsory shift.
Even if the charging infrastructure is fixed, what about the rare earth minerals needed for EV batteries?

Over recent years, the price of lithium, cobalt and nickel sulphate has soared.
With global EV sales poised to double to 31m a year by 2030, copper supplies will also come under huge pressure – an electric car, after all, uses five times more than a conventional car. And many of these materials are mostly found in parts of the world unfriendly towards the West.
The summer has been dominated by debates over green policies following the Tories’ narrow victory in Uxbridge after campaigning against the extension of London’s ultra-low emission zone. Calls to scale back various net zero commitments have been getting louder.
The reality is that the UK still relies on oil and gas for 70pc of our energy needs – including electricity generation and transportation.
Even the climate change commission – the government’s green watchdog – acknowledges that dependency will still be 50pc by 2030 and 25pc by 2050. And that’s based on estimated improvements in the efficiency of renewables which look increasingly unrealistic.
Oil and gas will be with us for a long time – which is why the Tories were right to extend more North Sea licences, even though the 75pc windfall tax makes countless drilling projects unviable.
Just as the politics of Ulez have become vicious, as the 2030 car ban approaches, environmental policies will spark country-wide outrage, as pleas from well-healed green campaigners are lost amid roars from the broader public.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Eureka!

Volcano discovery could power electric cars for decades, scientists say​

Ancient supervolcano holds potential to meet massive demand from global ‘lithium rush’​

Scientists say they have discovered the largest lithium deposit in the world inside an extinct volcano in the United States, capable of meeting global battery demand for decades.

Volcanologists and geologists reported evidence of the McDermitt caldera on the border of Nevada and Oregon containing up to 120 million tonnes of lithium, holding the potential to disrupt the price and supply dynamics of lithium globally.

The ancient supervolcano exploded around 16 million years ago, forming the rare metal inside its volcanic rock.

Lithium ion batteries are used to power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, however the vast amounts of lithium required to produce them has led to a “lithium rush”, according to the researchers.

Current supply forecasts suggest roughly 1 million metric tons of lithium will be needed to meet global demand by 2040 – an eight-fold increase from the total global production last year.

Calculations from researchers estimate that the McDermitt caldera could contain up to 120 million metric tons of lithium, making it 12-times larger than the amount of lithium in the salt flats in Bolivia, which were previously considered the largest lithium deposit on Earth.

“Developing a sustainable and diverse supply chain to meet lower-carbon energy and national security goals requires mining the highest-grade domestic lithium resources with the lowest wastere strip ratios to minimise both the volume of material extracted from the Earth,”the researchers noted in a study, published in Science Advances.

“Volcano sedimentary lithium resources have the potential to meet this requirement, as they tend to be shallow, high-tonnage deposits with low wastere strip ratios.”

Mining could begin as early as 2026, according to geologists at Lithium Americas Corporation, who made the discovery alongside GNS Science and Oregon State University. However, the site for a proposed mine on the Nevada side of the caldera has already drawn protests from environmental groups, as well as two area tribes who claim it would be built atop sacred land.

Volcano discovery could power electric cars for decades, scientists say

Ancient supervolcano holds potential to meet massive demand from global ‘lithium rush’

www.independent.co.uk

 

[lenaitch]

Eureka!

Volcano discovery could power electric cars for decades, scientists say​

Ancient supervolcano holds potential to meet massive demand from global ‘lithium rush’​

Scientists say they have discovered the largest lithium deposit in the world inside an extinct volcano in the United States, capable of meeting global battery demand for decades.

Volcanologists and geologists reported evidence of the McDermitt caldera on the border of Nevada and Oregon containing up to 120 million tonnes of lithium, holding the potential to disrupt the price and supply dynamics of lithium globally.

The ancient supervolcano exploded around 16 million years ago, forming the rare metal inside its volcanic rock.

Lithium ion batteries are used to power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, however the vast amounts of lithium required to produce them has led to a “lithium rush”, according to the researchers.

Current supply forecasts suggest roughly 1 million metric tons of lithium will be needed to meet global demand by 2040 – an eight-fold increase from the total global production last year.

Calculations from researchers estimate that the McDermitt caldera could contain up to 120 million metric tons of lithium, making it 12-times larger than the amount of lithium in the salt flats in Bolivia, which were previously considered the largest lithium deposit on Earth.

