Recently, Indian government led by PM Modi declared their plan to sell only electric cars by 2030 as well [0]. Both are great examples of how technology is trying to fix technology's side effects.
While I find the ban on self driving cars absurd (and something I hope they'll take back when self driving cars become more common), I don't find anything wrong with a government created competitor of Uber and Ola. Why not, if it eventually benefits the consumers? Also, regulation doesn't increase government's revenues. I don't think the idea is bad by itself, it all depends on the implementation now.
Microsoft has monopoly in a market. US/EU response: anti-trust regulations.
Uber/Ola have monopoly in a market. Indian response: burn taxpayer money.
This is how license raj is created. It will not create revenue but burn money like Air India ($8 Billion worth of taxpayer money burned), OFB, SAIL, BSNL. India has a long list of loss making PSUs. This won't be any different. Uber hasn't earned any profit yet, how will Indian government earn any?
Britain commits to power cars with its overwhelmingly fossil fuel based electrical grid and/or its even more fossil fuel heavy electricity imports by 2040.
(kidding, they'll just keep using petroleum.)
edit: apparently I can't read graphs, it's mostly natural gas not mostly coal. The "renewables" slice seems to be a bit heavy on not-exactly-green "biofuel" though...
The UK’s fuel mix has improved. Coal is now <20% and rapidly declining; it will soon be phased out. Overall fossil fuel mix is ~50%, with 30% renewable and 15% nuclear. Could be better, but the renewable sector will keep growing - so it’s a good trend.
It's mad that we're in this situation, with a government so paralysed and impotent that kicking the can down the road like this is being touted as an achievement.
The only justification I can think of for putting it off until 2040 is improvements to the national grid. The grid would fail faster than enough capacity could be brought online. Annoyingly the UK government cancelled solar panel installation subsidies which could have perhaps mitigated this somewhat (along with some energy storage solutions).
It is a tragedy that pollution levels will increase between now and then through a deliberate government policy. 23 years is a ridiculously long way off. The Dutch pushing for a ban by 2025 (8 years!).
The resource industry will experience a big change if this becomes reality. The oil industry will have to shift some of their focus on other non-automotive markets. The electrical energy suppliers will have to step up and take up the gap and reap the profits.
And/Or, there might be a big investment in hydrogen fuel cell tech. The incentive to keep a fuel business viable is significant, and from a public policy perspective there is benefit in being able to recharge cars at the same speed as with petrol as well as the ability to manage electricity demand in the fuel manufacture process.
The oil companies have put themselves in this position too with their denial of global warming. They could have invested in alternative energy and lead the change with their vast financial resources.
legit Q: is there a place in the world where we could go and basically burn as much oil as we want? A place where the effects of greenhouse gases wouldn't be much of an issue?
The moon has ~no atmosphere, so any gas released there would diffuse into space.
What I was trying to say is, because any gas will diffuse from an area of high concentration to one with a lower concentration, there is no place in Earth's atmosphere one can release gas without it diffusing throughout it. The best you can do is slow the process down.
The generated CO2 would have to not blow away to the rest of the planet.
The sun shines on the ground in a wide band of the spectrum and heats it up. The hot ground re-radiates mainly in the infrared. The result is equilibrium. CO2 reflects infrared more than the broad spectrum of solar radiation. Thus the ground with CO2 above it still gets heated as much by the sun but the infrared it radiates is partly now reflected back on itself. Thus the equilibrium is altered and the ground gets hotter.
So, even if the CO2 didn't spread everywhere, it would still be causing heating locally. The heat would eventually spread everywhere.
Today my 14 solar panels generate enough electricity to make my car go 12000 miles per year. It's not really going to be an issue by 2030 at the latest
It's all about the batteries and always has been. Hydrogen is ultimately the only thing that makes sense in the super-long term as a complete and total solution, providing the necessary energy density (given current knowledge), but something like lithium batteries might very well be a long-term stepping stone until then. We are pretty much already there. We just need a few megafactories to pump out those batteries on the cheap.
