The All-Electric Dream Turning into a Nightmare?

This article in the Daily Mail starkly illustrates the real-life problems facing electric car owners now that numbers are increasing on the road. 

Service stations with only a handful of chargers, where electric car owners have to queue to charge, broken chargers not allowing owners to charge; basically the charging infrastructure not keeping up with demand. 

Even the best charging network, provided by Tesla has had issues over the holiday period, with Tesla owners having to queue to use chargers. 

There's a reason that the number of chargers is low: the electricity supply to (usually isolated) service stations is limited. Only a certain number of chargers can be supported before new electricity supply cables have to be laid to the service station to supply the amount of current demanded by more chargers.

That then becomes prohibitively expensive. Tesla get round the issue by current-sharing. If one car hooks up to a charger, then you can usually supercharge fine. If two cars hook up to the same charging plinth, then the current to each car is reduced so the overall demand on the grid supply is shared and kept below the limit of the supply cables. 

That's why you find (or should find) more chargers in service stations in urban areas. The grid in built up areas should be able to cope with the demand without too much hassle. 

But this is yet more evidence that the push to electric is ideological. Had the push to electric been anything else, then the implications of a million electric vehicles on the road would have been investigated and the correct policies put in place to provide adequate charging infrastructure.

As it is, government policy is to set an end date for fossil-fuelled vehicles and then let the market sort out the infrastructure.

It's not good enough. The National Grid needs to be modified, planning laws need to be amended and so much more secondary changes need to be made to support electric vehicles, if they are to become a success.

The issue of grid supply to service stations is just one. Others are supplying charging infrastructure in historic preservation areas where there are planning restrictions. For instance how does one get permission to bolt a charger onto the wall of a listed building? How do you install on-street charging in preservation areas? In both instances how do you modify planning laws to allow it, or do you make preservation areas and historic buildings charge-free zones?

Even when the charging infrastructure starts to get better, it needs to be able to support electric cars in winter with vastly reduced range. Electric car drivers are now beginning to realise that battery range can be as much as halved in very cold weather. Meaning that drivers are forced to hook up to chargers more often and create more demand for chargers in winter. I doubt very much the charging infrastructure has even considered this effect. Instead just plonking chargers willy-nilly wherever they can be shoehorned in and grid capacity will allow. No consideration for range, no consideration for demand. Instead the market provides the solution for the cheapest cost, ensuring maximum profits.

No-one has yet cottoned onto the brand loyalty that could be gained by providing adequate numbers of reliable chargers for all, similar to the Tesla network, but without the limitations of having to own a Tesla. Of course the hurdles to this are many, with the risk of competitors undercutting you and providing just enough charging capacity at a lower cost. Although it appears that Tesla have now opened up their network to those who are able to use it. 

Over the past month I've been posting articles about the wider issue: that of the means used to generate the electricity we use. Even if we went all-electric tomorrow, the issue still remains that the bulk of our generating capacity is provided by gas-powered stations. Renewables are okay when the wind and solar are available, but when they are not (which is most of the time) gas has to come on stream to provide the shortfall. 

So at the moment electric cars are not as green as the hype suggests. They are still powered mostly by fossil fuels. It's just that you don't see any emissions from the car. They are moved away from the car to the power station. Just like industry has been closed in the UK and moved to India or China. We still require the materials, it's just that their manufacture (and therefore the emissions created by making the item) have been moved elsewhere.

We are far from Green, far from net-zero, far from the ideological perfection the disciples of Greta Thunberg demand. 

That's what you get if you blindly follow an ideology, a requirement, a target, without a plan or a convincing end-game, without thinking it through.

Something Different: Hybrid Cars.

As someone who is in the industry, I've been looking at what to expect in the future from automotive technology.

Electric cars are fairly straightforward: You charge a big battery, the motor drains the battery and when coasting the motor becomes a generator and the kinetic energy is returned back to the battery under regenerative braking. The only voodoo in an electric car is the efficiency of the motor and combining the regen and hydraulic braking.

The main focus on electric cars is range. Getting more capacity out of the same physical size battery and keeping that range long-term as well as improving efficiency of the electronics and the motor. Minimising the production of waste energy in the form of heat is the key.

Motor efficiency is the holy grail, trying to get the best mileage out of the battery capacity. Modern electronics can be designed with greater or lesser efficiency (see Chinese electric cars for the latter), the way the motors are wound, and how those windings couple magnetically at different speeds is a science all of it's own.

Battery technology is another science where much can be done to improve range, with the main battery technologies well understood. It's getting the formulation of the chemicals right and also maintaining the capacity of the battery over a large number of charge cycles is where the boffins are working.

The most technology goes into hybrid cars of all things. Trying to meld a petrol engine and an electric motor seamlessly requires a lot of effort and technology.

It's a shame that governments have effectively killed off the internal combustion engine, because there's a lot more technology that could be incorporated into a hybrid power train. Hydraulic valves that could be lifted independently of the pistons, so an engine can be turned over matching revs to the motor before the valves are sequenced as normal and the fuel and ignition are started, so the change from motor to petrol power is seamless without wearing out clutches, ultra-low emission engine like the new Mazda skyactive-x or petrol compression ignition engines could clean up the ICE part of the powertrain.

But I guess that manufacturers won't pursue ICE technology much further, given that the future is either battery powered, or Hydrogen fuel cell powered. Already compact hydrogen fuel cell generators are available for off-grid use, it's just getting the hydrogen that is the problem as there aren't many filling stations.

Such a shame. But when you see a hybrid car, just smile and think to yourself: "That's gonna break one day" and it will. Because all those complex electronics will fail. Thanks to the eco-loons, even automotive electronics moved over to eco-friendly solder, with less lead content. The lead keeps the solder flexible and without it the solder becomes brittle and resists vibration less. Oh dear, a bit of a requirement for automotive electronic applications.

The electric car suffers the same to a lesser degree because there's a lot less in the way of electronics to manage the powertrain.

So it's a case of when one of those many thousands of solder joints fails and renders the car helpless, not if.

The future of automotive technology is bright: (for the electronics repair facilities).