doctle wrote: ↑07 Mar 2019, 21:59
Electric cars HAVE to have a high carbon footprint because they have been made and all the processes require electricity that's mostly generated by fossil fuels. I know there are plans to have no fossil fuel burning cars in the UK in a short time (2040?) and Ireland is jumping on the idea with great enthusiasm.
So Electric cars have a high carbon footprint because they have to be made and those processes have a carbon footprint, and yet ICE vehicles somehow don't ?
ICE cars have to be made using carbon intensive processes as well ? They don't just get delivered by Santa from the north pole... Sorry, your argument makes zero sense.
Making
any new car has a high carbon footprint. That's why I've always been in favour of letting cars age gracefully and go off the road naturally when they reach the end of their useful life, rather than forcing still perfectly good cars off the road early to meet a specific emissions target, as prematurely constructing a new car to replace it (whether ICE or EV) is carbon and energy/materials intensive and wasteful.
You have also completely misunderstood the UK's 2040 deadline, and you're not alone as a large number of people seem to be confused about this, not helped by misleading and inaccurate coverage in the press. The 2040 deadline is not getting existing ICE vehicles of the road by then, it only affects sales of
new vehicles. Vehicles already on the road when the 2040 deadline comes around
are not affected.
Furthermore it's not a complete ban of any vehicle with an internal combustion engine in it, it only stipulates that
pure ICE vehicles - eg those with only a petrol or diesel engine will no longer be allowed to be sold new. However it does not ban hybrid vehicles which have at least a minimum amount of electric only range. I don't recall what the requirement is, but I think it's about 60 miles of electric range. And of course the emissions restrictions will no doubt be stricter by then.
Considering it's 20 years away the 2040 deadline is actually a pretty soft and toothless deadline (I said this right back when it was first announced) as it only affects new sales, (I agree with this bit) and it's easy to circumvent by making a hybrid vehicle which most manufacturers are already doing, albeit with not quite enough electric only range.
Completely separate to this 2040 deadline for the sale of new vehicles there are regional "low emissions zones" popping up in places like London, Glasgow and so on. They don't ban ICE vehicles completely but only ban older ICE vehicles. (Petrol's before 2005 and Diesels before 2011 from memory) Some of those are coming into effect quite soon, like Glasgow in 2022, which will stop me from driving my Xantia into Glasgow...
The Irish electricity generating doesn't have spare capacity to charge 1m+ cars plus vans etc its all fantasy stuff paper exercises. Last summer we had almost 3 months of very warm dry weather there are wind turbines everywhere they were sitting looking unattractive and generating zilch. They are the main Irish renewable supply. Again I don't know about the UK or any other countries but the amount of charging points for EV's in Ireland is laughable. So we have no spare capacity and no charging infrastructure doesn't sound great for EV drivers.
I think there may be a future for hybrid cars with the engine being zero emission and running on bio fuel.
I don't know what the situation in Ireland is but here in the UK things look promising. The national grid have already released multiple reports saying provided that the charging load is time shifted to the off-peak hours the existing national grid and generation can cope with the entire UK vehicle population being electric. Today.
Off peak demand is something like 20GW less than on-peak, which is enough to absorb the charging needs. How will that time shifting occur ? That remains to be seen. There are basically two options - managing individual charge points from a central location so that they can be commanded to delay charging until later in the evening. So you get home, plug in at 6pm but (unless you override it) a signal from the national grid tells your car not to start charging until say 8pm, dependent on the load in the area. This may be combined with incentives like cheaper off peak charging - even today it's already possible to use Economy 7 to charge an EV at half the price if you have a charge timer either in the car or the wall charger that can delay charging until the Economy 7 rate kicks in. (No economy 7 rate for petrol or diesel sorry!)
Another option is massive grid scale storage so that excess generation at night can be put into storage and released during daytime peak hours. In that case as long as some upgrades are done to last mile (residential) distribution circuits delaying charging wouldn't be necessary. Grid scale storage is already needed to make best use of renewables anyway, so I think over the next 10 years we'll start to see some really big grid storage projects go online.
The country is not going to go EV over night, it's going to take well over 20 years for an overall transition to occur from most people driving ICE to most people driving EV, that's plenty of time for things to be put into place for charging.