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These people are insane

Under the so-called ZEV mandate, electric vehicles must make up 80pc of a car maker’s total sales by 2030, or face a £15,000-per-engine fine for falling below the quota. So what’s a car maker to do?

What perversion of logic led to that idea? They been letting Friends of the Earth write laws again?

55 thoughts on “These people are insane”

  1. They’re only ‘insane’ if you think their goal is to have us all driving round in electric cars by 2030 (what’s so fucking special about 2030, anyway, by the way?).

    If their plan is to have a reduced population confined to specific geographical areas without permission to travel from the State then taking away personal transport is an absolute must, and they are, by the standards of that goal, perfectly sane.

    The really ‘insane’ people are those who persist in viewing what’s going on as though it is taking place in a genuinely multi-party democracy under the rule of law with proper media scrutiny etc.

  2. Dennis, Inconveniently Noting Reality

    Every time I think things can’t get dumber than they are in the States, I look to Britain and find solace.

  3. They’re only ‘insane’ if you think their goal is to have us all driving round in electric cars by 2030

    Bingo.

  4. if you think their goal is to have us all driving round in electric cars by 2030

    Their goal is for us all to own electric cars but not actually drive them.

  5. Simple,
    You want to buy a real car?
    You just have to pay for it, and also for the lowest, cheapest thing that qualifies as ‘an electric car’.
    Dealer happy.
    Then you throw the C5 in a canal and drive home.

  6. “Their goal is for us all to own electric cars but not actually drive them.”

    There could be method in that madness – if everyone has a big battery sat on their driveway (that they paid for) that is connected to the grid, how many hours/days electric could be stored in them nationally? Could it be a way to institute a battery storage system by proxy?

  7. Could it be a way to institute a battery storage system by proxy?

    People have talked about that, but…
    People’s (EV) cars are attached to the grid at night, when there is low electric demand (although if the green blob get their way, there will be lots of demand for charging EVs). When you would like a big national battery is either at morning peak (maybe) or evening peak (more likely) – but that risks people hopping into the Tesla and finding out that they can’t drive to work (morning) or home from work (evening) because their car was too busy being part of the national notional battery. That won’t go over well – so people will stop attaching their cars to the national grid during the daytime, or even get up in the early morning to disconnect once the Tesla’s full of nice shiny electrons.
    Of course, the fact that it won’t work is no deterrent to politicians blathering about it, and eventually even trying to implement it.

  8. The effect of this legislation will be the car manufactures discounting the cost of electric cars and pushing up the price of the rest to maintain profitability. This will narrow the price gap and allow the Greenies to “prove” that electric cars cost no more that real ones.

  9. Surely this will just lead to dealers pointing customers to each other?

    I can imagine the conversations at the dealerships will be fun.

    “Hi. I’d like to purchase an ICE vehicle please”
    “Would you like a milk float instead?”
    “No.”
    “that’ll be an extra £15,000 then ”
    “Fuck off”

  10. Ecoloon ‘logic’:
    1. Green energy and EVs are far cheaper than fossil fuel powered alternatives.
    2. Therefore we must subsidise them heavily.
    3. And make their use legally obligatory.

    Clown world.

  11. “People’s (EV) cars are attached to the grid at night”

    In practice a lot are going to be attached during the day (not everyone works the same hours, or even works at all, and weekends and days off are a thing). Some people’s cars will even be attached at work.

    I don’t think the purpose of encouraging BEVs is to create a battery system. But I wouldn’t discount the possibility of a battery system completely either, if during a lull in wind/sun it’s cheaper to use stored energy than to run up an extra gas plant or draw more power from France/Belgium/Norway .

  12. “…how many hours/days electric could be stored in them nationally?”

    A rough calculation shows that a million Nissan Leaf power packs, if fully charged, could back up the whole of the National Grid for about an hour. Of course you would only need such back up if you have handed over the entire grid to the wind industry. Presumably lulls in the output of wind turbines will only occur after a sustained period of windy days so that every electric car has a full charge when it stops.

  13. @Stoneyground

    Presumably lulls in the output of wind turbines will only occur after a sustained period of windy days so that every electric car has a full charge when it stops

    Wonderful isn’t it. We are betting our energy security on having “convenient” weather and a predictable climate, yet the very people promoting this are telling us that the weather is becoming more unpredictable and extreme due the the rapidly changing climate.

  14. “…how many hours/days electric could be stored in them nationally?”

    According to a recent Royal Society report, to cover long term periods of low wind power under Net Zero, about 100 TWh of storage would be needed. This amounts to about a billion Tesla-size batteries. So if each house has 40-50 cars with their batteries connected to the grid, the problem is solved.

