PMs & Candles

[Keith Morris]

[color=#40BFBF]"and the disgusting state of affairs we are experiencing with the present Greens/Teals/Labor lot. shows clearly your political bias, [/color]
Terry, how presumptuous of you to even assume that you know my political persuasion and who I support with my vote!
I know many other rational thinking levelheaded people who also voted Labor and are completely disgusted with the present / Greens / Teals / Labor/ Independent Officials that are in power.
Are you telling me you agree with the Energy solution of closing ALL of the Coal Electricity Generation, Gas power Electric generation, and not even considering Modular Nuclear Power Generation. You agree with all of the Lockdowns and Border Closures the population has been subjected to over the past several years,
ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH of my rant, and I offer no further contribution to this challenge of minds. I bow to your unchallenged authority so as to prevent the closure of the forum by you because of my expression of my feelings and thoughts.
Keith.

[T1 Terry]

Are you telling me you agree with the Energy solution of closing ALL of the Coal Electricity Generation, Gas power Electric generation, and not even considering Modular Nuclear Power Generation.

In a word, in true Biden style, "Bloody oath" but I think you will find it is the now privately owned coal fired power stations that are actually closing them down, not the govt in power, as far as the nuclear option, surely the war in Ukraine with Russia attacking their nuclear plant https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/08/18/7363806/, Fukushima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima ... r_disaster , Chernobyl which is actually in part of the Ukraine and the result of Russian B/S, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster and the Three Mile Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mil ... d_accident incidents are enough to show that the world isn't ready for nuclear power generation and until safe fusion cold nuclear technology actually makes it to a point where it is functional it shouldn't be considered by any country.

We have a huge atomic explosion going off already, wouldn't it be sensible to just harness the energy generated by that? How about the continued nuclear reaction still going off under the central area of Australia, why not use that?
Wouldn't that be far safer than messing with something that present technology can only keep just ahead of it going boom?

T1 Terry

[Keith Morris]

The list only includes civilian nuclear power reactors used to generate electricity for a power grid. All commercial nuclear reactors use nuclear fission. As of September 2022, there are 437 operable power reactors in the world, with a combined electrical capacity of 393 GW.

And the population of those countries all walk around with their head stuck up their armpits instead of rejecting Nuclear Reactors. Nuclear Energy has been safe for many DECADES now. Not only in my opinion!
It is remarkable how much prejudice lies below one quarter of human skull.

Nuclear Power in the World Today https://world-nuclear.org › current-and-future-generation. allow yourself the lassitude to have a look at the locations and the countries.

Around 10% of the world's electricity is generated by about 440 nuclear power reactors. About 55 more reactors are under construction in 15 countries, ...

[T1 Terry]

The list only includes civilian nuclear power reactors used to generate electricity for a power grid. All commercial nuclear reactors use nuclear fission. As of September 2022, there are 437 operable power reactors in the world, with a combined electrical capacity of 393 GW.

And the population of those countries all walk around with their head stuck up their armpits instead of rejecting Nuclear Reactors. Nuclear Energy has been safe for many DECADES now. Not only in my opinion !
It is remarkable how much prejudice lies below one quarter of human skull.
Keith

Ummm .....Nuclear fission Keith, is what was used in the bombs that were dropped on Japan and what the whole nuclear wars scare is about. Just because technology can keep that atomic reaction from a full on explosion by controlling the heat generated by boiling water, doesn't mean it can't go very wrong very quickly. Just because someone else does it doesn't make it safe, people still heat flower pots on an LPG stove and poison themselves with carbon monoxide gas, yes it works, no it is not safe.

On the other hand, a fusion nuclear reaction is what happens inside the sun. There has been one successful lab experiment to date https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633 Maybe we can achieve safe nuclear fusion, but is the risk worth it?

It is remarkable how much prejudice lies below one quarter of human skull.

I think I read that line about wind turbines, solar farms and wave power, geo-thermal ...... We have those technologies now, we can use wave power to pump water to higher levels to create hydro generation, we can use geo-thermal to produce electricity to produce hydrogen and combine that with nitrogen from the air to create ammonia that becomes transportable energy ......but we can't safely store used nuclear material from a fission reactor without burying it very deep in the middle of an unpopulated area ..... but that makes it into an area that can never be populated.

