Say it ain't so

Don't have to send for you do we Boobook. Ya like the tide. :)
Dave.
As an aside you don't spend some of your time digging holes in WA do you. ?

Those journos end up working for Murdoch.

1.25 million pounds!

Guess I won't be worried about the rating on my straps anymore!

Cheers

Anthony

Anthony - Yeah, it's good marketing BS, the "million pounds" pull, and the slick videoing.

The bottom line is, it doesn't take any more than a few thousand pounds gently applied, to get 1 million pounds of rolling stock moving on steel rails.

I've got a railway crowbar in my workshop. This crowbar has a large curved foot on it.

You can use it to move numbers of railcars, by prying between the wheel and the rail line. Once they start moving, they're easy to keep moving, provided the rail line has no grade - as most of the marshalling yards have.

I guess Ford are hoping no-one has seen the pictures of the Willys Jeeps being used as locomotives during WW2?? LOL

Jeep Train

Cheers, Ron.

.
Ron,

There is no doubt in my mind that all-electric vehicles will rewrite the book on transport in the future.
As a sparky of umpteen years, I can smell it coming.
It may not be tomorrow, but it will be the day after.

I can see it coming.....but for how long it will last is another thing.
I see it as a stop gap measure, to satisfy the climate change agenda, before the oil companies get their act together and come up with "true" futuristic fuels......one being hydrogen.
Some car companies have already said it will be their choice of fuel for bigger cars and trucks etc.

.
Well yes, hydrogen too...... for the larger and long haul vehicles. But I think batteries for the ordinary joe on urban journeys.
Even apart from fuel and environmental considerations, batteries and electric drives have it all over the internal combustion engines and their complex drive trains.
Of course car companies will opt for hydrogen if forced to depart from diesel and petrol. Just fit different fuel tanks and tweak the existing engines at little retooling cost.

A bit further along the timeline I can see mini nuclear reactors powering turbines and electric drives for long haul trucks and railways. Nuclear will also be the power source for high-energy industry too.

The really big problem is powering aircraft. They suck enormous amounts of energy and the ion-drive technology is barely more than a dream in practical terms. I watch with interest.

Alan, this is the hydrogen powered vehicle I was talking about. No piston engine and no gearbox.

Hydrogen link

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Thanks Eagle, interesting article.

I don't see it likely for hydrogen being introduced in Australia for long-haul.
Long-haul in Australia means the like of Adelaide to Perth with very much longer sections than what long-haul means in America and Europe. It would be necessary to have hydrogen refill stations at regular intervals with high associated costs.
Talk of fuel-cells is all very well but their development is not advancing nearly as well as other energy technology.

Hydrogen can be promoted as very attractive but in practice it has its problems. I have worked with it in industry and it is hellishly difficult stuff to manufacture and manage safely. The difficulty of preventing leaks requires exorbitant engineering and components at significant cost. And should a leak develop the consequences can be ginormous. I really do not see it going into general use as a vehicle fuel.

If you wanted to pick a fuel to replace petrol (or diesel) - the most dangerous, the mostly costly to produce, the most costly to store, the most costly to transport - and the most costly to convert into useable power - it would be hydrogen.

The oil companies have spent over 100 years installing their fossil fuels distribution system, at a fairly substantial cost.
There is no way stored hydrogen, or transported hydrogen, could be slipped into the service station network without additional massive cost.

The compression or liquifaction of hydrogen gas, absorbs large amounts of energy.
To build transport tankers for hydrogen gas would run into massive costs and involve major amounts of complex technology.
The alternative transportation method is pipelines. We do not have the population to support a massive pipeline distribution system.

A hydrogen leak would be twice as danagerous as an LPG leak. Not for nothing was hydrogen abandoned after the Zeppelin disasters.

Fuel cell technology has been with us since the late 1950's, when Allis Chalmers produced a fuel-cell powered tractor. It has developed at a snails pace since.

