My issue is though, where is this power coming from. The trillions of litres of ic fuel burned every day over the world will require massive power generation capability being put in place to replace it.
I did some calculations a few years back when I was working and reckoned we needed to quadruple our current wind energy production. We also need to add solar into the mix. New nuclear also needs to be in there as it runs at 100% output 24/7/365 with predictabily and ideally would meet our energy baseline needs. The reality is that no one single source of energy is ikely to be the answer.
Perfectly true; lithium is no rarer than metals like lead or copper. However, the problem is that it is less likely to be concentrated in economically useful ores; chemically it is very like sodium and potassium, which are common throughout the earth's crust, and there is no common natural mechanism by which it is concentrated. The main sources are hydrothermal minerals and salt deposits, but the concentration is low in both.
From the same info released by NG that the tabloids hysterically interpreted as meaning there would almost certainly be rolling blackouts; in order for that to be necessary the interconnectors to Norway, France etc would need to all fail, unplanned outages at UK power stations, failure of LNG delivery and a cold event of similar or greater magnitude to that which occurred a couple of weeks ago. 1 or 2 of those might happen, all happening at once is not quite impossible but definitely 5 numbers plus bonus ball territory.
What is the capacity of the NG compared to actual peak load? That would be a good method of accessing how close we are to blackouts.
As you are from Cornwall you will be aware of the scars on the landscape from china clay workings. Is Cornwall ready for even greater scars caused by the extraction of Lithium on an industrial scale?
Yes, plan to leave in about a week.
The surprising thing is that we could take an the fossil fuels currently burned directly in ICE vehicles, and burn it in power stations instead, using that to charge EVs. Despite transmission and conversion losses, this would still let us drive more miles for less energy overall, and would be better for the environment because a big power station can run closer to optimum performance with more sophisticated systems in place to prevent pollution. And of course it keeps pollution out of densely populated urban areas.
I have read somewhere that courier companies such as UPS cannot add any further EV-based delivery capacity, in the London area, because they have reached the limit of their available charging capacity.
All the current lithium extraction ventures in Cornwall involve separating lithium salts from brine obtained from deep wells, no open pits.
It's not straightforward from the technical point of view- it's more like swapping out the engine on an ICE vehicle. There is at least one company using this model but AFAIK there is currently no sort of standard interface in place.
Sounds like a case of ''out if sight out of mind''.
Not really - it's basically salt solution, so if they want, they can extract salt and magnesium from it as well. Same basic process as is used to extract salt; it's fractional crystallization. It's not like (say) iron or copper, where many tons of waste rock are mined for every ton of metal. Brine is pretty much all useable; it was the foundation of ICI in Middlesborough, which used salt dissolved out of geological deposits as a major raw material.
We came across 12 months ago with 720w of solar positioned to maximise the solar input when sailing. We also have a Duogen towed generator. In addition to the autopilot we have a Windpilot self steering. The Duogen caught a huge piece of discarded fishing net that broke it. We didn't realise how much the Duogen did in terms of night time energy production. We really missed it. We swapped over full time to the Windpilot. Turned off the chartplotter at night and used the ipad instead. We cook on gas. A few days of cloudy weather and shading from the sails and the batteries were not getting fully charged. We resorted to running the diesel generator a couple of times and used that as an opportunity to top up the water tanks by running the watermaker as well.
Interesting. I picked up a secondhand Aquair before we left and have never fitted it. I think I'd better bump that up the jobs list!
The problem is that you don't always get good days. Some days our output was well down even though we can point the solar panels at the sun. Very low output when sails in the way or clouds. Running two fridges doesn't help and cabin temperatures in the low 30s all day and most of the night due to hatches being closed. Certainly worth trying the towed gen. My friend wired his into his MPPT solar reg
We used to have a wind gen, it's long gone but there Marlec HRDi controller is still connected. My plan is to use that for the Aquair.
Agreed, they do this on buses in China. Can you imagine trying to get car manufacturers to agree?