T1 Terry

[pet-els]

Interesting article







Why a recent Tesla road trip revealed electric vehicle constraints.
O dear

A must-read!!!
Well worth a read before buying an EV.

Warren Brown: Why taking a road trip in a Tesla revealed the limitations of electric vehicles
I knew electric vehicles had questionable range, but in our quest for a green utopia I had no idea of the seat-of-the-pants hell of driving one in far-flung NSW, writes an EV-fatigued Warren Brown.
Warren Brown
September 5, 2022
The Sunday Telegraph
158 comments
If you ask anyone who knows me there’s nothing I like more than a jolly good road trip.
If you hang around long enough I’m guaranteed to bore anyone within earshot with tales of my road-going adventures that are so bonkers I have trouble believing them myself.

It’s all about the joy of long-distance motoring – the freedom it gives, the chance for adventure.

So when the opportunity to jump aboard an electric car and head west for the Riverina turned up last week I just couldn’t say no – after all, Energy Minister Chris Bowen has made it painfully clear the future for personal transport in Australia is electric.


Warren Brown, cartoonist for The Daily Telegraph travelled to Griffith in a Tesla Model 3 charging in Griffith. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Photographer Jonathan Ng and I were to head to Griffith last week for the annual Daily Telegraph Bush Summit. Instead of catching a flight from Sydney we decided to drive.

Jonathan, a car guy like myself, offered to pick me up from Goulburn in his 2019 Tesla and drive us the 390km west.

While I’ve driven electric cars before, I’d never been in one for any considerable distance, and while I’d experienced an EV’s blistering performance, like most people I was also aware of their shortcomings when it came to their range.


Warren Brown, Daily Telegraph cartoonist is an avid lover of road trips.

The Tesla struck me as the ideal car for a long drive, with its leather seats and plenty of leg room. The vehicle brimmed with futuristic features: instead of dashboard instruments there was what was fundamentally a giant iPad in front of the driver and passenger, which incorporates an endless variety of nifty features – satellite monitoring, Netflix, and most importantly a map indicating where recharging stations are situated.

“We’ll pull up at Gundagai, plug the car in and grab some breakfast,” Jonathan told me as we re-joined the highway, the thought of which sounded like a capital idea.

The 188km drive from Goulburn to Gundagai was effortless, and before long we’d arrived at the feet of the Dog on the Tuckerbox, to pull up at a bank of charging stations at which there is another Tesla and a Volvo-based Polestar already receiving an intravenous dose of 240 volts.


Turns out Teslas aren’t match fit for road trips.

“We’ll be here for half an hour or so” Jonathan told me as he plugged in our Tesla. And in the spirit of throwing healthy eating to the wind we partook in the first of what would be many roadside gourmand experiences for the day – two bacon and egg rolls and coffee.

In half an hour we returned to the car, where the other EV drivers were now unplugging their life support.

Despite being part of the rarefied 2 per cent of the population who are electric vehicle owners, it struck me how no one was making any well-met, collegiate chitchat about their cars. You know – “G’day mate! How many megahertz are you getting to the gallon?” kind of thing.

Instead, clearly wary of these electrical interlopers, Jonathan told me to keep an eye on where those guys were heading because it was imperative we got to a town before them – if there’s only one charger in a town and they get there first then it’s a half an hour waiting while they charge, then a half an hour for us.

I’m beginning to get it – for EV drivers out here on the open road it’s now a lithium-battery Hunger Games – a charge to get charged before the other guy takes charge.

Stuffed with bacon and egg rolls, we headed off for Wagga Wagga, some 88km away, where our mission was to quickly find the resident charging station placed in a car park, and another 45-minute stay to recharge again.

A vanilla slice and three-quarters of an hour later and we were back on the road, heading for the only charging station in Narrandera – a lonely monument to a green Australia plonked in a side street where we hooked up for yet another electricity fix. A pie from the bakery this time and we ever-expanding local-pastry-filled Electric Road Warriors were on the last leg to Griffith, with one eye on the road and the other on the diminishing battery-level symbol on the screen, arriving in town to hook the car up for an electro-adrenaline hit yet again.

