General > General Technical Chat
Confused about PHEV, Hybrids, etc...
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: nctnico on August 19, 2022, 11:39:28 am ---Ah, great. Next time I need to go to the toilet I'll take a dump in the neighbour's garden. According to you, I have that choice.
--- End quote ---
Oh you do have that choice, but your neighbor won't be very happy and he might kick the crap (Pun very much intended) out of you :-DD
Monkeh:
--- Quote from: Someone on August 19, 2022, 09:34:51 am ---You imagine there is no choice, while in fact you aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship eliminating all free will (east Germany anyone?). Your choice of accomodation and job are just that, there is no force requiring you to undertake them with no other option.
People get stuck in what they perceive to be optimal situations, that with a narrow/short view may well be the nearest best option, but miss the wider choices that could be better overall.
--- End quote ---
I don't imagine, I am simply aware that not everyone has the full range of choices you or I have. You seem to be stuck in the optimal situation of having every option available to you at all times with acceptable levels of risk, which simply isn't reality.
--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 19, 2022, 12:06:52 pm ---
--- Quote from: Someone on August 19, 2022, 09:34:51 am ---
--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 19, 2022, 08:40:57 am ---Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?
--- End quote ---
... can't tell if serious or joke. Car ownership being a basic human right? Even if it were a right, that doesn't make it mandatory or an essential of life.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, it is covered by many many legal systems. Just one below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_an_adequate_standard_of_living
And it's impossible for a country in Europe to ban you from car ownership. They can take your license, if you don't deserve it.
Of course there are always hippies and gen-z living in a city center debating this.
But car ownership is not a privilege. It's not something that is given to you by someone else for any reason, you are born with the right.
--- End quote ---
All very interesting, but car ownership is not a privilege I was talking about. And yes, ownership aside, the use of a vehicle on the public roads is a privilege, not a right.
Someone:
--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 19, 2022, 12:06:52 pm ---
--- Quote from: Someone on August 19, 2022, 09:34:51 am ---
--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 19, 2022, 08:40:57 am ---Is owning a car now considered a privilege?
How about it being a basic human right, and a consequence of living above the poverty line?
--- End quote ---
... can't tell if serious or joke. Car ownership being a basic human right? Even if it were a right, that doesn't make it mandatory or an essential of life.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, it is covered by many many legal systems. Just one below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_an_adequate_standard_of_living
And it's impossible for a country in Europe to ban you from car ownership. They can take your license, if you don't deserve it.
Of course there are always hippies and gen-z living in a city center debating this.
But car ownership is not a privilege. It's not something that is given to you by someone else for any reason, you are born with the right.
--- End quote ---
Did you read that link? a car (or transport) is not included on the list of adequate standard of living. Quoting the original source:
--- Quote from: Universal Declaration of Human Rights ---Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
--- End quote ---
25% of UK households have no car, 30% of Dutch households have no car. It's not some fringe thing or solely out of poverty, but a legitimate choice for many.
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 19, 2022, 05:51:23 am ---That is so typical of politics :-DD On the one hand they push you into buying an EV, but when you do and try to charge it with a cable running from your house to the car over "public" land then you get fined for it. :palm:
--- End quote ---
Yup, if and when it happens to me I shall be using exactly that argument to make a very public, very embarassing, fuss over it.
The particular irony for me is that 1 1/2 years ago my local council introduced payments for permits to park in residents only zones based on vehicle emissions. Prior to that it was free to get a residents permit, now it's only free if you have a very low emissions vehicle (basically PHEV or BEV). Also this year there was road charging (£12.50 per day) introduced in effectively the whole of London for using vehicles with that don't meet Euro 4 petrol or Euro 8 diesel emissions standards, effectively banning older cars with technically lower emissions that are too old to have been homologated to those standards. Which so happens to include my old car.
So faced with those two my hand was pretty much forced into getting a new car, which needed to be a PHEV/BEV to satisfy the parking requirement, when I could have happily run my existing car for several years more and spread its embodied energy/carbon emissions over a while longer.