  15. Martin Near The M25

    There must be loopholes where you “sell” cars but they get inexplicably returned before dispatch. Or “Oh no we delivered the wrong thing for the 800th time this month.”

    Or “buy” a heat pump and get a free gas boiler. Don’t worry, we’ll collect the useless heat pump and “sell” it again.

  16. Worth adding that the approx cost of 1B Tesla batteries is £10T, although you may get a reduction if you order a billion.

  17. When I worked in sales we’d get that every March. An order for £14595 of computer kit on March 29th, always an interestingly exact number, cancelled on 2nd April, the next budget year. “We’ve got to (show that we’ve) spend all our money, or it will be taken off us next year!”

  18. @ThatsTheWayToDoIt

    Nobody is talking about using the BEV fleet to store the entirety of UK electricity needs for weeks on end. If it does end up getting used, it’ll be to cover short spells of time where buying in electricity from the Continent or using a more traditional (or – and this will be one of the alternatives – virtual) power plant will be more expensive. It can’t be used for very long because obviously you’ve got to charge the batteries back up… which limits the scenarios in which it would be the cheaper alternative. But sometimes it likely would be.

  19. Anon
    So if you have to have real power stations as well as windmills, to fill in the week-long gaps when there’s no wind, why not just use the real power stations the whole time, and save the cost (and dead birds) of the windmills?
    It’s not as if we are short of gas.
    Oh, and don’t mention solar: it gets dark at nights.

  20. Anon

    You’ll be relieved to hear that the Royal Society report also thought that battery storage was hopelessly impractical. Instead it suggested that energy reserves should be in the form of hydrogen which would be stored in caverns.

    TtC

    “to fill in the week-long gaps when there’s no wind”

    The RS report examined the longest available record of UK wind power, ~37 years I think. They found extended periods – much longer than you might expect from a shorter term record – during which wind power was significantly lower than the average level. They concluded that, rather than needing a week or a fortnight or a month of stored energy, Net Zero UK will need 3-4 months reserve.

    The report also assumes that UK energy use in 2050 under Net Zero will be about half the current level. If energy usage were to be maintained – ceteris paribus – the stored energy requirement would therefore presumably increase to ~200 TWh; current total annual UK electricity energy consumption is ~275TWh.

    For reasons about which one can only speculate, the report has received almost no (net zero?) media coverage.

  21. I understand that Kier Starmer has said that he plans to accelerate the planning process so that houses can be more quickly built. I’d guess this essentially means that objections will be quickly over-ruled or deemed invalid. Such an approach could also be very useful for ensuring adequate storage space in “hydrogen caverns”.

    The explosive character of hydrogen under fairly ordinary circumstances is well-known. However, it may be difficult to imagine what the energy in 100 TWh of stored hydrogen “really means”. For comparative purposes – a comparison to which I’m fairly sure that some mischief-maker will presently draw attention – the energy of the Hiroshima bomb was about 17GWh. So – possibly labouring the point – in Net Zero UK the stored energy in (highly explosive) hydrogen would be the equivalent of ~6,000 Hiroshima bombs.

    Of course it’s unlikely to all be stored in one place; it might for example be distributed among a thousand different places around the UK. Now while no doubt the rock surrounding the stored hydrogen will be reassuring to those in the vicinity, it might have been quite a challenge to persuade the people in a thousand places that they’d welcome the explosive energy of six Hiroshima bomb in each of their communities. So Starmer’s robust approach to planning objections will be helpful here too.

  22. Given hydrogens well known ability to leak exactly how are they proposing to store it in these caverns, out gassing from leakage could be a serious issue as you can’t see the flame from burning hydrogen.
    Given that a % of carbon from human activities is where coal mining has led to underground fires (longest recorded one has been burning for a century or more) then I hope these caverns aren’t old coal mines or near coal seams

  23. The Aborigines named the mountain Wingen, which means ‘fire’. Their explanation of the origin of the burning mountain was that one day, a tribesman was lighting a fire on the mountainside when he was carried off deep into the earth by The Evil One. Unable to escape, he used his fire stick to set the mountain alight, so that the smoke might warn others to keep away.

    With utter twaddle like this, you can see why Aussies rejected “The Voice”.

  24. Tim the Coder
    October 31, 2023 at 2:21 pm

    The dealer immediately arranges to buy it back at the sale price – book a ‘new’ sale for the government, the customer nets out.

    That at least gets you to 50%.

