We’ve been discussing the charging of electric cars in previous posts and I’d suggested a vision of rows of charging posts and it taking 20 minutes or so to fill your car up while you surfed the net or otherwise chilled out. In a nutshell.

Two good counter points were made – we’d need big garages if it took that long to fill up (to hold all the cars) and why not swap batteries instead.

I think the case against swappable batteries is pretty clear, primarily that we just won’t need them and secondarily that it would be a huge undertaking to standardise car designs to accept a common ‘cassette’ and we’re talking maybe 100 Kilos each – that’s a hefty thing to just ‘swap’.

On the question of how many charging posts we’d need at these new garages, I pointed out that most of us (70% - I stand corrected that it’s not all) could charge at home each night and so would only need a ‘garage’ on long journeys. How long typical car journeys are, I thought, is going to be key to this.

I went away and did some digging and it’s altered fundamentally how I see garages of the future – I don’t think we’ll have any!

It turns out that less than 1% of all car journeys are above 100 miles. There are no figures above 150 miles, which is easily possible with today’s batteries – but it would follow that it’s a smaller number again. Some people talk of 200 miles being possible now – certainly in the future we can expect that. So far (far) less than 1% of cars on the road at any one time will need a filling station – as we know them.

There are 27 Million cars on the road today by the way – re-fuelled by under 10,000 petrol stations. Clearly we don’t all want fuel at the same time – except when there’s a scare on – otherwise that would be 2,700 car visits per garage per day. The fuel tank range of cars is a buffer, a vast rolling fuel tank. And so it will be with batteries. The big difference will be that we can fill up our cars at home and for most people (70%) and most journeys 99%+ that will be enough.

If just half a 1% of cars on the road were on journeys their batteries could not support (ie 200 miles or more) - which is a very reasonable ‘if’, then in theory, if it takes say four times longer to charge batteries than it does to fill with petrol (20 minutes versus five minutes) – we’d need four times one half a % of existing garages (if you follow). I make that 200 garages max, to simply meet the capacity – not taking location into account.

But if you factor in the probability of charging points in car parks and supermarkets – giving the chance to charge at your destination, for the return leg (doubling the range before a garage is required) I think we’ll need virtually no garages at all. Maybe a few on the motorway network – but then again, they can be in car parks.

Petrol Stations are destined to be extinct.

Where does this leave Oil companies?

With no liquid fuels to make and deliver (though they’ll try and foist Hydrogen on us first) and no retail outlets. There’s no future for them, except as reborn renewable energy companies. Or footnotes in history.

Roll on the day.

light of the fact that the Daily Mail didn’t publish my response to this collection of misinformation by Christopher Booker in a timely fashion - I thought I would reconstruct my comments here, where the editorial policy is slightly more balanced. Note to Christopher - feel free to comment here!

This is a piece of hysterical nonsense from Christopher Booker. It’s hard to know where to start.

Did the planning inspector really throw out all planning rules when he approved that turbine near where Christopher lives - just so we can meet EU targets?

Of course not.

Read his report and you’ll see he discarded the spurious reasons for refusal of the local council and actually upheld planning policy.

And do we really need to build new conventional generators to back up new wind generators as we build them? Simple intelligence should tell us not. As new wind generators get built they replace conventional sources (when the wind blows) and those conventional sources become the stand-by that wind needs (for when the wind does not blow).

Pretty simple really.

And that 90% figure is rubbish. I won’t go on. This piece by Christopher Booker is personal prejudice masquerading as journalism. Too often that seems to be the definition of tabloid articles….

“Revealed: UK’s blueprint for a green revolution”

So - we may actually be entering into a second industrial revolution if the government gets stuck in with that £100 billion. They’re making all the right noises…

But … the fact remains – we have to cope with a planning system not fit for purpose. In 1999 the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities first identified that the planning process is a “grave hindrance to achieving the necessary growth in renewables”. Nearly ten years on and nothing has changed –the planning system still remains the most significant barrier to achieving the delivery of wind energy.

It’s the only major generation source that depends for planning on District Councils – the government deals with all others for very good reasons.

Lord Adair Turner suggested that there may be a tweak in the planning process to ‘unstick’ more wind projects following my little piece on Radio4’s PM on Friday.

The planning bill was debated yesterday – it’s been heralded as the cure for all planning’s ills but it still leaves the majority of wind projects in planning hell while at the same time smoothing the way for New Nuclear and nice new runways.

With all this on his plate Prime Minister Brown couldn’t quite stop himself from running off to OPEC, asking ever so politely if it would be possible to “keep the price of oil down a little bit please … while I try and sort out our little energy problem” … and also to ask them if they wouldn’t mind investing some of their trillions of profit in ‘our’ nuclear programme…

It also seems there has also been no better time to be looking at electric transport (well - it would have been better to be looking at it a century ago, but better late than never!):

“Electric cars given official green light to boost climate change goals”

Most eco-towns are being turned down or criticised for lack of coherent transport policy.

