Double metering - its insidious

When a private residence or a small business decides to install solar panels or a small wind turbine, it is more financially advantageous to use the existing grid as an energy storage system rather than installing batteries. A revolution in battery technology could change all this but at present, to quote the mice, "that's the way things are". (Babe)

I think most of us would agree that the installation of small solar and wind generation equipment is a vital need. A country gains independence from overseas sources of energy, we, as individuals, gain a degree of independence from our own energy companies, our country gains the Internet type protection from a natural or man made disaster since it would be very hard to knock out the grid, and we improve our national balance of payments. You would think, therefore that it would be very much in the interest of the governments of all countries to make the uptake of these technologies financially worthwhile for their citizens. I wish.

If you are a small generator of electricity, Your government could decide that you will either be single or double metered. If you are single metered, the electricity you generate simply turns your meter backwards. Suppose you put in a small generator (solar, wind, hydro) of a size that will more or less generate the amount of power you use. At the end of each month, you will show a slight excess or a slight deficit and, possibly, once a year, you and the power company will have a financial reconciliation. Great!. It is of small consequence how much the power company charges for electricity or how much they give you for your excess. The difference between what you use and what you consume is small so the amount you pay or receive is small.

If, on the other hand, you are double metered, as occurs in some jurisdictions (Germany for instance), you have one meter that records all the power you use and a second meter that records all the power you generate*. You put all the electricity you generate into the grid and take all the power you use from the grid. Here is where the trouble starts and why it won't be worthwhile for you to put in a renewable electrical generation system if the government or your power company insists on double metering.

* you may be on yet a third system with two meters in which the second meter records your instantaneous export of power and the first one, the top up you need.  This is marginally better than the German system of two meters in which one measures all the power you produce and the other all the power you use but it is still an abortion.

First lets look at the most benign system. In this system the power company agrees to give you the same rate per unit as they charge you and they simply calculate what they owe you or what you owe them by taking the difference in the readings between your two meters. Then if you produce a little more power than you use, your revenue will be added to your income for income tax purposes. If you use a little more than you produce, you will be charged for this amount plus GST (sales tax). However it is unlikely that the powers-that-be are planning to do the calculations this way. If so why go to all the expense of putting in a second meter. they could simply read your existing single meter and just read off the difference, either positive or negative. More likely they intend the following. (as is done at present in Germany)

Since your power readings are being done by a registered company, the information is available to the government for tax purposes. They will likely note how much you are earning from all the power you produce and add this to your income for tax purposes. As a Kiwi with an average salary you pay 19.5% on your first income and 33% on the rest. Very well paid people pay 39% on the top part of their salaries. Since the extra money from your power generation is on top of your salary, the middle income Kiwi will pay to the government at his marginal rate of 33% of the revenue from his generation. To add insult to injury, the government will note how much power you buy and charge you GST on it. GST in New Zealand is 15%. Remember, this is not on the difference between what you use and what you consume. It is GST on every kWh you use and income tax on every kWh you produce. Suppose you are producing just about as much power as you use and that the power company gives you the same rate that they charge you (about 20c per unit in my country). Dusting off my algebra it turns out that instead of paying 20c per unit, you will still be paying just under 6.9c per unit even though you are producing an amount of power pretty well equal to what you use. Looked at a different way, if you want to be financially neutral with respect to your power bill, you will have to produce just under 1.7 times as much power as you use. In other words you will have to finance a system almost twice as big as you need when you install your renewable home generation system. Note that you will pay sales tax to the government on this larger system.


The situation is actually worse than indicated above. With double metering, the power company itself is libel for GST on all the power it buys from you.  They will have to pass this extra cost on to all their customers.

They are also libel for income tax on all the power they sell you. They loose on both buying and selling power to the small generator. This will make them even more reluctant than they already are to serve as your storage battery. Single metering is in the interest of the power company too. Note here the quadruple dipping system that the government can implement if you have double metering. Power you produce is taxed leaving your system and then taxed as it goes to the power company. Power the power company sells you is taxed when it leaves the power company and taxed again when you receive it*.

* the situation is marginally  better when your second meter records you excess and the first meter records your top up.

