Electric trucks.

[obscure]

Ohhh yes. That's the nirvana. Get fusion to work and you can have pretty much limitless clean energy to convert water in to hydrogen fuel.
Want your 5.2l V8 rip snorter that does 8mpg on a good day? Why not, it's running on hydrogen and produces water. Guilt free motoring.

One of the key problems with Hydrogen is that the easiest way to extract it is from natural gas which if I remember correctly produces CO2 during the process (If I am wrong on this please feel free to correct).

If we are going to start using Hydrogen on any scale surely we should be looking at producing it via Electrolysis (and ideally using renewable energy sources).

 

[Victor Churchill]

First heavy industry to go hydrogen will be where the money is to get interest and followers...steel I recon. Once its realised money can be made it'll be a bun fight..
I wonder what they'll do with all that coal they could still mine?

Dig it up and make plastic? Or just leave it in the ground...

 

[Chippy_Tea]

I don’t think your right. By the Department of Transports own figures, articulated lorries do less than 1/20 of total road miles and average 8mpg. The average mpg for all ICE cars is just under 39. So sorting out cars and vans has the potential to take away over 70% of road based CO2 emissions.

A modern diesel car pumps out more toxic pollution than a bus or heavy truck, according to new data, a situation described as a “disgrace” by one MEP.

The revelation shows that effective technology to cut nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution exists, but that car manufacturers are not implementing it in realistic driving conditions.

Diesel cars tested in Norway produced quadruple the NOx emissions of large buses and lorries in city driving conditions, according to a report from the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research. A separate study for Transport for London showed that a small car in the “supermini” class emitted several times more NOx than most HGVs and the same amount as a 40-tonne vehicle.

“It is crackers,” said emissions expert James Tate from the University of Leeds. His own research, which uses roadside equipment to measure passing traffic, also shows the latest diesel models cars produce at least as much NOx as far heavier buses and trucks.

The issue of NOx pollution, thought to kill 23,500 people a year in the UK alone, gained prominence when VW diesels were discovered to be cheating official US emissions tests. The scandal also led to revelations that the diesels of many car manufacturers produce far more NOx on the road than in EU lab tests, though not via illegal means.

The UK government say the failure to keep NOx from vehicles low in the real world means road transport is “by far the largest contributor” to the illegal levels of NOx in many parts of the country.

“It is disgraceful that car manufacturers have failed to reduce deadly emissions when the technology to do so is affordable and readily available,” said Catherine Bearder, a Liberal Democrat MEP and a lead negotiator in the European parliament on the EU’s new air quality law.

“The dramatic reduction in NOx emissions from heavier vehicles is a result of far stricter EU tests, in place since 2011, that reflect real-world driving conditions. If buses and trucks can comply with these limits, there’s no reason cars can’t as well.”

Greg Archer of Transport & Environment said: “Carmakers claims [that] new diesel cars are clean are preposterous. Governments must ignore the bleating of carmakers for lenient limits and fix the problem for good.”

Both the Norwegian and London research tested vehicles meeting the newest and strictest Euro6 standard in similar lab-based tests that – unlike EU official regulatory tests – are realistic simulations of city driving.

At the Norway Centre for Transport Research, the researchers found “all [12 of] the tested heavy vehicles’ engines have very low emissions of NOx in real traffic” and that emissions had fallen tenfold from the previous models. But the seven diesel cars emitted four times more on average than the trucks and buses.

The Norwegian team concluded: “Test results have shown by effective removal of NOx from the exhaust gases of heavy vehicles that it is possible with Euro 6 engines. This means that it is technically possible to achieve the same positive results for new generations of cars with diesel engines.” They also found that in cold weather the NOx from diesel cars soared to 11 time official levels.

The Transport for London research compared nine diesel cars, ranging from the super-mini class up to SUV, against three HGVs and one LGV. The NOx emitted from the cars was similar to that from the heavier trucks though one car – the smallest diesel tested – produced more than double the 12-tonne lorry and the same as the 40-tonne vehicle.

Tate said the reasons car manufacturers were not implementing the NOx reduction technology on cars were convenience and cost. The most common technology requires a chemical compound known as urea to be squirted into the exhaust gases, but a large urea tank would be heavy while a small one would require frequent refills. “It’s not really the image the manufacturers are looking for: you are in your smart suit filling up your expensive car – with urea,” he said.

In contrast, truck and bus drivers are happy to refill the urea tanks and the additional cost of the technology is easier for buyers of large and expensive vehicles to bear.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...sions-toxic-pollution-than-a-bus-data-reveals

 

[TonyT]

Sidings at Southampton been re jigged to take longer freight trains. Also look up "Tesco Train"

I did, that’s encouraging.

