December 1, 2008 By Dale Vince
Filed under: Transport
We thought the Greenbird had flown silently past the deafening roar of Top Gear towers, but we were wrong. Check out this link to watch the good ol’ Top Gear boys practically combusting internally at the prospect of cars powered by the wind. They got the wrong end of the stick of course – the fun end of the stick though – shame it ended up in the out-take bin…
This blog is about answers to the big questions - how will we keep the lights on, what kind of cars will we drive (will we drive?) and how will we feed ourselves - in a post oil world, and a world where we can't afford to keep burning things and throwing things away. Energy, Transport and Food are the three big issues.
Dale, what do you expect mate? You have to pity their lack of imagination…we love what you’re doing and we’d love to be showcasing Greenbird to the UK public at UK AWARE in Olympia in April next year. (Your retrofit leccy car would be great too!)
I like Top Gear, it’s an amusing and cleverly scripted piece of comedy entertainment. However Jeremy and his two performing monkeys increasingly making themselves look somewhat prehistoric. I’d really like to see a fair and unedited debate between that dinosaur and a representitive from the green team! Especially a green rep. making the case for sustainability rather than actual environmental issues. In that forum, anything that smells like the green argument or ‘saving the planet’ gets dismissed as sensationalism or some kind of ivory tower liberalism.
Hey hello,
Any publicity is good publicity I guess?
I’m afraid for me the page says:
“THE VIDEO YOU ARE TRYING TO WATCH CANNOT BE VIEWED FROM YOUR CURRENT COUNTRY OR LOCATION.”
Perhaps you can repost the footage for the world to see? The guys from Carver did. The top gears don’t seem to delete it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zua8R79OPHY
You could edit it and add some comments 🙂
Anyway,
Good luck with the project, we have a world to save here!
Hi Gaby,
Thanks for that – I have just asked the Top Gear bods if they could possibly add the clip to their Youtube channel… that will save anyone having to break their copy protection and/or break their copyright! Will let you know if they respond.
Nice Wind Car site you have there btw 🙂
And those Carver things do look fun – do you know if they made an electric one yet..?
Hi Paul!
The Carver One is über cool. They did sell a licence to venture one so they could use the tilting tech and there looks like they will have an electric version. You can see it at flytheroad.com…. but they seem to be taking their time in development 🙁
There are some other tilting cars in development, but carver is the only one I know that is on the market. I am sure you can convert it to electric, but you would need wheel mounted motors and may only get a max of 60 miles per charge.
Nothing like restrictive practices on the Internet… that video can not be viewed in my region.
It seems more and more clear that the only person on the planet who is unaware of how brainless Clarkson sounds is Clarkson himself.
He’s a journalist (100% non technical/scientific trade) and his sidekicks are a musician and a radio announcer…
Your local gas station attendant would have more of a technical/science background than that trio.
They are all ignorant dinosaurs if you ask me – but even worse – the TV stations let them have air-time with shows pumping out all sorts of incorrect facts like James May’s Big Idea only two weeks ago when he stated that wind turbines only provide a meaningful level of power 25% of the time. Journalists and TV presenters should be made accountable for the rubbish they put out.
Vicky, May’s not far off with his wind turbine comment.
The actual answer for the UK is a load factor of: 27.5% for onshore turbines and 25.6% for offshore.
See DUKES 7.4.
Chris – there is a very big difference between load factor and how much of the time any power generation system produces electricity.
Although DUKEs may show average load factors of 27.5% that is very different to how much of the time electricity is produced. Most studies show wind turbines produce electricity 75-95% of the time depending on location. Grouped as a whole for the contry there are virtually no times when no electricity is produced. In fact a turbine with a load factor of 27.5% could in theory produce electricity 100% of the time just not at its maximum rated output. There is a big difference.
This misrepresentation of load (or capacity) factors has been used for years by the anti-wind lobby, in a very disingenuous way.
not to mention that the average load factor quoted is based on old data and old models and in no way represents contemporary technology.
though archaic in approach, the video is a good chuckle.
Sam
Hi
Firstly we must move forward to a green future….But presentation can help and I think this may upset a few people! But here goes…
– The pinnacle so far of mankind and the petrol head era was reaching for the stars and man landing on the moon must be recognised as such…once the green movement acknowledge this and accept it in their literature and not slag off all that has gone before, when people just did not realise, we will get a lot more people on our side and move this essential growth of green issues forward…..we are all in this together…the closer we make ourselves to the main stream now the easier it will be for us to lead them towards the future!!