  25. I think my remarks above are being misinterpreted. At no point did I say I thought current policies were sensible. Just that no, BEVs aren’t some grand government conspiracy to get the motoring public to pay the cost of a national battery storage scheme that the grid can run off for days at a time – those numbers would never work and even most green nutters know it. The nuttiest green nutters hate BEVs as a form of greenwashing and want them banned too, while the more serious of the moderate green nutters will admit that BEV storage is negligible compared to multi day UK energy needs.

    But yes, despite the above, we may well see some limited use of BEVs feeding back into the grid at certain times, when it would be the option with the lowest marginal cost. Whether that cost will correctly handle any damage to the value of the battery by imposing extra discharge / charge cycles is an interesting question, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some people prefer to unplug at those times rather than accept whatever compensation they get offered for the use of their battery.

    Rather like people getting paid to reduce electricity at times where demand is expected to be high while renewable production is forecast to be low – the reduced grid load from which, particularly when talking about industrial power users, is known as a “virtual” power station – this is something that can make economic sense in its own right. Independent of policy around Net Zero, it creates the opportunity for people become mutually better off from gains of trade. Even if we ran a grid with little use of renewables, there would still be times when demand is high or supply is difficult (eg if several power stations are undergoing maintenance) and so generation capacity higher up the ladder of marginal costs would be being called into action: older, less efficient power plants, or those using fuels which have become relatively more expensive. If at some point there’s a lower marginal cost from an alternative option – drawing power from a network of batteries, paying users who have flexibility to reduce their demand for a while – then it is rational to use it.

    These alternatives would be called into action more often in a Net Zero regulatory environment – you get more mismatches of supply and demand when you make supply weather-dependent and therefore more variable. But that’s a problem with the policy, not an inherent flaw of virtual power stations or BEVs supplying the grid. Nor would such alternatives be sufficient to make an all-renewable grid workable.

  26. Another informative blog post full of clever solutions to an imaginary problem, and the more you fuel their delusions by doing so only provides them with the ‘evidence’ they are right.

    And no one has pointed out that if all those lovely bird choppers are supplying current (ho-ho) demand there isn’t any left over to charge the 1 billion Tesla batteries that don’t exist and never will.

  27. I was under the impression that battery life is measured on terms of discharge/recharge cycles

    So if they are being used as some sort of renewable energy storage they will last even fewer years

    Economic madness

  28. Bloke near Worcester

    I am seeing adverts for cars (I think the Nissan ‘CashCow’ is one – I know the name starts with a ‘Q’, but I cant remember the rest) where the propulsive power is electric (entirely, not hybrid), but has a petrol engine on board (and no plug for ‘leccy’).

    No idea why you would do this, but is this a clever ‘work-around’ to the incoming regs?

  29. @Bloke near Worcester:

    By definition that is a hybrid, even if it is not dual drive Electric/ICE, it’s still essentially an ICE fuel cell driven electric motor. Presumably this gets some different ULEZ rating and doesn’t have the weight of carrying the batteries, but still a rather pointless construction.

  30. It’s pretty sensible really. The battery alone will manage 40 to 50 miles. That’s 80% or whatever of all car journeys. The ICE can also be very small (800 cc?) as when it’s on it runs at a constant speed to produce ‘leccy to feed the battery. No direct connection to the drive train. So, highly efficient. But also giving range and fast refill times on long journeys. It’s actually a neat compromise. Of course politics means the Greens want to ban them. Even if they are a very sensible construction to deal with the technological problems. Most journeys battery only but range and refill available. And, as far as I understand it, small battery plus small ICE is cheaper than large battery.

  31. Unable to escape, he used his fire stick to set the mountain alight, so that the smoke might warn others to keep away.

    Of course its tosh. He used the fire to cook his tea.

    Anyway this compares quite well with most laws and reports on climate policy.

  32. An interesting idea but the vehicles are still reliant on electric batteries with largely unknown lifespans and unacknowledged recycling implications. Also a brief trawl online did not reveal the cost of a replacement battery.

  33. Agreed. I’m not someone that would touch an EV (completely useless for any proper journey in one day type scenario) but that sounds like it could be a compromise sweet spot. Could even do plug ins for all short day-to-day local hops. ICE kicks in once the battery drops below some number (50%?), which removes all long distance issues, but still potentially reduces fossil use as part of that (depending on your personal journey mix). Key being – is the small battery easily/cheaply replaceable after 5 years (or whatever it is) that means that the rest of the car might have a more useful economic life?

  34. We could store all that hydrogen by bonding it to a spare carbon atom.

    To create what exactly? Transition metal carbene complex?

    Better to go the whole hog and make methane, but then again even “Green Methane” (as in generated without fossil fuel source), is a greenhouse gas if it escapes into the atmosphere.

