Would you go back to ICE ?

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Dad
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Post by Dad »

I was Googling last night to see if you could create a home solar EV charging solution cheaply (a few thousand pounds rather than £5-10k). Something simple that could just supply 1Kwh so whenever your car was at home it could be plugged in and get 30-60 miles top up a day.. type of thing.

I realised that these small solar panel units with an inverter just won’t cut the mustard. It was suggested on a few websites that you probably need about 4-6 panels which would take up 8m2 of space. I was thinking of a mini system that would take up about 2m2 of space! No chance.

Is there anything you could build at home that would provide around 1Kwh per hour or is it just not cost effective?
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Erakettu
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Post by Erakettu »

One would probably need an additional battery together with the singular panel. As I understand the panels are not that effective per area occupied.

Also: watts = power, watthours = energy
orrery
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Post by orrery »

metalmadhammer wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 11:04 am The windmills are completely useless when the wind doesn't blow...

Oh No! I'm dumbfounded. All these engineers and companies working on them all this time and no-one spotted that! How could that have happened?

Have you heard anyone say that they expect the wind to blow 24/7/365? Have you heard someone claim that the sun shines 24 hours a day?

Or maybe, just maybe, people did know that all along and had actually worked out how wind turbines fit in to the new renewable energy economy and maybe it is just you that hasn't caught up?

Maybe they had spotted that solar and wind are just about complementary. In the summer when there isn't much wind, there's solar and in winter when there isn't much solar there's lots of wind. Maybe they had spotted that you can estimate, roughly, how much wind and solar there will be in a year. Maybe they had spotted that if you build lots of both, so that you are generating more energy than is required over a year, you can then store the surplus and use that to fill in the times when there isn't any wind and solar.

We can build lots of grid-scale batteries (my local solar farm has them) and enlist the huge number of EVs being sold each year (240 GWh in 2021) into V2G, for short term storage and grid balancing. Then build liquid air batteries (existing technology, well understood, scalable and easily deployable) for short to medium term storage. We can create hydrogen by electrolysis and use that for medium to long term storage, or convert it to liquid fuels like methanol or ammonia (a process which also sequesters CO2 to achieve) for long term storage and for transport fuel like shipping.

Most of this is pure engineering, not pure physics, we just need to get on and do it.
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ChangoMutney
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Post by ChangoMutney »

metalmadhammer wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 11:04 am
ChangoMutney wrote: Sat Feb 05, 2022 10:39 pm
metalmadhammer wrote: Sat Feb 05, 2022 10:55 am Them bloody windmills are not the answer - wish they would stop messing about with useless renewables and increase our nuclear capability - This will be the only way we can all enjoy EV's when the ICE cars are barred.
Fact check - those bloody windmills definitely are at least part of the answer. Its now the cheapest way to generate electricity. Current Nuclear technology is only a short to medium term solution, and getting rid of nuclear waste is a significant problem we really haven't solved yet.
The windmills are completely useless when the wind doesn't blow (On average it doesn't blow enough to turn the windmills for 7 weeks of the year - FACT and in some cases up to 11 days in a row). The amount of waste made by modern small Molten Salt Reactors is insignificant (The Chinese want to send the waste back to the sun in rockets as a typical large Nuclear power station only produces 1 cubic Meter of waste per year but i'm not sure that's a good idea) as is the risk of a any breach of the reactor.
Whatever the method, we need a method of generation which can meet demand any hour of any day of the year, not just when the wind blows and/or the sun shines, the only renewable method of any real use is hydro. If instantaneous power generation isn't achieved, we face a future of energy lockdowns which is just planning to fail IMO.
Wind combined with effective storage, tidal, solar, micro-hydro, geothermal, and perhaps a modest amount of nuclear in the short to medium term is the way forward. I agree nuclear is in the mix, and more than we have now, but it will never be enough long term, hence the requirement to invest in renewables and trying to live within our means.
Last edited by ChangoMutney on Mon Feb 07, 2022 2:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Goaty
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Post by Goaty »

Dad wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 12:59 pm I was Googling last night to see if you could create a home solar EV charging solution cheaply (a few thousand pounds rather than £5-10k). Something simple that could just supply 1Kwh so whenever your car was at home it could be plugged in and get 30-60 miles top up a day.. type of thing.