As someone who’d had no experience with EVs in the bush I was now taken hold by a new and genuine phenomenon that’s recently arisen with the advent of electric cars. It’s a paranoia known euphemistically as “range anxiety” – a rather patronising term suggesting that the fear of being stranded in the never-never without a spark of electricity and facing certain death is merely some sort of minor psychosis, like being afraid of the dark.

I knew electric vehicles had questionable range, but I had no idea of the seat-of-the-pants logistics of driving one in the Outback.

It was becoming glaringly obvious to me the federal government’s rabid fervour to fast-track electric vehicles by cracking down and dispensing with the internal combustion engine seems more than alarming in that we’re not being given the full picture of what the consequences will be.


Taking a Tesla outback evoked thoughts of MadMax fury road for Warren Brown. Photo:Jasin Boland.

I discovered there are two issues with electric vehicles that proponents tend to gloss over: the cars’ batteries don’t like cold weather, and nor do they like continuous high-speed driving – two rather important and regularly encountered features when driving in the Outback.

Not only do lithium batteries have reduced efficiency when it’s cold, but if you put the car’s heater on (so you don’t freeze) you’ll reduce its charge even quicker – therefore reducing the range.

MYEV.com suggests in order to keep the battery happy you should “park your car in a heated garage” – something else to load onto an already beleaguered electricity grid.

Unlike internal combustion engines, electric vehicles are happier in the “stop-start” situations you’d find in the city than the massive long-distance hauls you’d typically encounter in the Australian Outback.

If you do run out of charge, the car will give plenty of warning, resorting to “limp mode” for some time. But when it has eventually rolled to a complete stop, pray you have charge and range for your mobile phone, as it’s a tilt tray to the nearest town.

Scandinavian countries such as Norway are perennially wheeled out as the poster children for EVs. Yet the widest part of Norway is roughly the distance from Sydney to Dubbo, whereas the widest part of Australia is equivalent to the distance from London to Moscow.

In a green utopia where we’re all compelled to drive electric cars, who on Earth would be game enough to visit remote Outback towns in far-flung NSW?

This would conceivably curtail enthusiasm for regional tourism.

Three weeks ago I was at a roadside servo between Wilcannia and Cobar, the cafe alive with grey nomads and tourists exploring NSW post-Covid. But not an electric vehicle nor charging station in sight.

In our diesel Toyota Prado we needed to make a 250km detour due to flooding. How you could do that in an electric car out there I simply can’t imagine.

As for us, our return journey was the long, anxious process of charger-hopping in reverse sequence – sitting in the dark at Gundagai at 12.30am while the car took on more volts tended to take the shine off our grand motoring adventure – and not a vanilla slice in sight.
sorry T1 but it has to be said.


PeterH

[T1 Terry]

Interesting article







Why a recent Tesla road trip revealed electric vehicle constraints.
O dear

A must-read!!!
Well worth a read before buying an EV.

Warren Brown: Why taking a road trip in a Tesla revealed the limitations of electric vehicles
I knew electric vehicles had questionable range, but in our quest for a green utopia I had no idea of the seat-of-the-pants hell of driving one in far-flung NSW, writes an EV-fatigued Warren Brown.
Warren Brown
September 5, 2022
The Sunday Telegraph
158 comments
If you ask anyone who knows me there’s nothing I like more than a jolly good road trip.
If you hang around long enough I’m guaranteed to bore anyone within earshot with tales of my road-going adventures that are so bonkers I have trouble believing them myself.

It’s all about the joy of long-distance motoring – the freedom it gives, the chance for adventure.

So when the opportunity to jump aboard an electric car and head west for the Riverina turned up last week I just couldn’t say no – after all, Energy Minister Chris Bowen has made it painfully clear the future for personal transport in Australia is electric.


Warren Brown, cartoonist for The Daily Telegraph travelled to Griffith in a Tesla Model 3 charging in Griffith. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Photographer Jonathan Ng and I were to head to Griffith last week for the annual Daily Telegraph Bush Summit. Instead of catching a flight from Sydney we decided to drive.

