The perfect Surfer - Electric - Car ?

[drsurf]

But most important, this is the topic about electric surfer cars, maybe with solar cells on it if you like it, but if you are interested in solar power you better start a new topic.

It ain't an electric car if I use a gasoline generator to charge it. And that's the whole problem with Renewables and Electric vehicles. And I am right on topic with this one! A percentage of the electricity put into your battery is always going to be from NOT solar or NOT wind-generated power. This leaves nuclear hydroelectric or fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal to produce the electricity you use when driving the vehicle.

But I do like the way you sell the solar farm thing. You make it sound great. But it's still uses up land, and is not always producing electricity but still using up that land. As far as recycling goes with current solar panels, what's the power input to melt those solar panels down? And what chemicals and chemical processes do you have to use to strip those toxic chemicals out and then reuse them?

One of the greatest failures of recycling is plastic bottles. If you have a single-use item, and then send it in for recycling, it takes energy to clean and make that product into a new one.

If it takes one barrel equivalent of oil energy to produce 1000 plastic bottles, and it takes 1 and 1/2 barrels equivalent oil energy to recycle those 1,000 bottles into 1000 new bottles, then you wind up harming the environment more by trying to recycle those bottles, then if you just bury them.

Humanity is starting to rack up a long history of good intentioned Environmental cleanups, that wind up destroying the environment to a greater degree than if that cleanup would have never taken place. This is the electric car, curbside recycling, strict industrial environmental regulations in the West, and many many more failures to come. All of those failures had some slick-talking salesman who had stock in that particular miracle cure who got rich. And on this topic I think you have the potential to really sell things to a degree that could create another environmental disaster. I would ask that you look very hard at the issues, history, and the repercussions of environmental policies sold by someone who is there to just sell.

So don't get me wrong here, I would love to have an electric vehicle if I didn't drive on so many long-distance trips. I just want the Forum members here to realize that's a large percentage of those miles they put on that electric car, have been powered by coal and natural gas. That electricity comes from somewhere, and Renewables are not ever going to be a major source worldwide for the power to run your electric car.

Matteo, I think your negative attitude to solutions with regard to energy and environmental issues is self defeating and unhelpful. Perhaps your source of news in the US is Fox News
Australia currently has an appalling environmental record, but we also have some of the worlds best solar PV research which has increased solar panel efficiency and lowered cost of PV manufacture around the world. And it's still improving. Ditto with battery tech. In 2010 the US interstate highway system, which was constructed in just 35 years, is 94,000 square kilometres, or 20% of the overall required solar panel coverage area for the world. I don't think anyone is going to be concerned about having PV panels over your highways, house & factory roofs, sports stadiums and so on. So if desired one could power most the world with solar PV without sterilising any land.
Where solar PV is used on land it can coexist with agricultural practice and can be mandated to do so, producing both energy and food/fibre as is happening in Australia.

Wind, as you should know is an extremely powerful renewable source already significantly cheaper than fossil fuels. Contrary to popular belief it doesn't wipe out birds in massive numbers when the windfarm is well designed and located. If you cherry pick your arguments you can always find fault on the minuscule margins.

I agree with you re recyclables, we have a lot to improve upon here. But complaining won't solve the problem, start changing your own life. Don't use single use coffee cups, don't buy takeaway in single use containers. Supply your own containers, be an example of positive change in your life to set an example. Reduce, reuse and then recycle, in that order. Show the corporate f***ers you're not going accept their philosophy.

Below are two examples of energy solutions which cover energy in community and global energy networks:

Repower Shoalhaven https://www.repower.net.au/ is an organisation I'm a member of which began in my community through a number of dedicated individuals getting together to make renewables happen. This model connected ethical investors, who wanted a good $ return which supported renewables, with progressive businesses, who wanted lower power bills and didn't want to excessively spend or borrow to achieve that outcome. In the last 12 months, the 23 community funded solar projects administered by Repower Shoalhaven have:
* generated 860,000 kWh of clean electricity
* reduced CO2 emission by 700 tonnes
* reduced the power bills of local businesses and farms
* provided investors with reasonable returns.
Repower Shoalhaven is something virtually any community can do, even really small communities. It is a model that has been successful in many Australian communities and elsewhere in the world. Each project has quickly been subscribed as investors are keen for a guaranteed return and to be ethical. In some places in Germany the community even owns its own electricity distribution networks. (Take that you greedy corporate pigs )

