Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it The UK's venerable Ordnance Survey is to fling open its electronic doors in an effort to tackle infrastructure challenges faced by the UK's rollout of electric vehicles (EVs). Blighty does not have the best of records when it comes to access to charging points for EVs and, with a 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel …
I confess to sniggering so much at the image that I found the article somewhat difficult to concentrate on. Er anyway, yes, I see that UK.gov capacity to plan things properly is on its usual schedule. To be a massive cock-up.
They could probably get a greater uptake in people wanting to use cars that need charging points if they were situated in places with amusing names. Maybe.
Edit: for the nth time to correct my previous edits. D:
Surely the ultimate utopian solution to this problem is to figure out how to generate electrical power from the hot air and ego that can be produced from owning an EV?
You know what I mean - the whole "this journey cost me £2 to make because I just charge the car at home and away I go" -> capture that, turn it in to something meaningful like electric power to power their car. The monster then feeds itself, the more they can power it from their own hot air, the more their ego inflates, the more hot air is produced.
The REAL challenge is not where to place the chargers, it's where on Earth to get all the extra electricity generation needed, and baseload rather than fickle wind and solar.
As importantly, the current network cannot handle the extra load required.
As for all UK "strategic" planning in the recent decade or two, it's just pie in the sky because it's not a proper plan and it certainly won't be properly executed.
Far more logical would be to use LPG as a fuel, it's available already and existing cars can be easily and cheaply converted to it, we've had it for 3 decades. Then increasingly scale up hydrogen as a fuel, and both to be made available from the existing fueling infrastructure / locations.
Problem solved, and no digging up of Andean salt flats needed, nor kids digging in central African deep pits for rare earth metals to keep Elon's factories busy.
Couple of my near neighbours in UK have EV cars and their solar panels give enough power for that (& far more home power use besides, even in Winter). Though they do have advantage of plenty of South facing roof to mount panels on.
No EV or solar for me as I'm not rich like my near neighbours so cannot afford either... (a long wait before EV cars in the cheap old banger price range..)
One thought that has occurred to me (although I confess I don't know enough about solar panels to know if it could work, and frankly can't be arsed to find out) is what if all cars after 2030 had to have a solar panel on them? I'm not suggesting it could completely charge a car, but it might be enough for the daily commute and a trip to Tesco. EVs are already so terrifyingly expensive another couple of grand probably wouldn't make any difference...
Also means HMG wouldn't need to build half a dozen new power stations to supply all the 'leccy!
A 250W panel is about the same size as a car roof, so I'll use that.
12 hours of full sun would be 12x0.25=3kWh.
Electric cars do 3-4 miles per kWh, lets say 3, that's 9 miles of range, best case scenario.
Alternatively, 16 panels on the roof of your house could supply 144 miles worth on a good day.
Granted there are times when the sun doesn't shine so well, but for average drivers solar could provide a significant chunk of their requirements.
"Couple of my near neighbours in UK have EV cars and their solar panels give enough power for that (& far more home power use besides, even in Winter). Though they do have advantage of plenty of South facing roof to mount panels on."
They might have told you that but I call b.s. A domestic solar system is never going to charge a battery electric vehicle in summer, let alone winter!
My Dad has a plug in Hybrid (smaller battery). 6Kw (max) of solar cells on the roof of the house. Car charges at max of 10 Amps. (takes about 4 hours). Moderately sunny day will give 3Kw = 10a(ish) even on a cloudier day, it will equal out over the course of the day.
OK so its not fully EV, but he only does local mileage most of the time, so (particularly in lockdown) didn't put petrol in the car for about 4 months!
The flip side to this is that he has enough financial capital to a) have a big house with a big south facing roof b) buy the panels a decade ago and got an outrageous feed in tariff c)afford to by a new hybrid rather than wait for 2nd hand ones to become available.
Richer people get to make savings due to their financial position.
As importantly, the current network cannot handle the extra load required.
How long have you been away on your hermits retreat? Whether this is true somewhere else, the national grid has repeatedly said that this is not a problem.
”https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-myths-about-electric-vehicles-busted”
Problems with using LPG as a fuel source include the fact that we would still be generating CO2 which is a bad idea and the fact that it is even more dangerous that the petrol it replaces. The hydrogen that is pushed by people like Toyota is not neatly made by electrolysis. It is mostly made from more fossil fuel generating even ,more CO2!
