phasing out of fossil fuels - programme

[IanD]

8 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

Funny you should say that - it's an article in the Express, citing a Top Gear presenter ...

 

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1372709/car-tax-changes-pay-per-mile-rural-top-gear-rory-reid

 

Although it's been reused in a lot of "local" publications:

 

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/top-gear-car-tax-changes-19467858

"However, experts have recently predicted this could be anywhere between 2p and £1.50 per mile or somewhere in the middle around 75p."

 

Methinks there must be some very non-expert "experts" here (pulling numbers out of a hat?) given that the numbers range from 4x lower to 20x higher than current tax... ?

 

Coming up with 75p as the "average" of guesswork figures would be hilarious if not for the fact that this "alternative fact" is now all over the internet and being quoted by people as if there are actual facts behind it... ?

Edited December 16, 2020 by IanD

[Mike Todd]

As I understand it, VAT on domestic electricity is 5% whilst it is 20% on petrol/diesel. No doubt some clever Treasury mandarin is pondering on ow to make up that deficit!

[IanD]

2 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

As I understand it, VAT on domestic electricity is 5% whilst it is 20% on petrol/diesel. No doubt some clever Treasury mandarin is pondering on ow to make up that deficit!

I expect it'll all be done with smart meters, to spread out the grid load these need to know when to charge a car (or not to), which means they need to know it's a car requesting the current, which means some kind of communication between car and meter, which means that Big Brother knows you're charging your car, which means they can change the rate to include VAT or add "fuel tax".

 

You can bet the government won't let lots of lovely tax just walk out of the door, they'll find a way to claw it back *somehow*...

[Alan de Enfield]

1 minute ago, IanD said:

I expect it'll all be done with smart meters, to spread out the grid load these need to know when to charge a car (or not to), which means they need to know it's a car requesting the current, which means some kind of communication between car and meter, which means that Big Brother knows you're charging your car, which means they can change the rate to include VAT or add "fuel tax".

Its a wet, windy and cold day, thoughts just run wild ....................

 

If you simply plug into your '3-core' extension lead with the plug poked thru your window and into domestic socket behind your TV, and are prepared to accept a 'slow charge' rate, how'd anything know what's plugged in ?

[IanD]

1 minute ago, Alan de Enfield said:

Its a wet, windy and cold day, thoughts just run wild ....................

 

If you simply plug into your '3-core' extension lead with the plug poked thru your window and into domestic socket behind your TV, and are prepared to accept a 'slow charge' rate, how'd anything know what's plugged in ?

It wouldn't, so long as you're willing to wait long enough. If you want fast charging then some kind of smart charge control (with power allocation to suit grid loading) is essential, otherwise when everyone comes home at teatime and plugs their cars into fast chargers simultaneously the grid melts...

[ditchcrawler]

1 hour ago, Alan de Enfield said:

The proposal is to drop VED because VED is based on emissions, BEV have no emissions and pay no VED.

 

My 25mpg may be below the UK average but it is my choice to have a big Mercedes 4WD that can tow a 3 tonne horse box, it is a 'dirty diesel' and the VED is £330pa.

 

As an aside, SWMBO's Renault Scenic (petrol) also has a VED of £330

We have a Citroen and it returns about 48 MPG whereas the  Range Rover we use to drive was about 19 MPG 

[peterboat]

1 hour ago, IanD said:

...and who just happen to be funded by car companies heavily invested in ICE, like the recent reports in the press (well, Daily Mail and Express...) about ICE vs. BEV?

Which is what I said a lot of posts ago, car makers and oil companies are looking to scare us off EVs and they will lie and cheat to do that!

Remember the 50k breakeven for EVs funded by Aston Martin? They will lie and cheat to sell gross polluting vehicles 

34 minutes ago, IanD said:

I expect it'll all be done with smart meters, to spread out the grid load these need to know when to charge a car (or not to), which means they need to know it's a car requesting the current, which means some kind of communication between car and meter, which means that Big Brother knows you're charging your car, which means they can change the rate to include VAT or add "fuel tax".

 

You can bet the government won't let lots of lovely tax just walk out of the door, they'll find a way to claw it back *somehow*...

Solar panels for charging ?

[blackrose]

It's probably already been covered in this thread, but what's everyone going to do about heating their boats? For the majority of liveaboards who seldom move, fossil fuel burning stoves and central heating systems have a far greater impact on climate change and than the miniscule amount of diesel used for propulsion?

 

For a significant proportion of people who live on boats all year round it's not the boat's engine that's the real issue. It's heating the boat, combined with the relatively poor insulation of boats compared with modern land based dwellings, which is where the real environmental sustainability challenges lie.