Many of you will have heard of the German system. In case you haven't, I'll recap. German small generators are double metered and their system has resulted in the private uptake of solar panels with a generation capacity of approximately 4 large coal fired power stations and rising. They succeeded with this in a very cloudy country. Their secret is this. The government has decreed that the small generator will get approximately 3 times as much for every unit they produce as they pay for every unit they use. The government is not involved. The power company is allowed to charge a little more to all its customers and use this money to pay the customers with a small generating system. Another interesting wrinkle in the system is as follows. If you installed your system in 2004, you will be getting 55c per unit for 20 years. If you were to install your system today (2008), you would get 45c per unit also for 20 years. The longer you wait to install your system, the less you get. Clever Ehh??. This creates a great incentive to install your solar panels as soon as possible. What happens after 20 years.

The government may decree that you are taxed (income tax or GST depending whether you have a positive or negative balance) on the difference between the two metres. However this is unlikely. Even now, when they want the maximum uptake of solar-electric, the German government is charging its small generators both Income tax and GST just as outlined above. If you dust off your algebra, you will find that a small German generator in the top tax bracket will have to generate 2 to 3 times as much power as he uses to be financially neutral with respect to power. This is because his income tax and GST rate is higher than ours in New Zealand.  As I mentioned above, in New Zealand you would have to install a system about 1.7 times as big as you need for your own use to neutralize your electricity bill.

If countries are serious about getting a lot of renewable energy financed by private individuals they have to make the system financially attractive. One necessary measure is to legislate for single metering.

April, 2013
Thinking about it, double metering, depending on the arrangement you have with the power company can be even worse than outlined above.  Assume that your relationship  with the power company is such that they give you 10c/kWh for the excess you send to them and you pay 20c/kWh for any excess power you buy.  This assumes, of course, that you aren't on the German system in which all your power produced goes through one meter and all the power you use goes through a second meter.  As the day goes on, your power use is unlikely ever to be exactly in sinc with the amount of power you produce.  The amount of power you produce varies throughout the day as does the amount of power you use.  So all through the day, one or other of your meters will be recording.  Not to despair, though.  I think I have a solution.  If it is possible to have a truck battery or two in your system and if it is possible to set up the electronics so that you alway fill or empty the battery before you export or import power, your costs should be much less.  A couple of grunty batteries would also carry you through some of the dark hours in the morning and evening.

Feed In Tariffs - how to structure

For anyone not familiar with the term, Feed in Tariff  (FIT not surprisingly) is the money the electrical company pays you per unit (kWh) that you generate and send down their wires.
 
A most interesting system of feed in tariffs exists in Germany today. The government has legislated a feed in tariff equal to about 3 times what the same customer pays for electricity. The electrical company charges a little more to all customers and uses this money to subsidise the owners of home generation systems. Houses and businesses have two metres. One metre records the amount they use, the other how much they produce. You don't get the three-times rate for the difference between what you use and what you produce but on the whole amount you produce. The German government has guaranteed that this situation will continue for 20 years from the date of installation. To induce people to get in early, the small generator gets the rate for his power generation that is extant in the year he installs his solar unit and this rate decreases from year to year. Thus people who installed solar in 2004 are getting 55c per unit until 2024 while people installing their unit this year (2008) will get 45c per unit until 2028. By 2011, the rate may be around 35c per kWh (kilowatt hour)

The system is obviously not sustainable. A company can't be buying a product and selling it for a third as much. Moreover, as more and more people put solar panels on their roves or wind turbines in their garden, the power company will have to charge the conventional customers more to pay off the generating customers. However, you have to hand it to Germany. What they aimed at has worked and at a bargain price when compared with building coal fired power stations.  Best of all it is  without any involvement of the always inefficient government tax system. (well, maybe in Germany it is not inefficient.  In fact in this link you will see just how clever the German Tax Department is.)

Germany has clearly recognized that in the not too distant future, the cost of power from fossil fuels will start to increase exponentially, due to demand exceeding supply and due to increasing compliance costs. With the German scheme of feed in tariffs, they have created a renewable solar-electric generating capacity equal to the output of about 4 large coal fired generating stations (over 13 GW as of the end of 2007) and growing day by day. With energy being a large part of the cost of any product, when the rest of the world is trying to play catch up, Germany will have megawatts of stably priced, renewable energy for her industries.  This in a country with less that 2 peak hours of sunshine per day.

Here in New Zealand, I suspect, (and hope) we won't go for the subsidy model that Germany is using. Part of this is philosophical-historical. Not so many years ago, our agriculture was one of the most heavily subsidized in the world. People didn't farm crops, they farmed subsidies. With great foresight and more than a little courage, the government of the day decided to scrap all agricultural subsidies. We went cold turkey and it worked. After some admittedly hard times, our farmers have become lean and mean and of most importance, their decisions are now based on economic reality rather than how to play the system. They now compete all over the world against subsidized agricultures and compete very successfully. (or would if the Americans would pay more than lip service to their professed free trade policy)

I would like to see a much different system. It is simpler, more easily understood and sustainable. Keeping in mind the law of unexpected consequences, as a first suggestion, it would be structured as follows.