Don't worry about Elon Musk. His cars are still largely built in the USA which is not exactly famous for the quality of its engineering! Once we start getting them from China and (even better) Germany things will look up for quality and that will only leave us with iffy US design to consider.
well thats not what the NG were saying last month.
That depends on how you read "As importantly, the current network cannot handle the extra load required."
The much-quoted factoid is that the Grid cannot cope with the draw imposed by domestic EV charging and you will get local substation meltdowns. This is largely incorrect. The Grid has a capacity of ~80GW. Peak draw in 2005 was 63GW, peak draw in the last two years has been ~47GW thanks to massively improved domestic and industrial energy efficiency, plus growth in embedded generation (mostly domestic solar).1 We're nowhere near the actual transmission capacity of the grid (notwithstanding local substations which may be more heavily loaded than others).
The NG have repeatedly stated that the Grid has enough capacity to charge EVs, and anywhere that doesn't will be upgraded over the next 10-15years as EVs become more common and ICE is phased out. It's not as though anyone is flipping a switch. It's a gradual growth and they have time to upgrade substations and distribution nodes as demand rises and individual town or neighbourhood capacity is reached.
Outright Generating Capacity is a different kettle of fish, and if we read "grid capacity" as meaning generating capacity then there is more of an issue. On average, we currently have a comfortable overhead for overnight charging. Winter peaks are starting to cause issues as we have been busy decommissioning coal plants and other dispatch-able generators. Realistically we will need more, but that's at least 10years away. Improved storage (probably pumped hydro) will allow us to store excess wind rather than turning down dispatch-able generators when the wind blows, storing that power for peak periods. We're not currently generating as much as we could because we have nowhere to put the excess power at slack periods. Hinckley Point C will also help.
The fact that NG have had issues with peak winter demand in the past couple of years should not be taken as an indication that we fundamentally can't charge EVs or are running out of power. Most of those problems can actually be met with storage rather than outright additional generation (although we shall require both).
It is also worth noting that the often quoted figures for car energy usage now look rather high. UK Road usage declined 22% last year. Obviously it will bounce back but it seems likely that there will be significantly increased WFH going forward, along with modal shift with increased local rail coming online over the next decade.
1. For instance, as a kid our home would regularly pull 1.5kW of an evening via 100W lightbulbs, the CRT telly and Pentium 4 space-heater. These days we're struggling to crack 200W with two adults working from home with 27" monitors. If I turn on every bulb in the house the lighting draw won't exceed 100W. The compressor in the fridge is far more efficient than those of the 80s, etc, etc.
The REAL challenge is not where to place the chargers, it's where on Earth to get all the extra electricity generation needed, and baseload rather than fickle wind and solar.
That's a correct albeit unpopular assessment.
So here's what you do ...
Put the effort to site and build charge points out for public bid. If you require the successful bidder to have actual experience in siting and provisioning charge points, very likely the only acceptable bid will be from Tesla. Will Elon bid? Almost for sure. The man has never seen a subsidy he didn't like. Can he do the job? Almost for sure he can. And since this is something his company has done reasonably well before, he'll probably do a good job.
But Musk is going to point out (as you have) that the chargers require adequate power. And I imagine he will suggest huge banks of solar panels and humongous backup batteries. All of which he can sell you.
But England is way too far North to power its transportation grid with solar energy especially in Winter? Of course it is. Any teenager who has mastered basic arithmetic and trigonometry can work that out in a few hours. But that's not Elon's problem. It's yours. It just means that you need a LOT of solar panels and an enormous number of batteries. And it'll cost a bloody fortune? You bet. Maybe you should have looked at the invoice for zero emissions before you signed on.
I'm not an Elon Musk fan BTW, but as I see it, he's the about only guy with any realistic chance of bailing you out of the mess your folks are creating. Like they say, "Any port in a storm."
What's the alternative? Nuclear power I suppose. But humanity has managed to dink around for half a century without coming up with an inexpensive, easily replicated, safe, nuclear reactor design that does not easily support nuclear proliferation. Perhaps you folks should consider holding off on saving the planet until you have a proper toolset?
But England is way too far North to power its transportation grid with solar energy
Then power it with wind! Relatives in Orkney tell me that they produce 130% or their electrical needs from renewables. This is an area where tourism is a major part of the economy so it has to look nice. No trouble with NIMBYs and Luddites there!