[peterboat]

7 minutes ago, blackrose said:

It's probably already been covered in this thread, but what's everyone going to do about heating their boats? For the majority of liveaboards who seldom move, fossil fuel burning stoves and central heating systems have a far greater impact on climate change and than the miniscule amount of diesel used for propulsion?

 

For a significant proportion of people who live on boats all year round it's not the boat's engine that's the real issue. It's heating the boat, combined with the relatively poor insulation of boats compared with modern land based dwellings, which is where the real environmental sustainability challenges lie.

I mentioned it a while back it's a serious issue to say the least, I have used far more wood this year than anthracite, whilst wood is carbon neutral its heavy on particulate matter. In truth we can't win, what we need is electricity and heat pumps, but then we would be accused of warming up the canals 

[TheBiscuits]

2 minutes ago, peterboat said:

what we need is electricity and heat pumps, but then we would be accused of warming up the canals 

 

Only in summer when using it for cooling!

[Alan de Enfield]

5 minutes ago, blackrose said:

It's probably already been covered in this thread, but what's everyone going to do about heating their boats? For the majority of liveaboards who seldom move, fossil fuel burning stoves and central heating systems have a far greater impact on climate change and than the miniscule amount of diesel used for propulsion?

 

For a significant proportion of people who live on boats all year round it's not the boat's engine that's the real issue. It's heating the boat, combined with the relatively poor insulation of boats compared with modern land based dwellings, which is where the real environmental sustainability challenges lie.

 

Review of 2030.

 

At long last, after more than 5 years of constant fighting leading to 100s of boats being damaged and 1000s of bargees being injure, the last tree within 5 miles of any canal has finally been felled and the wood distributed amongst the few survivors of the 'wood-wars'.

 

 

As the new ice-age starts we expect to see the 'last-gasp' for the canals as the bargees finally die-off due to being unable to move, cook or even stay warm.

 

The end of an era - "We will remember them".

[ditchcrawler]

26 minutes ago, blackrose said:

It's probably already been covered in this thread, but what's everyone going to do about heating their boats? For the majority of liveaboards who seldom move, fossil fuel burning stoves and central heating systems have a far greater impact on climate change and than the miniscule amount of diesel used for propulsion?

 

For a significant proportion of people who live on boats all year round it's not the boat's engine that's the real issue. It's heating the boat, combined with the relatively poor insulation of boats compared with modern land based dwellings, which is where the real environmental sustainability challenges lie.

Maybe they will ban people from living on boats that don't comply with the latest house insulation standards. Think of all the house owners who will be spending a fortune on electricity for house heating when they ban gas central heating. Boat dwellers will be a very minor part of people affected so I doubt it will come very high on their agenda .

[peterboat]

43 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

Maybe they will ban people from living on boats that don't comply with the latest house insulation standards. Think of all the house owners who will be spending a fortune on electricity for house heating when they ban gas central heating. Boat dwellers will be a very minor part of people affected so I doubt it will come very high on their agenda .

Heat pumps are very efficient I have a number of friends with it installed, if I was on reliable mains I would install it on the boat without a second thought 

[IanD]

36 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

Maybe they will ban people from living on boats that don't comply with the latest house insulation standards. Think of all the house owners who will be spending a fortune on electricity for house heating when they ban gas central heating. Boat dwellers will be a very minor part of people affected so I doubt it will come very high on their agenda .

Boats might be less well insulated than houses but they're also a lot smaller. A water source heat pump should need less than 1kW when it's running (COP=5) to put out the same heat as a 5kW Webasto/Ebersplutter, which normally doesn't have to run all the time to keep a boat warm -- same as a solid fuel stove, average heating power is probably about half this so 500W average to drive a heat pump. Depending on how long you assume it's on and what happens at night, say 8kWh per day in winter.

 

[house owners won't be spending a fortune on electricity, heat pump CH is cheaper to run than gas CH but is expensive to install]

 

Previous estimation for energy usage when doing a full day cruising was 12kWh. So energy use for heating isn't small but isn't a total killer. Solar was estimated to give about 5kWh per day in summer, much less in winter (maybe 1kWh/day). Then you have to add other energy drains to run stuff on the boat, might be 3kWh/day but depends very heavily on what you use.

 

So when stationary in winter heating will be the biggest drain, 8kWh heating + 3kWh mains - 1kWh solar = 10kWh/day used. When cruising in summer (no heating) you get 12kWh propulsion + 3kWh mains - 5kWh solar = 10kWh/day used, coincidentally the same. This has to be replaced from either an onboard diesel genny (boo, polluting, probably banned in future) or a charging station. A 30kWh battery bank will mean charging every 3 days assuming you don't move in winter or have the heating on in summer and you run it down to empty, so maybe every other day is a safer assumption.

 

In other words using the same assumptions as for houses (heat pump CH) the energy needed for a boat is significant but not a killer, similar energy use per day (in winter) to cruising (in summer).