On a Global scale there is GENI, (Global Energy Network Institute) http://www.geni.org/ Decades ago, visionary engineer Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller developed the World Game simulation, posing the question: How do we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone? GENI was the answer.
In short the benefits of this sustainable development world electric power solution are:
• Decreased pollution from fossil and nuclear fuels
• Reduced hunger and poverty in developing nations
• Increased trade, cooperation and world peace
• Enables health care, communications and access to clean water
• Stabilized population growth
The interconnection of electric power networks between regions and continents into a global energy grid, with an emphasis on tapping abundant renewable energy resources — can create a world wide web of electricity. Remember there's always somewhere on the planet where the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and half the planet is working and half sleeping. Technically GENI is feasible by any measure. However politically ..., there's your problem. For countries to co-operate and agree to not to war with each other so as to maintain the integrity of a global energy grid, that requires global leadership that seems to be lacking at present. Still if we don't do something soon, more drastic solutions may be forced upon us.

This is just an example of two solutions, one local, one global. There are many more and we all should do our bit to support good effective solutions to make this planet a better place. Just complaining how bad something is doesn't usually help. Laying the blame on Governments, Corporates, and other parties without doing your best to make the changes we need in our own lives/communities/countries to make this a better planet isn't going to work.

My community has just experienced unprecedented bushfires, preceded by unprecedented drought as well as unprecedented high temperatures. An area greater in size than the country of Austria has burnt and the fires are still not all under control. This has woken up many complacent Australians who thought that coal mining is a great way for our country to make a buck and climate change was something that wouldn't affect them. So far more than 2000 homes, plus hundreds of businesses, farms and other assets have been lost to fire. The fires at one period extended for over 1000 km along the east coast of Australia. People huddled on the beach watching their waterfront homes burn, rainforests which had been stable ecosystems without fire for thousands of years burned. Billions of native animals have died, many ecosystems have been scorched beyond recovery.
In Australia we were warned. Scientists, fire chiefs, natural resource managers and others with relevant qualifications in climate science said years ago this could happen. Successive governments said it was just scare mongering and ignored them.
It's been really bad people, you don't want this happening in your country. Make the changes in your own life to make this planet a better place.

[Matteo V]

I love your enthusiasm, but some of the greatest environmental disasters of the 20th century were caused by those good intentions and positive thinking.

Just for example:

1. By creating regulations that made it impossible or unprofitable to have industrial production in the West, industrial production was done in second and third world countries. This meant that industrial production of most of the world's Goods were shipped to a place that had zero environmental regulations. Thus by cleaning up the West with strict environmental regulations, the overall pollution on the planet increased. Again we should maybe try to think things through before we implement feel-good BS regulations that cause more problems than they solve.

2. The West's initiatives for recycling were very ill-conceived. In the end those so-called recyclables were shipped off to a second or third world country to be recycled, but they were in fact "not recyclable" and thus just dumped into the ocean. For 20 plus years, this fact went unnoticed/covered up, and to this date no one has paid for the deception that was allowed to continue for so long.



So what I am asking the environmental nut jobs that seem to cause us more problems than they solve, is that they think things through and look at both the arguments for and against, before they "solve" our problems by creating bigger ones.

Now if your optimism is overflowing to a level that you believe, in this current day and age, we are done making as big a mistakes as we have made in the past, you should seriously reconsider speaking out on these type of subjects.

[drsurf]

I love your enthusiasm, but some of the greatest environmental disasters of the 20th century were caused by those good intentions and positive thinking.

Just for example:

1. By creating regulations that made it impossible or unprofitable to have industrial production in the West, industrial production was done in second and third world countries. This meant that industrial production of most of the world's Goods were shipped to a place that had zero environmental regulations. Thus by cleaning up the West with strict environmental regulations, the overall pollution on the planet increased. Again we should maybe try to think things through before we implement feel-good BS regulations that cause more problems than they solve.