<<Relatives in Orkney tell me that they produce 130% or their electrical needs from renewables.>>
Did they forget to mention that the 130% is produced on only 37% of the days in the year - massive productivity. Shame you can't store it.
Someone who actually lives in the north of Scotland and often sees the wind turbines having a nice rest.
Shame you can't store it.
Says who? At this moment we're a bit light on storage capacity. It's easily saturated by excess wind events. But there's a plethora of pumped hydro startups and other technologies which are technically ready now and have 10-year deployment horizons, which is about what we need.
Pumped hydro is well understood, it just needs building. Electrolysis for H2 is in the works.
Compressing/liquifying air is also technically ready - Highview Power's 50MW plant in Trafford will be operational next year, which follows their successful pilot plant in Slough and larger demonstrator near Manchester. Compressed air of course is cheaper than batteries and doesn't call for many rare earths. Scaling is a matter of "add more tanks".
"Pumped hydro is well understood, it just needs building."
yeah, that's the problem. Where?
You need a decent sized reservoir somewhere at a decent height so that the water has enough potential energy to make it worth it.
Have you got the space on Orkney, or more generally somewhere close to the coast (because while off-shore wind is actually fairly reliable, on-shore is not, so realistically, if as a country we are going to rely on wind to any degree, it will be off-shore wind farms).
Having found suitable sites (relative to the wind farm supplying them when they are pumping water up-hill but also for the recipient of their power when they are generating; also for the geology - need the reservoir not to leak), you then need the cash to build them.
And then chances are you find a local pressure group (almost certainly including lots of self-proclaimed 'environmentalists') that object to their nice local valley being flooded.
So yes, pumped storage is quite viable (and despite my negative comments, I'm a fan and do think we should be making more use of the technique); however, the practicalities and politics of building it are not that straight forward.
"very likely the only acceptable bid will be from Tesla"
FWIW, there are a number of charge point providers in the UK. Just as well really, since Tesla chargers only seem to work with Tesla vehicle, while the other networks will let anyone use them, even Tesla drivers.
Far more logical would be to use LPG
Liquid Propane will work -- on paper at least. And it should generate substantially fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline and diesel. I do wonder if modern computer driven ignitions are entirely compatible with LPG. I doubt anyone is likely to develop and certify new LPG capable hardware for older cars. Too small a customer base? And where is all the necessary Propane (and, in warmer climates Butane) going to come from? At what cost?
The other alternative is Compressed Natural Gas. It's apparently widely used in cars in Iran and Pakistan as well as a few specialized applications in other countries. I remember that the service manual for our 1998 Toyota Camry had an extensive section on the CNG version tucked away in the back.
Problems I'm aware of: Propane is heavier than air. Some tunnel and underground parking operations ban Propane because of its potential for pooling at the lowest levels of the structure. Oh yes, and Propane and CNG are probably more of a fire hazard in an accident than gasoline or diesel. And in really cold weather (-15C) Propane probably needs to be thawed -- at least I have had to throw Propane cylinders into a sink full of water a couple of times to get them to work.
My Volvo V70 runs on LPG quite happily.
LPG isn't a permanent solution, but it's an existing and proven technology that can be readily applied to the vast majority of existing petrol vehicles out there to ease the change until they die and are replaced with an electric vehicle.
How dare you bring any real knowledge of power generation and supply into this discussion? Your arguements can only be based on what you read on Facebook or what you overheard some bearded and be-sandalled (socks optional) green hippy say down the pub after half-a-dozen pints, suggestions or observations involving actual knowledge of how these things work in the Real World are not permitted!
Hydrogen over electric. It's just easier, cleaner and less environmental impact.
No.
Hydrogen in almost every role proposed is just greenwashing.
Generation of hydrogen is woefully inefficient - the only industrial scale production method is by high temperature catalytic breakdown of natural gas to hydrogen and CO2 (and water and some other odds & sods), you than have to clean it and compress it which is hugely energy intensive. Once you've got your hydrogen you then need some form of containment which is tricky to say the least, hydrogen will seep though everything, even solid steel.
Overall with the current technologies hydrogen is perhaps the worst possible fuel for motive power imaginable.
The only challenge here is with the planners. Nuclear power is the only way forward. BTW.
It's not just the planners. A huge chunk of Hickley Point is EDF's cost-of-capital. If Government had borrowed the project could have been financed significantly cheaper than the rates EDF was able to secure on the commercial money markets - but hey, that's fine because "industry has taken the risk" (they haven't, we're all going to pay it back in energy bills, and nuclear is always de facto underwritten by the taxpayer anyway).