Meantimes, battery technology and electric power technology, continues to advance rapidly.

The simple fact remains that 10,000 times the energy we need for powering Australia falls on us in the form of solar radiation daily - and it's simple enough to convert that solar radiation into electricity, which can then be stored and used directly in electric-powered equipment and vehicles.

To use that cheap solar-powered electricity to then produce hydrogen, is merely adding substantial energy losses, and costs, to energy collection and use.

Cheers, Ron.

.


Your'e dead right Ron, and with hydrogen if your'e not right your'e dead..... right? lol

So what size battery do we put in the Whyalla Steelworks Ron. ?
Just had a look on Google and there looks to be progress on the Port Augusta
pumped hydro. Base Load.
Dave.

The Nikola truck has a 1700k range loaded with a refuel time similar to diesel. Many of the trucks I drove only had 1000lt tanks with a range of around 2000k and I never had problems getting fuel. I wonder how many batteries and extra weight would be used to power a road train across the Nullarbor and how long the recharge times would be.

We will see, as time will tell what will happen in the transition to alternative fuel sources.

9900Eagle, I believe the answer will be battery swap stations.

Pull up, grab a bite and a drink, and the station will pull out the truck battery tray, and slide in a fully-charged battery, with the swap fee, considerably less than a diesel fuel-up cost.

For commercial long-haul operators, this would make a lot of sense, particularly if the swap batteries were being charged at leisure by solar power.

The problem is trying to get agreement on a standard size battery and tray for all commercial vehicles.
Swaps work just fine for BBQ gas bottles, I see no reason why it wouldn't work for batteries.

The only costs are the battery depreciation cost over 7 or 8 years, the cost of recharging, and a small fee to do the battery swap.

We have a viable electricity-powered Ultralight aircraft already, this is just the forerunner of the future.



Cheers, Ron.

Makes sense the only problem I see once the standardisation is sorted is the amount of stops required for swaps. I use Nikola as the benchmark as they have both straight electric and hydrogen models. Tesla don't impress me very much at all, as they seem tone all over the place with grandiose schemes and more than a few failures.

There’s heaps of taut liners & fridge vans on highways these days, if go electric or batteries, the trailers could be sheeted with solar cells to extend run time on batteries. Also, need regenerative charging built into the axles for further input.

My pick is nuclear. Do a Brisbane-Darwin and no need to refuel. If you did need a recharge, then you could call into Rum Jungle or Mary K for a top up.

All very interesting, but I hope to truly retired by the time one needs to choose a motive power.

Bob

"you can bet they are talking about a Prado, not a proper Landcruiser,"
Now you are really poking the bear H9. :)
Dave.

Mate, I prefer a Prado to both of the others, they're a nice car. The 2.8 diesel is a worry though.

The European diesel VS petrol scene is driven by fuel taxation.

The EU is intent on cleaning up the air in Europe, so they alter the tax on fuels to drive the changes.

Diesel was dirt cheap for a long time in the EU, so people went over to diesels, due to cheap fuel and much better economy.

Now the EU Govts have altered the fuel tax regime to tax diesel, so it's dearer than petrol.
So people swap back to petrol engines - helped by gains in new petrol engine efficiencies.

But the bottom line is, petrol engines produce more CO2 than diesels. The EU want to reduce CO2, so they will now encourage more hybrids and EV's via taxation measures.

Diesels produce NO2, but the levels of NO2 are not providing the biggest headache to Govts - it's CO2 and soot particles in the air, that they are primarily intent on reducing.

So if some way can be found to reduce soot particle emissions from diesels, that is not as restrictive and costly as DPF's, then diesels still stand a chance.

The biggest factor in the whole equation is simply the progress in developing battery efficiency and durability.
There are regular small increases in battery efficiency, which are slowly tilting the whole equation towards EV's.

Ford have thrown US$500M into EV R&D, they are serious about the change to EV.