    Storing it in a tank and burning it within an internal combustion engine tuned for methane, though? Not so much.

    This climate bollocks is easy once you ignore the inherent contradictions and hypocrisy.

  35. Interested, after years of dealing with HMRC one realises that when claiming expenditure allowable for tax, HMRC get really interested in figures that end in 0 or 5. I read a hundred (!) years ago that when faking numbers humans are inexorably drawn to 0 or 5.
    Just guessing, but it’s interesting that all the critical dates end in those numbers. Do all HMRC staff think “Greta, dear, hang on a mo!”?
    Mind you, probably too busy watching reruns of Sopranos or Game of Thrones while working from home…

  36. “Better to go the whole hog”

    I assumed that was his point – and yes fuel, and hence carbon neutral as it’s used.

    That’s potentially even a credible use for a renewable that can’t guarantee on-demand. Ie, like the old days, use it for when it’s available (and you can predict it will be sufficiently available, but more over a long enough period).

  37. @PF

    For more in that vein, see “Grid to X”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-X

    The current problem being, as the name suggests, a lack of consensus on what ‘X’ should be.

    @starfish

    Like I said there’s an issue with costing discharge and recharge effects on battery degradation, but it isn’t as simple as there being a fixed number of cycles before the battery stops working (or more realistically you get an X% capacity reduction, and the value of the car drops by Y%). Some cycles do more harm to the battery than others. The only way car-owners would tolerate their batteries being used in this way is if it’s done in a battery-kind way – which limits the type of operation available, I don’t think we are going to see car batteries drained to near empty then pumped up again ASAP for example. But even gentler operation could still be useful.

    If, once you factor in the effect on the battery and the need to recharge it later, this is still a cheaper way to get hold of electicity than the alternative marginal generation/storage/import option, then it isn’t economic madness. What would be madder is lots of households having a serious storage option sitting on their driveway but no way to access that storage for any purpose other than driving. If it can do something else, in a more convenient way than using the fuel in your ICE to run a generator would be, you might as well make use of it.

    It doesn’t even have to go straight back to the grid. There are people using similar battery tech to what’s in a BEV for home power storage, who rely on the battery when electricity prices are high. The basic economics is the same as people turning on the washing machine once their lower rate on Economy 7 kicks in, and we’ve had Economy 7 since 1978 – well before the trend towards renewables.

  38. Should have written “Power to X” rather than “Grid to X”, though the latter is used by Harnischmacher – who’s written a lot about the economics of connecting BEVs to the grid, including degradation effects of different models of charge and discharge. One thing Harnischmacher points out vehicle-to-grid would be particularly good for is maintaining grid frequency, because a V2G system doesn’t need time to spin up like a traditional power station does. We are talking more about uses like frequency containment here, rather than any green fantasy about running the grid off BEVs for days, which is one reason Harnischmacher expects degradation effects to be negligible enough that BEV owners will be happy to pocket the reward for V2G use.

  39. Anon

    “What would be madder is lots of households having a serious storage option sitting on their driveway but no way to access that storage for any purpose other than driving. If it can do something else, in a more convenient way than using the fuel in your ICE to run a generator would be, you might as well make use of it.”

    That sounds fine provided of course that we were dealing with individuals’ free choices, rather than any notion of collective. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s taking place here. Collectivist parasites are increasingly determining what our “choices” / direction of travel will be.

  40. Interested, after years of dealing with HMRC one realises that when claiming expenditure allowable for tax, HMRC get really interested in figures that end in 0 or 5. I read a hundred (!) years ago that when faking numbers humans are inexorably drawn to 0 or 5.

    Bugger. I’ll have to stop using the tip in restaurants to round my bill to a round number…

    I was taught that in fake sets of numbers, the number 1 doesn’t show up enough.
    The distribution isn’t even, with the lower numbers showing up more.

  41. The RS report examined the longest available record of UK wind power, ~37 years I think. They found extended periods – much longer than you might expect from a shorter term record – during which wind power was significantly lower than the average level. They concluded that, rather than needing a week or a fortnight or a month of stored energy, Net Zero UK will need 3-4 months reserve.

    For me, that was the biggest takeaway from the report. I’ve been arguing that Nut Zero would require us to cope with a dunkelflaute covering the whole of W Europe for a couple of weeks in winter. But the clever chaps at the RS looked at the historic weather records and found that we can (and regularly do) have entire years when winds are about 25% down on average, so you need enough storage to cope with that.

    Of course, as others have pointed out, using facts, numbers and logic to argue with ecoloons driven by religious conviction is a pointless activity.