There are a bunch of issues. Planning and "just getting on with it" (instead of paying people to sit around while you do another review - see HS2) is one aspect. The Government leveraging their significant borrowing capability to secure cheap capital on behalf of business is another.
Well, for many cars there is a reasonable amount of solar radiation available... Certainly not enough to do everything, but a couple of thousand miles a year isn't to be sniffed at.
Then there is the question of who needs to charge what where...
"a staggering 24.6% of households don’t have access to off street parking."
So that more than 75% of households without an issue.
Then look at car ownership:
"In England overall, 23.9% of households don't have a car"
This number is a bit skewed by London, but even outside London 20% don't have a car. But then the number of households without off street parking is also likely to be skewed.
The overlap between those groups will not be perfect, but I would suggest it will be better than random, since both are likely to be either situational (e.g. London) or related (e.g. low income family in a tower block without a car).
So we don't need to charge 32 million cars (current registered total) using public infrastructure.
Probably we need to charge ~3-4 million, but they only need ~5kWh/day (national average distance is ~20 miles, and 4m/kWh is easily done, various vehicles will do substantially more), or 35kWh/week.
That's only 5 hours a week on a 7kW charger (which is what most slow chargers provide).
Add in workplace / station / park and ride slow charging (since you're leaving the car there for several hours anyway) and you've cut the number who need down significantly further.
Will we want/need more public slow charging? Yes
Are fifth floor flats an issue? Not really - blocks of flats frequently have parking available, so provision of charging points in the car park isn't a difficult operation. It's fairly easy to have RFID authentication to have the charge correctly billed by the property management company (or a provider like pod point), with cheap rates for the residents and "public" rates for visitors using a contactless card.
Terraces are the greater challenge...
At some point you then fall back on other places people regularly drive - supermarkets, shopping centres, cinemas, theatres etc and the car parks nearby. For supermarkets there is probably a benefit to having a slightly faster rate, since visits are somewhat shorter than they would be to other venues - I'd reckon that simple three phase AC (22kW) would go a long way, needing 90 minutes a week, so probably a couple of visits to somewhere with such a facility.
Having a small number of rapid chargers (50kW+) would be good for two reasons:
- It would make them easy to find and universally available if they were in all supermarket car parks
- For those who really have nowhere else to charge it's a local and convenient option, requiring about a supermarket visit a week...
Shouldn't need them at every space, because only a few people will need that speed.
We're not looking at a ridiculous amount of charging infrastructure, but it does need to be installed in sensible places. I don't necessarily see lampposts as a great idea, because sodium lamps were already pretty damned efficient, so their connections aren't that substantial.
I'd be more concerned with getting micro reactors at most of the 150 odd motorway services (decent grid connections, away from centres of population but close enough to be useful) so that there was easy access to a significant bank of the latest rapid chargers (350kW). That then deals with long journeys trivially, and they'd also provide basic grid support as well.
Probably we need to charge ~3-4 million, but they only need ~5kWh/day (national average distance is ~20 miles, and 4m/kWh is easily done, various vehicles will do substantially more), or 35kWh/week.
You cannot reason in term of average to dimension the electricity network but in term of peak.
"You cannot reason in term of average to dimension the electricity network but in term of peak."
That's true, but you can look at what is possible, and it is trivial to have cars charge at times when it is most convenient to the grid.
There are a couple of methods:
- Simple time based metering (e.g. economy 7, Economy 10 etc)
- Wholesale based smart metering (e.g. Octopus Agile)
- Smart demand management (cars are great for that, reasonably large load that can easily scale and is generally attached to a decent computer)
The overall energy required is 5kWh*32M ~150GWh/day
Gridwatch suggests that we have a peak production (in the last year) of ~47GW, and we averaged 29GW yesterday...
That's 18GW*24h = 432GWh that we could have produced, nearly three times as much as is needed.
Obviously we can't rely on being able to produce over 45GW continuously, but we are capable of it, without the country exploding
The "duck" curve is also nicely balanced for the majority of that demand being overnight.
and it is trivial to have cars charge at times when it is most convenient to the grid.
What does matter for users is having cars charged when they need it.