In this market, at this time, hydrogen is Betamax and electric batteries are VHS. Technical quality doesn't matter if it's not available, and market penetration has a chicken/egg challenge.
And we'll have them. By 2025 global Li-Ion battery capacity should increase by about 10x. That should lower prices by at least 4x, which should make EVs very competitive on an upfront cost with gas-powered cars, and a no-brainer when you take into account maintenance and gas costs, too.
EDIT: I'm also hoping that by 2025, the 100kWh battery capacity will be standard in pretty much all $15,000+ EVs. The reason I'm hoping and I'm not so sure it will happen is because Tesla itself has signaled that it's not in a hurry to pass the 100kWh battery capacity mark even with the more expensive Model S for now.
My guess is it said that because it wants to put that extra money into buying more expensive self-driving equipment. Similarly, on the Model 3 it has already installed the self-driving hardware, even if the customer doesn't want to use it, so Tesla probably doesn't want to further expand those costs with larger capacity batteries for now.
I'm not a fan of this plan because for one, I think self-driving cars will be in "beta" for a lot longer than expected anyway, and two, it will unnecessarily slow down the EV revolution by compromising on battery capacity to include expensive self-driving equipment.
This wouldn't be a problem if it merely affected Tesla. Unfortunately, so far most of the other car makers have tended to "wait for permission" from Tesla before pushing the limits of their own EVs.
They kept "one-upping" (laughably so) each other for years with an extra 5 mile range from a bottom of 70 mile range on their EVs, until Tesla said Model 3 would have over 200 miles. Even now there are a bunch of cars planned for 2018 with only 30-40 kWh batteries and about 120 mile real world range.
I'm still optimistic for now, and I hope that now that most car maker have actually started taking EVs more seriously (we won't see the effects of that until 2021+ though), there will be a "megapixel-race" of sorts, but for battery capacity in the not too distant future. I want the EV makers to "go crazy" with 200kWh batteries, 300kWh, 400kWh, etc. Let the market decide what is the optimum battery size for passenger cars, for trucks, for semis, and so on.
A UK parliament can't bind future parliaments. However, long term policies can be set - it's then up to governments in future to change the policy if they see fit.
I can certainly see the deadline slipping if pragmatic concerns dictate, but I doubt the policy will change in substance.
Yes but there's no legitimate party in the UK against environmental policies like this (some other parties might make the deadline sooner but that's as much change as there would be).
Everyone remember when Japan and Germany said they were done with nuclear power and gave "hard" dates for retirements?
It's easy to make declarations for things way out in the future.
The hard work of paving that road head awaits. Politicians don't like hard work. They will be absent during the process, nowhere to be found, should it ever be paved, until the very end, golden shovel and oversized scissors in hand.
Efforts like these just confuse me. At first I thought It would be any cars on the road by 2040, in which case this is enough notice, since the warning gives consumers enough time to plan (22 years). But outside of a few strange edge cases like specialised cars, what's the point of banning them by 2040?
Electric cars are going to dominate sales within 10 years. At scale, they are cheaper to fuel, cheaper to maintain, have an acceptably high top speed (anything over 160km/h isn't really needed and Telsas can go 250km/h), a better acceleration curve, they are better for human health (no particulates), they are better for the natural environment (no oil spills), they are better to fight global warming.
The only thing that they are worse at is fuel up time and range. And if either of those problems are solved, both of them effectively are, since fast fuel up gets us a longer effective range and extremely long range (say 2000km) makes fill up time irrelevant.
The writing is on the wall. Fossil fuels are going to be completely replaced very quickly. By taking aggressive steps to ban non-electric vehicles sooner both the environment AND our economy will be better off since we'll gain an advantage in the new industries.
In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness. It's like building a whale blubber processing plant after the early commercialisation of crude oil.
It sets a deadline. Future parliaments can change it as they see fit, but I think the UK government had to say something otherwise they'd be contravening agreements made in the past.
