This is just another collection of my thoughts on something that I would have spent time bending people’s ears about, but know that I won’t be able to do so in the future. So I’m doing it here – and as with anything here, feel free to skip it! Not only will I not be offended, I probably won’t know!
The simple fact of the the matter is that we need to power as much as possible of our society via electricity as possible, as quickly as possible. CLimate Change is real, and it’s us pushing CO₂ into the atmosphere that is causing it.
If you disagree with this statement, then this is a rare piece of opinion from me here on this blog – you’re wrong. Just wrong. And that would be OK if the consequences of your actions weren’t destroying everyone (and evertything) else’s future.
Electricity is the one form of energy that is truly renewable, can be transported easily and efficiently, can be stored, and can do its work without contributing to climate change – indeed with enough of it it may even be possible to reverse some of the changes and damage that the last 100+ years of industrial progress have made to the natural world. Not all of it, but it can provide a much better chance than any other option.
First, transport. As much as possible needs to be electrified. As anyone who has known me since I was a teenager, I would absolutely quality as a ‘petrol head’ (a term I have hated forever). I know more about cars and engines than 99.5% of people. I understand how they work down to a tedious technical level, and have genuinely fixed and rebuilt more cars and motorbikes than some people have had hot dinners. I love what cars and motorbikes have done for me over my life – given me freedom, identity and I’ve achieved some lifelong dreams involving them.
But the simple fact of the matter is that they are polluting the planet. And that’s predominantly (but not totally) because of how they are powered – by burning fossil fuels which are effectively stored sunlight from hundreds of thousands of years ago. They release CO₂ into the atmosphere at a rate that is unsustainable unless each car was driven around 600 miles a year. And that’s about 1/20 of what actually happens. We all need to stop doing this, even if it means minor changes to our lifestyles to do so (and most of the time, even with today’s technology, the behavioural changes needed are minor). We need to grow up as a race and civilisation.
Electric vehicles don’t solve the problem totally, but they do the vast majority of the work. If every car present magically changed to an EV tonight, we’d still have a problem, but much less of one. Society needs to change as a whole to make it work long term, but EVs are a big part of the equation if we are to do it without upending modern life and alienating everyone.
There’s a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which is spread about EVs, and it all comes from vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. After less than a year, the extra carbon cost of making an EV (mostly because of the battery) is ‘paid back’ in savings, and every year after that, the EV’s benefit to the environment improves.
No, they won’t collapse car parks (My zoe weighs the same as a Ford Puma)
No, they don’t produce more pollution from the brakes and tyres.
No, the batteries don’t die in 2 years like cellphone batteries do – the battery heating and cooling is managed, leading to much longer lives (the notable exception, the first generaton nissan leaf, a lesson learned).
Yes, they are more reliable than combustion-powered vehicles – study after study proves this.
Yes, the batteries can be recycled at end of life or used for static storage in houses (which use drastically less power than moving a vehicle does).
In short, they are nearly all good news. Not entirely, but nothing is.
But it’s time to let go of combustion (ICE) vehicles. They might sound cool. You might like changing gear, or the driving experience, or thinking that you need an 800 mile range for the road trip you undertake once every 3 years. But you don’t. I’ve lived with an EV for 3 years, and (current health prognosis notwithstanding) I would never go back for a day-to-day vehicle. Everything about them is getting better every week. Our drive to Geneva last summer in our ‘shopping car’ involved only two stops on the long drive on the way back to the ferry.
The zoe is visibile in the aerial shot at 33:19…
Both of the stops we needed to charge the car coincided with toilet or meal breaks, and the car was charged fully by the time we were discharged or fully charged ourselves!
But there’s more than just cars. Heating and cooling our homes is another battleground where vested interests will tell us that the new alternatives just don’t work. But again this is simply untrue. Yes, a heat pump system is more expensive than a new gas boiler to install. But again, it will pay for itself fairly quickly as it is that much more efficient – up to 5 times more so. And combine it with solar panels and battery storage and it’s possible that you can heat your house for nearly zero outlay once the system is fitted. This is the stuff governments should be making happen (and some do), but if you can afford it, you should do it. It will make a difference, and you can live in a warm home which is not damaging the environment while you do so.
The same goes for cooking. Gas stoves are a major source of illness for people who use them. They actually cause deaths in otherwise wealthy countries because of the fumes they give off directly into our living spaces. Replacing with induction electric hobs eliminates all this. Once again, sometimes I see people saying that it means that thay can’t flambé their meal and they do that every night, but there comes a time when you need to change your behaviour for the better for society, not just think of your own selfish pleasure. Plus I’m betting this doesn’t happen every night, so just grow up.
If you want to know more about this sort of thing, but don’t want to be bored senseless, I would suggest watching videos from the truly excellent and engaging Climate Town on Youtube. I’ll be honest, it was this video that made me make the change to an induction hob when I was designing my kitchen:
But there are a lot more wide-ranging climate-based topics here, and they’re always engaging to watch.