Clarkson will always be Clarkson. I very much doubt he believes most of the stuff he comes out with to be honest, he’s just going for a reaction. The more people rise to it, the more he’ll do it. James May actually strikes me as a pretty intelligent chap, and he did give the Honda Clarity a pretty good review in a recent episode. Same episode had the Tesla in it as well, and was generally quite positive. I think people need to take Top Gear far less seriously…they’re entertainment, not a lobby group! To be honest, I think both camps are guilty of dubious statistics and selective reporting to some degree.
Thanks Danny. Sounds great, would love to come along. If you drop us an e-mail with details in it I’ll make sure it gets to the right people. Cheers.
I agree with you Vicky, they should be accountable. But the recent episode with the C4 program that fake graphs on climate change to make their point – it was ruled entertainment… kind of tells us it ain’t going to happen. Apparently, according to the watchdog, it’s TV and we should all take it with a pinch of salt – I paraphrase of course. Cheers.
Chris, Martin and Sam – Martin has it dead right, anti-wind guys confuse the issues of load factor and efficiency all the time, sounds like May took it a step further if he described load factors as a measure of how often windmills produce ‘a meaningful level of power’ – that really is silly.
Load factors are a very interesting statistical handle actually. If you calculate one for everyday things, like for example a car, you get a figure of about 1%..!, try a kettle it’s even worse, mobile phones… try them all. It shows what a spurious statistic load factor is if you use it to try and argue something is not efficient and therefore ‘not worth bothering with’ as the anti’s love to do.
Even ‘like for like’ (looking at generators) wind stacks up – take nuclear power for example, if there’s one power source that is ‘rocket science’ this is it, you’d expect it to have a vastly superior performance to wind, load factor wise – I mean you get to turn it on and off (and up and down) as you like. But the typical load factor of Britain’s Nukes is not even double that of typical wind. Surely something that relies completely on the weather to make power should perform far less well compared to the ultimate high tec generator – interesting that it doesn’t.
Load factors for wind are increasing, as Sam says, the stats are based on all UK wind farms and therefore have many very old tech machines in there. 30% onshore is not unusual now with new machines, from a modest site – 40% in Scotland.
Cheers.
Hi Mike, I think landing on the moon was an awesome feat, of engineering and of daring. Not sure if that’s an unusual view in green circles. The ‘space race’ spawned solar PV technology amongst other advances. I was a young boy when they landed on the moon, it was inspiring then, and still is. Cheers.
FYI: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5101
Good timing Damon – the latest video update also questions the Top Gear stamp of approval for Hydrogen…
Thanks for that link Damon, this is really interesting stuff. Cheers.
Hello Dale et al,
I think this explanation of why hydrogen has a future in powering vehicles has much to commend it:
http://www.riversimple.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59:why-hydrogen&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50
This is not my specialist subject, so I will let others pick it up and run with it. However, I must declare an interest as I have some involvment with the project – but not with regard to the vehicle powertrain.
Best regards,
Jonny.
Hi Jonny.
Lots of discussion on H2 vs EV and beyond has been had already, previously on this blog. Eg here: http://zerocarbonista.com/2008/12/16/the-wind-car-ep4-time-for-a-name/ – keep scrolling!
On the Riversimple page you refer to there seems hardly any discussion of where the hydrogen comes from, and what the efficiency (and cost) of this production process might actually be. This is important and cannot be ignored. Also, on the page it says “My estimate is that a purpose-designed fuel cell vehicle becomes more efficient than a lead-acid battery electric vehicle at an installed range of about 20 miles; with Li-ion, this crossover is at about 100 miles.” I think this is just plain rubbish. Look at the graph A.14 in MacKay’s book (page 263, downloadable at http://www.withouthotair.com). I think this is the graph the Riversimple page tries to construct with words, but with real numbers. A range of about 300km is definitely achievable with Lithium batteries.
Hydrogen may have a place, but not in pure FC vehicles; the place is as a range extender on an electric vehicle (a ‘hydrogen plug in hybrid).
Anyway… for intercity travel we need high speed trains! 🙂
Dave
p.s. try to read this awesome Nature article if you can, http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081126/pdf/456436a.pdf