Daily review 21/02/2020

Written By: - Date published: 5:30 pm, February 21st, 2020 - 33 comments
Categories: Daily review - Tags:

Daily review is also your post.

This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.

The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).

Don’t forget to be kind to each other …

33 comments on “Daily review 21/02/2020 ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Herodotus 1
    21 February 2020 at 6:39 pm

    Why does it that a vote for me promise for NZ 1 to adequately fund something that should be 100% funded by the govt ? We are in some instances a cheap country when we review what values we in NZ hold.
    The same could apply to how we view Surf Life Saving

    https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA2002/S00139/nz-first-pledge-major-funding-support-to-st-john.htm

  2. alwyn 2
    21 February 2020 at 7:06 pm

    Well New Zealand First is doing something sensible during the last six months of its life.

    They are scrapping the crazy subsidy scheme, paid for by people who don't have, and often can't have, electric vehicles. Ms Genter, who was a think the patron of the scheme has been sent back to square one. In practice of course the scheme is totally dead because she, and the rest of her party, aren't going to be in Parliament next year either.

    https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/119713361/nz-first-axe-governments-electric-vehicle-subsidy-plan-while-greens-vow-to-take-the-policy-to-the-election

    It certainly shows that we have a New Zealand First / Labour Government with a few hangers on from the Greens, doesn't it? And that Winston rules the roost.

    I am in favour of having more electric vehicles in the New Zealand fleet. This scheme certainly wasn't a way of doing it though was it? Higher prices for people who cannot use them because they live in rural areas while the residents of the leafy suburbs like Remuera get a discount on their vehicles.

    • Ad 2.1
      21 February 2020 at 7:26 pm

      The Green Ministers are getting passed around like …. omg

    • weka 2.2
      21 February 2020 at 7:31 pm

      Why can't rural people use EVs?

      • Chris T 2.2.1
        21 February 2020 at 7:36 pm

        Which type?

        Taking into account they have to tow massively loaded trailers and drive places there are no roads.

        • mickysavage 2.2.1.1
          21 February 2020 at 7:45 pm

          They are not making it compulsory to own a EV. But every urban liberal EV means that we have a bit more space for a cow's farting.

        • Cinny 2.2.1.2
          22 February 2020 at 8:57 am

          Chris, most rural people have two vehicles, a town car and a farm hack (ute) plus a quad or motorbike.

          Most rural people take the vehicle to town that costs the least to run, you don't need a trailer to pick up the groceries and a couple of bags of feed. JS.

      • pat 2.2.2
        21 February 2020 at 7:40 pm

        mainly range…though towing can be problematic. Theres no reason that the second vehicle couldnt be electric, other than range…or cost

      • alwyn 2.2.3
        21 February 2020 at 8:49 pm

        Mainly the absence of charging points. You can charge them, very slowly, from a wall plug but anything usable really needs a high amp circuit. Farm houses won't be likely to have circuits capable of providing the amperage to do the job in a reasonable time.

        I'm not really up on this so don't take these calculations as Gospel. I could easily have dropped a decimal point somewhere. Andre is, I think, up with it so if he comments you may get a better number.

        However. A smallish car needs about 12 kwh to travel 100 km. If you want to go into town from a typical farm you might have a round trip of 250 km. Hence you need a charge of roughly 30 kva. To put this into a battery in 2 hours, at 240 volts, will need a current of about 65 amps. A standard house circuit is 10 amps.so it isn't going to hack it. A wall plug would take 13 hours.

        There aren't likely to be to many outlets in the area either. They are expensive and need to have a good demand from people nearby.

        Urban travel is usually for much shorter distances. If you drove to work and home the trips might be 20 km each and you could charge the car while parked at work

        The electric vehicles also aren't that good at towing and farmers often need to tow a trailer. That is much better done with an ICE vehicle, and a diesel at that. If you go off-road the power you need goes way up as well. Say 30 kwh per 100 km?