“Developing a sustainable and diverse supply chain to meet lower-carbon energy and national security goals requires mining the highest-grade domestic lithium resources with the lowest wastere strip ratios to minimise both the volume of material extracted from the Earth,”the researchers noted in a study, published in Science Advances.

“Volcano sedimentary lithium resources have the potential to meet this requirement, as they tend to be shallow, high-tonnage deposits with low wastere strip ratios.”

Mining could begin as early as 2026, according to geologists at Lithium Americas Corporation, who made the discovery alongside GNS Science and Oregon State University. However, the site for a proposed mine on the Nevada side of the caldera has already drawn protests from environmental groups, as well as two area tribes who claim it would be built atop sacred land.

Volcano discovery could power electric cars for decades, scientists say

Ancient supervolcano holds potential to meet massive demand from global ‘lithium rush’

www.independent.co.uk

Some environmental groups need to pick a lane.

 

[Furniture]

Some environmental groups need to pick a lane.

Then they'd have to admit that half of the protesting is just to be a nuisance and feel important.

 

[YZT580]

Then they'd have to admit that half of the protesting is just to be a nuisance and feel important.

its what they get paid to do

 

[Kirkhill]

The great electric car experiment has taken a dangerous turn​

A 'terrifying' malfunction has added to concerns that the failures and risks of EVs are being ignored or casually explained away
ANNABEL DENHAM5 October 2023 • 5:21pm

When Alfred Sloan, the former president of General Motors, promised a “car fit for every purpose”, he presumably didn’t have the kidnapping of passengers in mind.
Yet a man’s electric car broke down in spectacular fashion this week and began driving itself, leaving the motorist with no ability to brake. Only by slowly, intentionally, crashing into a police van did it finally stop. It might have been more Father Ted’s milk float than a scene from the blockbuster Speed, but the ordeal will add to the doubts among the British public over the safety of EVs.
And these are not unjustified, despite the Government barely paying them lip service. Road safety groups have long described electric cars as “silent killers”, with research suggesting they are around 40 per cent more likely to hit a pedestrian than a conventional vehicle. Last month, firefighters were called to a car park in Sydney after a lithium battery, which had been detached from an EV, ignited a blaze. Such incidents are not entirely uncommon.
Structural engineers have raised fears that older designs of car park building cannot cope with the weight of EVs, some of which have batteries weighing half a tonne, while councils have been told to check the weight limit on bridges to ensure they don’t collapse under the strain of these new, gleaming vehicles.
Even the quintessential British pastime, queueing, is not safe from the EV revolution. One motorway service station provider has been forced to bring in marshals to police “charge rage” among drivers battling for access to plug-in points because, while the Government is pushing for greater ownership, a lack of grid connections is preventing service stations from installing enough chargers to meet demand.
And there are the dangers that haven’t reached the public consciousness – but would swiftly do so were things to go awry. In prolonged power cuts, as regularly happen in rural areas, there could be serious issues around transport and emergency response capacity. While the Call The Midwife notion of nurses bicycling to call outs might seem charming, it would be less so in a wintry emergency.
There is, too, the more sinister threat from China’s dominance in the global electric vehicle supply chain. Beijing has a stranglehold on mineral processing and battery component production. It’s now starting to export EVs in bulk, too. The next time a car refuses to shut off – or just won’t start – one might wonder what else is at work. It doesn’t take a hardline hawk to worry about handing the Chinese state access to our location and movements, or the ability to incapacitate official vehicles.
The lack of consideration for these risks underscores the wider flaw in the current approach to net zero: we have allowed ideology to come before reasoned debate. The groupthink that has penetrated elite opinion has meant evidence of failure has been either ignored or casually explained away.
This is how we end up with the British state part-nationalising a fertiliser plant in order to produce CO2 for the drinks industry while spending billions to achieve net zero. It’s how environmentally-conscious members of the public find themselves ditching well-functioning gas boilers for heat pumps that may not keep them warm. And it’s how politicians who believe EVs are a technological miracle are able to force them on a public that, often, doesn’t really want them.

The great electric car experiment has taken a dangerous turn

A 'terrifying' malfunction has added to concerns that the failures and risks of EVs are being ignored or casually explained away

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[OldSolduer]

I think the City of Champions’ Chumps suffering is more attributable to not being champions for quite a while…

OK FTFY. You are welcome sir.