Not so smart M/ways -

[asperity]

It won't really matter in 10 years time when everyone has to have an electric car by government decree, but can't afford the electricity to charge the battery (or the power companies don't have the capacity to supply the electricity - pick your worst/best cas scenario 🙄).

[asperity]

Further to my last post, why is the government even bothering with road improvements when their aim is to price everyone off the road? I'm completely flumoxxed 😕.

[Observer II]

Notice the Welsh Assembly has cancelled the M4(?) improvement scheme on enviromental grounds; but surely traffic congestion produced more pollution than if it's free flowing ?

[Evil Sid]

don't know obs. it depends on how they work out the figures.

50 cars taking half an hour to travel a mile produce X amount of pollution over that mile. How many cars would it take to produce the same amount of pollution if the cars take one minute to travel that same mile stretch.( assuming that the cars produce a set amount of pollution per car which is constant) so would be 30 x 50 which 1500 cars.

Not quite that simple does an idling car produce more pollution than a car that is travelling at 60mph in top gear?

Well yes if you take into account that and idling car will be in one place for say a minute and a car travelling at 60mph will pass that same point in less than a second.

But all cars are not the same when it comes to emissions especially taking into account hybrid cars and those with stop/start engines.

Still all that will be by the by when electric cars are the norm, which considering they have been around since the 1870's shouldn't be much longer in coming.

 

[Davy51]

Really versatile these electric cars. Countryfile  last Sunday was reporting on a little island off Madeira  that uses its fleet of all electric cars to help to power its version of the national grid at the end of the working day & throughout the night. Great idea in theory but i'm sure their noble effort is much simpler than it would be in the UK.

Apparently, the cars used their surplus energy to top up the grid. Don't know how the cars were fixed for the morning commute though.

[Confused52]

9 hours ago, Observer II said:

Notice the Welsh Assembly has cancelled the M4(?) improvement scheme on enviromental grounds; but surely traffic congestion produced more pollution than if it's free flowing ?

The Welsh First Minister scrapped the road because they could afford it. He then said that he wouldn't build it even if he could afford it because of it's effect on the Gwent levels. The effect on the health of Otters, Water Voles, wading birds and the King Diving Beetle is so much more important than the health of humans using or living near the M4.

It is interesting to note that the traffic on the M4 at the Cardiff end is expected to rise by 23% as a result of removing the tolls presumably as welsh consumers choose English services based in Bristol instead of those in Cardiff.

[asperity]

27 minutes ago, Davy51 said:

Really versatile these electric cars. Countryfile  last Sunday was reporting on a little island off Madeira  that uses its fleet of all electric cars to help to power its version of the national grid at the end of the working day & throughout the night. Great idea in theory but i'm sure their noble effort is much simpler than it would be in the UK.

Apparently, the cars used their surplus energy to top up the grid. Don't know how the cars were fixed for the morning commute though.

The island is called Porto Santo which is only 16 square miles in area, so any commute is going to be quite short. Apparently the cars maintain enough charge to allow a run to the nearest charging point. The population is only 5500 people which, compared to Warrington's 210,000, is minimal. It also enjoys a lot of sunshine!

[asperity]

A thought on the Porto Santo thing. Why don't the authorities just buy a load of batteries and use them as the stored power source at night, thereby cutting out the need to buy the power from the car owners?

[Davy51]

Yes, that thought struck me at the time.

 

[Evil Sid]

Maybe they are trying to get everybody to drive electric cars and are using that as an incentive. Drive an electric car and get money back by selling excess stored electricity from it to the grid.

For  a small population it could be quite a good thing. if all houses had sufficient solar panels to power the house during the day and charge the car and sufficient storage capacity to provide enough power to power the house during the night. whatever power was excess would then go into the communal pot add a few extra solar panels to the garden shed and you could be quids in. bung in a few wind turbines for those rainy days as well.

[Davy51]

All the islands in the Atlantic will be ideally suited for solar ,wind & wave power ,i suppose.

[asperity]

Solar wind and wave power all being intermittent..............................................

 

[Bill]

just to pick up on a couple of points.

Obs, the red cross lane closure signs have been ignored by impatient drivers long before anyone dreamed of smart motorways and fines for ignoring them given the potential for serious injury, imo was long overdue.

Secondly on the idea of the power companies buying batteries as a means of storing electricity? Well as far as I know, they do do it, but only on a very small scale because the cost is prohibitive and in any case it'd need to be paid for by a massif increase in everyone's bills. But if they did do this and everyone does end up with electric cars, then you'd have twice as many batteries as needed, so they'd have wasted peoples money buying them in the fist place.

Did that make sense? 

