VW Diesel Scam

"bert" wrote

Nothing to be complacent about, if the vast and rich VW group can't get their Diesel engine to meet both emissions and fuel consumption requirements at the same time without cheating who says anyone else can. Yes it's started with the Audi A3, Golf, etc but where will this scandal end.

In message , Bob Hobden writes

Hopefully with the realisation that, as the chairman of JCB said in a letter to the Telegraph yesterday said, everyone would be better off concentrating on building more efficient engines rather than bodging along bolting on assorted junk for each emission fad as it comes along.

"Bill" wrote

We have been hearing for decades about the Fuel Cell which generates electricity from hydrogen cleanly so allowing an electric car with no range problems, you refill as now (but with better pumps) yet only now are cars beginning to appear on the roads as experimental vehicle fleets. They still haven't worked out a "green" way to refine hydrogen and haven't even started a distribution network. Having driven in a BMW i3 I can see the enthusiasm for electric vehicles, full torque from standstill, quietness, clean, no pollution on the road (it's at the power station) but could our generating network cope if we switched?

Not even close. We already have a short term generating capacity shortfall, on current demand.

Nor could the National Grid.

Just a very localised demonstration of that - we have a transformer up a pole in the garden, serving eight houses and a farm.

Western Power replaced the original 1960s transformer last year. The 11kV lines to it have all three conductors, so no problem with three-phase, although the old transformer was single-phase, fused to 200A.

The new one... is single-phase, fused to 200A

The highest rated single-phase chargers are 32A - which Tesla say gives

22 miles per hour of charging. If all nine properties plugged just one single car in simultaneously, the draw would be nearly 300A - even before anything else people might want to do whilst waiting for their car to charge.

So that 200A @ 230v - between 8 houses and a farm - is 46kW... A Tesla Supercharger is 135kW...

Now imagine the sheer amount of current being pulled by your average motorway services...! (remembering that your current diesel repmobile has a range of ~6-700 miles, versus less than 300 absolute max for current electrics, less than 100 for most.)

Hydrogen power, both as fuel cells and modified Otto cycle engines, is under trial for buses in London and other cities worldwide. There are two truly "green" ways to produce hydrogen for mobile applications. One uses solar and wind power to electrolyse water, the other uses nuclear power.

So which way did the Powers That Be choose? They heat methane using fossil fuel until it splits into carbon and hydrogen, then throw away the carbon. How daft is that?

Given a decently efficient solar cell array on the average suburban house roof and a wind turbine, on most days, you could put enough charge into an electric car like the G-Whiz for a short inner city or suburban commuting run by either having two battery packs for the car, swapping them daily, or having a rather larger battery pack at the house to allow for the losses, and storing the charge for night time recharging of the car. Or alternatively, we could all start working nights and charging the cars during the day.

In winter yes, I haven't heard "quaking in their boots" about the winter to come and how much margin there is (or isn't). Unless it gets an extension, Wylfa closes for good in December thats 440 MW gone for a start.

Agreed, the grid is load balancing not distribution.

Find it a bit odd for there to be 3 phases available but not to use them. Is there really only a single 200 A fuse on the pole?

Think of it in energy terms. Cars filling up with say 50 l of diesel is in the order of 500 kWhr of energy. Through put of cars, 1 a minute? So in an hour that filling station has "dispensed" 30,000 kWhr of energy. I think that works out at about 1,000 A per phase @

11 kV or 330 A per phase @ 33 kV (ish).

Yes, and one of the conductors coming across the fields is left unused.

On the bright side, picture the end result when some toerag tries to nick the cables...

"Bob Hobden" wrote

There's an interesting argument that oil refinement requires such vast amounts of electricity that, if we were to stop refining oil, there would already be adequate reserves to power an all-electric car fleet (or something along those lines, can't be arsed to look for the exact statement). As a slight caveat, the person who said this was Elon Musk, so not the most impartial of stakeholders.