Unthreaded
It doesn't add up...,
Similar but different here. We had plentiful cheap electricity in NSW and interconnectors to neighbouring states where prices were negotiated directly between buyer and seller. That worked well for decades. Where we ballsed up was in the states handing it all over to the Feds who created the "market" and its operator. Prices have skyrocketed ever since,
Tip for anyone blaming this on "markets": when the people on both sides of the table are bureaucrats three levels removed from the producers and consumers, it's not a market, it's a charade.
tomo,
Very interesting. I hadn't heard of engine fumigation before, so that sent me on an interesting little excursion. I remember petrol and diesel technologies being characterised respectively as constant volume and constant pressure combustion, with consequent higher power/higher torque characteristics. Seems quite plausible that the ideal engine might be somewhere in between, so a blend of the technologies makes sense. Suspect the complexity monster might have a say in the matter.
Anyhow, a fun thought that you could repurpose a modern diesel's EGR to add something more useful to the mix.
Love the Kia Picanto story. New car feeling wears off pretty quickly after that first service.
I believe you when you describe the "flexibility" of the emissions rules' enforcers, able to avert the eyes sometimes, then to swing into full spotlight environment saviour mode when a diversion is called for.
Listened to Brendan O'Neill interviewing Sohrab Ahmari on the "tyranny of the free market". Curate's egg. I suspect his blaming of "free markets" owes much to those supposedly free markets being charades like Australia's electricity "market".
In particular, he looks at the censorious behaviour of Facebook, PayPal, etc., as failings of the free market. My view is that those companies were simply being the unaccountable mercenary arm of big government.
Robert Swan
idau - yep - the Noggies are rather circumspect about connectors these days...
Robert
About 20 years ago I had an interesting chat with an engineer in Birmingham who'd been doing some engine research where they substituted Propane / LPG into a modified late type mechanical diesel pump (plungers) diesel engine . The results after they'd reworked the low pressure fuel side up from 8psi to 250 psi were, in steady load conditions extremely encouraging they had issues with dynamic control using old pumps. This triggered my curiosity so after reading about American truckers who used their cooking gas canisters to apparently assist climbing over the Rocky Mountains... I rigged up a crude gas fumigation system on an old ("disposable" ) Peugeot 1.9 non turbo which ran just fine and actually seemed peppier and with less diesel combustion "knock" - seemed softer but stronger. Anyway ... gas fumigation has been tweaked by folks with (a lot) more resources than me and a simple fumigation setup performs at least as well as a DPF with the benefit of more power since the hybrid fuelling gas burns first and eats all the soot - the often touted metric is ca 20% either extra power or extra mileage (at optimum gas to diesel) - but I've yet to see real figures - what simply isn't at issue is that 95%+ of the soot is burned. Lower oil contamination, a cleaner exhaust and some few percent better fuel economy. I'd love to find out at what gas concentration the soot burn is optimised.
I'd guess that NOx can be tweaked too with some fuel / air mapping and timing adjustments.
Software tweaks ... an old family friend bought himself a new Kia Picanto common rail diesel when they first appeared - he were a bit OCD about fuel consumption and had a drawer full of notebooks going back to the early 1950s of fuel and mileage - I remember his arrival to show off his shiny red Korean thing to my dad - 82 mpg. You know what's coming... first service "we've upgraded the software for you sir" 55 to 60 mpg....
VW diesels... first thing to note is that the EPA scampering around waving a VW cheating report in 2015 was <48 hours after their people had perpetrated the Silverton sludge outrage and that report had been collecting dust on the EPA's shelves for 2 years. The whole emissions thing is something of a game with the regulators gaming the system as much as the manufacturers - some engine designs couldn't meet some emissions test so they changed the tests etcetera... I'm guessing discussions of collusion between regulators and engine manufacturers on unofficial industry forums have been memory holed.
Many engine emissions simply do not reflect their certification class - in London - motorbiking lawyers riding classic bikes fought on this and humiliated to creeps at Transport for London into allowing an independent emission test centre which still operates in London... https://www.nationalemissionstestcentre.com/
tomo
Is a commonsense article on EV roll out and Human induced climatechange (or more accurately the lack of evidence of human influence on climate).
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/08/30/why-i-will-never-buy-an-electric-car/
Ross Lea
Norway’s electricity price problem has been importing high prices via interconnectors. See what happened when they opened a new link to Germany.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fLVEo/1
It's no wonder they refused to go ahead with a new link to Scotland.
It doesn't add up...
Ross Lea, tomo,
Looking at tomo's map, being banned from ferries looks like it might leave EV drivers a bit short of options on many routes within Norway.
