Why are the government pushing for EV?

gifted

Reading on the RTE news and saw thst there is an alternative to diesel fuel available that has up to 90% reduction in carbon emissions.

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2023/0705/1392789-hydrotreated-vegetable-oil/

Why are we being encouraged/forced to change perfectly good cars for electric vehicles and changing our existing heating systems which is resulting in a lot of homes borrowing and being tied down with loans when there is an alternative available?

Why are the Greens not pushing this?

Dslatt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058303890/why-are-the-government-pushing-for-ev

Production issues being one, its an expensive process, monoculture etc. Could be the solution at some point but at the moment its not completely viable

gipi

Thought exactly the same when I saw the feature on RTE news yesterday. Given the amount of diesel vehicles in the country (I drive one myself), providing a financial incentive to switch to hvo could be a game changer.

Rudolf Diesel ran his first engines on peanut oil, so it's a back to the future scenario!

magicbastarder

vegetable oil, scaled up to levels required to fuel private transport, would put even more pressure on land use. it's not some sort of magic bullet where 80% or 90% of emissions just vanish.

Glaceon

I think we could end up with food shortages and/or high food prices if we diverted that much land from food to fuel use.

gifted

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120812062#Comment_120812062

Sats its " HVO is made from plant waste, used cooking oil, animal fats and other renewable materials"

magicbastarder

cheers, i missed that. how much used cooking oil and animal fat is available? i.e. how scalable is that?

i.e. do you think the supply chain would stretch down as far as your car?

Dslatt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120812084#Comment_120812084

No, this is the issue. It isnt feasible on a mass scale without making sh1t of other areas

Stevie2001

Politics, money, corruption, other forces like China/US governments, those governments have been at war with the Middle East for decades and want the pie back.

I have nothing against EV's, if you have a driveway, own house, can put in solar etc and it suits your lifestyle they are a great product, but they are not a great product for the 56% of Europeans living in flats

gifted

Ive no idea but if something is Sustainable, renewable, and is causing no harm to the environment then its worth pushing for.

Its sounds a lot better that the damage being done getting the parts for electric vehicles atm which will probably run out at some time as well.

Just going to add in here that it will stop a lot of homes getting into debt when there is an alternative.

purifol0

I think people dont realise that our government is not really ours. Damn near everything they do is either because the EU tell them to do it, or the US wants them to do it. Or they know they have to legislate for something, so they wait for someone else to do it and copy their legislation.

This includes everything form emission targets to gender quotas, to refugee numbers to vaccine mandates. Their personal opinions & feelings are immaterial, they get handed the script and read it verbatim. And if the public dont like it, they can always throw RTE another few bob (completely seperate from the license fee) to try get us on-board.

And to the use of Diesel - when in the early 2000's the german auto companies had a direct line to EU HQ, they told the EU that diesel was now clean and green. Next thing you know we all had "clean diesel" VW's, the green party was also on board. After all the EU are the good guys, and defintely wouldnt decieve us....

And now the push from the top is electrical vehicles but not nuclear power. And our govt. will happily push that.

Mikros

The big problem with biofuels such as hydrotreated vegetable oils (HVOs) is the source vegetable oil has to come from somewhere (e.g. rapeseed, sunflower, soybean, palm oil etc.). These crops have to compete with food production, are often grown very intensively requiring huge amounts of water and fertiliser, and increase pressure to clear forests for crops. Europe alone uses anywhere up to 324 billion litres of diesel in a year, while annual production of HVO for the world was 12 billion litres last year. To scale up to the demand for diesal would require huge amounts of raw vegetable oil which would cause massive damage from the farming required.

HVO's can help play their part, but I don't think they are scalable as a realistic replacement for diesel.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120812101#Comment_120812101

Where's the 56% figure coming from? The figures I have suggest that the proportion of flat-dwellers in Europe varies from 65.2% (Latvia) down to 9.8% (Ireland). The EU is 46.3%.

Contrary to what you might expect, EV penetration is often higher in countries with above average levels of flat-dwelling. The EU average is 11 EVs per 1,000 people, but Germany (56.4% flatdwellers) has 15.6 EVs per 1,000 people. Sweden (47.1% flatdwellers) has 28.8 electric cars per 1.000 people.

While charging is an issue for flat-dwellers, it's coupled with a larger issue, which is parking, and it can be addressed in that context. Parking for flat-dwellers tends to be consolidated — i.e. rather than physically separated individual bays, as in the drives of houses, you have a bunch of parking bays in one location. If the commitment is there, it's easier and cheaper to install shared charging infrastructure in parking garages and parking lots than it is to install separate charging infrastructure in individual bays at different locations.

marathon2022

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058303890/why-are-the-government-pushing-for-ev

I'm not an expert but a quick google search of recent studies and based only on findings presented in the research paper titled "Studies of Engine Performance and Emissions at Full-Load Mode Using HVO, Diesel Fuel, and HVO5" by Ruslans Smigins, Kristaps Sondors, Vilnis Pirs, Ilmars Dukulis, and Gints Birzietis, I find that the article does not provide sufficient evidence to support the notion that HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) offers significant environmental benefits as a viable replacement for Diesel fuel.