Dyson has just entered the electric vehicle game… (I hope his cars don’t suck!)
It turns out Dyson is not entering the electric vehicle game!

McCain puts bounty on batteries

For those people who travel less than 30 or 40 miles to work (well more like 15 or 20 if you can’t charge at the other end) – a sub £1000 electric scooter has arrived in the UK.

Finally there is an interesting piece from The Register - it’s an analysis of a draft book by Professor David J C MacKay of the Cambridge University Department of Physics, which attempts to do some real number crunching when it comes to looking at our future energy choices. The draft e-book is available here - it makes interesting and thought provoking reading if nothing else. I haven’t had time to check his figures though!

The UK have had big plans before, though not this big - what we’ve always been missing is the guts to make them happen, to drive the change needed. That’s why we’ve missed targets before and why we’ll miss them again. Talk is one thing (and we’ve had plenty of it, low carbon economy this, climate change biggest threat that……. and so on) what we need is action.

Offshore costs twice as much to generate from so unless huge sums of public money are being set aside - it won’t happen. And onshore is blocked by the planning system and unless the government intends to get to grips with this simple reality - again it won’t happen.

The biggest potential we have comes from onshore wind, yet two thirds of all wind projects are refused by District Councils at the planning stage, and two thirds are upheld by the government at appeal – a lot of bad decisions being overturned, eventually.

It usually takes between three to five years, costs an awful lot of time and money just to get a simple decision. Wind is our big opportunity – it’s our new North Sea Oil. We’ve enough to run the country three or four times over and it’s stuck in a planning system that’s not fit for purpose and wasn’t designed for it.

Went on Radio 4’s PM show last week to bring this up with Adair Turner. Not often you get to put the questions direct to those who have the power to change the situation. Here’s hoping Brown et al actually achieve something this time …

Simon - you make a couple of good points there. The idea of sitting around for 20 minutes while your car charges will be a bit of a challenge for some people, and it could require large numbers of ‘pumps’ or parking spaces. On the other hand we’ll all have ‘petrol stations’ at home, since we can plug our cars in every night and so the number of us using on street ‘petrol stations’ will drop perhaps massively. It would really only be when travelling more than 150 to 200 miles at a time – I don’t know what proportion of car journeys that is, but it would make interesting reading. And when so many of us have electric cars it’s easy enough to imagine fast charging facilities springing up in Supermarket car parks - I mean for how long will Tesco be willing to sit this one out? Even public car parks could have fast charging bays, and slow ones – for short and long stay parking. It’s quite possible that habits will change significantly and trips to the ‘garage’ disappear altogether.

Loads on the local grid are another good point, there’s definitely an issue to look at there. Electric cars shift the current petroleum load (in terms of energy) onto the grid anyway – and that’s a really big shift. Easier to strengthen that infrastructure though than build a new (hydrogen) one.

I don’t personally believe that swappable batteries are something that will work. It would require an incredible degree of co operation between car makers, and similarity of car design. Right now it would be nice if there was a common small appliance charging standard, for mobile phones and cameras etc – but instead we have a vast array of different ones. Bringing all car makers together would be far harder.

And then there’s the question of weight, these batteries aren’t light, it’s not likely to be easy to swap such a thing yourself.

Swappable batteries would be very unlikely to work in retrofit electric cars. And retrofit offers huge potential to reuse what we already have.

And finally one of the big advantages of the latest battery technology is you can shape the battery and distribute and fit it into parts of the car where it can assist to optimise weight distribution and centre of gravity – swappable batteries would negate all of that.

I doubt very much that the idea will succeed. It sounds good in principle though.
Cheers.

With our wind powered car we’re throwing down the gauntlet to the big car companies, who aren’t doing nearly enough. They bleat about needing decades and £billions to perfect fuel cell technology – and with that comes the need for big new infrastructure – hydrogen infrastructure - that’ll take decades too.

You know what I think – they’re hooked on burning things, hooked on the internal combustion engine – it’s what they know and what they’ve built their business around. They don’t want to move to cars without engines.

Modern batteries can be charged in 20 minutes or so, if you have a three phase supply – and guess what every petrol station in the UK has – yep that’s right. So the infrastructure for electric cars is already in place.

As Chris says, picture a world where you pull into a garage, plug into one of a row of charging posts, go and have a coffee, take 20 minutes off and drive out with a ‘full tank’. More than possible. Much more than.

Oh and if you use a MWh (million thousand units of electricity) to produce hydrogen to run a car – you can get about 1,500 miles from it. If you use the same MWh to power an electric car you can get about 5,000 miles. Hydrogen cars will be the new gas guzzlers if they ever take off – using three times as much energy per mile as electric.

Here’s an artist’s impression of our garage… More on this later.

It’s not un-common to hear people say ‘We need Feed in Tariffs in the UK, like they have in Germany – they’ve got umpteen Gigawatts of renewables from it’. And fair enough they do. It’s important not to confuse large scale FITs with micro though.

The problem for onshore wind (large scale) in the UK is planning not financial and therefore FITs just can’t help. We need German planning laws to emulate German success, in large scale wind.

