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Was the Felicity Ace Fire caused by Electric Vehicle Batteries?

By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | February 18, 2022

What made the Felicity Ace cargo so flammable? “It was not clear whether the [EV] batteries first sparked the fire”.

Felicity Ace Car Carrier Continues to Burn in Mid-Atlantic 

A salvage team from SMIT is en route to the retreive the abandoned M/V Felicity Ace, which continues to burn near the Azores.

BERLIN/LISBON, Feb 18 (Reuters) – A ship carrying around 4,000 vehicles, including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, that caught fire near the coast of the Azores will be towed to another European country or the Bahamas, the captain of the nearest port told Reuters on Friday.

Lithium-ion batteries in the electric cars on board the vehicle carrier Felicity Ace have caught fire and the blaze requires specialist equipment to extinguish, captain Joao Mendes Cabecas of the port of Hortas said.

It was not clear whether the batteries first sparked the fire.

“The ship is burning from one end to the other… everything is on fire about five meters above the water line,” Cabecas said. … Read more

We may never know if an EV started the fire, but even if the EVs didn’t start the fire, they are certainly making it a lot more difficult to extinguish the fire. EV battery fires are chemically comparable to thermite fires, hot enough to melt steel, so there may not be much left to analyse by the time the ship fire finally burns itself out.

This disaster could have real consequences for the EV market, both transporting EVs by sea or land, and consumer desire for a product which is potentially such a severe fire hazard. I would not be surprised if in the future, once insurers understand the hazard, owning an EV could make your home uninsurable, unless you can prove it is parked well away from your house.

At the very least insurers may start demanding strict end of use dates on the batteries. The hazard likely grows as the battery ages, though if the Felicity Ace fire was started by a new battery, you can never say the hazard is zero.

The following video demonstrates how ferocious EV fires can be in a home environment – and this fire is just an electric scooter. Automobile batteries are far larger. How much would be left of your house, how much time would you have to get to safety, if an electric automobile caught fire in a built in garage or car port? EV fires are not constrained by lack of oxygen. The battery itself contains everything necessary to initiate and sustain a deadly, white hot fire which is almost impossible to extinguish.

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

In Case You Were Thinking Of Buying A Hybrid Or An EV

By Andy Rowlands | Principia Scientific | October 2, 2021

The following was copied from a post on Facebook. It refers specifically to North America:

This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles. Our residential infrastructure cannot bear the load. A home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp service. The average house is equipped with 100 amp service.

On our small street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla each.

Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile of those things has never been discussed. All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline, with nary a mention of the cost of electricity to run it.

At a neighborhood BBQ I was talking to a neighbor, a BC Hydro Executive. I asked him how that renewable thing was doing. He laughed, then got serious.

If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, he pointed out, you had to face certain realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp service.

The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On our small street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla each. For even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly over-loaded.

This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles. Our residential infrastructure cannot bear the load.

So, as our genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are we being urged to buy these things and replace our reliable, cheap generating systems with expensive new windmills and solar cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery system!

This later “investment” will not be revealed until we’re so far down this dead end road that it will be presented with an ‘OOPS…!’ and a shrug.

If you want to argue with a green person over cars that are eco-friendly, just read the following. Note: If you ARE a green person, read it anyway. It’s enlightening.

Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors and he writes, “For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.” Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles.

It will take you 4.5 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours.

In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.

According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery. The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned, so I looked up what I pay for electricity.

I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh. 16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery. $18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery. Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg. $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 Mpg = $0.10 per mile.

The gasoline powered car costs about $25,000 while the Volt costs $40,000 plus.

So the Government wants us to pay twice as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country.

Using the industry-standard calculation volts x amps = watts, for North America we get 110v x 75 amps = 8250 watts.

Charging your EV overnight in the US would be the same as running an 8kw shower for eight hours.

Here in the UK, assuming the same 75amp charger requirement, charging your EV overnight gives the calculation 240v x 75 amps = 18,000 watts

Charging your EV overnight in the UK would cost more than running TWO 8kw showers for eight hours.

Imagine the impact on your electricity bill.

But before you can charge anything, you need to buy a charging unit, which are upwards of £500, and pay an electrician to install it.

Twice a month I travel to Matlock in Derbyshire. 65 miles each way. With the amount of traffic, each journey takes approximately two hours.

The outward journey would be okay in an EV, but the return journey, in the cheapest EV that would be the only one most people would be able to afford (with it’s limited battery capacity), would require me to stop to recharge for approximately two hours, and that assumes I wouldn’t have to wait for someone else to finish charging their car before I could start charging mine.

So my two-hour return journey could take between four and six hours.

About the author: Andy Rowlands is a university graduate in space science and British Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the new climate science book, ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘

October 2, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments