Picked this up from Dale Vince’s Zero Carbonista blog. Love the idea of plug in cars. But what about the space if everyone is hanging around for 20 minutes? What do you think?
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From Dale’s Blog
With our wind powered car we’re throwing down the gauntlet to the big car companies, who aren’t doing nearly enough. They bleat about needing decades and £billions to perfect fuel cell technology – and with that comes the need for big new infrastructure – hydrogen infrastructure – that’ll take decades too.
You know what I think – they’re hooked on burning things, hooked on the internal combustion engine – it’s what they know and what they’ve built their business around. They don’t want to move to cars without engines.
Modern batteries can be charged in 20 minutes or so, if you have a three phase supply – and guess what every petrol station in the UK has – yep that’s right. So the infrastructure for electric cars is already in place.
As Chris says, picture a world where you pull into a garage, plug into one of a row of charging posts, go and have a coffee, take 20 minutes off and drive out with a ‘full tank’. More than possible. Much more than.
Oh and if you use a MWh (million units of electricity) to produce hydrogen to run a car – you can get about 1,500 miles from it. If you use the same MWh to power an electric car you can get about 5,000 miles. Hydrogen cars will be the new gas guzzlers if they ever take off – using three times as much energy per mile as electric.
Here’s an artist’s impression of our garage… More on this later.
ben keene 