2. The West's initiatives for recycling were very ill-conceived. In the end those so-called recyclables were shipped off to a second or third world country to be recycled, but they were in fact "not recyclable" and thus just dumped into the ocean. For 20 plus years, this fact went unnoticed/covered up, and to this date no one has paid for the deception that was allowed to continue for so long.

So what I am asking the environmental nut jobs that seem to cause us more problems than they solve, is that they think things through and look at both the arguments for and against, before they "solve" our problems by creating bigger ones.

Now if your optimism is overflowing to a level that you believe, in this current day and age, we are done making as big a mistakes as we have made in the past, you should seriously reconsider speaking out on these type of subjects.

Wow, I must be an "environmental nut job" seeing as I like clean water, clean air and uncontaminated food. Jeez man, I'm sorry my regulations are upsetting you and depriving you of your polluted resources

As I said before Matteo, don't complain and blame others. You appear to be just a keyboard warrior that is avoiding responsibility for doing something positive to make the world a better place.
Go ahead and blame other countries for installing more technologically advanced heavy industrial capacity than the US. (They took our jerbs!)

Don't set up straw men, I didn't say I believe we're done making big mistakes. If you removed your bias from your vision you would have read that I said there are plenty of solutions to the issues you complain about. Change is challenging, especially for you it appears. But you are either part of the solution or part of the problem. Get off your arse and make your choices and then live with them without complaining. Sure there will be mistakes but that's how humankind learns to improve.

So I ask you Matteo, what are you doing in your life to make the world a better place? And complaining online is not an answer.

[Horst Sergio]

It ain't an electric car if I use a gasoline generator to charge it. And that's the whole problem with Renewables and Electric vehicles. And I am right on topic with this one! A percentage of the electricity put into your battery is always going to be from NOT solar or NOT wind-generated power. This leaves nuclear hydroelectric or fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal to produce the electricity you use when driving the vehicle.

Hi Matteo,
don't worry, there is enough solar power for all of us even old gray Germany during winter, picture from todays charge:

And you don't need to use a recycling system if you are worried about if it is efficient or not. Just take a strong plastic bottle and recycle it yourself by refilling it on the tap. Then stop buying further plastic for food, just buy the food without, if you are lucky you still can ask your grandma how to do, she will remember.

There is no need to buy a 100.000 $ Tesla or a 10.000 $ PV roof to start and therefore there also no excuses to not just get up right now to at least try to do it better. The first steps can be as small as described with the bottle and you will be surprised after a year how fast it is possible to turn long loved compfortable behaviour into more ecological and how much more fun it can be than writing comments at kiteforum.com

[turfAndsurf]

I have a 2017 Kia Soul EV, I have fitted three surfboards ranging from 5'6"-6', four kites, wetsuit, rinsing unit, towels, etc. I don't foil, just kitesurf or/and surf. I do have to fold the back seats down. The range I currently get is down to 90 miles, originally it started at 110. I was hoping to get the 2020 Kia Soul EV, which has a range of 243 miles but that demand is so high in Europe that it is being delayed until 2021 for the US. By the way, I always charge it at home since I have solar panels.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a2952 ... ayed-2021/

https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g27 ... /?slide=24

[Matteo V]

I love your enthusiasm, but some of the greatest environmental disasters of the 20th century were caused by those good intentions and positive thinking.

Just for example:

1. By creating regulations that made it impossible or unprofitable to have industrial production in the West, industrial production was done in second and third world countries. This meant that industrial production of most of the world's Goods were shipped to a place that had zero environmental regulations. Thus by cleaning up the West with strict environmental regulations, the overall pollution on the planet increased. Again we should maybe try to think things through before we implement feel-good BS regulations that cause more problems than they solve.

2. The West's initiatives for recycling were very ill-conceived. In the end those so-called recyclables were shipped off to a second or third world country to be recycled, but they were in fact "not recyclable" and thus just dumped into the ocean. For 20 plus years, this fact went unnoticed/covered up, and to this date no one has paid for the deception that was allowed to continue for so long.