EV are a dead end. Batteries are polluting to produce, require rare materials to produce, are hardly recyclable. let's also wait a couple of years to have more experience on how batteries behave when they get older. Also, the infrastructure you need to build to produce, manage, transport and provide the electricity for EV will generate a lot of CO2 (concrete making generates a lot of CO2 for instance).
That's 18GW*24h = 432GWh that we could have produced
If ifs and ands were pots and pans there'd be no work for tinkers' hands.
Anyway, even if whole Europe becomes carbon-neutral in 2030, CO2 in atmosphere will continue to grow because of India and China.
Becoming carbon neutral is a good thing, BUT:
- it won't be a solution to global warming
- There's no point of doing this if you produce a lot more of CO2 to produce new stuff to replace the old one.
My solutions:
- Hydrogen for vehicles (cars, trucks, trains) and for heating: hydrogen is a far better way to store energy than batteries. There are also incoming solutions to store hydrogen easily, even in a household.
- Give a high kick to CO2 storage, because we have urgently to find solutions for CO2 produced outside of Europe, which is by far the majority. In 2020, Europe accounted for 11,2% of the CO2 produced worldwide.
If you want to solve a problem, addressing 10% of it won't work.
a staggering 24.6% of households don’t have access to off street parking
Given that we've got to this point in the history of personal transport without actually having the infrastructure to keep that personal transport from being dumped on the public highway most of the time, I'm not optimistic about solving the charging problem.
From a logical (and environmental) perspective, it's probably easier, cheaper and more effective to get as many cars off the road as possible - eg by providing subsidised and frequent public transport. Might be a problem finding enough bus drivers, mind.
"Fewer cars is a far bigger win, and requires actual leadership."
This years summer holiday period has shown what it's like with more than the usual number od cars on the road. I've seen queues frequently this last month or so where I've never seen queues before. The difficulties and restrictions on people flying abroad means more people staying in the UK who are far more likely to drive to places. In a "normal" year, 100's of 1000's would leave their cars at home or airport car parks for two weeks. The people normally coming into the UK for holidays are far less likely to be driving either to get here or hiring when they get here, but there's far fewer of them this year too. The end result is way more cars on the road this year than normal. I can only guess what it's been like in the SW. I bet the A38 into Cornwall has been fun for many this year :-)
I live about 5 minutes from the A38 (along country lanes where the tourists and to be fair some of the locals can be a nightmare) and most of it is fine.
The real issue is the Tamar bridge (especially when only one lane is open westbound) although the roundabout in Saltash can be entertaining on occasion.
Things do get interesting east of Saltash especially when one of the (numerous) farm vehicles are going from field to field because the road is two lane with the occasional passing lane. That is actually a pretty good section of road to test your rally driving skills.
There is a sign in one of the villages "The A38 doesn't forgive driver error"
Then again, two lanes is luxury compared to country lanes (which right now remind me of the maze in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as they feel like they are closing in as you go along).
The availability of public charging points is something I am not sure of (none in Liskeard that I know of) although I have seen them at the Asda in St. Austell.
I don't have facts and figures to make a robust counter-argument, but I do feel several of the points seem counter-intuitive to some general observations.
1) In my nearby "average town" most residential streets seem to be lined with cars - so households relying on on-street parking.
2) Newer build estates often provide car-ports, which is not the case for many areas of older housing stocks.
3) In some areas separate garage blocks are provided - but do not have an electricity supply; not an insurmountable problem, but seems likely to be a large job that is going to make FTTP look like a walk in the park.
4) Many households have multiple cars, particularly when there are also adult children in the household (something that already aggravates the street-parking situation).
The problems of switching over to EV seem complex. Interpretting data, and applying it meaningfully in any planning is likely to be challenging. Rough calculations based on general data might give some indication of the scale of what is needed, but I feel that there are many devilish details that need to be worked through.
"The obvious and predictable result was when it opened, all the local streets were clogged with parked cars."
And the obvious (to the council) solution, is to make all those streets permit parking only and the council issue free residents parking permits. At least until they suddenly realise they need to charge for "admin" and suddenly it costs £30 per year for a permit and the visitors permits start getting too expensive to bother with. A nice little earner.
The insurmountable problem with garage blocks in older housing estates isn't lack of power, it's the fact that they are too narrow for today's cars. Anything bigger than a Fiesta in mine means exiting out of the hatchback.
I never use mine and most of the others are empty so I'd be all for knocking them down and replacing them with charging spots, although that would probably cause more problems than it solves with people hogging them and fly tipping in them.