If you want a more data-driven version of things, then I would suggest watching some of Simon Clark‘s videos. Not all of them I totally agree with (sometimes I think he lets perfection get in the way of practicality), but there is a lot of interest and learning to be found here. And being informed about this is important, as there are a lot of people whose business interests mean they will either be economical with the truth or just flat out lie to keep their businesses going. What’s happening in the USA could happen in the UK unless we become better informed and make better choices. Because if we make better choices, then whoever is trying to be in government will pander to them. I used to think that politics was about choosing the best things to believe in and then trying to persuade people to do them.
But having seen some of the UK’s political system from the inside, I don’t think that’s the case at all, aside from the extremes such as Farage, the privately-educated multimillionaire ex-commodities trader who has convinced the average joe that he’s a man of the people and led the UK in to the biggest piece of self-harm via Brexit and is now trying to persuade us that net zero is a bad idea – by lying about the costs (I spent some time checking this out when I stood to be an MP and was told by the department he got his figures from that he cherry picked the net zero one as a large one, even though the ‘do nothing and carry on as we are’ was a bigger figure).
Net zero will be good for us – both financailly and environmnetally. Being ahead of the curve will be good for us. It will create high-skilled jobs which will be in demand around the world as other countries demand the same changes that we will benefit from. Despite what they naysayers tell you, we are making progress. I wish I would be alive to see the results as things improve into the future, and I would have spent time trying to make that happen – both with my own home but by helping people see that they can make a change themselves and even have it save them money.
The Zoe costs about 2p per mile to run, compared to 15-20p for an equivalent diesel car. It would be even cheaper had I been well and installed solar panels and battery storage – effectively running for free from the sun from much of the year, as well as the rest of the house too. I will not live to see those days, but others already are, and more will do if we all make small changes. Walking more. Cycling more. Driving less. Buying a smaller EV instead of a needlessly large fashion-tank SUV.
But most of all, electricity is the future.
A couple of things that aren’t, though:
Hydrogen. Hydrogen is being touted as the way to go by some companies (such as JCB). The reason for this is pretty simple – it’s possible to use a lot of current diesel technology to create an engine that burns Hydrogen in the same way, leading to ‘just water’ (H and O combined) as the exhaust. Except, as with so many things in the real world, that’s not what happens. Firstly, there’s more than just Oxygen in the atmosphere, and at the temperatures that are involved, oxides of nitrogen are created. The same ones that cause respiratory disease for those who live in cities already. Burning Hydrogen like this does not make sense and is not an improvement worth chasing. It can (kinda of) be stored in a tank. and used to produce electricity, but the complete failure of the Toyota Mirai as a going concern tells you all you need to know about how well this has worked, along with the number of places you can now fill one up. If anyone tells you EV chargers are hard to find, compare this map with one from Zap-Map for EV chargers!
Secondly, Hydrogen is a nightmare to deal with. It’s first in the periodic table, and that’s because it’s the smallest atom. It’s like Houdini. It can escape from pretty much anywhere, and causes all sorts of problems. Back in the day this was touted as a ‘simple swap’ for the gas main system in the UK. But gas leaks already contribute massively to the UK (and indeed the world’s) greenhouse gas emissions (Methane is much worse than CO₂ although breaks down more quickly). Hydrogen would just leak all over the place. And if you ever did GCSE chemistry, your teacher probably showed you how well it burned!
Thirdly, production. If it’s produced in a way that doesn’t involve fossil fuels (which the vast majority does, creating more greenhouse emissions in the process), then the same amount of energy at the end use takes about five times as much energy as using electricity stored in batteries. This makes zero sense except in a very few cases. And that’s not cars.
With unlimited electricity to create hydrogen via hydrolysys, it may find some use in some transport solutions, such as large shipping and aviation. But it won’t be cars.
Carbon Capture. If anyone tells you that they think carbon capture is part of the solution,they are wrong. They don’t even have a GCSE-level grasp of the physics involved. CO₂ is very difficult to split back into C and O because they are very happy to be in that state. So the alternative is capturing it as is, and storing it underground (or using it to extract more fosill fuels). So either difficult or stupid, depending on which option you take – not only because capturing just the CO₂ isn’t easy to do. Tony Blair has been bought hook line and sinker by the Saudi government, so if he did have any credibility left (I’m not sure he ever did), then it evaporated with his support for CCS. And what do they export? Exactly. No working large-scale carbon capture system has ever worked at an efficiency that would make it worthwhile unless we had infinite energy (in the form of electricity).
And if you have infinite electricity, why on earth would you burn fossil fuels? It makes zero sense.
Generating Electricity from fossil fuels is not the future. They need to come from renewables, combined with interconnected grids (the sun’s always shining somewhere), and storage. When all this is in place, the electric society will be clean, and able to do things now that we can’t even dream of, once power is ubiquitious and cheap. It’s not something I’m ever going to see, but I know it’s an achievable goal if we work together (in small ways and large) to achieve it.