There would be only one meter in your house or business and the electricity you generate would simply turn the meter backwards.  The two meter system is a scam. The electrical company would structure its charges (as they do at present) with a fixed charge and a charge per unit (kWh) used. There have been many names for this fixed charge but for the sake of this discussion lets call it a line charge. This is the amount you pay for the privilege of being connected to the grid. This is reasonable as the electrical distribution company had to build the distribution system and has to maintain it. Now here is where we have to be a bit careful. The electric company could structure this differently for people just using electricity and for people using and generating electricity. For the generators, they could have a very large fixed cost and a very low power rate for power used or generated. For the non-generating customer the reverse. This is where the government must step in and block this possibility. They must simply legislate that whatever the charge structure the power company decides on, it must be the same whether you are generating or not. Then if the generating company tried to charge a huge line charge and a small per-unit charge, the ordinary customer could use huge amounts of power for almost a fixed cost. If they charged a very small fixed charge and a large per-unit charge, the generating customer would make lots of money. Structured so that the system is the same for both types of customer, the system is reasonably self regulating since it is in the interest of the power company to maximize its profits by a middle of the road approach.



There is also no need for the power company to send out bills every month (or payments for that matter) to the user-generator.  The amounts either way will be small and a financial reconciliation can occur once each year.  Ordinary  customers get billed as usual. So what are the implications of such a system.

Firstly, there is no need for the installation of any extra meters by the power company which they will charge to the customer. This also eliminates the VAT you would have to pay on the extra meter.

Secondly, the power company doesn't have to service a developmental loan for installing new power stations. All the capital costs fall on the private individual. The only extra wiring needed is the wiring associated with the power generating unit. The customer must have in place all the equipment that makes his system compatible with the electric company and that is the end of it.

Thirdly, this system is sustainable and good for the power company. The power company is "buying" power during the day when they charge the greatest amount for their power and the power, on average, is being generated closer to the end user than is the case with remote, high output power stations. Getting power when the demand is greatest and reducing their line losses increases their profits.

Fourth, the system can be left in place for ever and doesn't have to be changed at some time in the future as with the German system. Stability of system allows for long term business planning and is greatly encouraging to businesses.

Fifth, the power company also gains on the Internet effect. Diffuse power generation is less vulnerable to line outages than high-power point-sources.

Sixth, the power company still makes money on their line charge commensurate with the cost of maintaining the lines.

New Zealand is an innovator in so many ways. Hopefully we will also be innovative with Feed In Tariffs.

One thing we must guard against at all costs is double metering. In Germany, even, now when the government is trying to encourage as much uptake of solar electric as possible, they are adding the revenue made by the small generator to his income for income tax purposes. For someone with a high salary, the marginal rate is 46% and there is a further 5.5% Unification surcharge. They are also charging GST (VAT/sales tax) at 19% on every unit of electricity the customer uses. Note that these charges are  not on the difference between what you use and what you produce but on ever kWh you use and every kWh you produce.   When the unrealistic FIT system ends, the small generators are going to find they are still paying quite a bit for their power even if they are generating as much as they use. In fact, depending on their tax bracket, the small German generator would have to produce 2 to 3 times as much power as they use in order to reduce their net power bill to zero. Think about the cost of servicing the loan they have to take out to buy this extra large system. Think about the GST they pay the government for this larger-than-needed system.   If someone does decide to put in a system which is larger than they need for their own use, they should be allowed a fair return. For the sake of argument, let's say 80% of what the power company charges for power at the time of generation.

The correct system of metering and Feed In Tariffs which is fair to both power company and customer and which is sustainable will be a great encouragement for the uptake of renewable energy by the small generator and won't have the customer wake up one morning and realizing he has been scammed.

Growing Oysters in the Outflow of Mariculture Ponds

Mariculture ponds which are growing fish, prawns or other organisms provides the ideal food source for growing oysters. It depends on the fact that with a conversion coefficient of 2:1 from feed to fish/prawn, 90% of the feed goes into the water. I can just hear you saying "this guy can't add two numbers together" but bear with me.