The figures I've seen bandied around by pro-EV organisations tend to settle on around 30% of all *car owning* households not having access to off-street parking, so it might be more like 10 million cars needing regular charging from public points just based on the simple "on street vs off street" metric.
You'd also need to account for EV drivers who, for whatever reason, don't have the facility for at-home charging despite falling into the "off-street parking" category (e.g. allocated space in a private car park where the landlord refuses/hasn't yet got around to install charge points in the car park, and where stringing an extension cable out the window to your car is utterly impractical) and so can *never* charge at home, plus those who would *normally* charge at home but need an ad-hoc top up whilst out.
It's still doable, just not as easily doable as it might seem based on a quick glance at the headline figures.
"Add in workplace / station / park and ride slow charging (since you're leaving the car there for several hours anyway) and you've cut the number who need down significantly further."
I suspect it will take a lot more than 9 years to put a charger in every one of the parking spots you listed, let alone all other parking spots. Leaving your car unnecessarily on a charger all day in a car park likely to only have a few chargers will not go down well with other users. At least if you're just out shopping, your charging or car app should alert you to reaching full charge and you can go move it, but not if you're miles away from the Park & Ride car park.
FWIW, I'm disagreeing with you, just pointing out that there are still difficulties to overcome.
It's weird because around my neck of the woods (admittedly very few EVs thanks to the non-existent charging infrastructure) the people with egos to massage seem to do so by ragging a 1.2l Renault Clio with a missing exhaust up and down the main road.
You might want to re-read your original post because it makes you sound like a bit of a prick.
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As demand for fossil fuels falls the governemt will need to replace the tax income from old tech cars with a new tax on electric vehicles. I'm thinking that it will be some software that reports your daily milage back to a central computer, and which then taxes you for each mile that you drive. Obviously it will charge more for driving into cities.
The USA is most certainly NOT, repeat NOT a socialist democratic republic.
The GOP is heading in the direction of becoming a Fascist Party with Death de Dantis at its head.
The UK is far more socialist than the USA. The wailing and gnashing of teeth over in USA land when someone like Bernie Sanders suggests "Medicare for all" can be heard all the way over here.
Goddamnit, my taxes helped pay for that Eurofighter, I DEMAND to be allowed to take it for a quick spin... Oi, stop pointing that SA80 at me, don't you know my taxes helped buy it for you, I DEMAND you hand it over so I can go shoot some tin cans... Ohjesushchristthathurts, I know my taxes helped pay for that ammo, but I didn't ask you to give it to me...
As for the OS data sets, ever since they got onboard with the Open Data scheme some years back, they've been providing steadily more and more of their data for free use by anyone, to the point now where the majority of the broadly useful data is open and the stuff you still have to pay for is in the minority.
Yes but the problem with the Ordnance survey charging for their data was that the main customer was the UK government and so the overhead of billing themselves and arguing with themselves over licensing terms cost more than collecting the data
Then you had UK companies, especially startups, who couldn't afford to use the data to develop new ideas. So they were beaten in the market by US companies who just bought satellite imagery to make their own inferior maps.
It's more like Oxford University Press charging British users for using British spelling.
"Yes but the problem with the Ordnance survey charging for their data was that the main customer was the UK government and so the overhead of billing themselves and arguing with themselves over licensing terms cost more than collecting the data"
The same could, I'm sure, be said about any number of other government departments which provide services to other government departments, some of which existed only to provide services to said departments and not also to the general public/companies/A.N.Other paying customers who could be used to generate an additional revenue stream.
Not that this necessarily makes it OK for one arm of government to charge another arm for an internally provided service, but it's certainly not something the OS is uniquely guilty of. And the problem isn't then that the OS charges for access to all of its data, it's just that it charges other arms of the government for access to it - earning additional revenue for the country by selling the data to outside parties, whilst making it freely available to other arms of HMG, doesn't seem like a bad idea.
"Then you had UK companies, especially startups, who couldn't afford to use the data to develop new ideas. So they were beaten in the market by US companies who just bought satellite imagery to make their own inferior maps."
I'm missing something here - either the UK company has enough resources to be able to afford the same lower quality data as their US competitors ended up using, or they can't even afford that and need the data to be available for free, in which case what stops their competitors taking advantage of free access to the data as well?
