No new petrol or diesel cars by 2040

[John D v2.0]

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...all-diesel-and-petrol-cars-and-vans-from-2040

The quote is the time scale is long enough to be taken seriously. But I know people here are sceptical the electricity networks will choir with demand. So do we think that will be long enough to get the required capacity online?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

No - we will all be driving private vehicles a whole lot less. Or not at all.

 

[JohnW2]

So do we think that will be long enough to get the required capacity online?

No.

Kind Regards, John

 

[flameport]

Not a hope for adequate capacity in just 23 years time. We will be lucky if there is enough electricity for everything else without electric cars.
Capacity meaning both generation and infrastructure to distribute the electricity to where it is required.

The current practice of installing huge numbers tiny little generation facilities (mostly solar) will ensure instability and unreliability, power problems will be commonplace.
No doubt to be made far worse once people start installing battery packs for storage, smart meters are everywhere and they are connected to various home appliances to switch things on and off as and when some software decides.

Owning your own personal car is likely to become far less prevalent, in towns and cities renting one by the hour or minute is rather more likely.

 

[bernardgreen]

The neurological effects of lead resulted in the removal of lead from petrol and the replacemt of lead water pipes.

The neurological effects of lithium are not yet fully known. Lithium is used in the treatment of neurological conditions such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression) and dosage has be very tighly monitored.

Will lithium in vehicle batteries be discovered to be more harmful than lead was ?

 

[magicmushroom666]

At least we're not burning anything as with petrol, or drinking anthing as with pipes. The lithium should largely stay inside the packs. I guess scrapyards etc are a potential for problems, but they seem to be tightly regulated these days all ready.

The neurological effects of lead resulted in the removal of lead from petrol and the replacemt of lead water pipes.

The neurological effects of lithium are not yet fully known. Lithium is used in the treatment of neurological conditions such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression) and dosage has be very tighly monitored.

Will lithium in vehicle batteries be discovered to be more harmful than lead was ?

 

[FrodoOne]

Fast charging Aluminium / Graphite batteries are under development.
http://news.stanford.edu/2015/04/06/aluminum-ion-battery-033115/
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/07...te-low-cost-battery-storing-renewable-energy/
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/04/...num-battery-can-charge-a-phone-in-60-seconds/

 

[ban-all-sheds]

It’s hard to imagine building a huge lithium-ion battery for grid storage.

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...iggest-lithium-ion-battery-in-south-australia

 

[JohnW2]

Will lithium in vehicle batteries be discovered to be more harmful than lead was ?

Who knows, but it could well be moot. Battery technology is always changing, and the main challenge of EVs is to develop better/cheaper/lighter batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have only been widely available for a bit over 20 years, and it would seem pretty like that, if we ever reach a point of EVs being very widespread (IMO, many decades down the road, if ever!), the batteries will be something other than lithium-ion ones.

There therefore may be a question of whether batteries used by EVs may be "more dangerous", in some way, than the tetraethyl lead which used to be added to petrol, but, when it arises, the question may well relate to something other than lithium.

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnD]

Fast charging Aluminium / Graphite batteries are under development.
http://news.stanford.edu/2015/04/06/aluminum-ion-battery-033115/
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/07...te-low-cost-battery-storing-renewable-energy/
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/04/...num-battery-can-charge-a-phone-in-60-seconds/

I thought I heard the Stanford one (your links are from 2015) had hit a snag during development, and collapsed.

A viable storage has to be cheap and massive.

But there is a lot of money to be made from energy storage. NG and the supply companies are already researching and planning in the belief that district storage is on its way. Nobody knows yet what solution(s) will be around in 20 years.

 

[JohnD]

The neurological effects of lead resulted in the removal of lead from petrol and the replacemt of lead water pipes.

I don't believe that the brain damage caused by leaded petrol was understood when it was being phased out. It's only recently that we have become aware of the enormous costs caused by damaging the developing brain in babies and children, and the social effects of violence, crime and reduced intelligence it caused.

The benefits of removing lead from petrol only became apparent after 20 years, when we had a generation of young adults who had not been damaged.

 

[charliegolf]

It's not just storage though, is it? In many cities (and even on the street 200m from where I type), you can't get your vehicle to your house, so even if every house had a charging point, how do you connect? Charging points at every parking spot, with a credit card to pay? Then there's the replacing of the fuel of 2.7 million cars per years from burning to charging. Switching off the oil to the refineries will be relatively easy as demand reduces; turning up the generation of electricity, not so much.

 

[JohnW2]

I don't believe that the brain damage caused by leaded petrol was understood when it was being phased out. It's only recently that we have become aware of the enormous costs caused by damaging the developing brain in babies and children, and the social effects of violence, crime and reduced intelligence it caused. The benefits of removing lead from petrol only became apparent after 20 years, when we had a generation of young adults who had not been damaged.

You may well be right, but are you suggesting that violence and crime reduced, and intelligence increased in the generation of people born following removal of lead additives from petrol??

It's worth remembering that the petrol additive was only able to have effects on human bodies/brains because the lead existed as an organic salt (tetraethyl lead), which was not only volatile but could easily be assimilated into the human body following inhalation. People have never been at any significant risk because of all the lead roofs, gutters etc. around!

As bernard has said, lithium is quite toxic, but lithium batteries could only represent a problem to health if they also produced some salts/compounds in the environment which could easily get into the human body.

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnD]

You may well be right, but are you suggesting that violence and crime reduced, and intelligence increased in the generation of people born following removal of lead additives from petrol??

yes.

https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/are-diesel-sales-doomed.479186/page-3#post-3900006

this is a US graph. The UK graph is similar, although the dates are different because UK was relatively late in banning leaded petrol.

Violent crime is shown because it is predominantly a crime of young men. Around 20'ish.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27067615

It seems incredible, until you look at the evidence.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis#Evidence

"It is extremely difficult for policemen, criminologists and politicians to believe the evidence, because their careers and self-worth depend on believing that their actions have been responsible for crime reduction."

 

[JohnD]

A more thorough article
http://www.motherjones.com/environm...sure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/

An article by somebody who checked the references
"I began by reading the papers. Do they say what the article claims? They do. Then I looked up the citations: the discussion of those papers in the scientific literature. The three whose citations I checked have been mentioned, between them, 301 times. I went through all these papers (except the handful in foreign languages), as well as dozens of others. To my astonishment, I could find just one study attacking the thesis, and this was sponsored by the Ethyl Corporation, which happens to have been a major manufacturer of the petrol additive tetraethyl lead."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export

version with links and references
http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/07/the-grime-behind-the-crime/

Why are US jails full of black men?
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-how-it-connects-race/