Are EVs really the future?

[PeteStupps]

4 hours ago, Nick Jones said:

Ooooo er….

 

Blimey. That particular EV wasn't very good for its environment. 

I've been thinking about what your brother said Nick, and reckon the safest way to store energy at home is food and ale.

[JohnD]

About 1:30 in, two people are  standing about 50 ft from the inferno, having a sidewalk cigarette.   Either, with true Parisian disdain,   "Un autobus en feu?  Tant pis! Tu as une clope?" or it's not there.

And towards the end, the whole bus is on fire, with the batteries "in the roof" surely destroyed by now - and the hazard lights still flash!

Is this real? Or 'deep fake'?

John

Edited May 28, 2022 by JohnD

[Hamish]

Plenty of news stories to corroborate the French bus fire

and the potters bar bus depot fire too

[Nick Jones]

10 hours ago, PeteStupps said:

Blimey. That particular EV wasn't very good for its environment. 

 Thanks Pete, that made me laugh out loud.

1 hour ago, JohnD said:

and the hazard lights still flash!

Is this real? Or 'deep fake'?

There’ll be a conventional 12 or 24v  vehicle system to run the non-drive systems with its own separate battery.  I’m convinced it’s real. There are plenty of other examples.

[PeterC]

Lithium, similar to sodium.....reacts with water to liberate hydrogen. That should make fire-fighting fun.

 

[Hamish]

This is near me  ( with mum at the mo)

but I don’t think it’s an EV. super yacht 

https://news.sky.com/story/firefighters-tackle-huge-blaze-on-superyacht-in-torquay-marina-12623076

[JohnD]

Hamish, BBC reported that it had 8000 gallons of diesel on board, which since the yacht has sunk is now spreading out over Torbay harbour. So probably not an EV!

John

[Mark]

When they go up they really go! Fortunately no one on board, dread to think if it was rush hour.

Edited May 30, 2022 by Mark

[Hamish]

11 hours ago, Mark said:

When they go up they really go! Fortunately no one on board, dread to think if it was rush hour.

Or rafted up like at Monaco !!!

[RogerH]

On 5/29/2022 at 10:59 AM, JohnD said:

Hamish, BBC reported that it had 8000 gallons of diesel on board, which since the yacht has sunk is now spreading out over Torbay harbour. So probably not an EV!

John

One of the radio news channels said it was 8000 ltr.

still quite a lot.

 

Roger

[thebrookster]

1 hour ago, RogerH said:

One of the radio news channels said it was 8000 ltr.

still quite a lot.

 

Roger

Yup, which equates to roughly 7 tonnes of fuel (as opposed to the "8 or 9 tonnes" quoted in a couple of articles I read earlier!!

In the grand scheme of things pretty insignificant, although for a harbour like Torquay the visible results will be amplified. (For comparison, Exxon Valdez spilled roughly 37000 Tonnes, Deepwater 780000 tonnes). Not to "degrade" the severity of the spill, more to observe that whichever Spill Response Team is tasked out will take this in their stride, probably without even breathing hard.

I'm more concerned with how much pollutants were released by the fire, this in the long run will have far more effect I suspect.

Phil

[Escadrille Ecosse]

It gets worse though.

Article in the Economist about building being held up by lack of electrical infrastructure capacity. Much of which is once again down to our regulatory system which would appear to actively restrict any sort of coherent planning planning. Utterly bonkers... just like the gas storage fiasco.

Copied here in full (bad boy that I am)

The grid needs to be expanded to cope with the demands of net zero

 

Jun 2nd 2022 (Updated Jun 3rd 2022)

On may 24th the Greater London Authority, a governance body for the capital, wrote to the person in charge of planning and economic development in the borough of Ealing. The letter, entitled “Electricity Capacity in West London”, noted that housing developers were facing delays in connecting new homes to the grid, and that electricity would not be available to them until between 2027 and 2030. New battery-storage systems and data centres had already gobbled up capacity.

A boom in data-centre construction has affected west London particularly badly. This area is only a small part of a regional grid that covers a swathe of southern England, but it has received 90% of all applications to connect data centres to that grid in the past two years. The amount of electricity these new facilities require is very roughly the same as west London’s entire existing capacity.

The issue of insufficient capacity is a national one. The government’s “net zero” climate-change targets have increased demand for electricity, which the existing infrastructure cannot meet quickly. National Grid, which runs the backbone of Britain’s electricity-transmission system, says that requests to connect to the grid have quadrupled in the past four years.

This creates a problem. All electricity-transmission networks in Britain are licensed by Ofgem, an energy regulator. The licence obliges networks to treat all connection requests equally and to fulfil them only on a first-come, first-served basis. The regulatory system also creates incentives for new connection requests to be at the signed-contracts stage before network operators invest to expand capacity. In the past this approach has saved money for billpayers. Now it inhibits growth.