    Conversion coefficient is calculated by dividing how much feed is used, (usually in the form of a pellet) by how much fish is produced. Conversion coefficients in the range of 2:1 are common with all animals including fish. However, the pellet is typically around 7% water (to keep it from growing moulds, bacteria and so forth), and the fish is typically around 80% water. In the end, when you calculate the true conversion coefficient, of dry pellet to dry fish, it comes out at about 10:1 just as you learned in biology when the teacher said that only about 10% of the mass, transfers from one tropic level to the next. 

 

 

   For instance, 100kg of krill will make 10kg of penguin and 10kg of penguin will make 1kg of sea lion. From the point of view of the oyster, 90% of the food that is fed to the primary organism (fish or prawn) is available to feed the oyster. Note that this is not some attempt by the fish farmer to bluff someone. 

 

    He buys his feed pellets at so much per kg and sells his fish or prawns for so much a kg. For him, this is a perfectly logical way of looking at conversion coefficient.  For a biologist who wants to know how much food is available for the next stage, the true conversion coefficient is the one to use.

Of course, this food enters the pond in the form of feces, excretory products and Carbon dioxide. Not what your oyster wants to eat. For the welfare of the oyster it is important that the ponds are in a good sunny location. With lots of sun, a heavy crop of a wide range of single celled phytoplankton grow and use this bounty. If, as in one place I worked, the water is sucked through beach rock with a good proportion of organically derived silica, then the water will contain a good quantity of Si for the formation of diatoms. Diatoms are generally speaking the best food for oysters. In another location where we farmed, the water source was otherwise and I always attributed this to the much poorer results which were obtained. I suspect an addition of Sodium silicate (water glass, isenglass) would help and possibly an addition of ferric chloride or sulfate in some locations.

Here a problem arises. In your typical mariculture pond in a sunny climate, even with an exchange rate of once every two days, the concentration of phytoplankton is much too great for the oysters. The Japanese oyster (Saccostrea gigas) survive and grow very well in this rich soup of phytoplankton but they waste a lot of food. An oyster uses its "gills" to separate out particles from the water with preferred particles moved by paths of cilia toward the mouth while unwanted particles go the other way. Every so often, the oyster snaps its shell closed and expels the unwanted items as pseudofaeces. When the concentration of the normally desired food items is too great, much of this good food is also expelled as pseudofaeces. The feces along with the pseudofaeces fall to the bottom of whatever container the oysters are growing in and turns anaerobic. Various systems are used to ensure that this bottom muck does not poison the oysters.  Part of the trick, to produce the maximum crop from the available food, is to present the  food at the desired concentration.  More of that later.

If you have ever been associated with oyster growing in the sea, you know how much work it is and how many processes go into handling the oysters. I mention this as I am going to describe the method we used to grow the oysters. It may sound like a lot of work but is a fraction of the work needed to grow in the sea and  all the work is in comfortable conditions on land rather than at sea where you are exposed to whatever weather is throwing at you. Even better, most of the work you have to do in the land based system is with the small juvenile oysters so there is little weight to move around and later the oysters finish their growing pretty well by themselves.   In a sea based system, you are continually separating and sorting the oysters which are continually attaching themselves to each other.  And a fast growing oyster has very sharp edges.

The oyster we grew was Crassostrea gigas (now Saccostrea gigas), also known as the Pacific or Japanese oyster. It is able to handle high concentrations of food in its environment and grows fast producing, to my taste, the finest oyster available. It has one cup shaped shell and one flat shell. When grown free on mesh racks, the oyster sits on its cup shaped shell with the flat shell uppermost. If you grow on racks this orientation is necessary since, if the growing edge of the shell touches the rack (as it would do if you put the oyster flat-side-down), the oyster  will grow into the mesh and will have to be pried off every time you thin or harvest. However, this characteristic can be turned to one's advantage.

Early on, we noted that with stacks of racks of free sitting oysters, the build up of feces and pseudofaeces would soon smother the oysters unless we cleaned them every week or so.    Even then oyster on the bottom racks were often smothered. Even worse, with the oysters in contact with anaerobic mud, we often got infestations of shell worm. When you open an oyster which is infested with shell (mud) worm, you often break into a pocket of anaerobic mud in the shell.  Not the thing to impress the customer.  The system we came up with was as follows.

