tagged 
Austin, Bernie, Electric vehicles, Hungary, Nurburgring, Power Grid
Austin, Bernie, Electric vehicles, Hungary, Nurburgring, Power Grid Entries in Electric vehicles (2)
Nurburgring
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 02:09PM The numbers are out and the German GP lost 13.5 m Euros last weekend after paying Bernie a fee of 20 m Euros. That's some pretty fast work to put those numbers together. The promoter said before the race he expected a crowd of 65,000, and that's what it looked like, a lot of empty seats despite 6 German drivers, and one that should have been expected to win. That's pretty bad. On those numbers you can't really see the point apart from ego. The 24 hour race on the old track attracts four times that many people and there are probably no fees to be paid to anyone.
Now Bernie is saying he will cut them a deal the same as Hungary, which is much cheaper apparently. It would have to be. The Hungarian GP has been with us for about 25 years on a track that no one really likes and in one of Europe's smallest countries, so how does it survive and why does it get a break from Bernie? The doings of F1 are strange to behold when Hungary has a race and France does not.
In an equally puzzling piece it seems the City of Austin is submitting to the Texas Comptroller for the $25m for next years race, and the Comptroller has 30 days to think about this. The puzzling piece is the statement that "it is unclear when the funds need to be paid to F1 officials." I would suggest someone read the contract, I'm sure it is pretty clear there. Why would you say something like this?
Now for something completely different. Regular readers will know of my scepticism about electric vehicles, mainly because at the moment they are still fossil fuel powered, just one step removed. Now that step is causing a problem as an article I read yesterday explains.
We have a problem with the power grid in the US anyway and at times a capacity problem. Plugging in a whole load of electric cars at the wrong time is not going to improve this. When people say that the infrastructure is not there for alternate fuels like Hydrogen they should consider the increase in infrastructure needed for electric powered vehicles. Yes we can use smart technology to monitor and move demands around, which can help the grid, but in the end we do not have the generating capacity either. And then there are all those batteries.
Electric Vehicles
Monday, October 18, 2010 at 11:24AM Earlier this year I posted a question on Facebook, how many new power stations do we need if we move to electric vehicles. Someone knew the answer, 100. How many have we built in the last twenty years? Not that many, in fact very few apart from "peaker plants" running on natural gas to provide top up power at times of peak load. Now California is thinking of, or may have done it, restricting the power consumption of big screen TV's, so how are they going to handle electric vehicle demand, which is probably going to be higher in trendy California? In a similar vein this article was on Fox website yesterday asking how the grid is going to cope?
"A new generation of vehicles powered at least partially by electricity is on the way. And the prospect of a million or more Chevy Volts, Nissan Leafs, Tesla Roadsters and others on our highways in the next few years raises a practical question: Can the nation's electrical grid handle the power surge?
The grid already is responsible for running our offices, cooling our homes, powering our TVs, keeping our food cool and doing more or less everything else a modern human needs. Now, we're going to ask it to help drive us around town as well.
That shouldn't be difficult in the next year or so, when there won't be that many electric vehicles taking power from utilities. However, boosters hope that we'll see a million of these cars on the road by 2015. So researchers and industry officials will be paying close attention to make sure that the grid will be able to adapt."
Nice to see someone else is at least asking the question. You will notice that the new plants are mainly running on natural gas, while others remain on coal, both carbon based fuels, so how are electric cars green? The Leaf advertising says there is no tailpipe, that's because they swapped the tailpipe for the smokestack. Not in my backyard though. Until we make electricity from solar or some other truly green source we should stop kidding ourselves about electric cars. And let's not get started on the batteries.
There is, as usual, a nice piece in Autosport from the MPH page of Mark Hughes. It deals with the stress of the competition off the track between designers, which is even more intense than the drivers. Quoting James Allison from Renault, "I live in a state of perpetual fear. I fear that everything is always going to be not quite good enough - and I think it is better to feel that way." It is a great piece, and could just as easily have been written about track designers. "There are so many potentially wrong answers," he goes on to say, and that is just how I feel when laying out a track. You really only get one shot at getting it right, the owner is not going to be happy at changing it, and there are life and death issues here. It goes on to talk about the intuitive approach, not relying just on the data and the number crunching. I have talked about this before in respect of Adrian Newey, that he is not a technician but an artist. Any mathematician can crunch the numbers, but it is the artists that creates something new and innovative. As they say at the end of the piece, it is Newey the other designers are most afraid of, "They say he can visualise what the air wants to do." That is how I see race tracks.
The British Formula 3 calendar for 2011 was announced and it starts in Monza. Did I miss something here, this is the British F3 series? Maybe this is the problem, there are more than one F3 series and they tread on each others patch.
The grid already is responsible for running our offices, cooling our homes, powering our TVs, keeping our food cool and doing more or less everything else a modern human needs. Now, we're going to ask it to help drive us around town as well.
That shouldn't be difficult in the next year or so, when there won't be that many electric vehicles taking power from utilities. However, boosters hope that we'll see a million of these cars on the road by 2015. So researchers and industry officials will be paying close attention to make sure that the grid will be able to adapt."
Nice to see someone else is at least asking the question. You will notice that the new plants are mainly running on natural gas, while others remain on coal, both carbon based fuels, so how are electric cars green? The Leaf advertising says there is no tailpipe, that's because they swapped the tailpipe for the smokestack. Not in my backyard though. Until we make electricity from solar or some other truly green source we should stop kidding ourselves about electric cars. And let's not get started on the batteries.
There is, as usual, a nice piece in Autosport from the MPH page of Mark Hughes. It deals with the stress of the competition off the track between designers, which is even more intense than the drivers. Quoting James Allison from Renault, "I live in a state of perpetual fear. I fear that everything is always going to be not quite good enough - and I think it is better to feel that way." It is a great piece, and could just as easily have been written about track designers. "There are so many potentially wrong answers," he goes on to say, and that is just how I feel when laying out a track. You really only get one shot at getting it right, the owner is not going to be happy at changing it, and there are life and death issues here. It goes on to talk about the intuitive approach, not relying just on the data and the number crunching. I have talked about this before in respect of Adrian Newey, that he is not a technician but an artist. Any mathematician can crunch the numbers, but it is the artists that creates something new and innovative. As they say at the end of the piece, it is Newey the other designers are most afraid of, "They say he can visualise what the air wants to do." That is how I see race tracks.
The British Formula 3 calendar for 2011 was announced and it starts in Monza. Did I miss something here, this is the British F3 series? Maybe this is the problem, there are more than one F3 series and they tread on each others patch.
tagged Adrian Newey, Autosport, Designers, Electric vehicles, F1, F3, Mark Hughes
Adrian Newey, Autosport, Designers, Electric vehicles, F1, F3, Mark Hughes