Like you said, within 10 years electric cars sales will probably become the norm anyway, but I guess from a policy perspective it's signalling to manufacturers and the general public that they have 22 years to make the shift.
> Future parliaments can change it as they see fit,
And that's exactly why this is a dodge: It doesn't affect the current administration, and if a future administration doesn't like it, they can just change it. it's a classic maneuver of the "kick the can down the road while pretending to make policy" kind.
> In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness.
In Australia too the politicians keep droning on about "clean coal" and trying as hard as they can to prop-up existing coal-power-plant-as-a-license-to-print-money.
My attitude is, "Who cares"?
Let the dinosaurs die their out-dated death while the world moves on underneath them.
All they have done is made an announcement. Convolutedly, this is more about: the now lame-duck prime minister who asked the people for a stronger mandate to negotiate the best out of the Brexit disaster but went down like a bag of sick with the electorate thereby weakening the government's position even further to 'laughing-stock in Europe' status. Who then showed utter contempt and a complete lack of integrity by trying to delay the inevitable, cling to power and refusing to do the honorable thing and resign, in doing so creating even more uncertainty for a repulsive, back-stabbing cabinet member to jockey for position during the recess and a gutless party desperately sucking up to the Greens and their ilk for support in a minority government and trying to divert attention from the stories of historical incompetence emanating daily from the press.
It also ironically falls in line with other EU states recent announcements. So old-, non-, fake- whatever you want to call it news.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 97.6 ms ] thread[0] : http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/03/technology/future/india-elec...
1. Creating a taxpayer funded Uber competitor, all to break up a monopoly. Looks like they don't know concept of a regulator. https://qz.com/1037837/indias-uber-ola-cab-wars-could-have-a...
2. Banning self driving cars, because India needs jobs.
Uber/Ola have monopoly in a market. Indian response: burn taxpayer money.
This is how license raj is created. It will not create revenue but burn money like Air India ($8 Billion worth of taxpayer money burned), OFB, SAIL, BSNL. India has a long list of loss making PSUs. This won't be any different. Uber hasn't earned any profit yet, how will Indian government earn any?
(kidding, they'll just keep using petroleum.)
edit: apparently I can't read graphs, it's mostly natural gas not mostly coal. The "renewables" slice seems to be a bit heavy on not-exactly-green "biofuel" though...
Coal hasn't been in the majority for some years, and indeed there have been days this year where no coal powered generation powered the grid.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications-and-updates/infographi...
The UK’s fuel mix has improved. Coal is now <20% and rapidly declining; it will soon be phased out. Overall fossil fuel mix is ~50%, with 30% renewable and 15% nuclear. Could be better, but the renewable sector will keep growing - so it’s a good trend.
- 37% Gas
- 24% Nuclear
- 14% Wind
- 6% imported from France (which will mostly be nuclear)
- 4% Solar
- 3% imported from the Netherlands
- 3% Hydro
- 2% Coal
1. https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...
It is a tragedy that pollution levels will increase between now and then through a deliberate government policy. 23 years is a ridiculously long way off. The Dutch pushing for a ban by 2025 (8 years!).
Or would it just spread everywhere?
Any gas released into Earth's atmosphere would diffuse quite quickly.
What I was trying to say is, because any gas will diffuse from an area of high concentration to one with a lower concentration, there is no place in Earth's atmosphere one can release gas without it diffusing throughout it. The best you can do is slow the process down.
The sun shines on the ground in a wide band of the spectrum and heats it up. The hot ground re-radiates mainly in the infrared. The result is equilibrium. CO2 reflects infrared more than the broad spectrum of solar radiation. Thus the ground with CO2 above it still gets heated as much by the sun but the infrared it radiates is partly now reflected back on itself. Thus the equilibrium is altered and the ground gets hotter.
So, even if the CO2 didn't spread everywhere, it would still be causing heating locally. The heat would eventually spread everywhere.
