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The champion energy source for BEVs is nuclear power, not renewables. [discuss ... ]

19K views 940 replies 42 participants last post by  donald 
#1 ·
I am just reading through

and it seems to me that anyone confronted with today's reality of 17p/kWh and considering an EV is going to have their work cut out to make the man-maths work.

They need to be good a preparing a really creative spreadsheet.

Whilst one can rely on dirt cheap over night rates (as many of us have enjoyed over the last couple of years) then the EV price-per-mile argument is a slam dunk.

I don't think my electricity cost me much more than 5p/kWh across several providers since my first EV, 2013.

Not until the prices on the Agile started ramping up did I even for a moment questions this.

So, what's the cause of the rise? Well, lots of negative pricing was great for us on Agile, it was a right laugh wasn't it!! Ah! If it's too good to be true it either isn't, or at best it won't last.

What am I proposing here?

Well, one reason the prices have skyrocketed is that the offset base load from nuclear was pushing prices negative, but now many are shut down or shutting down (for 'maintenance' or other) and the facts of life for the costs of renewables is shining through.

This is a dilemma; if what we are seeing now is the true price of renewables, then are BEVs really a likely future option? It becomes questionable. 18p/kWh is not far off the cost of 70mpg (at least, so close you're not going to remotely spot the p/mile difference when nursing the financial injury from a £3k/year depreciation profile).

At 4p/kWh, which is whereabouts my EV charging has averaged for the last 100k miles, one finds the pull of BEVs irresistible. At 18p/kWh, diesels are looking interesting once again. W

My thesis here is that we therefore need the nuclear base load to press down the cost of electricity to that sort of order, ~4p/kWh. The 'BEV sell' can only be made on dogmatic ideology at 18p/kWh, I see no financial arguments as there once were.

BEVs running off wind and solar alone remains, at the moment, looking like a far-off green-dream that one has to buy into, not yet one which can be seen [at the moment/any more] as a financial advantage.
 
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#3 ·
Mostly, agreed. We should be building a nuclear fleet for the next generation 30-40 years. This allows us to immediately have reliable low-carbon electricity.

The issue is that with one hand we are heavily penalising/disadvantaging traditional thermal energy generation (with only gas and diesel remaining on the grid), whilst also being entirely dependent on it to fill the gap in renewable energy generation. It's a lose-lose for the consumer and the environment.
 
#4 ·
we need to move to zero emission vehicles for the environment and our health in city centres, not because they’re cheaper to run. They happen to be cheaper to run at the moment and that may or may not be the case as we go forwards
 
#6 ·
we need to move to zero emission vehicles for the environment and our health in city centres
Euro 6 is basically clean air. A Euro 6 car will tend to filter out particulates from a city centre, not add to them.

BEVs add to urban particulates. An air breathing engine 'could' actually filter them out of the air (not saying they do so, net, but I expect they would if following an ancient diesel van).

Euro 7 is extreme. I think it is becoming Emperor's new clothes, one can say one has made a Euro 7 engine but no-one can actually measure it.

If I stick my head out of my urban house, I smell cooking, distant burning, vegetation, farm activity from 10 miles away. Not a sniff of traffic fumes (any more). Just isn't happening.

Ban pre Euro 6, that is what ULEZ zones are doing.

It's dogmatic to say that we 'must' get rid of ICE for BEVs. BEVs emit pretty much the same level of particulates as Euro 6 diesels.
 
#5 · (Edited)
new solar and wind is cheaper than new nuclear, new gas, new coal. what’s the advantage in increasing prices with nuclear? nuclear entails the unavoidable release of radioactive tritium effluents which leaves a radioactive legacy for both current & future generations, and the future costs of keeping the spent fuel away from future generations isn’t factored into the current cost. if you’re worried about the cost of electricity in retirement and suffer poor balance, then a 3 wheel EAPC (which goes 18x further than your electric car per kWh) is your new friend, not a new nuclear plant. it isn’t the most moral decision to kick the nuclear waste storage costs and environmental issues on down to future generations. solar and wind and reducing consumption is the path forward. talk of building new nuclear plants is sheer madness, not to mention no one wants one in their back yard, look at fukushima and chernobyl. california (wisely) shuttered its only remaining nuclear power plant. that is to say except for the ones at lawrence livermore labs which they use for designing and testing nuclear weapons.

see page 7 in this report—
 
#7 ·
My home solar and battery system will in all likelihood produce damn near 98% of my electricity needs, and around 85% of my DHW needs.