 

And before anyone says "but pumping all that energy out of the canal will make it freeze" I suggest you go and look at the numbers -- short answer, it won't ?

[cuthound]

According to this site a typical water source heat pump costs £10k to provide and install (about 1/3 of the cost of a land based ground source heat pump)

 

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/heat-pump/water-source-heat-pump/water-source-heat-pump-cost

 

What with £15-20k needed for batteries and electric motor the boat if the future is going to be considerably more expensive than current fossil fuel powered examples.

 

I foresee a lot of people giving up boating because of the cost.

 

 

[IanD]

47 minutes ago, cuthound said:

According to this site a typical water source heat pump costs £10k to provide and install (about 1/3 of the cost of a land based ground source heat pump)

 

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/heat-pump/water-source-heat-pump/water-source-heat-pump-cost

 

What with £15-20k needed for batteries and electric motor the boat if the future is going to be considerably more expensive than current fossil fuel powered examples.

 

I foresee a lot of people giving up boating because of the cost.

 

 

That cost is for a house-sized heat pump which is *way* bigger than a boat-sized one, typically around 30kW compared to 5kW. A boat-sized one won't be 6x cheaper because it's 6x smaller, but could easily be a third of the price -- and £3k isn't that bad, it's only 20% of the cost of the propulsion system.

 

Also the cost of of all this is dropping year by year as the cost of BEVs falls and drives the cost of the components down, the estimate is that BEV and ICE will reach cost parity in about 2025 at which point the "more expensive" objection disappears for new builds -- and the same price erosion will happen for heat pumps as they become the norm for house CH. There will have to be some kind of time-limited legacy getout to allow a transition, but eventually most vehicles (and boats) will have to change, except presumably with a (very?) few exceptions for historical/classic engines.

 

So electric isn't going to be as cheap as a new diesel (at least for the next 5 years or so), and certainly not a dirty secondhand one -- but then nothing is as cheap and easy and dirty as burning fossil fuels, which is why the world is hooked on them. But unfortunately this can't be allowed to continue -- if the end result is that some cheap-dirty-fuel-burning polluters in "old banger" cars and boats are driven off the roads and canals, then I'm afraid that's what's going to have to happen. Sorry.

Edited December 16, 2020 by IanD

[Ronaldo47]

I don't see how the present generation of smart meters could be used to control car (or boat) battery charging with only one meter per household.  While all smart electricity meters include a circuit breaker that provides the supply company (or a hacker!) with the ability to disconnect your supply remotely, it's on an "all or nothing" basis. You would need a different type of meter with two or more different outputs connected to different distribution boards for different classes of load. A bit like a more complex (and more expensive to install) version of the non-smart "White Meter"  I had in the 1970's for my storage radiators. Alternatively you would need more than one smart meter,  one for each class of load with each feeding its own distribution board, plus the wall space to mount them on. 

 

Certainly possible, but requiring the services of an electrician to modify the wiring, so more expense for the user, ether directly or hidden in increased electricity costs. I did read that the present smart meter rollout is costing each customer around £200, spread over a number of years, whether they have one or not, the price of electricity being higher than it would otherwise be to pay for them. 

Edited December 17, 2020 by Ronaldo47
Typo

[peterboat]

16 hours ago, ditchcrawler said:

Maybe they will ban people from living on boats that don't comply with the latest house insulation standards. Think of all the house owners who will be spending a fortune on electricity for house heating when they ban gas central heating. Boat dwellers will be a very minor part of people affected so I doubt it will come very high on their agenda .

Heat pumps are very efficient I have a number of friends with it installed, if I was on reliable mains I would install it on the boat without a second thought 

[peterboat]

I have to say the coroner in London has done for any chance of diesels remaining in boats, his ruling that pollution killed the young girl is going to make life very difficult for any ICE vehicles and that includes boats. I wonder how long the cheap boats in London will survive now? I think a couple of years before pressure is brought on them to clean up their act or go

[tree monkey]

17 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Review of 2030.

 

At long last, after more than 5 years of constant fighting leading to 100s of boats being damaged and 1000s of bargees being injure, the last tree within 5 miles of any canal has finally been felled and the wood distributed amongst the few survivors of the 'wood-wars'.

 

 

As the new ice-age starts we expect to see the 'last-gasp' for the canals as the bargees finally die-off due to being unable to move, cook or even stay warm.

 

The end of an era - "We will remember them".

Rubbish felling, plenty of timber left

[IanD]

13 hours ago, Ronaldo47 said:

I don't see how the present generation of smart meters could be used to control car (or boat) battery charging with only one meter per household.  While all smart electricity meters include a circuit breaker that provides the supply company (or a hacker!) with the ability to disconnect your supply remotely, it's on an "all or nothing" basis. You would need a different type of meter with two or more different outputs connected to different distribution boards for different classes of load. A bit like a more complex (and more expensive to install) version of the non-smart "White Meter"  I had in the 1970's for my storage radiators. Alternatively you would need more than one smart meter,  one for each class of load with each feeding its own distribution board, plus the wall space to mount them on. 

