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Too cheap. It you pollute the valuable air we breath you must pay heavily. We have no choice what air to breath.
John,
What source of fuel is used in the UK to heat your home and every building in the UK? The reason why I ask that question is because I am assuming that you use boilers and furnaces that need fuel to heat your home, and even if you heat your home with electric heaters, the electrical power must be generated and distributed to your home from some remote location.
We often don't realize when talking about EV's is that to built one of these vehicles, including its battery, this results in a great amount of pollution. Also, if you use a boiler or furnace to heat homes and all other structures, that too pollutes the air.
But that is not all. Our homes as well all other structures that are "man made" require building materials that must be mined, forested, built in factories and shops, and then delivered to the location or construction site. As long as we are alive and living relatively in comfort (shelter, food, water, clothing, and all sorts or amenities), we are polluting. Every time that you flush your toilet you are polluting.
What source of fuel is used in the UK to heat your home and every building in the UK? The reason why I ask that question is because I am assuming that you use boilers and furnaces that need fuel to heat your home, and even if you heat your home with electric heaters, the electrical power must be generated and distributed to your home from some remote location.
We often don't realize when talking about EV's is that to built one of these vehicles, including its battery, this results in a great amount of pollution. Also, if you use a boiler or furnace to heat homes and all other structures, that too pollutes the air.
The UK uses predominately natural gas, which is infinitely cleaner than the poison from the pipes of vehicles, to heat homes. The UK only has three remaining coal fired power stations, which are to be decommissioned in a few years. If gas and oil quadrupled in price, you would see a big move in home insulation and making buildings air tight. Fossil fuel is considered by many to be too cheap.
Same in any country - you poison our air, you pay us heavily. An EV consumes less pollution to manufacture than an ICE car - less when solid state batteries are here. Do not believe Big Oil & Auto propaganda.
The UK uses predominately natural gas, which is infinitely cleaner than the poison from the pipes of vehicles, to heat homes. The UK only has three remaining coal fired power stations, which are to be decomissioned in few years. If gas and oil quadrupled in price, you would see a big move in home insulation and making buildings air tight.
Same in any country - you poison our air, you pay us heavily. An EV consumes less pollution to manufacture than an ICE car - less when solid state batteries are here. Do not believe Big Oil & Auto propaganda.
Natural gas is cleaner, but it does not mean that it does not emit fumes that harm the environment. You also have to consider that that natural gas is not produced at the pipe connections at your home, but pumped to your home from a remote location. Something else you have to consider is the following: the diameter os the pipe in a vehicle is around 2-3 inches, versus the diameter of the exhaust pipe at a multi-fasmily building. Then you most have factories and office buildings, right? How large do you think the exhaust pipes of multi-room buildings are? Do you have any idea of how much toilet flushing takes place each day and night?
You are forgetting something that is very important: Where does the insulation you are referring to comes from? Will you have enough money to re-build your home to insulate it?
Look at your national budget: does the UK governments earn more than what they spend? How much would money would it take to switch from ICE to EV in a short period of time? Once you look at this figures, you will realize that the national budgets exceed earnings, and that's the reason why it will take a great number of years before EV will replace ICE and aircraft jet and turbofan motors. If the UK gets rid of the coal-burning power plants, then it must also provide at least an equal amount of electricity as the one generated by these power plants.
See...we are thinking at a grand scale (replacing one system with another all over the world), and not realizing that the simplest way to see things is at an individual level. For example, lest say that you rent an apartment, and have a budget. Do you earn more than what you spend? What would be the most economical form of transportation-if you need it? Can you afford getting rid of your ICE automobile and buy an EV?
There is nothing wrong with wind power, except that it depends on nature. For example, a wind storm can stop its operation.
In relation to pollutions: as long as we live somewhere, we humans pollute day and night. We sit in front of our keyboard and complain about pollution without realizing that everything we are surrounded by at home (house, appliances, instruments, utensils, running water, rugs, automobiles, and even the keyboard...all are part of the pollution we create. Yes, the ideal world we are envisioning is an illusion (Nirvana?).
To clean up the air it takes legislation. That could be in the form of low or zero emissions zones, emissions from vehicles pipes reduced, tax on roads, tax on fuel to discourage heavy use and encourage efficient smaller vehicles or even ban ICE vehicles entirely, as is the current trend as other measures have largely failed.
Look at the LA smogs in the 60s/70s. Left to the auto industry, who assisted in creating it, they did little and would have done little without legislation. Corporation's prime aim is to make money, and they will do that at all costs.
Insulation is a one off pollution when making. It does not pollute when working doing good.
If you poison our air you pay us. So far the polluters have got away scot free.
There is nothing wrong with wind power, except that it depends on nature. For example, a wind storm can stop its operation.
Wind power works well when surplus energy created is stored for later use, balancing the grid. There are many ways of storing surplus electricity generation.
Wind power works well when surplus energy created is stored for later use, balancing the grid. There are many ways of storing surplus electricity generation.
Yes, the same for solar power. But what happened to Texas and its wind power is just an example of what I am referring to.
Using Texas who appear to have a third world grid, and equipment not built for freezing temperatures, is grasping onto straws to justify oil burning.
The wind turbines were either bad design, poor maintenance or poor installation, or a combination of any of the three. I saw a bus broken down last week - I does not mean all buses break down.
"some of these turbines certainly froze in the recent bitingly cold conditions But so did vital equipment at gas wells and in the nuclear industry. And these failures in the non-renewable energy sector had a much greater impact. So although nearly half of Texas's wind-energy capacity was lost at the peak of the freeze, twice as much overall was being lost from other sources."
""Operators [in Texas] didn't invest in the usual weatherization or ice protection techniques says Prof Sovacool "because generally they didn't expect it to become so cold,""
What happened in Texas is that their natural gas generation plants failed in the cold weather. Where I live, the natural gas plants are indoors and fine in subzero. The wind farms also operate just fine. Nothing in Texas is engineered for weather extremes because they have no regulation. Houston floods in hurricanes. The power grid fails in cold weather. This was a governmental failure. In Texas, the ERCOT board chair and 3 other board members just resigned. Their oversight of the grid was deemed “unacceptable”. They’ll re-arrange the deck chairs and ignore the problem because it’s Libertarian Texas.
Your wind power rant is laughable. Try harder next time.
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