OPERATORS of a Chinese-made electric truck are making highly questionable claims about the truck’s much publicised run from Sydney to Canberra on a single charge.
As pointed out by Topher Field, the Sydney-Canberra run is what long-distance truckies driving diesel rigs would do before morning smoko, and probably carrying a load massively heavier than, in this case, boxes of toilet paper.
The trip was organised by New Energy Transport, in partnership with the toilet paper maker Who Gives A Crap, ANC delivery services and truck company Windrose.
“This delivery proves that zero-emission road freight is not a future concept – it’s already happening,” New Energy Transport declared in it’s PR release.
“Using the Windrose electric prime mover, the freight was transported on a single charge from Sydney to Canberra, before being delivered to the end customers using ANC’s electric last-mile delivery vans.
“This marks a major milestone for Australia’s freight industry, demonstrating that electric logistics can match diesel on performance, reliability and cost, while eliminating emissions, air pollution and noise.”
We’re not quite to sure about those claims. We would be more convinced if the electric truck did the trip with a load of scrap metal or two decks of cars.
As noted by one website, the bottom-line power to weight efficiency numbers between diesel and batteries are “insane” – in favour of common old diesel.
Even the obvious claim that an EV truck eliminates emissions is highly questionable, because the big truck batteries require large amounts of mined lithium and other rare and common mined minerals – all dug up and transported by diesel powered machinery and then put through extensive refining processes.
The website ScienceInsights notes that lithium is present in every lithium-ion battery regardless of cathode chemistry.
“It appears in the cathode, in the electrolyte solution, and as the ion that shuttles charge back and forth during use. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, the best estimate is about 160 grams of lithium metal per kilowatt-hour of battery capacity, which translates to roughly 850 grams of lithium carbonate equivalent per kWh.
“For a typical 60 kWh EV battery pack, that works out to about 51 kilograms of lithium carbonate equivalent. Lithium is primarily extracted from brine deposits in South America or hard-rock mines in Australia, and refining it into battery-grade material adds significant processing steps.”
Translating that to truck batteries, Scania’s electric batteries range from 416 kWh installed capacity at a weight of 2300 kg to 728 kWh, weighing 4160 kg. In terms of kilograms of lithium carbonate equivalent, this would make the amount of the mineral for these electric trucks range from 353kg to 618kg.
Scania notes that lithium ion batteries up to 15 tons “are considered”, which could deliver 2500 miles of range, comparable to a diesel truck. That would, roughly calculated, translate into more than two tonnes of lithium carbonate, and God help us if a battery that size catches fire.
We’re not suggesting people should be pig headed about electric vehicles. They have their uses and advantages, but the underlying issue that few people, especially our Canberra bureaucrats, understand is the matter of energy density.
Battery-powered electric engines have amazing power, as Tesla has demonstrated on drag strips, but at the same time their energy density – that is the power expressed in terms of megajoules per unit of volume – is very low.
The patron-supported YouTube channel driving 4 answers notes: “If we convert battery specs from watt/hours to megajoules we get that a modern lithium ion battery as found in a battery electric vehicle typically delivers around 0.9 MJ/kg or 2.5 megajoules per litre.
“Let’s use these numbers to try and electrify a large excavator, something in the 35-40 ton operating weight class. A 350 class excavator typically has an inline six diesel usually with 8-10 litres of displacement and a power output of around 250-400hp and a realistic fuel consumption of 25 litres of diesel per hour of work.
“Currently 350 class excavators have diesel engines that weigh around 1.5 – 1.8 tonnes and they are usually equipped with 500 litre fuel tanks, which brings the total weight of the propulsion system with a full tank to around 2-2.5 tonnes.
“In other words it requires 942.5 MJ of energy/hour. At 0.9 MJ/kg we need 1047kg of batteries to do one hour of excavator work. If we want to do an 8 hour shift that’s 8377 kg of batteries or 8.3 tonnes of batteries.
“If we add electric motors to our 8.3 tonnes of batteries we will probably get around 9 tonnes. Which means that the weight of the propulsion system increases more than threefold which would probably lead to issues with balance or safety.”
I reckon the truck woulda done even better mileage if it were carrying nothing.
And how long did it take to recharge the battery for the return trip? I don’t imagine it was a quick turnaround, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a diesel truck would have been back in Sydney before the electric truck had even left Canberra.
Australia Post have not converted to electric yet and it is costing them a fortune in diesel fuel
Hey folks,
Q. What’s the difference between walking talking pig’s arse AnAL and North Korea’s Supreme leader Kim Jong Un?
A1. Kim Jung On actually gives a shit about his people.
A2. North Koreans are people worth protecting. Australians are sheep fit only for slaughter.
Australia, folks, the REAL Hermit Kingdom, a bona-fide multi-vectored global energy SUPERPOWER where it’s insanely paradoxically ILLEGAL to actually produce, let alone use energy. The REST OF THE WORLD gets to enjoy all of Australia’s abundant energy resources FOR FREE, but its absolutely verbotten for Australians.