Cheers, Ron.

I just googled , but can only find recent info.
But we were recently in Ireland, and I think there were all or nearly all diesel vehicles, from previous regulations. Back when it was deemed diesel was cleaner.
So things change all the time don’t they.
How many products that are deemed safe , end up being declared carcinogenic?

I can certainly see EV’s being big in the future , but how do you charge them cleanly?

Ron is dead right when he says it's been controlled by taxation. The price of petrol compared to diesel through Europe was way higher back then, no wonder everyone was using diesel, and then there was the added fuel economy benefit on top.

The trouble with declaring something as carcinogenic is that it takes a long time, decades really, for the effects to materialize and even then they don't always happen. I mentioned my grandmother who smoked until she was in her 80's with no ill effects. The laugh is that she was advised to take up smoking by her doctor in the 1940's to help calm her nerves. There is a rule of thumb though, most things are initially taken as safe unless proven otherwise, it rarely happens in reverse. It's a scientist's job to observe and report, then draw conclusions from the report. Everything is statistics.

Shane - There will be a slow but steady swing to renewable energy generation, driven by cheap solar panels and windfarms, coupled with large batteries.

The headache for power station owners/operators at present, is that so much power is being generated by solar panels on homes, it's leading to a crunch situation where the power station operators will not be able to survive.

They only survive at present by generating night-time power.

The situation demands a large investment in big batteries for power balancing, as has been done in S.A.
Pumped hydro will become another power storage feature, which system offers longer power generation capability than big batteries.
The big batteries are suitable for short-term power storage, but not for producing power for hours on end.

I believe we will see serious investment in large batteries, and more pumped hydro, for power balancing, happen fairly soon.
This is currently, the missing part of the renewables power-generation equation.

Cheers, Ron.

Totally agree Ron
But a long way to go yet, we live on Eyre peninsula of south Aus. And had a huge power outage A couple of years back, when everything went pear shaped. Without looking at google l’m pretty sure the battery that Tesla put in doesn’t power that much for that long(as they say). So as I said , a long way to go yet.
Cheers

Yep agree Michael , about the carcinogenic thing,
If someone was to stop consuming or exposing themselves to everything that is declared carcinogenic they would have to live in a bubble, I reckon!
Cheers

shane r1, you won't have to charge them if you buy a vehicle for the specification you want.

Round town battery and recharge. Long haul hydrogen fuel and make your electricity on board. Hydrogen can be transported similar to fossil fuel and it can be produced during the day using renewables.

This will take a fair while during the transition stage, and with battery recharging the whole power grid will have to be upgraded, that will also have to include the ability to put more output into the grid to replace the 34 million litres of fossil fuel Australia uses each year.

We're burning through millions of years of naturally stored fossil energy at an alarming rate. I can't see how we can possibly produce that amount of energy from scratch on a daily basis to maintain that scale of output in any other way. (No, nuclear in its current form is a dangerous pipe dream.)

Michael - According to the official figures, 58 Petajoules of solar radiation falls on Australia daily - around 10,000 times our daily energy consumption.
So, we only have to harvest 0.0001% of that daily solar radiation energy to reach our energy needs.

But realistically and practically, I see a substantial mix of energy sources in our future - solar, wind, pumped hydro, natural gas, geothermal power and possibly hydrogen.
I don't see us running out of power with adequate forward planning. But we can't rely on politicians to do the planning, we have to be personally proactive.

I believe many people will go off-grid in the near future with solar power, and some form of energy storage such as batteries, or other form of energy storage. I can tell you, I will very likely be one of them.

Cheers, Ron.

Agreed Ron, my next house will be as off grid as possible too. I had no idea on those solar radiation numbers, that's a glimmer of hope.

Ron, Ergon in Qld are trialing off-grid power packs on a few cattle properties to see if they can get rid of the swer lines.

They consist of solar, wind and backup genset + inverters and batteries.

Solar trial