21st Century Clean Technology - Two Allegories

Story 1 - A Box Full of Watches

When I was a little kid watches were things that you wound up and they made a quiet ticking noise. They were expensive, fragile and kept time rather badly. I had an idea of what a watch was - a small machine on your wrist that told the time.

But this is not an article about watches, at least not directly. The picture above of a box of watches is an allegory for how I am thinking these days about electric vehicles - more particularly how I imagine the future of electric cars.

A once ubiquitous British electric machine called a "milk float", existed when I was a kid, but frankly they were pretty useless machines. People talked about electric cars, and you might even see one in a science museum, but not on the road. I think it is fair to say that the person who made the electric car 'happen' is Elon Musk. His Tesla cars accelerate fast, they can drive a long way and they have a completely different internal mechanism than the the familiar internal-combustion-engine-powered, and fossil-fueled, cars of my youth.

Cars, watches... what's the link?

Well it is something to do the idea that electric car innovation reminds me of something.

It makes me think of the arrival of digital watches back in the 1970s. They worked in a completely different way to earlier watches. They were more accurate, they did not need winding, they did not tick and, for a while at least, they were really quite fashionable.

To demonstrate my nerdy credentials on this topic, I can't resist adding that I own, in 2024, a fully working example of one of these:

On first release in 1975 a stainless steel Pulsar Calculator Watch cost $300 - that's equivalent to $1750 today! There was also a solid 18kt gold version that was more than ten times more expensive. Digital watches were once the future.

When I lived in America in the late 1980s I remember an in-class discussion about the car in society. It was a classroom technology policy discussion. For me the car in the 20th C was a story all about mobility, but for the Americans it soon became clear that it was a story all about sex. I finally understood why American cars in the 1950s had to be so big and comfortable.

So where am I going with this...? Well let's not get into the sex thing, but I will say that cars are about freedom not just mobility. The freedom to go somewhere right now, and to do it in style.

But let's get back to watches. The 1980s saw a breakthrough technology - liquid crystal displays which were better in almost every way to the power hungry red displays of the first generation products. These LCDs products were like today's best electric cars, compared to the old milk floats. The new LCD watches were amazing and at that point one would surely have expected that a box of watches in 2025 would be full of digital designs, but of course it is not. Just as a car is not just about mobility, a watch is not just about telling the time.

My point is that comparing an electric car to a car is like comparing a digital watch to a watch - if you know what I mean. The ownership experience of a gasoline-fueled car is not just a question of mobility. It's about convenience, flexibility etc. Unless one is rich enough to live in the suburbs, owning an electric vehicle is usually not that easy. In the UK one often now sees improvised charging cables running across the sidewalk. It's not easy to own an electric car if you live on the fourth floor.

But let's talk some more about watches - from the perspective of 2024 I think I can say with certainty that wrist watches are now nothing to do with telling the time (your phone does that very well) - wrist watches are now simply jewelry. For men they are the dominant form of jewelry.

Digital Watches and Battery Electric Vehicles - What the Future Used to Look Like...

This is not the place to point to all the negative attributes of battery electric vehicle technology. One can read elsewhere about the global stress on critical minerals and the associated geopolitics or the risk of a small battery scratch costing a fortune to you (or more likely someone else's insurance company). But neither is it the place to sing their praises in terms of lifecycle performance and environmental impacts, especially if these virtues are not unique.

I will, however, observe that car design, so far at least, has gone in completely the opposite direction than I once expected. For years Gordon Murray and others had pointed out persuasively that the design trajectory for cars must be for ever more lightweight vehicles needing less and less motive power and causing ever reducing environmental harm as a consequence. I imagined that progress in car design would be all about structural materials . The reality, however, of today's battery electric cars is that a 70 kg person is given mobility by a 2 ton car. It just doesn't feel right. There must surely be a better way - one that, as Charles Forsberg at MIT once memorably said to me, doesn't require the car to carry around its own oxidizing agent.

In completely different places one can read of nostalgic fears that the roar of the V8 will soon be gone along with all the associated fun of motoring, similarly one would hear in the 1980s that wonderful mechanical watch movements, such as the Tourbillon, would soon be a thing of the past - but take comfort that they were not.

Finally one must observe that a digital watch was actually built upon two electronic innovations: the digital display and the quartz crystal timing circuit. Most, but not all, of the timepieces in our allegorical box of watches will be based on quartz technology. Similarly one can note that hydrogen fueled cell vehicles are electric vehicles. Or, to be clear, one can also use hydrogen in an internal combustion engine - if one, for example, really wants to hear the roar of a traditional V8 (or something similar) in the 2050s.

Our watch box has digital watches, analog quartz watches and mechanical watches and interestingly they are all much cheaper than watches were 50 years ago. Looking ahead to cars on the road in 2074 I can imagine battery vehicles, fuel cell vehicles and low carbon internal combustion vehicles catering to different tastes.

So much for 'dominant design'.

Talking of dominant designs - let us consider another story - bicycles....

Story 2. The bicycle has a long history ...

That history is too long to recite here. It is sufficient to say that by the end of the nineteenth century the design that we would clearly recognize as a bicycle had become dominant.

The bicycle is an amazing machine. It can traverse rough ground, it stays upright of its own accord as a result of gyroscopic action, and it is simple and affordable. It is no surprise that there emerged a dominant bicycle design that we still recognize today.

Similarly in electricity generation we saw the emergence, fifty years after the modern bicycle, of the large steam turbine in electrical power generation. Such turbines are heavy and they spin at very high speed, typically 3,600 RPM for a 60Hz power system. It reminds me of the magic of a stable bicycle, a high-speed steam turbine gives an electrical power system its inertia for free. Heavy steam turbines ensure grid stability. Like bicycles - they don't fall over.

OK... not like bicycles - the physics is completely different in each case.

In all the discussion around nuclear power new build, I think that there is not enough debate about how a big nuclear power system gives grid stability for free (at least when it's running). Advocates of a electricity generation system based solely on stationary, or only very slowly rotating, renewables must rely on concepts such as synthetic inertia and the opportunities provided by a responsive digital smart grid to ensure that things do not fall over when faced with bumpy ground.

My allegorical concern is that a future smart electrical future will forego all the free advantages of the large turbines and instead seek to build an impressive machine like a bicycle that stays up because it has many wheels in contact with the ground. Each wheel is adjustable and responsive. It is controlled and tweaked by smart interventions and in this way even the most rocky ground can be covered. So you see I am here worrying that the smart grid makes me think of a machine of Heath-Robinson complexity, and all to solve a problem that was solved by physics long ago - how to achieve system stability?

At the risk of spoiling my allegory by excessive explanation, the bumpy ground traversed by the bicycle is analogous to the fluctuating challenge of balancing supply and demand in a modern electricity system. Even without a shift to renewables that is a daunting task. As the familiar nature of that mismatch starts to change, I am concerned that we will be losing must of our inherent system stability that we once had for free in the days of the big power stations.

Of course, my country, the UK is building large new nuclear power stations, based on two reactors each with its own enormous steam turbine. These will give the British electricity a strong component of good old-fashioned real inertia. They will be a bedrock on which to build frequency stability and low-carbon 'firm power', while renewable electricity supply fluctuates all around.

Sometimes old fashioned simple ideas do the job very well. That said, if I am just a twentieth century guy who likes old watches, please do tell me that I worry needlessly and that synthetic inertia will be fine.