 

[Jim Brewster]

Most of the solar system is hydrogen, if just a small amount could somehow be harnessed

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Sidings at Southampton been re jigged to take longer freight trains.

They built a business park on ours donkeys years ago.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Here is why electric cars will be with us for the forcible future.

Skip to 10:35 to see the problem with making hydrogen.

Hydrogen cars are half as efficient than electric.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Wasn't the Hindenburg a Hydrogen airship and we know that crashed like a Led Zeppelin

 

[Nicks90]

One of the key problems with Hydrogen is that the easiest way to extract it is from natural gas which if I remember correctly produces CO2 during the process (If I am wrong on this please feel free to correct).

If we are going to start using Hydrogen on any scale surely we should be looking at producing it via Electrolysis (and ideally using renewable energy sources).

But its a circular industry. Use the fusion reactors to produce massive amounts of clean energy and part of that electricity can be used to split water via electrolysis in to hydrogen. As most fusion reactor designs need heavy hydrogen, which is naturally occurring, then the vast amount of the hydrogen produced is 'waste' and be used for the hydrogen fuel cells in cars. The good hydrogen can then be used to power the fusion reactor.

 

[Clint]

The hydrogen fuel cells in cars...batteries?

 

[dad_of_jon]

I am surprised we don't have a working "heritage" coal mine.
Not just a museum to show people what it was like, but a working mine to supply the heritage steam railways & traction engines that are scattered around & require Welsh steam coal rather than imported dirty brown coal to run on.

Big Pit National Coal Museum - no coal being dug tho....

 

[obscure]

But its a circular industry. Use the fusion reactors to produce massive amounts of clean energy and part of that electricity can be used to split water via electrolysis in to hydrogen. As most fusion reactor designs need heavy hydrogen, which is naturally occurring, then the vast amount of the hydrogen produced is 'waste' and be used for the hydrogen fuel cells in cars. The good hydrogen can then be used to power the fusion reactor.

I hate to say it but they have being claiming fusion is 30 years from now for at least 30 years (okay I will rephrase that fusion that is viable on an industrial scale) but yes the key to making hydrogen a ‘green fuel’ is large amounts of energy for electrolysis which could come from wind, solar, fusion (if we ever get it to a point of being practical) or even conventional nuclear energy.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

the key to making hydrogen a ‘green fuel’ is large amounts of energy for electrolysis which could come from wind, solar, fusion (if we ever get it to a point of being practical) or even conventional nuclear energy.

The problem is its widely predicted we wont have enough energy to power electric car charging if they become more popular if you then add using huge amounts of electricity to make hydrogen we are going to need a lot more power stations.

Watch the edited version here -

 

[Alastair70]

A modern diesel car pumps out more toxic pollution than a bus or heavy truck, according to new data, a situation described as a “disgrace” by one MEP.

The revelation shows that effective technology to cut nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution exists, but that car manufacturers are not implementing it in realistic driving conditions.

Diesel cars tested in Norway produced quadruple the NOx emissions of large buses and lorries in city driving conditions, according to a report from the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research. A separate study for Transport for London showed that a small car in the “supermini” class emitted several times more NOx than most HGVs and the same amount as a 40-tonne vehicle.

“It is crackers,” said emissions expert James Tate from the University of Leeds. His own research, which uses roadside equipment to measure passing traffic, also shows the latest diesel models cars produce at least as much NOx as far heavier buses and trucks.

The issue of NOx pollution, thought to kill 23,500 people a year in the UK alone, gained prominence when VW diesels were discovered to be cheating official US emissions tests. The scandal also led to revelations that the diesels of many car manufacturers produce far more NOx on the road than in EU lab tests, though not via illegal means.

The UK government say the failure to keep NOx from vehicles low in the real world means road transport is “by far the largest contributor” to the illegal levels of NOx in many parts of the country.

“It is disgraceful that car manufacturers have failed to reduce deadly emissions when the technology to do so is affordable and readily available,” said Catherine Bearder, a Liberal Democrat MEP and a lead negotiator in the European parliament on the EU’s new air quality law.

“The dramatic reduction in NOx emissions from heavier vehicles is a result of far stricter EU tests, in place since 2011, that reflect real-world driving conditions. If buses and trucks can comply with these limits, there’s no reason cars can’t as well.”

Greg Archer of Transport & Environment said: “Carmakers claims [that] new diesel cars are clean are preposterous. Governments must ignore the bleating of carmakers for lenient limits and fix the problem for good.”

Both the Norwegian and London research tested vehicles meeting the newest and strictest Euro6 standard in similar lab-based tests that – unlike EU official regulatory tests – are realistic simulations of city driving.