I didn’t spend that much on it and the battery system is good to cover around 2 days with cloud cover or constant rain.

So I think we’ll be surprised once renewables truly take off how little energy we really need from the grid.
 
#10 ·
Remind me again where you live?

It's just not the case in the majority of global locations that solar and storage is viable throughout the year. Nor is it viable in high density housing (terraces and flats) or where the existing housing stock is not optimised for rooftop solar installations.
 
#14 ·
I am just reading through

and it seems to me that anyone confronted with today's reality of 17p/kWh and considering an EV is going to have their work cut out to make the man-maths work.

They need to be good a preparing a really creative spreadsheet.
I think you might be forgetting a lot of people buy the cars because they like them rather than the fact they will be cheaper than XYZ to run, the cost of running....in fact every car we have owned never came into the equation.
 
#16 ·
This discussion brings back a thought I often had whilst flying from London to the US West Coast, a flight of around 10+ hours. For around 7 of those hours, we are flying over frozen, uninhabited wilderness. Nearly 3 hours of that are just over Canada. I would look down at the Greenland Icecap or the frozen wilds of northern Canada and wonder why we are spending billions to find some form of habitable planet with all the associated problems of generating enough air and water, never mind food and an energy supply when we have vast areas of our own planet that already have air and water in quantities that are there for the taking, never mind the potential energy.

Buying an EV, for some, may be an exercise in conscience salving. For others, it may be an exercise in a reduction of running costs. For others, it may be the thrill, torque and efficiency of an electric motor powered car. There is no one standard that can be applied with a broad brush and then spout facts and figures to try and prove a point of view.

Nuclear power has both advantages and disadvantages, as do all the other options. It is finding a balance between all the options that will be the most efficient. Factor in the costs, both financially and environmentally, and you may begin to get an idea of what is best. I seriously doubt that there is a single answer... maybe cold fusion but we're a bit of a way from that for the moment.
 
#42 ·
#53 ·
I have seen a working high mass flywheel system, the balancing had to be near perfect and stay like that. I cannot see concrete being a suitable material. Any imbalance and it will tear itself to pieces and take out anything nearby. I would not want to be in line if it broke loose. I would be less nervous living next to a nuclear power station, not that I would want that either.
 
#61 ·
Oooh, more ignorance. Problem is, nuclear power plant generates electricity. It fixes its carbon debt. Your flywheels actually consume electricity through their use!

Yep, once you've smelted it at least twice in a VIM-VAR process to get the high grade steel you'd need for a flywheel.
 
#63 ·
Please provide actual numbers if you wish to continue these apparently baseless assertions.

You mention a flywheel scheme there from 6 years ago. Can you please show the CO2 account there, demonstrating costs versus CO2 benefits.

Then, you can carry on to explain the CO2 emissions from whatever power source actually delviered the energy into those things.

I trust you do understand that nuclear is an ENERGY GENERATOR and flywheels are ENERGY STORAGE.

You get the difference between generators and storage, and the thread is about generators.

If you are right, why is electricity so expensive when the nuclear stations get shut off?

You are making no sense, none whatsoever, so you'll have to put some extraordinary numbers behind your extraordinary claims, or .. just shut it.
 
#70 ·
Your whole argument is flawed though. It's the Government pushing the EV agenda, due to the ban on conventionally powered cars from 2030. It won't make any difference if the man-maths still don't stack up in 9 years time. In any event, cars are still cheaper in real terms than they used to be, so it's no bad thing if they cost more, meaning fewer people have them. And that's before you take in to account the effect on people of too many cars.
 
#71 ·
First we tried steel but we found that the cost of steel was too high,” he said. “And then we tested cast iron, which is cheaper than steel but still too expensive. Finally, we decided to think about something really different. We’ve tried all of the classic materials. What’s next?”

Gennesseaux decided to give concrete a shot. Concrete is cheap and readily accessible but posed one significant problem – it doesn’t work well with flywheels. Gennesseaux thought he could adapt both concrete and the flywheel to work together. He decided to try prestressed concrete, which is extremely compressed concrete. He then adapted the flywheel to access the energy by reducing the compression rather than pulling on the material. To Gennesseaux’s surprise, concrete not only worked but it far exceeded expectations.

“Not only did it work, the concrete flywheel stored energy at one-tenth of the cost of batteries,” he said. “I didn’t trust the results at first. I had to check it many times before I was convinced!


 
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