        There is a lot more to it but that might show you the bones of the problem

          • McFlock 2.2.3.1.1
            21 February 2020 at 9:44 pm

            Also seems to me that charging points could be plugged into the mains and just be power packs on permanent charge, which can then charge EVs at the higher rate when needed.

            • alwyn 2.2.3.1.1.1
              21 February 2020 at 11:27 pm

              I don't know whether I am reading this Tesla material information properly, and as I said earlier I'm not really o'fay with this subject but to get a 40kwh battery system seems to cost about $36,500. Is this the sort of power pack you mean?

              If you were going to try and discharge it within a couple of hours you wouldn't be able to get anything except the power already in the pack. That's why I said I had no solar power. Basically this calculation seems to be saying that to get 40kwh of storage this is what you need.

              Seems to be a lot of money for just one charging unit, wouldn’t you say?

              https://www.tesla.com/en_NZ/powerwall

              • McFlock …
                22 February 2020 at 3:10 am

                Yeah, but I suspect that iPhone-brand power packs are much more expensive than the generic pack I picked up from kmart, too.

                But, like electric cars, the product exists and will go down in price as consumers shift to EV.

                Also – might be just the thing for a farm with a variety of machinery that needs to be used at different times of the year. Charge one when you're using the other.

                • Puckish Rogue …
                  22 February 2020 at 7:11 am

                  Agreed, thank goodness we live in a capitalist society and not a socialist one where this is what we know will happen

                  • McFlock …
                    22 February 2020 at 2:28 pm

                    Thank goodness we live in a socialist country where if you roll your ev, your medical care is free (rather than bankrupting you like in a capitalist country).

                    Ain't mixed economies great. Thanks for bringing random shit into the discussion.

          • alwyn 2.2.3.1.2
            21 February 2020 at 11:31 pm

            @Muttonbird

            Dinky little thing isn't it?

            I'm not sure I would try it on a road of course and I don't think it would provide the real off-road transport for a farm. Fence posts are bloody heavy, and a dozen hay bails would be rather an overload. Much nicer than a quad-bike though. God I hate those things.

        • dv 2.2.3.2
          22 February 2020 at 8:05 am

          Alwyn
          Nope we can full charge on a 3 pin standard circuit plu over night.- and that gets 150k ish. So fine for 50 k commute.
          And traveling we usually can charge over night through a window.

        • Andre 2.2.3.3
          22 February 2020 at 8:58 am

          12kWh to go 100km is at the very best end of the scale, a largish ute is likely to halve that distance per kWh, or worse.

          Typical hardwired domestic chargers are around 7kW. Most house supplies can provide this with a new dedicated circuit from the main board.

          250km round-trip to town seems like an exceptionally remote farm – perhaps Ohura or somewhere on the West Coast.

          Dunno where the idea that electric vehicles are poor for towing came from. Their instant full torque from zero speed is a much better performance characteristic than an ICE that has to be turning at well above idle speed to generate useful torque. There's all kinds of stunt demos of various vehicles towing massive objects – like Teslas towing jumbo jets of the Ford F150 electric prototype towing a million-pound train. Sure, towing reduces range in an EV, just like it uses more fuel in a dino-juice vehicle.

          In an electrified farm context, there's lots of machinery that sits idle most of the time, as McFlock notes below. Those are opportunities for either their batteries to be used as storage to provide quick recharges for whatever machines are in heavy use at that moment, or maybe there's an opportunity for quick-swap standardised batteries to be developed.

          As for where the farm electricity comes from, farms usually have lots of roof space for mounting PV panels. As well as land space for wind turbines. If they’re lucky, maybe also a nano-hydro setup.

