Amr El Beleidy

Travelling at a snail’s pace

Cars are an amazing invention. They are mainly a combination of two inventions, the box and the wheel. Put a box on a set of wheels and voila you have a car. While it might not be practical to drive your car in a Flintstones style, with your legs popping out from under and pushing you through, sometimes it seems like that would be more efficient than what we did now. Your input will be biofuels and your carbon emissions is the CO2 in your breath.

Of course this arrangement will not allow you to go as fast as modern cars, but if you are in a city such as London, you might never need to.  A Transport for London report shows that the average traffic speed in the inner London area is between 11 and 12 miles per hour (17.5 – 19Km/hr). That is not particularly fast. We already know that internal combustion engines (car engines) are not terribly efficient, but they are even worse at low speeds.  Electric cars tend to have  flatter efficiency curve, that means they have the same efficiencies across the different speeds, and would thus serve quite well in a busy city situation.

What’s even more interesting about electric cars is that they have batteries, and a large number of cars will have a large number of batteries that can store a large amount of electricity. Now if we plug those in whenever we park them we have a large amount of electricity storage on hand to use in the grid. This means that in times of peak demand, instead of having a very expensive power plant start up just for that we can draw electricity from the parked cars. The car will make sure it does not give out a lot of electricity so that its owner can still go home. This should decrease the difference in demand on the grid between peak and minimum times, which means a lower planning margin, which means higher load factor, and which also means less money. (See comment on the Micro-CHP post).

Now why would I help the grid people with their problems and use up the lifetime of my battery? Because you would probably make some money out of it. You charge up at night, when electricity is cheap, and demand is low. Then you sell the electricity back during the day, when your car is parked and you are reading Dilbert cartoons at work.

Now aside from all the possible benefits of an electric car or electric vehicle (EV), here is a suggestion for Transport for London. The three lane system. One lane for public transport, one lane for electric vehicles and one lane for bicycles. Hmmm no normal cars there, exactly. This is the solution I came up with while day dreaming today, in the next post I will look for arguments why it could actually work.