Šmigins, Ruslans & Sondors, Kristaps & Pirs, Vilnis & Dukulis, Ilmars & Birzietis, Gints. (2023). Studies of Engine Performance and Emissions at Full-Load Mode Using HVO, Diesel Fuel, and HVO5. Energies. 16. 4785. 10.3390/en16124785. 

Conclusions below

1. Studies have shown that there are benefits in using HVO fuel and its admixture, namely, power increases slightly and fuel consumption and hydrocarbons in the exhaust gases decrease. At the same time, no additional effect can be observed from increasing the mixture concentration; HVO5 showed better power and torque indicators than HVO compared to FDD.

2. The full desired ecological effect found by other researchers has not been achieved. The carbon monoxide content in emissions increased by an average of 3.0% using HVO and by an average of 36% using HVO5, while the NOx content in the emissions increased by an average of 3.0% using HVO and by an average of 8.8% using HVO5.

3. To achieve significant improvements in results, more attention should be paid to research the impact of other different factors, such as the fuel composition, spray characteristics, air-to-fuel ratio, compression ratio, injection strategy, engine parameter adjustments, etc., which can further affect the combustion process and, accordingly, Energies 2023, 16, 4785 12 of 14 the exhaust gas composition. This means that achieving the benefits of HVO cannot be fully realized with the existing internal combustion engine adapted to work with diesel fuel, but only after optimal adaptation to work with HVO.

4. Considering society’s desire for low-emission and zero-emission vehicles, the ecological effect could be the most important driver of the use of this fuel in the latest generation of diesel engines. In addition, the slight increase in power in the case of using pure HVO will not be felt by the end-user, which will therefore hinder the full evaluation of this fuel. In that case, some more extensive outdoor studies using portable emission measurement systems (PEMSs) and high-precision fuel consumption measurement systems (AVL KMA Mobile) for fuel consumption and emission detection would be recommended and probably will be realized in future research.

While I acknowledge that transitioning to fully electric vehicles may present challenges and require a significant amount of time, I strongly believe that it is a preferable option over internal combustion engines (ICE) emitting harmful emissions from any fuel type that negatively affect our respiratory health.

OmegaGene

the big push for electric cars is all for money and to restrict movement in the future, look at the price of them and people end up getting tempted into pcp deals and then they have a new car every three years which to me does not seem good for the environment. with the flick of a switch they can do anything to the car with a software update, i know someone that had comfort entry added by mistake and they released and switched it off after 18 months and didn't even tell him, he assumed it came with the porsche when he leased it.

Our government are only doing what they are told by the big boys, i can't see how it is going to work long in the long term, when biden flew to the uk he brought his fleet of motors over and they were not electric

Stevie2001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120814277#Comment_120814277

You'll get a reply from someone that gets it's news from RTE/Sky/Irish Times etc in a few mins, telling you that's a conspiracy theory and your off your head and they are not making 15 minute cities all over the UK to get rid of long distance travel.

They'll own an EV, be vaxxed to the max, thinking about or have solar, work for a multinational or government and will think Biden is a great guy

gifted

https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/1008/1409597-budget-analysis/

George is on the case .....it sounds like a no brainer to me...all the money been spent and no need for it.....Why?

magicbastarder

george is on the case, repeating a eye-grabbing press release in the opening paragraph, without actually examining if that's achievable?

Robert333111

If electricity power generation becomes green (sources from green energy), then vehicles powered by that green electricity will also be green. Green energy within the context of Human Greenhouse Gas Emissions ("HGGE") that are causing Climate Change / global warming, mean energy that does not source from fossil fuels (are not HGGE). The Republic of Ireland is not the only country promoting electric vehicles. However, while electricity power generation continues to source from fossil fuels, Electric vehicles (EVs) powered from it, will not be green.

A word about "bio fuels":
'Burning biofuels results in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas.'
Source:
(I'm not yet allowed to post Links, but the latter information is from a "U.S. Energy Information Administration" webpage. The reader can use a Search Engine and search (without the quotes), for: "EIA AND Biofuels and the environment").

Hydrogen powered cars produce zero emissions, apart from a little water! The problem is that Hydrogen production involves the emission of greenhouse gases.
The good news is that large reserves of natural hydrogen have been, are being, discovered.
(For the latter sentence, the reader can use a Search Engine and search (without the quotes), for:
"Science org AND Hidden Hydrogen").
Hydrogen powered vehicles powered by natural (green) hydrogen will become in my personal view, the "greenest" form of vehicle.