When we got our oyster from the hatchery at about the size of half a pea, or sometimes smaller, we grew them on trays of mesh until they were large enough so that they could be laid flat on a piece of Netlon with a 10mm hole.  We  made up racks of netlon (plastic extruded mesh) of about a meter by a meter.  We cut the mesh in strips leaving both ends connected. We put spacers at each end like a weaving so that alternate strips of net were up and down. We then placed a baby oyster on every third hole which it was now large enough to bridge. Sometimes we just laid them on and sometimes used a variety of glues. The oysters were placed cup-shell-down. As soon as the mantle of the oyster came out and touched the mesh, they started to grow into the mesh. After a couple of weeks they were firmly attached. At this point, we cut the mesh strips apart in such a way that each oyster now had a loop at the hinge end with which to hang it.

We then manufactured split rings by winding warmed PVC welding rods around a suitable shaped stick and cutting the spiral apart on the bias once it had cooled. We then attached an oyster to each cross of a 1 metre square piece of plastic coated wire weld mesh with 55mm wire spacing. The oysters were now suspended, hinge up, entrance and exit down under the mesh. These pieced of mesh were then stacked with about 150mm spacers in the flow of water from the fish and prawn ponds. With this system the area available for organic material to settle was greatly reduced and even if it did settle on the thin hinge end, it did not plug the water entrance or exit of the oyster which was now down-facing. The stacks of racks were suspended in a concrete trough of about a meter and a half on a side. Usually we had 5 layers of mesh in a stack.

 

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Sorry, I couldn't work our how to paste the picture here but if you enter the above address in a google search, the picture will come up'

 

An interesting aside which relates to our present acidification of the oceans was that with a high level of algae production, the alkalinity of the water increased. Not surprising since phytoplankton growth uses up Carbon dioxide which is causing acidification.

November 2011
I haven't read this blog for quite a while.  I just realized that I didn't deal with the problem of an excessive concentration of food in the water.  We got around it this way. 

Our trough where we grew the oysters, was closed on one end and the water flowed in at the closed end and out the other end.  Instead of introducing all the water at the closed end and letting it flow through the whole length of the trough, we introduced it all along the trough.  This way, as the oysters removed food, it was replaced and the concentration of food in the water which the oysters experienced was much less that the concentration of food in the water straight from the pond.  This also allowed us to solve another problem. 

Oysters use up oxygen just like any animal.  One of the most effective ways of oxygenating water in a tank or trough is to jet the new water vertically into it.  Such a jet entrains and blasts air down into the water.  You would think it would cause the water to circulate and so it does but not the way you would expect.  If you blast this water downwards along one side of the trough, you would think that the rotation of the water in the trough would be in the same direction that the jet pushes it.  In fact the opposite occurs as the bubbles which are blasted down into the water rise up and cause the water to rotate in the opposite sense to the jet.  To be effective, the pond must be a couple of meters above the trough and feed pipes must be large enough so as not to loose significant pressure.  Otherwise you would need a small centrifugal pump.  We drew "pipettes" from heated black plastic pipes to make the nozzles just as you do with glass tubing.  It was then easy to cut the drawn part of the pipe at whatever diameter you wanted and to make two pipettes from each piece

From time to time, we would pull the plug on the trough and wash down the oyster racks and the trough bottom.  The bottom of the trough was flat but would have been better if it had been deeper at the middle to aid the washing out of the anaerobic mud which collected there.  I never measured it but I suspect a given weight of oysters makes more feces that an equal weight of cow.

Of course the next stage would be to grow a commercial sea weed on the outflow of the oyster troughs.  This occasionally happened accidentally in our system but we didn't sort out a commercial system while I was there.

Conversion coefficient

In fish, chicken and many other types of farms the conversion coefficient from food to animal is often in the range of 2:1. It takes 2kg of food to produce each kilogram of animal. On the other hand if you studied biology, you learned that about a tenth of the material from one tropic level is captured in the next level. It takes 100kg of krill to make 10 kg of penguin and 10kg of penguin to make 1kg of leopard seal. The conversion coefficient is 10:1. So what is happening and why is it important.

First the what. When you are talking about the situation in nature, you are talking about wet prey and wet predator or even better dry prey and dry predator. Dry-dry is better because different animals can have different percentages of water and what is of interest is how much actual material exclusive of water, transfers from one level to the next. The flip side, of course, which will concern us just now, is how much material goes back into the environment to power the food chain (if in quantities the environment can handle) or pollute the environment (if there is too much of it). Clearly if 10% is captured, 90% is excreeted, secreted and respired out into the environment.