EDIT: I'm also hoping that by 2025, the 100kWh battery capacity will be standard in pretty much all $15,000+ EVs. The reason I'm hoping and I'm not so sure it will happen is because Tesla itself has signaled that it's not in a hurry to pass the 100kWh battery capacity mark even with the more expensive Model S for now.
My guess is it said that because it wants to put that extra money into buying more expensive self-driving equipment. Similarly, on the Model 3 it has already installed the self-driving hardware, even if the customer doesn't want to use it, so Tesla probably doesn't want to further expand those costs with larger capacity batteries for now.
I'm not a fan of this plan because for one, I think self-driving cars will be in "beta" for a lot longer than expected anyway, and two, it will unnecessarily slow down the EV revolution by compromising on battery capacity to include expensive self-driving equipment.
This wouldn't be a problem if it merely affected Tesla. Unfortunately, so far most of the other car makers have tended to "wait for permission" from Tesla before pushing the limits of their own EVs.
They kept "one-upping" (laughably so) each other for years with an extra 5 mile range from a bottom of 70 mile range on their EVs, until Tesla said Model 3 would have over 200 miles. Even now there are a bunch of cars planned for 2018 with only 30-40 kWh batteries and about 120 mile real world range.
I'm still optimistic for now, and I hope that now that most car maker have actually started taking EVs more seriously (we won't see the effects of that until 2021+ though), there will be a "megapixel-race" of sorts, but for battery capacity in the not too distant future. I want the EV makers to "go crazy" with 200kWh batteries, 300kWh, 400kWh, etc. Let the market decide what is the optimum battery size for passenger cars, for trucks, for semis, and so on.
I can certainly see the deadline slipping if pragmatic concerns dictate, but I doubt the policy will change in substance.
However, up until 2039, any legislative session can modify, change, even repeal such a goal, is that correct?
It's easy to make declarations for things way out in the future.
The hard work of paving that road head awaits. Politicians don't like hard work. They will be absent during the process, nowhere to be found, should it ever be paved, until the very end, golden shovel and oversized scissors in hand.
Electric cars are going to dominate sales within 10 years. At scale, they are cheaper to fuel, cheaper to maintain, have an acceptably high top speed (anything over 160km/h isn't really needed and Telsas can go 250km/h), a better acceleration curve, they are better for human health (no particulates), they are better for the natural environment (no oil spills), they are better to fight global warming.
The only thing that they are worse at is fuel up time and range. And if either of those problems are solved, both of them effectively are, since fast fuel up gets us a longer effective range and extremely long range (say 2000km) makes fill up time irrelevant.
The writing is on the wall. Fossil fuels are going to be completely replaced very quickly. By taking aggressive steps to ban non-electric vehicles sooner both the environment AND our economy will be better off since we'll gain an advantage in the new industries.
In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness. It's like building a whale blubber processing plant after the early commercialisation of crude oil.
It sets a deadline. Future parliaments can change it as they see fit, but I think the UK government had to say something otherwise they'd be contravening agreements made in the past.
Like you said, within 10 years electric cars sales will probably become the norm anyway, but I guess from a policy perspective it's signalling to manufacturers and the general public that they have 22 years to make the shift.
And that's exactly why this is a dodge: It doesn't affect the current administration, and if a future administration doesn't like it, they can just change it. it's a classic maneuver of the "kick the can down the road while pretending to make policy" kind.
In Australia too the politicians keep droning on about "clean coal" and trying as hard as they can to prop-up existing coal-power-plant-as-a-license-to-print-money.
My attitude is, "Who cares"?
Let the dinosaurs die their out-dated death while the world moves on underneath them.
Their world-class airport built on an island? they planned and "built" that island for decades.
Bullet trains? They planned and designed and built those things for decades.
There are a ton more examples.
It also ironically falls in line with other EU states recent announcements. So old-, non-, fake- whatever you want to call it news.
Yes. We added "pledges" above.