Posted on 08/20/2017 8:12:41 PM PDT by Lorianne
Britain’s goodbye to fossil-fuel cars by 2040 could boost the need for dirtier natural gas-powered stations.
The government’s goal to replace petrol and diesel cars with those powered by electricity could see the construction of so-called open-cycle gas stations, said Carsten Poppinga, senior vice president of trading and origination at Statkraft, the Norwegian utility that operates hydro power plants and wind farms across the UK. Such units can keep the grid from buckling from the strain of people charging cars in peak demand periods. The catch? While the plants can start generating power almost instantly, they don’t recycle waste heat, making them emit more greenhouses per megawatt than the combined-cycle stations that comprise the largest share of the UK’s daily power output.
Britain may have no choice but to use the less environmentally friendly option, though. With little spare generation capacity, the nation is vulnerable to power shortages, particularly on cold, winter days when wind and solar energy may be in short supply. “Fundamentally there isn’t as much overcapacity on the British market as in Germany, ” Mr Poppinga said by phone from Dusseldorf. “You could think about building open-cycle gas power plants to increase the flexibility in the system.”
(Excerpt) Read more at irishtimes.com ...
Lithium is an extremely toxic metal, many thousands of times more toxic than CO2. It is not about the environment, it’s about destroying western civilization. Satan hates man’s freedom, so his minions comply.
It’s a parallel with Antifa using their freedom of speech to protest freedom of speech.
Minions...
How about if we had a large population of electric cars, we wouldn’t have enough fossil fueled generating capacity to charge them.
The cobalt used in lithium batteries is mined by slave labor also! Don’t those sophisticated Englishmen know that?! /s
Natural gas isn’t “dirty”, because burning it emits NO particulate.
Phasing out fossil fuel cars will prove their superiority to electric cars.
electric cars do not need Exxon or OPEC.
that is why some FReepers don’t like electric cars
Their electricity does not come from pixie dust.
maybe global freezing.....
Good luck surviving a new ice age with battery powered vehicles.
Some FReepers don’t want their freedom and mobility to be limited by a multi-hour charge process, and prefer the 5-minute recharge technology offered by Exxon.
No.. I don’t like electric cars because electricity is a utility m9nopoly and too expensive. When electrify starts being produced and sold by private companies I will be more interested.
Electric cars are heavily susidized by my tax dollars, because they are.. that bad.
When those items are addressed, I will buy whatever is best. Until then the Hemi and the TT make me happy.. although I could use a challenger hellcat, bit that’s out of my price range.
I imagine all that broken glass from the greenhouses falling from the sky makes quite a mess!
Whatever happened to editors?
Couldn’t demand be smoothed out significantly by using smart metering to charge higher prices per kwh for battery charging during peak periods? Simple economics would seem to minimize the problem they are lamenting.
Most do not realize that large scale adoption of electric vehicles in no way reduces the overall consumption of energy, it just alters (and concentrates) where pollutants or toxic materials are released, causes major conversion and transmission losses, and renders trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure obsolete. Once the generation capacities and electric grids are upgraded at massive cost to handle the increased loads, there might be some savings by eliminating inefficient gasoline/diesel refining and distribution operations (but plastics and other refining by-products will be much more expensive). Small thorium-fueled pebble-bed reactors have not taken off as a technology as boosters expected, but might fill the bill for regionalized expansion of capacity for electric vehicles.
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