But what about micro generation; Are feed in tariffs the answer to better deliver this?

Planning used to be a barrier to micro generation but no longer. The problem is just that the numbers don’t stack up. It’s a financial problem, the territory of FITs.

German FITs pay well for micro generation – more than 30p per unit. No wonder much more gets built there than here with our 10p or so. That’s how it works. It’s nothing to do with it being an easy system to use or anything else, just much more money.

But multiple ROCs would do the same job here. They recently doubled and it would be easy enough to have them quadruple (to emulate the value of German FITs) – much easier than to set up a new scheme. And here’s why.

Export from home generation cannot be economically metered, so the ‘system’ cannot attribute it to individual suppliers, it just reduces grid losses. FITs require an electricity distribution company to pay for the power, one who operates the grid – and who then passes on the cost to electricity suppliers working in that region. That’s how it works in Germany. It would be complex to set up and run – compared to multiple ROCs. And it would require new legislation, no small issue.

And would FITs for micro generation give us shed loads of renewables, like Germany? Well yes and no – it would be a boost, but let’s not overestimate how much they have in Germany – from micro gen. Germany’s incredible 12% renewables contribution is often described as coming from ‘wind and solar’ - giving the impression that solar (micro generation) plays a large part. It doesn’t.

Solar actually makes up 0.3% of Germany’s electricity – wind and other large scale renewables produce 11.7%. Put another way micro generation makes up just 4% of the electricity supported under FITs in Germany. It’s good but not as good as it’s cracked up to be.

FITs are good at stimulating micro generation simply because they pay well. Money is really what stimulates micro generation. FITs are a mechanism that works in Germany to provide that money, they could be made to work here but not easily. Whereas multiple ROCs could readily do the same job. The system and the legislation is in place and it works in a UK market context. There’s nothing clever about FITs, they just pay well. That’s easy to emulate. You’d think.

Our German friends do have something we lack – commitment to renewables. That’s what we need. German style commitment to Planning for large wind that works and Finance for micro generation that works.

Has Tesla really killed of the myth of rubbish electric cars as Simon says? And are we just trying to make another Tesla as Peter says?

Tesla’s big success has been to convince so many people that they’ve actually done it. That their car is on the road and does what they say it would. I think they’ve created a new myth (for the few), that the Tesla works. It’s a great piece of PR. Hasn’t killed the old myth though (for the many).

Behind the PR - $150 Million spent so far, running 2 years late, only one car just delivered to the CEO - and this with the ‘gearbox problem’. New plan is to fix this later. Performance will drop. But we knew that, because the numbers don’t add up anyway.

Do we want to make another Tesla, no we don’t. But we share similar goals.

The current myth of electric cars lives on and it will be years before Tesla, or anyone else, gets it together in the UK (if they ever do). So we’re stepping up. It needs doing because it has not been done yet and we don’t actually have any time to lose.

If all cars in the UK were electric (and wind powered) we’d cut CO2 emissions by 12.5%

Cheers.

On its very best case the Good Energy approach is indirect; it’s the second best way to go about bringing change – encourage someone else to do it. The first best way is to take responsibility yourself and build, that’s what all power suppliers should be doing. I believe these are just marketing claims to green up the product.

Tom mentioned the Westmills project. I know the Westmills project well, it started sometime around 1993, when I persuaded the farmer (Adam Twine) that he had a good site for a wind project. It’s taken an awful long time to get it off the ground, and I’m glad it’s finally up and running. But it hasn’t been held up though by an inability to get a power purchase agreement with somebody – far from it. In fact Westmills had a power purchase agreement many years ago with the government (under its NFFO scheme) and it spent some time getting out of that so that it could be more profitable now that ROCs exist in the world. The recent Good Energy purchase agreement did not make this wind farm happen – in any way. Anybody that tells you that is not being completely honest.

I’m not slagging Good Energy off, they work hard at what they do and they contribute, we’ve more in common than we don’t – they just don’t bring generation into being, they buy it once it is existing, or about to exist. I think it’s good to be clear on that.

The reason for the delay from consent to construction is well known in the industry. And it’s still the planning system, in this case the way it deals with the discharge of planning conditions – of which wind farms have many. It can take years to clear these conditions and it has to be done before building. That’s mostly why, of 2.5 GW right now, less than 40% is under construction.

Stats confirmed here for anyone interested: http://www.bwea.com/statistics/

Two facts to support my argument about planning: two thirds of all wind projects are refused by District Councils at the planning stage, and two thirds of all appeals are upheld by the government – a lot of bad decisions being overturned, eventually.

And wind energy is the only major generation source that depends for planning on District Councils – the government deals with all others for very good reasons. District councils are not up to the job, on the whole.

If offshore wind had onshore economics and/or onshore wind had offshore planning, we’d be well away. Bolstering offshore will cost hundreds of Millions, bolstering onshore will take some political courage, to give it a planning system fit for purpose. We could spend those hundreds of millions in far more effective ways.