I don't get it why people are so keen on replacing fossil fuel with electricity to solve the pollution problem in cities.
If we do so on a large enough scale to solve the pollution problem, something like 3 million vehicles in London, how are we going to recharge them with our existing grid?
The solution is surely to clean the fuel or capture exhaust gases.
I've raised this problem before, as have many others in the wider world, but it doesn't end with producing enough, the distribution is a new nightmare. Obviously recharge stations replacing current fuel stations would have to use fast charge rates of at least 50 kW even for a 30 minute charge, and that's not fast enough. A typical station charging 8 or more cars at a time would be consuming thousands of amps at 220 volts or 440 volts 3 phase.
Basically what this means is that every recharging station would have to have its own electricity substation with oil cooled transformers, mainly fed from national grid pylons. Where on earth are we to find the space for all this infrastructure?
Nationally it's even more impossible, the conclusion being that we can never achieve or even get close to an all electric car future. Either we choose to continue with fossil fuels or we ditch fully independent private transport in favour of centrally supplied public transport of people and goods. Rail, Light Rail, Trolley Buses etc.
But longer term we need to design different ways and places of living and working that don't entail constant movement over large distances for hours every day. Our current system of wasting from 10 to 20% of our waking lives just in expensive and environmentally damaging moving from A to B is surely rather silly.
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