          A solution for the battery size/range conundrum is range-extended EVs. That is, a battery vehicle with a modestly sized battery suitable for the vast majority of daily use, and a small dino-juice generator that fires up and operates at its most efficient speed and power for when an extended use is needed. The BMW i3 has had it for a long time, LEVC are doing it for London taxis and delivery vans, Ford is offering a Transit van like this and so on.

          https://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/117224423/ford-nz-to-launch-plugin-transit-van-next-year

          https://www.levc.com/

          https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/20/american-farmers-are-turning-to-wind-energy/

        • Cinny 2.2.3.4
          22 February 2020 at 9:07 am

          Alwyn, there are loads of farms around here, not many, if any, are a 250km return trip to town. There are charging points at the supermarket among other places. It's the same over in Golden Bay.

          • alwyn 2.2.3.4.1
            22 February 2020 at 6:22 pm

            I was basing it on what I remember from a cousin of mine in Hawkes Bay. He farmed a few km from Waipawa, out near Tamumu. That was about 75 km from Napier. It never seemed very far. However a trip to "town" might mean going to see his Accountant at Napier, dropping in to say hello to my mother, visiting a Supermarket and the Stock and Station Agent in Hastings. That would very quickly blow out the supposed return trip of 150 km to well over 200. 250 doesn't seem impossible and a detour for a blocked road would have certainly blown it out to 250 km Have a look at it on the map and you'll see that he was certainly not out in the wop-wops.

            Those sort of trips are never door-to-door and no detours as people seem to think.

            However, how close is the supermarket with the charging point to their farm? A farmer really doesn't have the time to drive 5 km to a charging point, wait for it to become available and then wait an hour or two for the vehicle to charge. They always seem to have work to do back on the farm.

        • weka 2.2.3.5
          22 February 2020 at 10:04 am

          "Mainly the absence of charging points"

          So that's an argument for better infrastructure rurally to help with transition. It's not an argument against a scheme that is needed to shift the fleet to EV to avert climate catastrophe. Unless some farmers think they are special and should be exempt.

          Re heavier vehicles for farm work, I agree, but again, this is an argument for better support for the transition, not to avoid transitioning.

          Last year I looked at charging points available for across Southland and Otago (online map). There seemed to be a few gaps for the kind of driving I was wanting to do but I was surprised at the coverage already given how few EVs there are. Some of that will be because of tourism, but if I were a farmer I'd be lobbying for better rural support.

          The thing about EVs is we have to change travel behaviour. All of us, including rural people (I live in the country btw).

          • alwyn 2.2.3.5.1
            22 February 2020 at 6:32 pm

            Have a look at my comment to Cinny. It isn't really feasible for a farmer to drive his ute every couple of days to a charging station and then wait round for a couple of hours at the slow chargers that shops supply or even the half hour or so it takes to get a 100 km or so range with a fast charger. They can't do anything while they wait. It is not as if their place of work is only a couple of hundred meters away. I'm afraid for a farmer it is charge it at home or don't use it.

            • weka 2.2.3.5.1.1
              22 February 2020 at 6:50 pm

              Or the govt subsidises charging stations in each rohe. Large farms could be doing this for the community too. Fonterra and FF could be front footing this. Massive power line infrastructure has been put in so farmers could have irrigation, no-one was saying then oh we can't figure out how to power these new things.

              It's not hard to figure out solutions when one accepts the need for them. The actual problem here isn't rural distances, it's the CC denial of the industry.

              "They can't do anything while they wait"

              Yes They Can. Just like other busy people who have lives that need to be lived and work that needs to be done. We all have to change our behaviours.

  3. Chris T 3
    21 February 2020 at 8:13 pm

    Anyone else hear Sean Plunket today saying his "Connections" have told him Ihumatao will be sorted in the next couple of days.

    Apparently Soymun says Labour are giving 40 mill to a new Maori group to oversea the sale and Winston has okayed it.

    Probaby bollocks, but will be quite a big thing if by some weird fate it is true

  6. DirkDirkin 6
    25 February 2020 at 5:02 pm

    Unbelievable Bridges dosent know our extradition laws

    Did he get his degree by paying someone else to.sit his exams?

The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.