Here in the Netherlands there is a shortage of electric energy,
> some new companies cannot even get a connection to the grid.
> Reason: more cables and power lines needed..
> Network overloaded by people's solar panels feeding back into the grid?
The answer is simple: Drive your car to the place where the solar panels are installed and charge it there ...no extra cables needed.
Maybe they'll do lunar panels for charging overnight. ;-)
And drive maybe 10 miles per week, in the summer.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Just have panels on the roof of your car and charge from the light of the street lamps.
I should patent that.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Would you want to drive that car? Only in the summer in Australia?
Is there a hatchback version with a ski rack?
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Or a power outlet! There are power lines everywhere, and personal vehicles spend 95+% of their life sitting around doing nothing.
From the sun-light point of view there's not a lot of difference between summer and winter in Australia
A ski-rack would tend to shade the solar panels.
An electric car that you charged from your roof-top solar panels - about
30% of the houses in Australia have them - could have a ski-rack.If you also used the car to commute to work, you'd need a Telsa or BYD power wall to accumulate power during the day. About 40% of the new roof-top solar installations in Australia have them.
A friend of mine who recently moved house put one in, and hasn't bought any electricity from the grid since then.
I'm not sure if it's actually in use in the USA, but has been considered:
Would he have done it if it wasn't subsidized? Not likely.
In the UK there are swingeing taxes on petrol and diesel and subsidies on electric vehicles. If electric cars had to compete on equal terms they would become expensive novelties and hardly anyone would buy one.
It is obvious that the Government cannot go on losing tax revenue in this way, so the time will eventually come when they transfer the tax burden to electric vehicles. No doubt they will delay this until it is impossible to back-track to internal combustion engines when the folly becomes apparent to the ordinary motorist.
Sounds like fun.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Electricity has usually been subsidized. Just like roads, police, fire departments, sewers, water supplies to homes - what part of paying for the infrastructure to support our society don't you get?
John ;-#)#
Is there a time limit for how long one can park at a streetlamp charger? Does one get a ticket for being there too long?
Or will there be enough for everyone with no time limits? A charger per every parking spot in a city?
If I park and charge outside my mistress's house, that will be on some city database.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Really? Our local utility makes a profit.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
He probably would have. He has the money (he's a retired professor), and roof-top solar is a profitable investment in Australia - the electricity companies will only invest in renewable generation, and while they are bitching about the cost of the extra poles and wires, they aren't spending any money on any other power source. The electricity companies don't like buying the excess power generated by roof-top solar, and buying yourself a decent sized battery so that the excess power generated during the day powers your house at night pays itself off over about eight years - circumstances alter cases but that's a reasonable rough approximation.
Actually he almost certainly would have. He's well-off - a retired professor of medicine - and the subsidies aren't all that big.
The charm of electric cars is that they are cheaper to run.
In Australia there is talk of a mileage charge to cover the cost of the damage done to the road when you drive over it. Fuel excise has always taken in a lot more money that than it costs to maintain the road system. Charging for miles driven would be a much much more sensible system, and we've now got the hardware to keep track of it.
Electric cars have gotten a lot cheaper to build now that they are manufactured in high volume. Australia had to drop out of car manufacturing because our domestic car market was too small to sustain production in high volume. The first generation of electric cars were expensive mainly because there wasn't the market to sustain high volume manufacture.
There's nothing foolish about electric cars. They are much simpler mechanically than internal combustion engine cars, and we really can't afford the CO2 emissions.
He almost certainly would have.
A theory that does depend on a lot of wishful thinking.
Except that the move to electric vehicles isn't in the least foolish - unless you are as silly as Donald Trump and John Larkin and don't understand the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming.
Even without wanting to minimise CO2 emissions, you should be able to realise that electric cars now work just as well as combustion engine cars. The people who drive them seem to be perfectly happy with them.
Diesel is £1.40 per litre, of which 75p is tax [Source: RAC], so diesel without tax is 65p per litre. My van does about 30 miles per gallon which is 6.6 miles per litre. Therefore my van costs approximately 10p per mile in fuel. Many small cars claim to get twice as many miles per gallon.
I bought it with 130.000 miles on the clock and it has now done 160.000 miles. The purchase price was £6.000 and, if I assume it is now worth about £3,000 [current eBay price for equivalent van] it has cost me about 10p per mile in depreciation.
I assume other running costs, such as tyres and annual safety checks are similar across all vehicles but repair costs are higher for electric vehicles which an ordinarly wayside garage can't tackle.
What are the figures for an electric vehicle with the same mileage and weight (1,750 kg) after any subsidies have been discounted?
What kind of electric cars do you own?
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
A couple of weeks ago I filled up the diesel tank of my van. I drove to several places and the gauge came down to about 3/4 full. Last weekend I drove to Malvern and back, a total of 180 miles, followed by a trip to a neighbouring county.
The fuel gauge was getting near 1/4 full, so on the way back I called in at a self-service filling station and refilled the tank. It was in the sort of place where I didn't want to hang around late at night - but I was only there for less than 5 minutes. I calculated the energy transfer rate to be 27 Megawatts for about 2 minutes.
Until electric cars can do that, many people won't want to buy them.
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