In farms the feed is generally a formulated pellet often using fish meal and soya as its source of protein. The fish meal portion of the pellet is dehydrated ground fish and the soya is the dehydrated seed of the soya bean plant. Depending on availability and on which animal the feed is for, many other components may be added to make the feed, along, usually with a vitamin package, a mineral package and usually a source of starch for energy and binding. The point here is that the pelleted feed, to keep it from rotting in the sack and to reduce shipping costs is dry, typically containing less than 7% moisture.

An uninitiated reader on learning that a salmon farm (samon feed lot actually) achieves a conversion coefficient of 2:1 would be forgiven for assuming that for every kilogram of feed fed to the fish, 500grams in the form of faeces, nitrogenous wastes from excretion and Carbon dioxide from respiration goes out into the environment. Not so. As you can see from the above, the figure is actually closer to 900g of waste per kg of feed. The fish eat the pellets, add water and put on half a kilogram of weight per kilogram of pellets they eat. However, the half kg that they gained consists of 100g from the food they ate and the rest is water.

One shouldn't think that the farmer is pulling a "fast one" in the way he expresses the conversion coefficient. He pays per kg of pellet he buys and receives revenue per kg of animal he sells. Conversion coefficient the way he views it is a perfectly valid method for calculating his profitability. It is only a "fast one" when someone tries to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by falsifying how much of the feed actually finds its way into the environment.

If you want to find out how much waste is shed by a salmon feed lot in order, for instance to work out the equivalent sized town that would contribute the same amount of waste, you will be pretty accurate if you calculate 90% of the feed used by the feed lot.

The car I'd like to drive

Most major car manufacturers are getting serious about electric cars and most of them are designing cars with all the bells and whistles. I hate to think what they will cost. I believe there is a massive market for a simple, basic, Volkswagen / model T ford / 2cv/Mini - type electric. It wouldn't be for everyone but I believe the market would be huge.

Not only would it be huge in third world countries but also in first world countries. So many of us are fed up with having such a big foot print on the world, fed up with being dependent on someone else to fix our gadgets and fed up with having to tie up a huge proportion of our wealth in a vehicle simply to get from A to B. For other people for whom their very concept of self worth is intimately entwined with driving a fancy car - carry on. Enjoy. The rest of us have a different self image.

So what would this car be like. It would be both very simple and very sophisticated. Simple in that it would have very few frills, a low selling price and it would be easy for a home mechanic of modest ability to maintain and repair. It would be sophisticated in that it would have the very best engineering and best materials providing reliability, longevity, safety, easy driving, fast charging and maximum range.

It would be upgradable as new technology became available.  For instance if the new graphene batteries prove to be better than Lithium batteries, one could change the batteries.  The critical factor is that the new batteries would fit the space where the old batteries lived.

If the engineers insist on producing a hybrid, it would be mostly electrical with a small emergency generator. (a turbine??)   However, consideration should be given to replacing even the emergency generator with more batteries on a weight to weight or volume to volume basis.  So what sort of a car would it be.

Styling
The styling would be distinctive.  It would be as recognizable as the  Volks Wagon Combi, Deux Cheveaux, Model T Ford or Mini.   Note that none of these cars were objects of beauty but they were distinctive.   Clearly it would have to be as aerodynamic as possible and this tends to converge the styling of all cars but there must be no doubt what vehicle you are looking at when you see one of these cars. Easy identification is necessary for the vehicle to become iconic . No changes would be made to the styling from year to year. None what so ever. The Beetle didn't need it, neither does our Peoples-Electric.   Not needing to retool for design changes contributes to a lower price.

Driving damage
Bumpers and mud guards should be bolt off and bolt on so that repairing a ding is a simple job of trading in your old part for repair or recycling and bolting on the new part. These easily damaged parts should be compatible for decades. A bumper from the first production model must fit the latest model and vice-versa. Some thought should be given to a hydraulic or pneumatic bumper which could sustain bumps of, say 5 or 10km/h without damage*.

*Nov 2011.  I just read of a jell bumper that a new electric car is using.  Good on you guys.


The Vehicle Manual
The vehicle manual would be straight out of America in their best tradition; the sort of manual that comes out of Time-Life or Readers Digest. They have the most incredible how-to-do manuals where everything is beautifully, clearly laid out and the illustrations are works of art. Once the car had been designed, the wives, secretaries and accountants of the company would be let loose on the car, with the manual, to see if they could change the electric motor, CV joints and anything else that might need to be replaced. If they could not do this, either the manual or the car or both would be redesigned. (No fair changing the secretary or accountant)  A copy of this manual would be standard equipment and would fit in a specially designed compartment in the car.


