Energy distribution…

During my various pieces you’ll hear me arguing about the distribution of power to electric vehicles. All of the big players in this industry recognise that oil will not last forever and that we need to find an alternative. Annoyingly it looks like the worlds supply of oil will last until the people that run these companies retire so they have little interest in pursuing alternatives but to play lip-service to it.

There have been several alternatives the most successful of which of late has been LPG (liquid petroleum gas or butane/propane mix to our American friends), this fuel does come from oil but it’s normally wasted so by bottling it up it was seen as a way of prolonging the supply. Its not as efficient as petrol but it’s half the price and a normal petrol engine can normally be made to run on it. People rushed to convert their thirsty cars and Vauxhall even produced new cars with built in LPG tanks to take advantage (Duel-fuel cars benefiting from certain tax cuts here in the UK). But this doesn’t solve our reliance on mineral oil.

Then diesel vehicles began to take off (yes America cars as small as your slippers all the way up to trucks) thanks to their much improved MPG’s and lower CO2 outputs (the basis for road-tax in the UK now). Diesel is a genius of engineering, the premise is that you compress a fuel until it explodes, whether it be a heavy mineral oil, vegetable oil or something derived from algae. I had a ‘compact’ car made in 1991 with a 1.8litre Diesel engine that could achieve 55mpg. Regular diesel oil has the same problem as petrol as it’s extracted from crude oil and the price is even higher owing to its popularity and the relatively few number of refineries set up to extract it commercially. We can’t rely on vegetable oil as it works better when it’s been used and we’re already destroying rain forests all over the world to produce enough palm oil for foodstuffs. Algae is an interesting proposition but its a million miles from being produced to a low cost in any quantity.

So we’re left with ‘alternative propulsion’ fuels which at the minute are; Hydrogen; Compressed air; and Electricity.

Compressed air in my own mind is nothing other than a curiosity. You compress air and store it in a cylinder; to convert it to drive you pass the air through a three stage motor that drives a high-pressure, a medium pressure and then a low pressure piston. The rest of the drivetrain is fairly conventional. Another way of providing the compressed air is to produce steam but then we’re getting into the realms of steam cars again (see below).

Hydrogen is an interesting one. You can extract Hydrogen from gas by steaming it or by electrolysis of water. You can then either use the hydrogen like the compressed gas option or by using a hydrogen fuel cell which re-combines hydrogen with oxygen and gives you electricity and water. This electricity is then used to drive an all electric drivetrain. I’m led to believe that this is a fairly efficient process and it has the benefits of instant fill ups and the only emissions are water. I say efficient, the turning hydrogen to water and getting energy out is efficient. Creating hydrogen isn’t very efficient, its storage isn’t very efficient and its distribution doesn’t exist as yet. Currently the storage on board is a bit of a sore point as the pressures involved restrict the tank size and range.

Advocates of hydrogen claim that the production could become more ecologically sound through the use of nuclear, wind, tidal power stations etc. which is true but the government would have to do something about it and we all know they’re too tied up with expenses and immigration to care about the environment or science. So whilst hydrogen IS an interesting prospect I don’t see it as anything other than an interesting taster of what the future could be.

The final option as far as I see is electric vehicles. I’m going to admit now; I’m very much an advocate of pure electric propulsion but stick with me.

When cars were first making it big there were steam, petrol and electric cars. Steam was smelly and required a lot of work, electric was limited to the battery technology and people didn’t trust driving around in a vehicle full of explosives but somewhere along the way petrol won out. In the UK though we’ve always had a bit of a fetish for EV’s, our milk floats are electric, many warehouses use electric forklift trucks and old people are often carted about on small electric personal vehicles. This has meant that electric motors for propulsion have been in development for years and with the advent of reliable battery technologies we’re in a position where they could make sense. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility to produce a ‘normal’ vehicle with electric drive and battery power that can do 70mph with a range of up to 300miles. We’ve already got a power distribution network in place, the national grid. Those who have garages or dedicated parking could charge their vehicles using cheap off-peak power when the grid is well under capacity, those who don’t could use dedicated quick charging stations at work or in town such as the ones that have popped up around London.

My feeling is that supermarkets, service stations and large employers are the people who could push this. Whilst charging at home on a single phase supply might take eight hours, a three-phase supply could provide 80% charge to most EV’s in as little as half an hour. These places already have three phase supplies and even if they needed to upgrade the incoming supply to take account of the higher peak draw it could be quantified and used to decide on how much to charge per unit of electricity.

Car manufacturers don’t seem interested in making the leap, there’s little incentive for business to make any investment if there aren’t vehicles to use the infrastructure.

So what’s needed? It goes against my very nature but I think business should be encouraged to work towards electric vehicles for everyday use, based on existing vehicles. Toyota did it with the Rav4EV and Ford did it with the Ranger SUV, both were done in the 90’s, almost twenty years later what’s to stop them outfitting some of their cars with lithium-iron-phosphate (as opposed to lithium-ion) batteries and a propulsion system based on one of the hundreds of smaller manufacturers who’ve perfected the technology?

God forbid another NGO come along and tell people what to do, but the big manufacturers had floundered long enough. GM have had the technology to produce effective EV’s for twenty years and all they’ve done is throw it away and start again to make it look like they’re doing something.

Maybe the stepping stone we need are hybrids but I’m sceptical as to whether the car makers are using it as a development of future vehicles or as a way of prolonging the old technologies.