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.
Audi,