Summary
According to "Electric cars are coming: but where will you recharge?", it seems that the electric vehicle (EV) has been successfully introduced and now the trend of EV usage is increasingly among people in the United Kingdom; however, the whole nation needs to discuss how to prepare for this change. First, how do they refill the charge? Because the parking areas and the charging bays are limited, people of the UK need to upgrade the local facilities to add the charging point in their area. However, this leads to another question: will electricity in the UK be enough for supplying EV usage in the future? The government explained that the electricity demand is still manageable; however, it also has a chance of the electrical crisis. Therefore, a long term plan is required to sustain power consumption in the near future.
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Response
Electric vehicles, vehicles which consume electrical energy instead of fossil fuel, have become more interesting innovation recently. Due to the global warming awareness and the cost of ordinary fuel, people begin seeking for alternative solutions which seem less damaging to the environment and also more comfortable than public transportation. Therefore, electric cars have been introduced and many countries are planning to embrace this innovation. It seems that EV revolutions will become our future sooner than we thought; therefore, learning implementation progress from more technical advanced countries, such as the United Kingdom (UK), might be necessary for our preparations.According to the article, citizens of the UK are ready to adopt this technology, but these 2 unavoidable problems push them back: the lack of charging bays and the risk of electrical crisis. Because this innovation has just been released to the public, the private sector might hesitate to upgrade the facilities for EV; however, it is possible that soon the number of EV charging bays will increase, due to the demand of electric cars usage. As a result, electricity consumption will be a great challenge for the government to manage the sustainability of electric power - in failure, it would cause black out in large areas. So, revolution of EV should be considered as a national issue which involves the government and private sector.
Because of plenty of resources in order to make a change, so shall we resist the EV revolution? In my opinion, we should support the EV revolution because it might be a good chance to save our world by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions released from transportation. Then we also need a discussion between government, business, and people to make a plan and handle possible incoming issues. From the news, we now learn how we should prepare for this change. However, in the next 5 years or a decade we might need to be concerned about waste management. Because the next generation of car will use a large capacity battery instead of fossil fuel, it is possible to see piles of hazardous waste instead of carbon dioxide emissions.
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Question
Shall we support or resist the EV revolution and why?
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Reference
- Baraniuk, C. (2020, March 6). Electric cars are coming: but where will you recharge?. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51678830
I think we should support the idea of using electric vehicles(EV) more. As EV do not contribute to air pollution as fossil fuel cars, EV will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I have been living in Bangkok since I was born but I rarely walk on the street to enjoy the view of this city. I would love to be able to walk in Bangkok without getting sick and I notice that the air in Bangkok is getting worse every year. Lately, I cannot even jog around my village because of air pollution, except a day after a rain. There are too many cars and motorcycles and they all use fossil fuel. People in Bangkok are not going to use more of public transportation because many of them do not live close to main street to get public transportation. Hence, I think EV is the solution to the air pollution of Bangkok.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there are some problems about EV in Thailand. First, fluid from car batteries is toxic. How are we going to destroy or recycle car batteries of EV? I found an article long ago that Toyota is going to open a factory for recycling car batteries, but I am not sure this is enough to reduce waste from the battery. As Wit said in his response, it is about waste management. Second, do we have enough charging stations? The government and company should prepare enough charging points for EV. If not, nobody is going to use EV because it is not convenient. However, I heard that some convenience stores are going to install charging points. I think it is a good idea, so you can grab something to eat while you were waiting for your car. Last problem, all the power plants in Thailand are not using renewable energy. Some power plants still use gas, diesel, fuel oil, lignite, and coal to make power. In the future, it is possible that Thailand needs more power from those non-renewable energy power plants for the demand of electric power. In addition, Thailand buys power from neighboring countries at the moment. I wonder if we will have enough power to use for factories, home and EV.
Mae discusses an issue that occurred to me as I was reading Wit's post about EVs. That is, if the electricity that they use comes from dirty sources like burning coal, it really isn't helping global warming, and just pushes the pollution from the city to the area where the power plant is located, which might not be fair to local residents of that area. I think that apart from solar energy, nuclear is a good option. In fact, I think a lot more should be spent to develop nuclear fusion, the energy source that fuels the sun. If we can make that work on Earth, we will have vast amounts of clean energy effectively forever. That seems to me a very good investment, so a lot more should be spent on the basic science research needed to make it happen. At the moment, we can achieve nuclear fusion on Earth, but only in hydrogen bombs, which is not what we want, and in very small-scale reactions that use up more energy than they create. But I think several research groups are making good progress. Since it would free us from coal, oil, and other traditional energy sources, all of which are seriously polluting, I would my own and ever other government to give scientists a lot more money to research nuclear fusion, although I suspect that oil producers might not like that idea, which would make their products almost worthless.
Deleteafter I read Peter's opinion, and I agree on term that oil producers would not support electronic vehicles especially in Thailand which has a lot of corruption in every scale. The good example about corruption was a mega transportation project as "Hope well" in many decade. If the project completes, it would gradually improve not only public transportation system but also develop our economic as well. As you can see from the news, there are a lot of good projects stuck because of the corruption in the country. Ev are the good idea to save us from using oil. However, there has toxic waste come together as a plus and I believe that our country would not provide any team to study about the waste management. In addition, nowadays our government import toxic waste from abroad even we never have any proper system to manage it. Government may say that we have recycle factories to manage toxic waste from abroad in contrast recycle factories pollute the environment where they stand. This is the fact that government try to hide.
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