In "certain weather conditions" taking the EV across the mountains might be a rather fateful decision. I had a brief debate with an EV advocate at Jo Nova's where he was equating a petrol kWh to an electric one. Sure they're equivalent to the physicist — that number of joules — but the different vehicle weights, driving styles, weather dependence, etc., meant the equivalence was a very rough approximation.
QDM rant was fun. It's always been pretty obvious that if you want to minimise CO2, minimising fuel consumption is the way to go. Bolting on piles of extra kit isn't likely to help on that score. Having been behind a few vehicles as their DPF "regen" kicks in, I have my doubts that the overall soot output is reduced at all, but I suppose it's concentrated around the motorways rather than in the 'burbs.
On a related point, after all the high dudgeon about VW's gaming the emission tests, I wonder how many owners, after rushing to get the "improved" firmware installed in their cars' computers noticed the fuel economy wasn't as good. Always been a trade-off between best economy and NOx emissions. I suppose CO2 will be up too.
Recent EconTalk with Walter Russell Mead was ok, but nothing amazing until he came out with a pithy phrase for something I have waffled on for paragraphs trying to express:
The arc of history is nobody’s poodle.Spot on. It's how I feel when I hear about Schwab or Soros or Gates or whatever. It's not that such people don't have great schemes in mind, just that there's no way they can control them. Hitler did exist after all, but despite having far more at his disposal than Schwab or the others, his Thousand Year Reich came up a bit short.
Perhaps better than the EconTalk is Mead's essay. Not the easiest of reads and I don't agree with him on all the details, but it's a pretty good perspective.
Robert Swan
Norway EVs
from my Norwegian colleagues - long journeys over the mountains are presenting challenges.
The last charging points over the mountains going east (from Haugesund and Bergen to Oslo) have seen some incidents with lots more cars than available chargers and some bad tempered scenes where the police were called..
There has been talk about banning EVs on the routes in certain weather conditions.
What many people don't see is that Norway is more densely populated than many other European states - quite dense urban areas separated by lots of wilderness.
Many Norwegian households run two cars - the EVs get ZIL lanes and parking concessions. Electricity prices have skyrocketed too...
Good rant by QDM on YT - where does the the burden of emissions line cross over the fuel consumption line / efficiency?
tomo
With regard to Norway and EV's I understand they have been banned from ferries because of fire risk.
Ross Lea
tomo,
No argument from me. It's unwise of him to take up with such people. It's not exactly a modern thing, but the lazy outlook of the enemy of my enemy is my friend and the friend of my enemy is my enemy is more visible than it used to be. Having applied it, Shellenberger may be disappointed to find todays "friends" aren't so friendly tomorrow.
Ross Lea,
Agree about the elitism, but attending a festival via YouTube strikes me as a bit to close to the Matrix world. Here's Leunig's one really good cartoon (he was the "whimsical" cartoonist for Fairfax Press for decades)
Subtle use of smirks in this video while delivering ONS stats on excess deaths along with vaccination uptake. Fairly amusing; you won't miss much watching at double-speed.
I'm always talking about modern norms and how you're out in the cold if you're more than two sigmas away from the mean. Here's an example from airline passenger screening. Perhaps I should be glad that two sigmas below the mean isn't a problem in this case.
Today's at Jo Nova's is Norway's big uptake of EVs having little effect on Norway's consumption of oil. Not a bad line of argument since there is no EV equivalent for the biggest fuel users, but unfair since it'll take a few years before the ordinary passenger vehicles have been changed over. Like with the wind turbines, there are better arguments. E.g. that the BEVs impose a huge CO2 cost in their production.
Robert Swan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR2zWfnIChQ
tomo
Robert
gas fumigation shouldn't be confused with the mad magic world of HHO electrolysers :-)
The proffered mechanism for fumigation is that the gas burns faster than the atomised diesel droplets - which consequently have slightly longer to burn and burn more completely, surrounded by burning gas.
It's a a measure of the capital cost implications of IC engine development + production that side avenues in combustion aren't thoroughly explored - I've run LPG converted petrol engines for a decade plus - half price motoring (fuel-wise ) - but the insane green ideologies (and reduced tax take) have led to that option being now disparaged in the UK ... Gas fuelled IC engines have been successfully deployed across Asia for ages but the self absorbed, doctrinaire ideologues in the Anglosphere have been the tail wagging the emissions dog....
A commercial fumigation system https://www.prinsautogas.com/en/systems/dieselblend-dual-fuel-system.
There's another unintended consequence of emissions kit with modern direct petrol injected petrol engines - crap from the crankcase ventilation and EGR systems building up in the inlet plumbing (especially on the inlet valve area) and killing the engine's ability to breathe I've seen some serious amount of crud on inlet valves.