In other news….

I work on the car terminal on the docks and going by the number of electric cars coming in there will be a huge market for their chargers. Every car manufacturer now has electric cars and hybrids in all their models. The market will be huge.

Just excrement news for the area really.

Regards electric cars, the problem is that you can only install so many chargers.  Once a house or a place of work has a charger, it's there.  It's not like a car where you replace it, there isn't really a repeat customer.  Electric car sales will increase for a long time, but the rate of sale for chargers was always going to slow down at some point.

May not be great news for a football club they sponsor.

Quoted from BobbyCummingsTackle

May not be great news for a football club they sponsor.

Clee town?

The car industry seems to be leaning towards hydrogen as the long term green solution for travel and the UK has missed the boat a bit regarding battery production.

I remain to be convinced that digging up rare Earth minerals, creating batteries that last 7-10 years, that cannot be recycled, is actually any better for the planet than using oil based products to run a combustion engine.

A viable hydrogen solution is likely to be more environmentally friendly.

Quoted from blundellpork

I remain to be convinced that digging up rare Earth minerals, creating batteries that last 7-10 years, that cannot be recycled, is actually any better for the planet than using oil based products to run a combustion engine.

A viable hydrogen solution is likely to be more environmentally friendly.

We just need to have fewer cars. Embodied carbon emissions from manufacturing will continue apace for years until the steel industry is fully green. Public transport here is mostly shambolic now though and our steel industry is fecked.

Looking at the Myenergi product portfolio the battery (Libbi) and diverter (Eddi) are where there should be growth. Once we have excess renewables generation connected to the grid the marginal grid price of off-peak power will be nothing, you need the smart gadgets that use off peak energy and store it either in the battery or as hot water in a thermal store (hot water tank).

Quoted from MuddyWaters

The car industry seems to be leaning towards hydrogen as the long term green solution for travel and the UK has missed the boat a bit regarding battery production.

Where do you get that idea from about hydrogen?

Three companies produce a single hydrogen fuel cell model. In comparison are literally dozens of all-electric or plug-in hybrid models which you can go out and purchase right now.

There is no proper infrastructure for hydrogen vehicles pretty much anywhere in the world, except California, yet you can plug in your car using a household socket (though it would charge very slowly!). It's possible that improvements in fuel cell longevity might see hydrogen become the fuel of choice for long-distance HGVs or trains or even ships (though my money is on ammonia for them), but that would be in the future.

At present, pretty much all hydrogen is produced from natural gas without any carbon capture, which defeats the whole point of it. There are some approaches under development which look to generate hydrogen from renewable power, but the hydrolysis and storage still means big losses in comparison to simply charging up a battery.

Don't forget that a fuel cell car is actually an electric car with a small battery. The fuel cell charges the battery which then runs the electric motor(s). With better/cheaper batteries the costs of electric cars will fall. Lithium ion rules for expensive cars at the moment due to higher capacity, but cost is high due to use of metals such as cobalt, manganese and nickel. Tesla (and one or two others) now use Lithium Iron phosphate batteries in certain models which are cheaper, with lower capacity, but longer life and fast charging. Next step will be Sodium ion batteries - a Chinese company has just produced the first a car featuring these. Cheaper with no heavy metals and good enough capacity. After that, solid state lithium batteries or lithium metal batteries in development have the potential to both reduce cost and further increase range. Lots of other battery chemistries under development.

What I think will be the turning point is when cheaper house batteries similar to the Tesla Power Wall become available. Lots of people have solar panels on the roof of their house and are currently being paid a pittance for the electricity fed back into the grid. With with more economical house batteries, you could store this and use it to run your appliances or charge your electric car. This is where the opportunities lie ahead for MyEnergi I expect, though it may be a few years down the line.

I'm sure they've got a good handle on all of this, so will hopefully be ready to kick up production once again when the economic situation hopefully improves.

No idea when this will be, however, as we've got the BoE intent on hammering consumers with their interest rate rises which can't impact the inflation which is caused by external factors and profiteering!

You're not wrong about the failure to invest in battery manufacturing, incidentally. I don't think the government or Labour have much of a plan in this regard which is very short sighted.

Quoted from blundellpork

I remain to be convinced that digging up rare Earth minerals, creating batteries that last 7-10 years, that cannot be recycled, is actually any better for the planet than using oil based products to run a combustion engine.

A viable hydrogen solution is likely to be more environmentally friendly.

I'm not sure why you think batteries can't be recycled? They can and they are, providing the materials in them are valuable enough.