 

Certainly possible, but requiring the services of an electrician to modify the wiring, so more expense for the user, ether directly or hidden in increased electricity costs. I did read that the present smart meter rollout is costing each customer around £200, spread over a number of years, whether they have one or not, the price of electricity being higher than it would otherwise be to pay for them. 

I don't now if the present generation of smart meters have the intelligence to deal with this or not, but I suspect they do.

 

They know their location and use cellular radio to "phone home", and this has to be fitted to all new cars nowadays for emergency service signalling, which also means the car has to know its location. It's technically possible for the two to communicate with one another via the network, the car knows where it is and how much charge it's getting, the meter knows where it is and how much current it's providing, so it's possible to tie all this up -- maybe also with a phone app? -- and apply a different per-unit cost to car charging without needing any separate hardware or a meter with multiple outputs. The days of needing separate hardware to apply different tariffs are long gone, nowadays it can all be done virtually.

 

Whether this can be made to work with the current generation of smart meters is the question; all smart meters can have new firmware downloaded over the air to update them (this is part of the specification) so this should be possible, but it will need a standard defining for how all this should work and this could take some time.

Edited December 17, 2020 by IanD

[TheBiscuits]

4 hours ago, peterboat said:

Heat pumps are very efficient I have a number of friends with it installed, if I was on reliable mains I would install it on the boat without a second thought 

 

They usually have  a COP of between 2 and 4, so 1 kWh of electricity gives about 3 kWh of heat.

 

Sadly 1 kWh of electricity costs about the same as 3 kWh of gas ...

[cuthound]

30 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

They usually have  a COP of between 2 and 4, so 1 kWh of electricity gives about 3 kWh of heat.

 

Sadly 1 kWh of electricity costs about the same as 3 kWh of gas ...

 

Indeed, I ran a project to put ground source heating in a building for Greenwich Council about 10 years ago.

 

It cost them circa £500k to install in a multistorey office block and the running costs were actually slightly higher than the previous gas fired heating system. 

 

It did however tick the green credentials box and was funded by the taxpayers.

 

To really reduce heating coat this country needs to adopt Scandinavian building standards.

[IanD]

1 hour ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

They usually have  a COP of between 2 and 4, so 1 kWh of electricity gives about 3 kWh of heat.

 

Sadly 1 kWh of electricity costs about the same as 3 kWh of gas ...

You need to do better research -- the CoP of 5 I quoted wasn't just plucked out of thin air:

 

https://www.renewablesfirst.co.uk/water-source-heat-pumps/water-source-heat-pump-benefits/

 

"Compared with other heat pumps, water-source systems have a very high efficiency, with a ‘Coefficient of Performance’ (CoP) of around 5. This means every unit of electricity delivers 5 units of heat to the building."

 

https://www.csemag.com/articles/the-benefits-of-using-water-source-heat-pumps/

 

"With a water-source heat pump in heating mode, not only is the thermal energy from the water loop being extracted and used, but also the heat of compression in the refrigerant circuit is captured and used as a source of heating. Due to this capability of extracting heat from a heat source (i.e., the water loop) and using the heat of compression, the WSHP can easily provide 4 to 6 units of heating for every unit of energy consumed."

 

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/heat-pump/water-source-heat-pump

 

"Thus, water source heat pumps can reach reasonably high efficiencies (300% to 600%) even on the coldest winter nights, in comparison to 175% to 250% for air-source heat pumps on cool days."

 

https://www.thegreenage.co.uk/tech/water-source-heat-pumps/

 

"For every 1kW of energy required to run a water source heat pump, 4-5kW of equivalent heat energy is produced which can be used to warm your home."

36 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

Indeed, I ran a project to put ground source heating in a building for Greenwich Council about 10 years ago.

 

It cost them circa £500k to install in a multistorey office block and the running costs were actually slightly higher than the previous gas fired heating system. 

 

It did however tick the green credentials box and was funded by the taxpayers.

 

To really reduce heating coat this country needs to adopt Scandinavian building standards.

Better insulation/higher building standards is a no-brainer for houses, as well as using efficient heating sources like heat-pumps -- both should be done in future.

 

However fitting ~300mm of insulation into a narrowboat might be tricky... ?

[TheBiscuits]

47 minutes ago, IanD said:

You need to do better research -- the CoP of 5 I quoted wasn't just plucked out of thin air:

For a boat sized system?

 

I know some of the bigger systems can manage 5, but I'm not aware of any that can do that with a loop the size of a baseplate.