A US startup inventing a product that needs route mapping eg. Uber, Mapquest etc can get all the data for free. They then get bought by a Google/Microsoft/etc who can afford to just do their own UK mapping.
A British startup is caught between the expense and complex licensing terms of OS data or Postal Address File so never gets the chance to make it to market.
It's the same way that free local phone calls in the USA launched the bulletin board and then consumer internet there while the UK had expensive per/minute billing and restricted set of expensive BT approved slow modems.
Is this like the shutdown of analogue radio broadcasts in the UK in 2015? Then 2022. Then 2032. Then not at all.
The petrochemical cars and vans deadline was carefully chosen so that the current crop of political leaders will all have happily retired to their mistresses, mansions and lobbying contracts by then, comfortable in the knowledge that the next generation of politicians will get the blame for kicking the ball down the road.
After all, who are they expecting to buy the fruits of the new Scottish Cambo field?
More precisely it's in the n+1 parliament.
You don't have to anything now or even if you win again, in the one after that it's either the other lot or you have such a slum majority the bill will fail and you can blame the opposition
Climate change is the never a problem deadline. A 75year old promises to his 70year old voter base to do something about it in 30years time
"For instance, how are we going to be able to manage the needs of potential EV owners who need to charge their car at home but live on the top floor of a block of flats, or planning car charging points in a terraced street where parking spaces are already in short supply?"
Wait until self driving cars are capable of driving themselves in the dead of night to local charging centers like big supermarket car parks or purpose built sites.
"My car said it just wanted to buy cigarettes, but afterwards I remembered it didn't smoke"...
Seriously, this would be a nightmare: Imagine all cars of a big city (London, New York) trying to reach some fairly distant charging center, and then coming back in the morning. Because of course real estate prices won't allow those centers to be downtown, they will rather have to be built in some quite distant industrial area. Think of the road congestion and noise during all night! It would also be the birth of a new excuse for being late at work: "I was ready to go, but my car wasn't back yet."
(Didn't downvote you.)
>Imagine all cars of a big city (London, New York) trying to reach some fairly distant charging center, and then coming back in the morning
The cars will be linked by mesh network and a common data standard allowing them to communicate and cooperate.
British cars will form an orderly queue which will be completely gridlocked by the two cars at the front sending "after you", "no after you", "no I insist", "no I couldn't possibly"
American cars will simply form a deathrace to get their first, ramming other vehicles out of the way until all cars built by US makers will resemble robot tanks built by a 14year olds in GameWorkshop
London is pretty easy for a couple of reasons. London cars reportedly average 7mph (daytime) so are generally not doing high mileage. Consequently they won't need charging very frequently. When they do need charging there are all those bus lanes that are available from 7PM to 7AM. They would make great linear charging stations for autonomous cars. A hypothetical 7AM end of charge congestion could be avoided by staggering the times the chargers go out of service.
I'd expect an app developer to fix in a couple of weeks. Why on earth Ordinance survey would be involved, other than to divert some green cash their way, I don't know.
Take a typical services by geography app, e.g. Park for Night (overnight wild parking site tracker):
https://park4night.com/
It's trivial to make a similar app to track electric points, its practically the same templates!
But also how is ethanol rollout coming along?
Thailand rolled out E20 a long long time ago, its rolled out E85 a decade ago, all cars now support E20 or higher, (E20=20% ethanol, E85% =85% ethanol made from palm sugar or cassava). It's probably only an ECU upgrade to your current cars, if those are also sold in Asia or Brazil or Germany or Netherlands, they will already be capable of running on ethanol. The delivery infrastructure is already there. If you can roll out a new brand of petrol, you already have the tanks and you can roll E20 and E85 trivially.
Ethanol is ~ carbon neutral. It gives off the carbon it absorbed when it was grown.
And yes, I am aware of Norway and its PR attack against ethanol..... "Ethanol causes deforestation"... says a country entirely dependant on oil and gas sales it takes from the North Sea.
Ethanol is an easy fix for a lot of the CO2 production, it doesn't require a massive change to the vehicle fleet, and it has zero issues.
"Why on earth Ordinance survey would be involved..."
OS has recently cottoned on to the fact that it has competitors and that it also has a shed-load of data that it needs to exploit pretty quickly before it becomes obsolete and/or too expensive to maintain. Hence this, the recent OS "Hackathon" and the Pokemon-style game as reported by el Reg recently.
