What’s the difference?
What is the difference between the three pieces of engineering shown above and what is today’s connection?
No, it is not a quiz as such but a demonstration (further) of the total lack of joined up thinking and indeed any sense of reality when it comes to energy and transport.
Of the three images, the electric car is very limited in providing transport over any distance because of it’s battery power that is even more limited in winter with headlights and heater on, it also is ridiculously expensive and although they – the manufacturers and any else involved in promoting them – won’t tell you, try selling one when a few years old when the batteries need replacing at anything up to £20,000, plus they are not green and nobody’s buying them.
The second image is the equally inefficient wind turbine, costing billions in subsidies to build but needing stand by power stations for when the wind doesn’t blow – like most cold winters and whose main purpose seems to be filling the bank accounts of all those involved in building or running them.
The third image is of our old friend the milk float, this actually does work, designed for the job, it’s quiet in its early morning rounds and cheap to run, also doesn’t mind spending the day being recharged as it is not in use then.
The connection is the announcement this morning of our “friend” on the Today program, Tim Yeo, stating we are facing the possibility of an energy gap – for that read electricity blackouts, smart meters etc – and the Minister for transport Patrick McLoughlin ‘who he’ (the man who lives in a county without a motorway ?) and doesn’t like driving, announcing that electric cars are fantastic and are the future.
Not if there is no electricity to charge them with, that being the least of their problems.
Where is the electricity going to come from? When if ever we have millions of these on the roads, never mind the tax loss from fuel duty, how long before they become no cheaper to run than anything that went before?
We’ve heard it all before. Nver mind subsidising electric cars and charging points, how about some power stations so we can keep the lights on and stay warm, the endless rag bag of stupid money and rubbish policies just seems to spew endlessly from this government as it did with last and they wonder why people are disenfranchised and lacking in belief of any politicians and anything they say.
Filed under: History & Culture, Society & human issues, Technology & ideas, Wiggia
Wonder if there’s a difference in the amount of money spent on developing each of these ‘technologies’?
Burning windmills could solve our energy needs for a long time to come.
How about energy producers having influence over the type of consumer products we buy, cars, white goods, etc
So if we all reverted back to a simpler lifestyle, the crisis would be solved (to a degree)
I’m pretty sure such a move would become illegal, if we were to attempt it but individually, giving thought to maintaining some kind of power to our houses and how we could feed ourselves if the supermarkets closed down, would pay dividends eventually.
The problem would be that we would be responsible for helping out all of those around us who just carried on regardless, and then found themselves coming unstuck.
It’s time to think about our personal domestic energy sources, because we are on our own. We have a variety of heating options – gas, electricity and solid fuel. I’m also looking at domestic generators.
A K Haart recently posted…The Mafia and the Fascists
You can be sure of that. That’s what I’m doing too just now and might have a solution.
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My thinking is that we should try to consume less.
It would take quite a few KW of energy to maintain my current lifestyle.
I always assumed that electric cars were the other part of the windmill senario. If loads of people buy electric cars, then charge them overnight, or even better had smartmeters to control their charging, you have a partial solution to storing irregular windmill power.
Woodsy42 recently posted…One way the government can cut government spending at a stroke.
A few years back I worked with a chap who used to race milk floats. Apparently you can get quite a turn of speed out of them by altering the gearing ratios.
On 27th August 2003, two teams met at Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome in Leicestershire for a competition to set the first World Milk Float Land Speed Record.
http://www.milkfloats.org.uk/race.html
The winner managed an average speed of 73.39mph.
Well I never.
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Ian, so Ernie really did know something we didn’t !
“I always assumed that electric cars were the other part of the windmill senario. If loads of people buy electric cars, then charge them overnight, or even better had smartmeters to control their charging, you have a partial solution to storing irregular windmill power.”
@ Woodsy42 – That is indeed the plan. But, (like so many badly thought out “Green” ideas) it falls down on many fronts.
1) They have NO idea how much electricity the UK actually uses in 24 hours, never mind a week.
2) How would you feel if your car was unusable in the morning, or for several days, because of a typical winter “blocking high”, resulting in no wind and overcast skies?
3) This will further reduce the limited life of current battery technologies, which is primarily determined by the number and depth of discharges.
There’s a very good post and comment discussion over at Watts Up With That:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/08/the-carbon-footprint-of-alternate-energy-technology/
Microdave that is a good link but it only further cements the logic that renewables are so far away from practicality that anyone with a brain wonders why so much of taxpayers money is being poured into something that at this stage and some time to come just doesn’t work.
We partly know the answer to that in that the EU directives are part of the problem and the rest is a subsidised scam.
As far as heating goes why is geothermal usage not on the agenda, there may be good reasons but I’ve not seen them.