Ofgem says it is “aware” of the issue and is “working with parties involved for an effective resolution”. National Grid and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, which operates the grid in west London, are saying much the same. The short-term fix is to ring up developers who have already been assigned capacity to ask if they would be willing to give up their place in the queue. The structural solution is to change the regulatory regime.

That is necessary because growth in connection requests will surely accelerate. Networks have barely begun to accommodate the charging-points that will be required for electric vehicles. Much of Britain’s heating must be moved from gas to electricity, further increasing demand. All this is a natural consequence of the legal mandate that the country must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The government should free up Britain’s electricity grid to adapt to changes that it is ushering in.

[JohnD]

Happened to see a lorry with an ad on the side, for a lithium specific fire ex tinguisher.

Turns out, these are quite old  technology and are copper-based - forms a non-combustible compound with the lithium - or graphite (!!!) based, smothers the fire and absorbs its heat.  See Fire extinguisher - Wikipedia Class D section.

Lots of fire extinguisher suppliers have them.    There's even a 'bucket' of granules that you can pour over a burning battery Extover® - Fire protection and Fire-extinguishing granules for Lithium Batteries in 33L Bucket - Nexus Modelling Supplies (nexusmodels.co.uk)  These appear to be glass granules , that may alos work by smothering he  fire, but when used to demonstrate how effective they are against a vehicle fire, they had to fill a container that the car had been put into to get it out!  

(10) Extover® - Firefighting of a burning lithium-ion battery of an electric car - YouTube

Edited June 15, 2022 by JohnD

[2.5piman]

Hello Escadrille,

quite expected by anyone with a knowledge of the electrical distribution system and has been known since the goovernment planned to outlaw internal combustion engines.

Typically politicians decide a course of action and want it done by a specific time, with little or no regard to the mechanics of it all. Not only that they do two simultaneously, i.e. heat pumps and electric vehicles, both of which will use fairly substancial amounts of electricity for long periods which is bound to overload the local distribution circuits. This is over and above power station and grid capacity.

Alec

 

 

[Escadrille Ecosse]

On 6/15/2022 at 1:22 PM, 2.5piman said:

quite expected by anyone with a knowledge of the electrical distribution system and has been known since the goovernment planned to outlaw internal combustion engines.

Yup. But I thought this was the most succinct summary I've seen to save me the effort of composing it myself

Depressing nonetheless.

And at the end of the day it is important to move the discussion beyond the few people who actually know this sh1t out to the wider population so we can have an informed discussion with our politicians. Apparently Leonardo da Vinci was a really clever bloke but was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard because he didn't tell anyone and didn't do anything with what he knew.

And there's more.... Li-ion batteries which are supposed to be saving our skins by providing ever cheaper battery storage are another one. We keep getting shown graphs about how rapidly the price is falling and how much more production is planned.

At the moment that is something like double current lithium demand and four times the cobalt demand by 2030 for the EU.

But the supply side for these is barely coping now. Lithium prices have more than doubled in the last two years and pretty much all the cobalt comes from politically dodgy and/or environmentally/socially negligent sources.

And proposals to open a European lithium extraction site were knocked back recently becuase of local environmental protests. Although it probably won't stop thise same people buying them from elsewhere.

However lithium-sodium if we can get it to work

Edited June 16, 2022 by Escadrille Ecosse

[Escadrille Ecosse]

A chocolate fireguard is just a waste of chocolate. Unlike a chocolate teapot

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-29126161

[Nick Jones]

Hmm…. Unconvinced. You can always eat it though. I suppose you could eat the fire guard too. Which makes them both more useful than your average Tory prime minister.

[Escadrille Ecosse]

1 minute ago, Nick Jones said:

Which makes them both more useful than your average Tory prime minister.

Wouldn't be hard. Pretty much anything would be more useful than he.

Pity we couldn't find something that would eat the great lard arse. Although that might be considered unreasonable cruelty.

On the animal not the lard arse.

[Nick Jones]

2 hours ago, Escadrille Ecosse said:

On the animal not the lard arse

Quite. I reckon he’d even poison a crocodile…….

[Hamish]

10 hours ago, Nick Jones said:

Quite. I reckon he’d even poison a crocodile…….

Worth a try tho surely. Perhaps a swimming trip to the Oz NT.

[michaeljf]

Steady Hamish...and I was getting to think you wern't a bad sort of bloke! Regards, Michael.

[Hamish]

Sorry 

I do like wildlife even crocs and gators no wildlife should be poisoned. 

[michaeljf]

Hello Hamish, Forgiven! Regards, Michael.