I realised that these small solar panel units with an inverter just won’t cut the mustard. It was suggested on a few websites that you probably need about 4-6 panels which would take up 8m2 of space. I was thinking of a mini system that would take up about 2m2 of space! No chance.

Is there anything you could build at home that would provide around 1Kwh per hour or is it just not cost effective?

😱😱😱 Again relating to an industry I’m involved with - people need to be very careful bringing these systems into their homes; there is a professional regulated market, but also a ‘DIY’er’ market where the choice of battery technology, BMS, and other factors can lead to fires. Once a lithium-ion battery ignites, the thermal runaway which takes place makes it almost impossible to extinguish. We’ve seen these home-builds put in some very questionable locations in terms of hindering evacuation. Also prior to failure, lithium-ion packs can release toxic, flammable electrolytic solvent vapours (called off-gasses). Not nice! I personally wouldn’t put the battery pack inside my home.
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RichR
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Post by RichR »

Yep - plenty of options for storage technology. Batteries have downsides relating to scalability at larger power levels (this is where things like pumped hydro works better), but they are indeed ideal for siting at solar farms generating a few tens of MW to smooth out the flow to the grid to make it easier to manage the frequency output (which has to be very, very close to the rest of the grid).

I can say (without breaking confidentiality laws) that carbon capture facilities are at the planning permission stage, as are hydrogen generation, storage and combustion facilities. The plants are designed and ready to build, it's just the matter of getting permission, contractors and materials. The government has some ambitious (but achievable) targets for getting off fossil fuels, and there's enough money being poured in from various places to make it happen. But as I said before - in matters of infrastructure this large, things take many years to become reality. It's not that people aren't working on it, it's just that it's a very complex and time consuming process as you have to get it right first time.

And for the next stage of electricity production, the UK's first commercial demonstrator plant for nuclear fusion (using a spherical tokamak) is currently down to the last five potential sites. It'll only be a small 10MW plant, but once that's running and the logistics of scaling up to multi gigawatt production is worked out, we can expect that to be in the mix. But the plant won't be online until around 2040, and it'll be no earlier than 2050 before the plans for a proper commercial scale plant start to take shape I would imagine. But fusing isotopes of hydrogen made from sea water to produce non-radioactive helium as the waste product (and the world needs helium anyway) makes a lot of sense in the longer term. But that'll be beyond my lifetime.
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Dorsetandy
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Post by Dorsetandy »

Without wishing to hijack this post with is about ICE cars, to put into context thinking of replacing my second ICE with a second EV. With more home charging and electricity costs rising (will soon be on a standard variable tariff when my current fixed tariff expires at the end of the month). If you can even get an energy supplier to quote an EV tariff the offset costs of the increased daytime tariff make the break even point for 2 low mileage EVs questionable. Don’t want to cover my roof with solar panels but would still like to take advantage of cheap off peak electricity. To achieve this will need to able to store sufficient off peak energy for use during the expensive period, ie between 04:30 and 12:30 around 10-12 kw. Would a professionally installed battery storage system capable of being fully charged using off peak electricity work? Does anyone have experience of battery power in the home - guess most will be linked to a solar panel system. Tesla Powerwall looks good but is expensive.
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Skeniv
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Post by Skeniv »

Once I take delivery of the Enyaq, it’ll be the first EV in my care, it is a 48 months lease through my work and I have the option at any point to get a quote for the vehicle and buy it outright or finance it as my own, that’s all subject to how my experience into the EV world will be in the next year or two of ownership but I have a strong feeling I may not return to ICE again, willingly, at all, unless circumstances beyond my control leads to me having an ICE vehicle again. I hope not.
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Goaty
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Post by Goaty »

I’ll let you know:

A) After a winter with snow
B) After taking the Enyaq from the UK to Poland this summer
!!
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IanEV
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Post by IanEV »

If you have 20 mins spare this is a really interesting video discussing nuclear vs renewables



Drove my 3.5 tonne ICE LWB camper today for the first time since owning the Enyaq. I had to work out what my left foot was for!
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