THE GREENS AND LABOUR ARE BOGGED DOWN IN THIER OWN EXCREMENT WHICH POWERS WHAT LITTLE THEY HAVE AS FAR AS BRAINS ARE CONCERNED.
Just learn to wash with water or leaves au naturale.
Aussies using toilet paper = domesticated cattle
You’ve got to wonder what we’ll be using for energy when our political handlers run out of BULLSHT! It’s the only thing still keeping Australia afloat.
What! Only feather-weight load of tissue?! Come on, put it to a REAL test – just as the diesel trucks do every day. Load it up with boxes of canned and bottled goods, machinery, tools etc. Unless, of course, there will be NO need for such things in the foreseeable future? Albanese, a comment from you since it is YOU pushing this agenda, would be appreciated by ALL Ozzies – who you have let down to date.
Zero emissions is a bull shit claim, how do they charge it?
More likely a coal fired truck in disguise…
Well folks,
Why are they shipping a truckload of toilet paper to Canberra anyway? That’s what our “votes” and “petitions” are for.
Point being from the article here, that Electric Vehicles just ain’t the “solution”. Not yet, probably not for a while yet, probably not for another decade or two, if ever. Because they just can’t do the work, they just can’t go the distance. Period.
And that’s if we even had the electricity to feed them, which we don’t.
We MIGHT have had enough electricity if we had enough coal-fired power plants, like China which is literally building a new coal-fired power plant every week, but we don’t, because we’ve already bulldozed most all of our coal-fired power plants into the ground and salted the Earth for 100 miles in every direction all around them to make sure that no living thing ever tries to do something like build another coal-fired power plant here in Australia ever again. Which makes sense, we might suppose, because coal is the most devilishly evil thing under all of God’s Creation, and if you’re caught with any coal here in Australia they’ll arrest you and burn your house down and beat you to death, even though Australia is BY FAR the world’s largest coal exporter.
And we MIGHT have had enough electricity if we had enough gas-fired power plants, but we don’t, because (of course) LNG is illegal here in Australia, if you build a new house with gas appliances in Victoria they’ll arrest you and burn your house down and beat you to death. Even though Australia is the world’s largest LNG exporter, that’s right folks, even more than Qatar, even more than Russia, sold to the world for a pittance, literally for FREE while Australia doesn’t even get any royalties FFS.
And we MIGHT have had enough electricity if we had ANY nuclear power plants, let alone enough of them, but we don’t, because nuclear power in Australia is literally ILLEGAL, it was made ILLEGAL under Federal Legislation DECADES ago, if you even MENTION nuclear power here in Australia they’ll arrest you and rape your dog and kill your cat and beat you to death, because Uranium is so very thoroughly insidiously devilishly malevolently EVIL. Even though Australia has 40% of the world’s known Uranium reserves and exports Uranium to the 30+ countries all around the world who DO have nuclear power plants.
So we don’t have enough electricity to feed any new-fangled electric vehicle fleet, and even if we did (which we don’t) they don’t work anyway, they don’t do the job, they CAN’T do the job that hydrocarbon-powered trucks and cars CAN do with ease across the length and breadth of the Australian CONTINENT.
Except now we don’t have any hydrocarbon fuel for the trucks and cars either, we don’t have any refineries to make it because we DEMOLISHED them, we bulldozed all of them into the ground and salted the Earth for 100 miles in every direction all around them to make sure that no living thing ever tries to build another oil refinery here in Australia ever again, and we don’t have any oil wells to produce it even though there’s shitloads of it under Australia because oil is so diabolically evil, and Super War Criminal Trump aka Peace President Ginger Nuts and Luciferian lesbian baby-killer Penny Wrong have made sure we can’t even buy it from anyone else even if we had the money to buy it (which we don’t).
So we may as well face it, folks, and articulate what the headline article was just too polite and genteel to spell out in plain English – we’re F*CKED.
The obvious solution is mini nukes or fusion and don’t forget the first planes didn’t even fly ..
Engineers from the aviation and space technologies developed The Technology Readiness Level metric to assist converting Patents to Commercial products. The 9-level scale covers Research, Proof of Concept, Prototypes, Limited Rate Production and Commercial Production. On that scale, the trip to Canberra would be considered at Level 6, a working prototype. As long as EV’s need Lithium Batteries, the Technology Readiness will stay at Level 6. How is the second hand market for EV’s holding up now?
The Malcolm Bendall Thunderstorm Generator Technology is capable retrofit to diesel/ petroleum vehicles light weight and proven plus provable by any one that cares to investigate giving unprecedented power boosted performance and ambient air exhaust emissions take a look on YouTube and make up your own mind
Electric Vehicles are potential death traps
In fact the lithium-ion batteries themselves lack repair-ability, leading insurance companies to junk entire cars even after minor collisions if the battery has been damaged in any way.
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/electric-vehicles-are-potential-death-traps
I can’t wait for the greens to come up with a diesel electric road train.