So how long have we got

Well, unless you use the vast amounts of left-over heat to actually heat people's homes as they do in Scandinavia rather than vent it off through cooling towers so you can sell people electricity to heat their homes with...

Except that these days very few people heat their homes electrically.

I object to being pilloried because British power generation policy was geared to maximum profits in the days when it was a nationalised industry.

Do not forget that electric cars driven by a battery (motive power battery) have to be charged up giving off nasty fumes which are explosive. That is why you are not allowed to smoke in a battery charging shop. The production of these motive power batteries is so polluting is that the workers have to completely change their clothing on arriving at work and all waste incluing water has to be disposed of as hazardous waste. These motive power batteries are very expensive to purchase and maintain. Although denied, it was a mystery to me why people working in the battery charging shop had an average of one in eight going ill with cancer where other places nearby had about one in one hundred. If you you go hybrid you have the weight and complexity of two systems which makes it more expensive to purchase and maintain. Hydrogen (for the fuel cells) is very dodgy stuff - people pushing this stuff should be made to watch the news reel of the Hindenberg going up in flames. Any great increase in the use of electricity means more substations and when I last had dealings with this matter, the supplier expected the consumer to pay for the substation. There is another problem with electric vehicles which I know about having worked with them - they are too quiet! People get used to hearing trucks coming and step out in front of them because they did not hear it coming. This is more common in large industrial areas. Robbie >

On or around Wed, 1 Nov 2006 20:11:01 -0000, "Nick" enlightened us thusly:

I'm not sure that it's valid to say that the electricity generation etc. is inefficient - compared with the typical IC engine, it's probably much more efficient; at the sort of scale the electricity companies work, inefficiencies add up.

On or around Wed, 1 Nov 2006 21:54:44 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

CHP is obviously more efficient than simply generating. I doubt it's more efficient, small gensets being what they are, than getting power from the grid and burning the oil in a boiler - the typical domestic boilers claim efficiency greater than 90%.

It'd work well in a fixed or nearly-fixed load situation where your generator was optimised to produce n Kw, all of which is being used, plus the heat from the generator.

In a domestic situation, though, your power usage varies typically from a few hundred watts on a warm day when you're just running a fridge and a freezer and maybe a computer up to several KW if you have the washing machine, drier and kettle all on at once; ergo you need a genset capable of at least say 10KVA for a typical-sized household (if you don't use electric cooking) to be able to cope with the peak loads, and 90% of the time it would be running well below optimum efficiency. It would be possible to store electricity, in batteries for example, but that just adds another layer or more of inefficiency.

If you grew oil crops and processed those to run it, that would at least be carbon-neutral, I guess, or more nearly so - I doubt it'd be possible to be genuinely carbon-neutral though, in fact, I doubt any fuel-using mechanism can be, taken in its entirety.

Or rather, any one such could be, but they sure as hell can't all be, since there ain't enough room on the planet to grow the necessary crops.

On or around Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:26:03 +0000, steve Taylor enlightened us thusly:

from the engine... also, I assume it does regenerative braking, if not, then lexus/toyota need shooting.

Part of the deal with micro CHP is that you flog the surplus energy back to the grid, so they'd run at optimum efficiency all the time. I'm not sure what happens to the surplus heat when you don't need it, I suppose heating the outside air isn't going to cause much trouble!

ISTR that I'd need two micro CHP units to power the small data centre that seems to have sprung up around the house..

I think the engines can run on a wide variety of fuels, although I suspect that the ones available to the public will be tuned to run on one popular one, in a similar way to most cars being set up to run on diesel rather than on generic oils, as was supposedly the original intention of Mr. Diesel himself.

We need to start killing people... Spread the word!

Yes, its called hydrogen. Its unlikely to be that toxic. Now a charging cell that is charged WRONGLY can cause the acid to give off vapour, but a properly handled charge should release only a little hydrogen.

Battery wise, we are likely to see more metal hydride than Lead Acids used in the future, large capacitor technology possibly, or lithium cells.

General Motors claims to be within 18 months of engineering an electric power train for the same price as an IC system, same weight, including batteries (Lithium again=

Anyone who actually knows what they are talking about would realise hydrogen burns with an almost totally INVISIBLE flame. The Hindenburg was more likely the reaction between the aluminium powder of the fabric doping system they used and the polymer dope. Similar systems are still

- used as rocket fuels.

Besides, there are other fuel cell technologies (solid oxides) for example, which DON´T employ Hydrogen directly at all.

Steve

I have one on the balcony in my flat ICE :)

Now a C5 towing a honda generator on a trailer, hows that for a hybrid :)

Its not just the generation itself that is inefficient in the power stations but also the transmission network itself with all the losses in the cables, transformers etc. For example the reason cables are not in the ground is that they would get too hot.

Then there is the inefficiency of converting the mains to DC and the inefficiency in charging the batteries and then converting the battery power back to motive power.

(MAINLY that the eddy current losses would be killers) Cables dissipate much more when buried in other words. Distribution transformers are over

98% efficient, the whole transmission losses are of the order of 8-10%. I think its generally accepted by engineers that the overall efficiency of electric vehicles could be higher than IC engines.

Steve