--- Quote ---Through this thread I saw mentioned a lot that overnight charging is the thing, but with solar electricity there is not a lot of it around during the night! So this means wind has to fill in here, but that does not always blow, meaning there still is a large need for conventional electricity. No will many say, electricity storage will do here. With current state of battery technology I doubt that will be feasible. What will, I don't know. Just pointing out problems I see here.
--- End quote ---
it's probably better to think of 'idle charging' rather than 'overnight'.
There are plenty of opportunities to charge vehicles when idle as long as there are places to plug them in when idle and it's quite possible to modify charging to take place when there is abundant wind/solar power available and defer it when there is enough general demand that non-renewables would be brought on-stream to satisfy demand.
Infrastructure to do this could be cheap and implemented tomorrow if there was a will. Even without infrastructure it's possible for a vehicle or charge point to monitor mains frequency to assess the current whole grid demand today, it would require very minor changes to current AC chargers to implement - basically a mains zero-crossing detector, a stable microprocessor clock, and a bit of extra code in existing chargers.
The first requirement however is to have enough EVs plugged in when idle whenever possible so that they can charge opportunistically when there is low electricity demand.
Currently I try to manage this manually, only charging my car at times I know are typically low demand and have high availability of solar or wind as sources (sometimes even actively checking demand/availabilty on gridwatch.co.uk). I'm sure that it makes bugger all difference, but at least I know that I'm doing my best to not make things worse.
--- Quote ---Also something to think about. Do we have any idea of the long term influence of what we are doing? Erecting big wind farms everywhere on the planet. What does this do to the climate. Are we changing micro climates that can have an impact on the big picture? Think of it, a wind mill takes energy from wind blowing, reducing its strength a bit. On a large enough scale, does this change how clouds are being dispersed and with that change rain distribution?
Same question with wind farms in the north sea. All the pillars that stand on the seabed how do they affect current flow and with that temperature distribution through the water?
Solar installations on grasslands, how does that affect the thermal behavior? We know that asphalt has a big impact where it comes to heat. It absorbs a lot during the day and releases it at night.
See the bigger picture here? Do we know about the long term effect of what we are doing to try and change the effects of what we already did?
--- End quote ---
Yup, we don't know, for a fact, the long term implications of going down those routes. What we do know is how damaging our current/previous energy infrastructure is/was. All we can do is pursue a policy of harm minimisation based on our best current understanding of the science and update our policies as we learn more. As we've already intimated, sound science/engineering and politics are poor bedfellows and as we have to go through the political process to achieve the engineering outcome we stuck with that and all its faults. A cynic might say doomed, if past observation of politics is any predictor of future behaviour.
Someone:
--- Quote from: Monkeh on August 19, 2022, 12:23:14 pm ---
--- Quote from: Someone on August 19, 2022, 09:34:51 am ---You imagine there is no choice, while in fact you aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship eliminating all free will (east Germany anyone?). Your choice of accomodation and job are just that, there is no force requiring you to undertake them with no other option.
People get stuck in what they perceive to be optimal situations, that with a narrow/short view may well be the nearest best option, but miss the wider choices that could be better overall.
--- End quote ---
I don't imagine, I am simply aware that not everyone has the full range of choices you or I have. You seem to be stuck in the optimal situation of having every option available to you at all times with acceptable levels of risk, which simply isn't reality.
--- End quote ---
No-one has infinite/all imaginable choices available, but at the same time very few have no choice (even incarcerated people have choices). You can try and argue stupid extremes, but they are stupid and do nothing to discredit the basic premise that people make their own choices and are not forced to do anything a specific as own a car or park it on the street (let alone the and condition presented above).
Nothing compels someone to have a car, they choose it... for one of many possible reasons that they have ranked/valued. If you really can't understand the complexities, perhaps the following might illuminate you:
"Household Car Ownership in The Netherlands
The Changing Influence of Factors Explaining Household Car Ownership Levels in The Netherlands"
https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3Aa33eb3a5-5f30-4744-934e-613644fd14d2
a thesis elaborating on this without relying on hyperbole and nonsense
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