Jonathan, a car guy like myself, offered to pick me up from Goulburn in his 2019 Tesla and drive us the 390km west.

While I’ve driven electric cars before, I’d never been in one for any considerable distance, and while I’d experienced an EV’s blistering performance, like most people I was also aware of their shortcomings when it came to their range.


Warren Brown, Daily Telegraph cartoonist is an avid lover of road trips.

The Tesla struck me as the ideal car for a long drive, with its leather seats and plenty of leg room. The vehicle brimmed with futuristic features: instead of dashboard instruments there was what was fundamentally a giant iPad in front of the driver and passenger, which incorporates an endless variety of nifty features – satellite monitoring, Netflix, and most importantly a map indicating where recharging stations are situated.

“We’ll pull up at Gundagai, plug the car in and grab some breakfast,” Jonathan told me as we re-joined the highway, the thought of which sounded like a capital idea.

The 188km drive from Goulburn to Gundagai was effortless, and before long we’d arrived at the feet of the Dog on the Tuckerbox, to pull up at a bank of charging stations at which there is another Tesla and a Volvo-based Polestar already receiving an intravenous dose of 240 volts.


Turns out Teslas aren’t match fit for road trips.

“We’ll be here for half an hour or so” Jonathan told me as he plugged in our Tesla. And in the spirit of throwing healthy eating to the wind we partook in the first of what would be many roadside gourmand experiences for the day – two bacon and egg rolls and coffee.

In half an hour we returned to the car, where the other EV drivers were now unplugging their life support.

Despite being part of the rarefied 2 per cent of the population who are electric vehicle owners, it struck me how no one was making any well-met, collegiate chitchat about their cars. You know – “G’day mate! How many megahertz are you getting to the gallon?” kind of thing.

Instead, clearly wary of these electrical interlopers, Jonathan told me to keep an eye on where those guys were heading because it was imperative we got to a town before them – if there’s only one charger in a town and they get there first then it’s a half an hour waiting while they charge, then a half an hour for us.

I’m beginning to get it – for EV drivers out here on the open road it’s now a lithium-battery Hunger Games – a charge to get charged before the other guy takes charge.

Stuffed with bacon and egg rolls, we headed off for Wagga Wagga, some 88km away, where our mission was to quickly find the resident charging station placed in a car park, and another 45-minute stay to recharge again.

A vanilla slice and three-quarters of an hour later and we were back on the road, heading for the only charging station in Narrandera – a lonely monument to a green Australia plonked in a side street where we hooked up for yet another electricity fix. A pie from the bakery this time and we ever-expanding local-pastry-filled Electric Road Warriors were on the last leg to Griffith, with one eye on the road and the other on the diminishing battery-level symbol on the screen, arriving in town to hook the car up for an electro-adrenaline hit yet again.

As someone who’d had no experience with EVs in the bush I was now taken hold by a new and genuine phenomenon that’s recently arisen with the advent of electric cars. It’s a paranoia known euphemistically as “range anxiety” – a rather patronising term suggesting that the fear of being stranded in the never-never without a spark of electricity and facing certain death is merely some sort of minor psychosis, like being afraid of the dark.

I knew electric vehicles had questionable range, but I had no idea of the seat-of-the-pants logistics of driving one in the Outback.

It was becoming glaringly obvious to me the federal government’s rabid fervour to fast-track electric vehicles by cracking down and dispensing with the internal combustion engine seems more than alarming in that we’re not being given the full picture of what the consequences will be.


Taking a Tesla outback evoked thoughts of MadMax fury road for Warren Brown. Photo:Jasin Boland.

I discovered there are two issues with electric vehicles that proponents tend to gloss over: the cars’ batteries don’t like cold weather, and nor do they like continuous high-speed driving – two rather important and regularly encountered features when driving in the Outback.

Not only do lithium batteries have reduced efficiency when it’s cold, but if you put the car’s heater on (so you don’t freeze) you’ll reduce its charge even quicker – therefore reducing the range.

MYEV.com suggests in order to keep the battery happy you should “park your car in a heated garage” – something else to load onto an already beleaguered electricity grid.

