Engineering news
Yesterday, France announced plans to ban the sale of non-electric vehicles by 2040 as part of its ambitious plans to meet climate change targets.
The news came a day after car manufacturer Volvo said it would only make fully electric or hybrid vehicles from 2019 onwards.
Chris Goodall, carbon industry expert and author of The Switch, a book about solar power, believes 2040 is a realistic target, and that in fact it might even happen earlier than that.
He told Professional Engineering that the UK should follow suit. “I want to live in a country where politicians make similar commitments,” he said. “We’ve got India saying they want it by 2040, France by 2040. The Netherlands and Germany are also making noises about putting an end the sale of internal combustion cars.”
He says it represents an opportunity for UK firms and engineers. “The UK has some strength in this area. Last year, it made a third of all electric cars made in the EU. If we don’t commit ourselves to electric cars we run the risk of losing that natural advantage to countries that are prepared to make that commitment.”
Even if electric cars end up drawing their power from non-renewable sources, there would still be a net benefit, according to Goodall. “An electric car, broadly speaking, is four times as efficient as converting energy into motion as a conventional petrol car,” he said. “There are big carbon savings even with a typical UK fuel mix, and it would be even better in France because France is basically nuclear."
There would be extra strain on the national grid, but Goodall says that smart charging technology can be used to ensure that cars are charged at quieter times when demand from elsewhere is lower. “It will be 3AM. It will not be 5PM on a December evening,” he said.
A move to more electric vehicles will mean a huge increase in the demand for batteries, and the raw materials required – particularly lithium. However, research is progressing all the time.
A paper published today by scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas describes a cheaper material for batteries that uses manganese and sodium ions.
"Lithium is a more expensive, limited resource that must be mined from just a few areas on the globe," said Kyeongjae Cho, professor of materials science and engineering at the university and a senior author of the paper. "There are no mining issues with sodium -- it can be extracted from seawater.”
Sodium batteries typically store less energy than lithium ones, but Cho’s team believe they have found a solution. “Our sodium-ion material is more stable, but it still maintains the high energy capacity of lithium," Cho said.