Tools
There would be a standard 'A' tool set and an optional 'B' tool set. The 'A' set would allow one to change a tire and tighten up a screw. The B tool kit would allow most procedures necessary to be done on the car. Very rare tools could be rented from the dealer.  If at all possible the car would be designed to use only conventional tools and to ensure that  a minimum of tools are necessary. The tool kit would fit in a specially built-
in compartment in the car.

The Chassis
Initially there would be only one medium size chassis but eventually there would be three sizes: small, medium and large. On to each of these chassis would bolt the body of a pick up truck (Ute, Bakkie, Tender), a family car, a people mover (van, Combi) or a sports car..... Well maybe not a sports car on the largest chassis but certainly on the medium and small chassis.

Parts
Wrecked or scrapped cars could be taken apart for parts and the parts would fit on any other car no matter what the vintage. Also, in so far as possible, fittings from one size of car would fit on the other sizes. All, for instance, would use the same head light bulb, door handle, radio mounting and so forth.

Yearly Model Changes
 None.

This ridiculous system of planned obsolescence must be scrapped .

Steering gear
Lets go for simple rack and pinion.  Check out all the cars that used this system and adopt the best one.  Power steering uses power and in a reasonably light car power steering is completely unnecessary.  Besides, Rack and Pinion is cheaper and easy to repair (if it ever needs repairing).  Our Peoples Electric will tend to be a light car with all the frills removed and eventually, as the technology allows, thermoplastic carbon fiber bodies so Rack and Pinion will be perfectly adequate.


Windows
Nothing wrong with wind up windows but make them of quality material so that they wind up smoothly when you buy the car and just a smoothly in 20 years.  Remember, no planned obsolescence.  Electric windows use power and are more expensive to build and repair than mechanical windows.

Car Magazine
A quarterly car magazine would give interesting hints on how to maintain your car, maps of places to exchange or charge your batteries and quirky stories of how someone had crossed the Sahara with the car fitted with solar panels and how someone else had fitted a chuck wagon stern to his vehicle and gone on roundup.  It would be interesting, informative amusing and iconic.


Solar cells
Solar cells must eventually be fitted on every possible surface. Very interesting work is being done on allowing all panels to contribute their full generation capacity despite a lack of co-linearity and despite some panels being partially shaded. When we have nano power point tracking for individual solar cells, these technologies will greatly increase the effectiveness of the solar cells which clad the car. At one time solar panels were stiff and flat.  Now one can buy flexible panels.  It should soon be possible to clad any shape.  In addition there is work on producing power from windows.

 Note that the solar panel retrofit on the Prius on the roof between the front and rear window is reputed to give about 10 km extra for a day in the sun. A nice little bonus. With advances in the technology and panels on the whole car, one might get, say, 25 extra km per sun-day*. We're not talking here about a completely solar car.  Just a nice little bonus for a day in the sun and the possibility of getting home if you forgot to charge and ran out of gas (sorry - electricity)

*Note that since the writing of this article there has been an item in the news (The NZ Press, feb 2010) that IBM has developed a solar panel using only "easy to find" minerals. If this development materializes, the cost of solar panels should plummet. They already are on a toboggan ride.  Standard panels coming out of China are already (2012) down to a dollar per nominal watt.


Mechanical Design
The designers would endeavor to use the most commonly available parts much like the Skunk Works does. The Skunk Works only innovates parts that are necessary for the special functioning of the aircraft in question. The rest is off the shelf. If a certain tire rim with a certain spacing of stud is the most common in other cars of the world, this size should be adopted. If a certain head-light bulb socket is most common all over the world, this one would be used and so forth. This would ensure that if you were stuck, you would have a good chance of finding parts that would get you by. Conversely, scrapped cars of this type would be a rich source of parts, even for other makes. Even better for the company, people with other types of vehicles would always try to buy from the company because of the high quality and competitive pricing of their parts.  Having your parts fit other cars would ensure a large market.

Warranty
None, Nada, Zilch. This may sound revolutionary..... and at first, not having a warranty would be a negative selling point. At the very least, make it an optional extra.  As confidence builds up in the reliability of the car, people will relax about the lack of warranty. In fact, a lack of warranty will quickly become a major selling advantage. 

Warranties cost the company money and this is built into the price of their vehicles. The savings from the lack of warranty must be passed on to the customer. An added effect would be that people would not thrash their car during the warranty period. They would look after their cars from the start.