At the Norway Centre for Transport Research, the researchers found “all [12 of] the tested heavy vehicles’ engines have very low emissions of NOx in real traffic” and that emissions had fallen tenfold from the previous models. But the seven diesel cars emitted four times more on average than the trucks and buses.

The Norwegian team concluded: “Test results have shown by effective removal of NOx from the exhaust gases of heavy vehicles that it is possible with Euro 6 engines. This means that it is technically possible to achieve the same positive results for new generations of cars with diesel engines.” They also found that in cold weather the NOx from diesel cars soared to 11 time official levels.

The Transport for London research compared nine diesel cars, ranging from the super-mini class up to SUV, against three HGVs and one LGV. The NOx emitted from the cars was similar to that from the heavier trucks though one car – the smallest diesel tested – produced more than double the 12-tonne lorry and the same as the 40-tonne vehicle.

Tate said the reasons car manufacturers were not implementing the NOx reduction technology on cars were convenience and cost. The most common technology requires a chemical compound known as urea to be squirted into the exhaust gases, but a large urea tank would be heavy while a small one would require frequent refills. “It’s not really the image the manufacturers are looking for: you are in your smart suit filling up your expensive car – with urea,” he said.

In contrast, truck and bus drivers are happy to refill the urea tanks and the additional cost of the technology is easier for buyers of large and expensive vehicles to bear.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...sions-toxic-pollution-than-a-bus-data-reveals

My reading of that is that cars are much worse than lorries.
My point (as an EV driver) is that the ICE cars on the road are the bigger problem and we already have a functioning technology to address that. If haulage is going to get sorted in the near future, it will be through the scaling up of hydrogen and developing the infrastructure to support it and not through some speculated new technology that may or may not come to fruition. In the meantime we have 300+mile range EVs available right now. (Cost and availability are separate discussions, both adversely affected by current global supply chain issues. Low mileage second hand petrol cars are selling for similar money to new vehicles).

 

[Northern_Brewer]

In the meantime we have 300+mile range EVs available right now.

Tesla claim they will have 300 and 500 mile range battery trucks in 2023.

Well they need to find a solution for wagons they all use diesel do 5mpg and there are so many of them its pointless trying to get the rest of us into electric cars and do nothing with trucks, they cannot really use batteries as the weight would mean their carrying capacity would be massively reduced they cannot run all day without charging and they cannot afford time for drivers to charge them as they are already driving the maximum hours they are allowed this would be the perfect solution especially for motorways.

The load weight won't be "massively" reduced because the drivetrain and fuel on fossil trucks take up a lot of weight too, Tesla have indicated that the Tesla Semi will be within a tonne of a standard truck, although that's probably the 300-mile one rather than the 500-mile version which will likely need about 3 tonnes more battery. And the EU are giving electric trucks a 2t allowance, so the 300-mile version could have a higher load than a diesel truck.

Also Tesla are claiming <2kWh per mile, which in price terms would imply an effective 15-25mpg depending on when you charge. Which I imagine would be helpful.

But that's not to say these electric highways couldn't be useful - there is a school of thought that says we'd be much better binning railways altogether and replacing them with dedicated truck highways.

Lorries accounted for a total of 17.4 bvm. So don’t worry about the lorries for now. We already have a functioning technology to deal with cars and vans.

They use a lot more fuel though. I sketched out the energy consumption of an all-electric vehicle fleet over on the electric car thread, commercial vehicles account for over 40% of transport energy use, split roughly 50:50 between trucks and vans. It's still a non-negligible thing, the big question is how will alternative technologies stack up against battery trucks. Up to 500 mile range would relegate alternatives to niches.

First heavy industry to go hydrogen will be where the money is to get interest and followers...steel I recon.

There's huge amounts of chemical industry (fertilisers, plastics etc) that will have no choice to go hydrogen and there won't be much hydrogen left over the next decade or so for other uses other than small niches in transport. Steel could be the big exception though - although SSAB have already made hydrogen steel that's gone into a Volvo dump truck, the one to watch is direct electrolysis of iron ore by Boston Metal which would use electricity directly.

One of the key problems with Hydrogen is that the easiest way to extract it is from natural gas which if I remember correctly produces CO2 during the process (If I am wrong on this please feel free to correct).

If we are going to start using Hydrogen on any scale surely we should be looking at producing it via Electrolysis (and ideally using renewable energy sources).

There's a lot of controversy over how to create hydrogen - there's an argument that because natural gas is such a powerful greenhouse gas and Russia's pipelines are so leaky, that using Russian gas for anything is almost as greenhousey as burning coal (whereas Western pipelines are generally a lot better). And the process of turning natural gas into hydrogen is not 100% efficient, so from a greenhouse point of view making hydrogen from natural gas is pretty pointless other than for developing an ecosystem of hydrogen use that can then be "greened" later.