 

Bill

[Davy51]

2 hours ago, asperity said:

Solar wind and wave power all being intermittent..............................................

 

I would think islands in the Atlantic would be in prime position  for all three ,especially wave & wind power.

[asperity]

Great Britain consists of a load of Atlantic islands and we don't always have an abundance of wing, wave and solar power potential. Certainly nowhere near enough for base load.

[P J]

The UK tripled it’s renewable energy capacity in the last 5 years,  it’s capacity has surpassed  the use of fossil fuels already and it is rising all the time.  Fossil fuels, like the fossil posters on here are dying out and will soon be gone and the world will be a better place for it.

 

[Confused52]

2 hours ago, P J said:

The UK tripled it’s renewable energy capacity in the last 5 years,  it’s capacity has surpassed  the use of fossil fuels already and it is rising all the time.  Fossil fuels, like the fossil posters on here are dying out and will soon be gone and the world will be a better place for it.

 

Based on observable facts that is one of the most stupid posts I have ever seen. The rest of the thread contains sensible comments about the difficulty of storage and indirectly of generation density. Without nuclear which, along with hydro, regulation does not count as renewable global warming better be massive or we will all freeze to death in the depths of a windless harsh winter.

[P J]

I suggest you take it up with the Imperial College London who produced the report and figures which was commissioned by Drax.  Here is the link  https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/06/uk-renewable-energy-capacity-surpasses-fossil-fuels-for-first-time

read it and learn something before gobbing off as ever, in your inimitable snobby manner. 

 

[Bill]

This is getting a bit far removed from motorways but there has to a limit to how much use can be made of unreliable sources like wind and solar. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, we still need power so for the immediate future we have to keep a certain amount of the dirty stuff until a solutions found. 

 

Bill

[P J]

50 minutes ago, Bill said:

This is getting a bit far removed from motorways but there has to a limit to how much use can be made of unreliable sources like wind and solar. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, we still need power so for the immediate future we have to keep a certain amount of the dirty stuff until a solutions found. 

 

Bill

The filthy stuff still exists but the increase and improvement in renewable energies is making it possible to phase it out.  I imagine that the “dash for gas” if the 90’s had the same sort of naysayers but before you all had social media platforms to spout on

[Confused52]

1 hour ago, P J said:

I suggest you take it up with the Imperial College London who produced the report and figures which was commissioned by Drax.  Here is the link  https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/06/uk-renewable-energy-capacity-surpasses-fossil-fuels-for-first-time

read it and learn something before gobbing off as ever, in your inimitable snobby manner. 

 

I did read it before. It was irrelevant then and it still is. The Guardian has had a period when it deliberately exaggerated every climate story as part of its effort to get more money from left wing readers, including the acme of stupidity in employing the 97% fraudster Dana Nuccitelli. I have read all of this stuff before and unlike some understood it too. Just because it is left wing crap doesn't stop it being crap.

Quoting Drax would not be popular with true eco-warriors because of damage to American forests and the tremendous costs in fuel of getting the stuff to the power station. I will let you look up for yourself the complaints about the department at Imperial College and their shenanigans over the economic cases in climate studies.

[Observer II]

Seems they are having to re-think "smart" M/ways, as the death toll rises - I told you so - pearls before swine again !

[Bill]

A month back, my old Alfa suddenly developed a weird cutting out problem which left me kangarooing along at 20 mph. Fortunately, there was a hard shoulder and an exit not too far away that allowed me to get off but if that had happened on a smart motorway it could have been a disaster. The figures suggest that the number of recorded near miss incidents has increased twenty fold on these roads which to me indicates that someone skimped on the safety assessment.

 

Bill      

[Davy51]

For a health & safety obsessed country with a compensation fuelled legal system i am surprised the idea of smart motorways was even mooted let alone implemented.

[Milky]

Coming late to this discussion.

Isn't the USA the forth most congested country in the world, Los Angeles most congested city in the world followed by New York and San Francisco in 5th place?

I was just watching a YouTube video a few days ago about speeding fines through a section of road works in the states have been quashed after it was demonstrated a temporary  speed restriction (were you got fined double) had been in place for seven years.

The problem with UK motorways is that the signs can not be taken seriously, restrictions come on, flash away for mile after mile and nothing has occurred, other times there are non and you come across miles of traffic. my only experience with smart motorways is near Birmingham on the M6, one mile the speed limit is 40, next it is 50, then down to 40 again then 60, same with the hard shoulder one mile it is a lane, the next it is a hard shoulder then a lane again.

However smart motorways are not new, when you go into Birmingham there are lanes open one way (running into town) and in the evening there are fewer lanes open into town and more open running out of town and that has been around for years