Besides, as mentioned above, the cars would be so easy to repair that any joker with a basic set of tools and the manual could repair any part of the car. By their nature, electric cars will be far simpler than petrol cars.  Moreover computer boards are simply unplugged and reprogrammed or a new one plugged in.  Computer chips are as cheap as,,,,, well chips, and software when spread over many users is also cheap.

Dealers
Dealers would locate in the low rental industrial areas of cities or towns. Only one dealer would be allowed per city or town. In their warehouses they would sell the car and have a full stock of spares. They would never ever ever ever run out of spares. Their computer system would flag when they had to order parts to keep their inventory up to date. A dealer who couldn't do this would loose his dealership. All dealers and their staff would be sent to the factory to practice doing everything on the car that could be done but they would not be required to do repairs at their dealership. They would be there to provide advice and parts.

Computers
Undoubtedly, there will be  computer chips in the car. How about using one of those computer memory sticks (flash drives) that people use to transfer information from computer to computer. Have it plug in to the dash board. Taking it out and plugging it into your PC would run a diagnostic and you could reprogram the chip for maximum efficiency or maximum performance or for whatever other options were available right from your PC.  Hardware is expensive.  Software, when spread over many units is cheap.

The Battery
This is out of the hands of the company but every effort should be made to standardize batteries between different makes and models of cars. For instance, the battery of a Tesla should fit a Volt and vice versa. It would be well worth while looking at the Project Better Place option.  At the very least, a new company developing an electric car could adopt the battery design of other cars right from the outset and build the car around that design. Apparently the lithium ion battery is now obsolete and the Lithium titanate, lithium iron phosphate and lithium polymer batteries are far longer lasting.  The polymer battery, is apparently much lighter. Graphene batteries are on the horizon with the discovery that with an addition of water, the layers of grapene do not fuse.   Batteries can be upgraded as technology allows but can still have the same outer aspect so that they can be used in older vehicles. The batteries might be based on a standard cell of 2x3x5 cm that could be combined in series and parallel to achieve whatever voltage the particular car uses and combined in different physical configurations to fit virtually any available space.  Incidentally, such batteries would find uses in a wide variety of other applications including power storage for the home.

Recycling
All components of the car must be designed to be completely recyclable. All parts will have a core charge just as is done with glass bottles and given back when the part is returned. This would ensure that worn out cars would not litter the environment. People who are too rich or too lazy to recycle their vehicles would find any number of people who would take the vehicles off their hands to recycle parts or to get the return fee.


Lubrication
A great beauty of electric cars is not only that you save on fuel but also on lubricants. An electric car can be built today that needs no lubricant except perhaps a little 3 in 1 oil for the door hinges. Remember all the grease points we used to have to attend to at each service. These don't exist on modern cars.  Electric cars do not have an oil sump.  More saving of our too-valuable-to-burn fossil fuels.

Reliability
Electric motors are so reliable that one could have a car quite soon that would last almost a lifetime. You would probably change the upholstery 4 or 5 times before the car wore out. Israel is about to convert to electric cars provided by Renault-Nissan with reticulation and battery exchange provided by Project Better Place. If successful, this will cause a paradigm shift in the car market. A very attractive option is to for a new car builder to build a car with a battery that can be changed by Project Better Place stations.

The world is ready for a simple affordable car. Renault is now building the Logan which already goes some way towards a "peoples car" and demand has outstripped anything the company expected. Of course it is a petrol car but they have tapped a market that they didn't know existed. Renault has been absolutely amazed by the response of the public in France. Tata in India has done the same. Obviously a simple car is not for everyone but all over the world there is a longing for simplicity, for having a smaller footprint on the world and for being able to look after yourself rather than having to depend on a specialist for all your needs. If Renault "keeps the faith" and isn't tempted to slowly turn the Logan into a conventional car, it will sweep the world. By the time other manufacturers wake up and smell the flowers, the Logan should have captured the imagination of the world and a huge chunk of its markets. How much more would a simple electric car capture our imagination.

And finally
If a car manufacturer does this, eventually it will have to down-size. Such a car will saturate even the world market and The Company will then be providing top up cars and parts. And ultimately, isn't this what we want: a much smaller car manufacturing sector, using less raw materials and energy and producing usable, long lasting cars for the public. We are just on the brink of an ecological melt down and must reduce our foot print on the world. We don't all want to be living the way the kids were in the winner of this year's (2009)Oscars*.

*Slum Dog Millionaire

What is certain is that the car manufacturer that twigs on to this philosophy first will capture a huge share of the market.  If this car comes from America, the world is their market.  If it comes from some other country, America and the rest of the world is their market.