Unlike internal combustion engines, electric vehicles are happier in the “stop-start” situations you’d find in the city than the massive long-distance hauls you’d typically encounter in the Australian Outback.

If you do run out of charge, the car will give plenty of warning, resorting to “limp mode” for some time. But when it has eventually rolled to a complete stop, pray you have charge and range for your mobile phone, as it’s a tilt tray to the nearest town.

Scandinavian countries such as Norway are perennially wheeled out as the poster children for EVs. Yet the widest part of Norway is roughly the distance from Sydney to Dubbo, whereas the widest part of Australia is equivalent to the distance from London to Moscow.

In a green utopia where we’re all compelled to drive electric cars, who on Earth would be game enough to visit remote Outback towns in far-flung NSW?

This would conceivably curtail enthusiasm for regional tourism.

Three weeks ago I was at a roadside servo between Wilcannia and Cobar, the cafe alive with grey nomads and tourists exploring NSW post-Covid. But not an electric vehicle nor charging station in sight.

In our diesel Toyota Prado we needed to make a 250km detour due to flooding. How you could do that in an electric car out there I simply can’t imagine.

As for us, our return journey was the long, anxious process of charger-hopping in reverse sequence – sitting in the dark at Gundagai at 12.30am while the car took on more volts tended to take the shine off our grand motoring adventure – and not a vanilla slice in sight.
sorry T1 but it has to be said.


PeterH

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, especially if you have a barrow to push or being supported by an entity that wants to paint a certain scene that may be seen as an "alternative truth" if viewed with the facts in hand.

Let's start with the recharge at The Dog on the Tucker Box. There is a Tesla fast charger there, these add 325km every 15 mins, 30 mins charging would equal 650 kms and the actual total range of a 2019 model 3 275km, so in 15 mins it would have been 80% charged and the next 15 mins would have brought it up to at least 90% charged. The distance from the Dog and the Tucker Box to Griffith is 257km via the shortest route of 268km by the longest route, insistently, this was the route they chose after leaving the fast charger .... hmmmm..... but still well within the range of a 15 min charge to get all the way to Griffith via this longer route without requiring a recharge ..... they did charge for 30 mins according to the article .... no idea why you would do that in a vehicle with a 275km range when fully charged ..... but let's continue this charade https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... sh/charade.
They charge for 45 mins at Wagga Wagga, no idea how they actually fitted it into the battery, even if it had been screaming "charge me, charge me now", after 30 mins the battery would be 90% charged, battery capacity is 74kwh and they added another 45 mins at Wagga Wagga? .... If the warning lights had been flashing at Gundagai, you can be sure it would have been in the story in very big letters.
But we continue this now clearly total B/S story with a 45 min charge where there is an NRMA charger with 50kwh output, I'll let you calculate 75% of 50kwh, where did this go? The battery would have been at least at 90% SOC and only travelled 88kms .... it just doesn't add up, does it?

We have visitors arrived and a job to work on, so reading total fictional tales being passed off as "alternate facts" will have to continue later

T1 Terry

[T1 Terry]

Maybe watching this You Tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmb1rUhS8dg of an actual Tesla running out of battery might help with sorting the real life events from the story tellers ..... to start with, watch for the "Limp home mode"come up on the Tesla, see how far it travels before it actually decides it doesn't want to go any further, how he gets around the problem and just how far the vehicle actually travels before it refuses to go any further .... relate this to the "story" Warren Brown wrote in the Sunday Telegraph and you will see a slight difference between real world and fantasy land ...... Keep in mind, this Tesla being driven till it stopped, was using the heater and headlights .....

The cold weather and lithium battery issues is clearly something Warren read that he liked because it suited his bias, Winston LYP cells, the ones we use for the house batteries and original equipment in the Australian built Blade, charge and discharge down to -30*C .... don't see that very often in Australia, so maybe Warren should read articles that relate to Australian conditions before he shows all his total ignorance on the subject ....
By the way, Tesla use reverse cycle heat pumping to control battery temp and vehicle interior temp. the power use in the Australian climate is not much more than a rounding figure ....

T1 Terry

T1 Terry