So what I am asking the environmental nut jobs that seem to cause us more problems than they solve, is that they think things through and look at both the arguments for and against, before they "solve" our problems by creating bigger ones.

Now if your optimism is overflowing to a level that you believe, in this current day and age, we are done making as big a mistakes as we have made in the past, you should seriously reconsider speaking out on these type of subjects.

Wow, I must be an "environmental nut job" seeing as I like clean water, clean air and uncontaminated food. Jeez man, I'm sorry my regulations are upsetting you and depriving you of your polluted resources

As I said before Matteo, don't complain and blame others. You appear to be just a keyboard warrior that is avoiding responsibility for doing something positive to make the world a better place.
Go ahead and blame other countries for installing more technologically advanced heavy industrial capacity than the US. (They took our jerbs!)

Don't set up straw men, I didn't say I believe we're done making big mistakes. If you removed your bias from your vision you would have read that I said there are plenty of solutions to the issues you complain about. Change is challenging, especially for you it appears. But you are either part of the solution or part of the problem. Get off your arse and make your choices and then live with them without complaining. Sure there will be mistakes but that's how humankind learns to improve.

So I ask you Matteo, what are you doing in your life to make the world a better place? And complaining online is not an answer.

Either you didn't read my post that you quoted, or you simply lack the ability to comprehend it. So I'll give it another go.

The clean air and water you enjoy is due to outsourcing the pollution to countries with no environmental regulations. Again that means that pollution worldwide was actually increased by you getting your precious clean water. And billions of people live with that outsourced pollution in their backyard contaminating their air, water, and food, because you have clean water. The only way to have stopped this would have been to make environmental regulations that required products to be built inside of Western countries with strict regulations, as opposed to building them cheaply where there are such lax environmental restrictions.

Again, maybe you don't want to understand that, or simply lack the capability of that level of understanding. The bottom line is that environmental regulations that cleaned up the West have made second and third world countries a toxic wasteland. And when considering a global scale, those regulations that cleaned up some places, likely doubled or tripled the total amount of pollution on the Earth.

Now I'm going to try this again - if you keep making the same mistake over and over, and the results are exponentially increasing pollution, waste, and environmental destruction, would you not want to maybe slow down and think things through before you try to fix something with another one of those "solutions"?


And change is not challenging, as you suppose. The world changes every day. Society changes everyday. What is challenging is to see through what the salesman tries to make look like the best thing in the world, when those salesman are actually just scamming you.

So there is my big complaint. People are too easy to sell something which is really worthless or actually harmful. But the sales pitch changes every time. So it's almost as if humanity as a whole cannot build an immunity to getting scammed.

So I ask you Matteo, what are you doing in your life to make the world a better place? And complaining online is not an answer.

The suggestion that I simply go away is all of the encouragement that I need to continue to help debunk the stupidity that causes the masses to continue buying into something that is untested, or has shown to be in the past to have serious negative consequences. This is my little part of it. This is what I do. I try to make sure that the slick salesmen are outed for the liars, or just plain peddlers of a new destructive useless religion, that they are.


And thank you for your excellent presentation of the low-hanging fruit for me to go after. It's those that have little regard for logic and reason, who seem to the best at disproving their own point.

[drsurf]

My dear Matteo I think you'll find you're the one who lacks the ability to comprehend, (and to take responsibility).
Now let me see who you blamed here, there were other countries whom you and your country choose to buy products from. I think you'll find your President is going to help you here, winding back regulations so you can pollute your own backyard.
Change is challenging, especially for you Matteo. You're still trotting out the same tired arguments and not taking responsibility.
And you blame people for being scammed, which I can only assume by your febrile arguments indicates you have been scammed badly yourself and not yet got over it.

And no-one asked you to go away, just show us how you're making an effort to make the world a better place instead of complaining and blaming.

Look I'll make it easy for you, in the spirit of Horst and his reusing a good strong plastic bottle, here's my example which you can do at home. I take some strong PET bottles, make my own tasty, refreshing Kombucha, (for cents rather than buying at the supermarket for $$), and bottle it in said bottles. So far these collection of 8 bottles have been refilled approximately 250 times and are still going strong. I also generate my own biogas from kitchen waste for boiling the kombucha brew. The overflow liquid from the biodigester goes onto my veggies and fruit trees as fertiliser. Reuse instead of recycle. Just imagine if everyone reused perfectly good containers how much less there would be to recycle.