One option is "blue" hydrogen, hydrogen made from natural gas in a plant that then captures the CO2 and stores it. The track record of carbon storage is pretty dismal, but there's a lot of money going into it. Even so, there's plenty of debate as to whether blue hydrogen is a good idea.

As you say "green" hydrogen made from renewable electricity is the ultimate goal, but until we've got big surpluses of electricity it's far more sensible to use it directly. A battery car can turn about 90% of electrical energy into kinetic energy, whereas electricity-to-hydrogen-to-hydrogen-vehicle is about half as efficient. And that's before the huge new fueling infrastructure needed before a single hydrogen vehicle hits the road, whereas electric vehicles can plug into the existing electricity network (that's not to say a lot of investment won't be needed for largescale adoption, but at least it's incremental). So hydrogen just makes no real sense for transport except for niche uses, in the same way that LPG doesn't make much sense for homes unless you can't get mains gas.

 

[jof]

You also need to think that hydrogen could be made from say solar energy plants in the Sahara desert & then shipped here as liquidised gas. Which is probably a better use of renewable from a low population, high sunlight, you're not displacing crop & hopefully some of the earned cash can be distributed to a poorer region (in an ideal world)

 

[Chippy_Tea]

What I don't get is if its this simple and cars have been using it safely for years why are they pushing batteries?

 

[johnny108]

Question: where is the power to charge these vehicles going to come from?
Nuke plants see the only reliable, energy- dense answer, and regulations are strangling them. Renewables simply don’t reliably produce enough.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Question: where is the power to charge these vehicles going to come from?

New petrol and diesel cars will no longer be sold in the UK from 2035, so before long, far more of us are going to be behind the wheel of electric vehicles (EVs).
Here Graeme Cooper, National Grid’s Project Director – Transport Decarbonisation, addresses some of the myths about them.

1. Can the UK energy grid really cope with a huge increase in the number of electric vehicles being plugged in for charging?
There are two aspects to whether we have the capacity to manage lots of EVs being plugged in at once – whether we have enough energy and then whether we have sufficient capacity on the wires that carry that energy to where it’s needed.

Enough capacity exists
With the first of these, the energy element, the most demand for electricity we’ve had in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, due to improved energy efficiency such as the installation of solar panels, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16 per cent. Even if the impossible happened and we all switched to EVs overnight, we think demand would only increase by around 10 per cent. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.



Most people will charge their vehicles at home at night so this demand on the national grid will be at the time most of us are in bed not using any electricity and 900,000 homes already have solar panels installed and all new builds will have them installed, charging at night is not a problem.

Solar panels and EV charging
There are a number of benefits to powering your car from home – not only is it more convenient, but it’s cheaper too! And, if you want to save even more money (as well as being environmentally friendly), you can go the extra mile and use solar energy to power your car.

Can you charge an electric vehicle with solar power?
Absolutely! If you’re at home for most of the day, your electric vehicle can be charged directly from your solar PV system. If you plan to charge your car at night, however, you’ll need a domestic solar battery storage system to store the energy harnessed throughout the day.

 

[johnny108]

New petrol and diesel cars will no longer be sold in the UK from 2035, so before long, far more of us are going to be behind the wheel of electric vehicles (EVs).
Here Graeme Cooper, National Grid’s Project Director – Transport Decarbonisation, addresses some of the myths about them.

1. Can the UK energy grid really cope with a huge increase in the number of electric vehicles being plugged in for charging?
There are two aspects to whether we have the capacity to manage lots of EVs being plugged in at once – whether we have enough energy and then whether we have sufficient capacity on the wires that carry that energy to where it’s needed.

Enough capacity exists
With the first of these, the energy element, the most demand for electricity we’ve had in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, due to improved energy efficiency such as the installation of solar panels, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16 per cent. Even if the impossible happened and we all switched to EVs overnight, we think demand would only increase by around 10 per cent. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.



Most people will charge their vehicles at home at night so this demand on the national grid will be at the time most of us are in bed not using any electricity and 900,000 homes already have solar panels installed and all new builds will have them installed, charging at night is not a problem.

Solar panels and EV charging
There are a number of benefits to powering your car from home – not only is it more convenient, but it’s cheaper too! And, if you want to save even more money (as well as being environmentally friendly), you can go the extra mile and use solar energy to power your car.

Can you charge an electric vehicle with solar power?
Absolutely! If you’re at home for most of the day, your electric vehicle can be charged directly from your solar PV system. If you plan to charge your car at night, however, you’ll need a domestic solar battery storage system to store the energy harnessed throughout the day.

Thank you.
You seem in a far better position than California, which was running diesel generators to power electric car charging stations, during power outages this last summer….