Electric cars: now come in desirable?

There seems to be a new breed of electric cars (or at least concepts) that are around at various motor shows at the moment. Instead of looking like a child's car, they are starting to look absolutely amazing- to the point where I really want one. This is a step in the right direction for getting electric cars into the mainstream: not many people would claim to own a G-wiz but I for one would brag about owning something that looks like this.


The example I am particularly thinking of is the BMW i-series. As well as all the clever work that has been done in reducing weight and improving the drivetrain/battery, the design guys have done a fantastic job. The i8 in particular is just jaw-dropping. BMW are not the only ones doing this- the Tesla Roadster was the first to go down this route, and there are many others making electric supercars or just well-designed (aesthetically) electric cars. Obviously the G-wiz and the Tesla (for example) are in different price ranges and for different purposes, but the fact that people are making electric cars that could replace the Ferraris and Lamborghinis on young boys' bedroom walls is a good sign.

Hopefully, when I start looking at getting myself an electric car in a few years, I will have plenty of choice of desirable ones!

Wind Turbine at University of Warwick

This post is a continuation of sorts of my post yesterday about how "green" the University of Warwick is.
I found out that a friend from school of mine, Andrew Wooldridge, was involved in the setup of a 1kW wind turbine on campus, only a few minutes away from my room!

I went to go have a look at it just now, and took a few photos. It's quite a still day so it wasn't spinning, but it was interesting to see. It really isn't that big, I was slightly surprised- but then, 1kW is not a huge amount of energy to produce.
Photos below!

University of Warwick: Green?

The other day, I went shopping in a hired car (we had hired it to go to a 1-day X-ray workshop in Didcot), and I realised how much I missed having a car, just for the convenience of going to the shops and back;  I wouldn't really need it for much more than that. I appreciate that my situation of living on campus is not normal, as I essentially live at my workplace and within walking distance of shops and so on. Still, even if I did live a few miles from where I worked, an electric car commute would be entirely possible.

The Planet Zero

I just stumbled upon this website, which is run by Nissan. It's quite a childlike introduction to some basic stuff about Electric vehicles, and other things related to it. It does seem to be a good visualisation of the ideas that Nissan have: I've been playing about with it for a while, it's quite fun!

http://the-planet-zero.com/


I've just started my masters at Warwick, and am hoping to plan time to keep updating the blog regularly, especially as it looks like I will have quite a bit of downtime waiting for calculations to run.
Enjoy the site!

Macro- vs micro-generation

I was thinking the other day about how the electricity-generating landscape will be different in the future. There seem to be two sides to this: large power plants, generating a large amount of power for a large number of people (macro), or households and businesses generating their own electricity (micro).

There are many good arguments for both sides, and clearly as both exist as markets (there are both large offshore wind farms and small-scale solar systems being built, for example). However, I thought I would have a look at the arguments for both and see which I think is a more realistic option, if we had to pick just one.

I must apologise that this post may be lacking in numerical backup: I am writing this in a (rare) break from revision, and wish only to give an indication of the pros and cons for each, without concrete numerical evidence.