  42. “But the clever chaps at the RS looked at the historic weather records and found that we can (and regularly do) have entire years when winds are about 25% down on average, so you need enough storage to cope with that.”

    They are white middle aged men, so can be totally ignored as irrelevant to a progressive society. More important from a governmental perspective is to get a collective of transwomen to opine on the situation and declare that it can all be done by tapping into the natural vibrations of the earth.

  43. ‘We could store all that hydrogen by bonding it to a spare carbon atom.’

    True, jgh. Converting CO2 to methanol (https://www.carbonrecycling.is) is off-the-shelf technology. And of course you can convert the methanol to petrol if you wish. (https://www.exxonmobilchemical.com/en/catalysts-and-technology-licensing/methanol-to-gasoline-technology).

    Unfortunately extraction of CO2 from the ocean surface to recycle it is still at the experimental stage. (https://picryl.com/media/dr-heather-willauer-explains-how-scientists-at-the-naval-research-laboratory-83f21e)

  44. @CD

    Benford’s law… Though people seem to disagree how useful it is for fraud detection.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

    @PF

    The lack of choice issue is fair comment indeed. Whether charging infrastructure starts coming with restrictions on use, including compulsory handing of control over charging cycles to the energy companies, is one to watch out for. But in the big picture, V2G isn’t going to make a huge dent in the energy storage problems associated with Net Zero – isn’t even a good solution purely in CO2e terms if you push the batteries so hard that cars start coming to their (environmentally expensive) end of lifetime sooner. The academic research I’ve seen suggests that V2G is only likely to make a marginal contribution, and be unpopular with owners if not compensated, so I’m cautiously optimistic that V2G is unlikely to be compelled. But many other important lifestyle “choices” are being compelled. Including, in the near future – and unless there’s another U-turn, which can’t be ruled out given the practical difficulties – the ICE vs BEV choice itself.

  45. I just read Anon’s contributions at November 1, 2023 at 11:13 am & following. I wonder if he’d be interested in buying a bridge I’m selling?
    Think about it. The idea would be electric vehicle owners giving the generators access to a free utility. What could possibly go wrong with that? You can predict exactly what would happen. They’d push the charge/recharge cycle to the absolute limits because they’re not paying for the battery degradation. And the “limits” of course, would be whatever best case, perfect world, computer model they could get commissioned.

  46. @bis

    What Harnischmacher reckons is that electric car owners simply wouldn’t sign up to that. She’s working on the basis that the electricity companies would compensate owners who let their batteries be used, with discounted bills or similar. That’s the market mechanism that would keep the electricity firms honest – the more aggressive the discharge/charge cycles they use, the fewer BEV-owners would be interested. In terms of economic efficiency, people with a high-end vehicle they don’t want to depreciate would be unlikely to sign up even to more moderate usage, but someone whose car has already depreciated heavily or whose battery is particularly resilient to charging could find the compensation good enough. Obviously @PF’s point about whether this is all voluntary is relevant, but it would be a tough thing to compel. If they’re not on board with it, people would simply unplug their cars at times they might get discharged.

    Harnischmacher also makes the point that BEV adoption is going to be harder to achieve if people think they’re going to get gamed in this way, and since many governments seem to be prioritising getting off ICEs off the streets at the moment, she thinks they’re unlikely to let it be a free-for-all for the energy firms. (I think it helps that vehicle-to-grid is not important enough. Use of the extra storage capacity might be a “nice to have” for frequency containment etc, but hardly something that Net Zero either stands or falls on – it simply doesn’t make a big enough difference. To the extent that V2G is an economically viable idea, and having run the calculations Harnischmacher think it makes sense, a market mechanism between energy firms and consumers ought to suffice to realise that value. The situation where it’d be easier to imagine governments compelling it is if it didn’t make economic sense – so compulsion is necessary – but was nevertheless critical to keep the lights on, which governments would presumably view as more important than encouraging people to transition from ICEs to BEVs. That doesn’t seem to be the case.)

    Pretty much all the comments above assume that it’s the battery that determines the depreciation of a BEV. There have been developments in battery tech that improve their ability to go through charging cycles; you’re likely to see more progress on that front than further dramatic improvements on energy density/range. There are practical reasons people want fast charging, and fast charging is only going to be attractive if batteries’ ability to withstand it improves, so this is an area that’s actively worked on and improvements are in the pipeline. A lot of people in industry are confident that battery life isn’t always going to be the main determinant of a BEV’s lifetime. More gentle discharge/charge cycles could become near-enough free. That does tilt the economics in favour of V2G, if done properly. But again, since we’re not going to see order of magnitude increases in energy density, it isn’t ever going to make V2G a solution for large-scale energy storage.

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