Now this is a small example of one of the things that I'm able to do. Everyone has their choices of what they buy and what they can do to make the world a better place for us all and numbers matter. What are you doing Matteo?

[Horst Sergio]

Hi Matteo,
there is also another point of view:
Times are changing fast and I think just in few years not the guy who generates his own biogas from kitchen waste and with the roof solar panels and the electric car will be the freak, but he will be the guy in the pub everybody is asking for his useful experience.

So today everybody who don't want to be the single old freak surfer with the stinky gasoline car has the chance to order a PV plant and a surfer - electric - car at the same time and turn into pioneer.

https://sonomotors.com/ this weekend will collect the last 1 Mio € of their campaign to build the next preserial prototyps and order production tools. For everybody very enthusiastic within thise campaign there is still the chance to become even part of the community of company owners, but here you have to preorder for 9.000 € (instead 500 €) which is a lot of money in the case that sonomotors broke as every company in its starting phase likely can. When the campaign is over I happily will be part of the community as I ordered 1,5 years ago paying less for it, means, it is not only a risk to be one of the first.

[drsurf]

Hi Horst.
I hope Sono Motors is successful enough to one day export to Australia. The Sion has the features I want, not just for kitesurfing, but for other practical uses such as towing and as a power supply.
I look forward to a thorough review when you get your car Horst You are definitely looking further ahead than many!

[Matteo V]

My dear Matteo I think you'll find you're the one who lacks the ability to comprehend, (and to take responsibility).
Now let me see who you blamed here, there were other countries whom you and your country choose to buy products from. I think you'll find your President is going to help you here, winding back regulations so you can pollute your own backyard.
Change is challenging, especially for you Matteo. You're still trotting out the same tired arguments and not taking responsibility.
And you blame people for being scammed, which I can only assume by your febrile arguments indicates you have been scammed badly yourself and not yet got over it.

And no-one asked you to go away, just show us how you're making an effort to make the world a better place instead of complaining and blaming.

Look I'll make it easy for you, in the spirit of Horst and his reusing a good strong plastic bottle, here's my example which you can do at home. I take some strong PET bottles, make my own tasty, refreshing Kombucha, (for cents rather than buying at the supermarket for $$), and bottle it in said bottles. So far these collection of 8 bottles have been refilled approximately 250 times and are still going strong. I also generate my own biogas from kitchen waste for boiling the kombucha brew. The overflow liquid from the biodigester goes onto my veggies and fruit trees as fertiliser. Reuse instead of recycle. Just imagine if everyone reused perfectly good containers how much less there would be to recycle.

Now this is a small example of one of the things that I'm able to do. Everyone has their choices of what they buy and what they can do to make the world a better place for us all and numbers matter. What are you doing Matteo?

First off I'm not going to sit there and virtue signal with you on "your little part that you're doing." If it makes you feel better, well, that's all it's going to do. You're not going to save the environment with those methods.

And am I correct in my understanding of your post above that your rebuttal to "the disasterous actions of wacko environmentalists in the past and present", is that I am "trotting out the same tired arguments"?

So again to put it simply:

1. The blame for the plastic in the ocean lies squarely upon the environmentalists who came up with the idea of recycling, which didn't work, so they just sent the garbage to the second and third world for recycling, but the second and third world just dumped it into the ocean.

2. Pollution on a global scale is the result of environmentalist who pushed for strict regulation in the west that stopped industrial production there, but increased it at least two fold in the second and third world where there are no environmental restrictions.

Trump or whoever you hate is not responsible for that. Snobby nose in the air environmentalists who are better at selling a stupid idea then creating good ones, are to blame. And we are still on the same road making the same exact mistakes with the same players. So again I would ask that logic and reason, careful thought, listening to your opposition, and not turning environmentalism into a religion, would be a good place for us to try to fix the disaster that has been environmentalism in the past.

Oh, and thanks for the recipe, I'm sure I won't use it.