Renewable and alternative fuels have moved well beyond the buzzword stage and, for some, have become part of a culture war focused on who is right and who is supposedly a Luddite fearful of change.
It is all rather dull and often seems to avoid some key technical realities about how vehicle propulsion works and what is actually appropriate for different applications.
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Within an urban environment and on the streets of Westminster, all-electric drive for passenger cars and light delivery vans seems entirely sensible. Short journeys, relatively low speeds and numerous locations to recharge battery systems make it application-appropriate, with environmental and social benefits through improved air quality. Excellent stuff.
Industry applications
But applying the same vision to long-distance heavy haulage, remote construction, agriculture and rural industries highlights just how little technical understanding many policymakers appear to have about what these vehicles need to function and just how much energy they consume.
A 250hp tractor working for 10 hours will consume a little over 1,860kWh of energy, which in battery terms would require a battery weighing around 10-12 tonnes alone.
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Apart from the cost, the impracticality of a battery weighing roughly the same as the tractor itself should be fairly obvious.
The solution is an energy mix, and that requires some grown-up discussions about what will work best for different tasks.
Future energy mix
For more than 150 years, we have been remarkably successful at exploding liquified dead dinosaurs to provide power for everything from the smallest lawnmower to the largest container ship. As we move away from this, policymakers need to understand that a future energy mix will likely include electric, biogas, HVO, ammonia and hydrogen, alongside technologies we have not recognised yet.
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There was once effectively a one-fuel solution for almost every task. Replacing that with a ‘different energy source for different applications' approach is far more complicated and nowhere near as simple as pretending every problem can be solved with a battery.
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