"OS has recently cottoned on to the fact that it has competitors and that it also has a shed-load of data that it needs to exploit pretty quickly before it becomes obsolete and/or too expensive to maintain."
It'd be a very sad day for the UK if that were allowed to happen - when you compare the quality of publically available mapping in this country to pretty much anywhere else on the planet, you realise how good the OS are at what they do.
Not that it's likely to happen mind, even if J.Public stops buying OS maps in favour of just relying on the free alternatives (which aren't *always* genuine alternatives mind - if I want to go for more than a quick 5 minute walk in the countryside, it'll be an OS map that helps me plan the route, nothing else comes close), they'll still get plenty of business from local and national government through the ongoing maintenance of the hyper-detailed maps the general public rarely see but which are used extensively for planning, administration and other background tasks.
more importantly how is the Hydrogen infrastructure coming along.
The hydrogen fuel cell cars are available, but without the refuel stations its all moot
Basically there are currently 11 hydrogen stations in the UK. Five of these are located within the M25, with others in the Southeast and Wiltshire. There are also two hydrogen refuelling stations for cars in Scotland, and none in Northern Ireland. (Compared to 91 in Japan and 92 in Germany)
Hydrogen is not going to replace petrol for private motorists. Bus and logistics fleet operators could use it, just like they use natural gas at present, but the storage costs would make it impractical for the smaller filling stations that you’d need to broaden its reach, and the methods that make the fuel more practical to transport and store (methanol) aren’t CO2 free.
If you’re running a large fleet of heavy vehicles out of a depot with your own fuel storage on-site, then Hydrogen is worth a serious look - especially if you’ve got any way to locate electrical generation on site too, as electrolysis is the cheapest and cleanest way to make H2.
But if you’re an average motorist, it’s never going to get to you. There’s just too much of an infrastructure cost for something that has an uncertain future as a mainstream fuel.
Some time ago (perhaps 5 years - not sure anymore, things are getting hazy) around the time when the idea of using hydrogen as a fuel became a popular topic, the Sainsbury's filling station in Hendon installed a Hydrogen recharging station. I seem to remember it having blast walls to separate it from the petrol pumps.
Last year I called in to acquire some bonus sector points and noticed that the entire hydrogen bit had gone, blast walls too.
The only place that ever made ethanol viable as a fuel was Brazil, and only then because they could burn the sugar cane after they had extracted sugar from it and fermented it to ethanol, which meant they could produce more energy from the crop than was invested to produce it (not counting the energy from the sun, obviously).
Most places outside of the tropics have to use some other crop, such as sorghum or maize, which require more energy invested than you get out of them, including the energy from the sun. That makes them net CO2 emitters. Every other crop than sugar cane is a net CO2 emitter when used to make biofuel.
Aside from that, we don't have room to grow food and also grow crops for fuel, even if we massively reduce our energy consumption. Brazil didn't either, which is why they abandoned ethanol production for a long time.
Currently, most ethanol for fuel is produced in the tropics, in huge sugar cane and palm oil plantations that have been hacked out of pristine tropical forest. More forest has been cleared to feed "environmentally friendly" fuel than anything else in the last thirty years. This isn't "Norwegian propaganda", it's verifiable fact.
"https://park4night.com/
It's trivial to make a similar app to track electric points, its practically the same templates!"
Yes, any shit app dev can make a trivial geo-location app that doesn't take geographic features into account, just like the one you linked.
A GOOD app dev would be able to point me at my nearest overnight parking or charging point and take into account that my car can neither fly nor sail over the large, navigable by warships and cargo ships river that runs by my house and find the nearest one by road rather than "as the crow flies". Most large cities and towns are built around rivers, some even have railway lines running through them and the crossing, bridges, tunnels are not always close togther. That means a LOT of people get very pissed off at these geolocation apps that tell them the nearest $whatever is only half a mile away if they can fly, but might be 5 or more miles away by road.
Likewise, as others with similar issues have pointed out here too, certain coastal features and shapes can make as-the-crow-flies distances quite short while it might be a 30, 40, 50 or more mile drive to the app recommended location.
Try looking for the nearest branch of some shop while in Stranraer on an app. There's every chance it will recommend one in Belfast rather than Glasgow.
Creating a GOOD geolocation app is NOT trivial.
The logistics of providing charging points for all these cars and the time needed to charge them will be a bit of a nightmare, and also generating the amount of electricity needed to meet the near future demand. JCB are doing a lot of work on hydrogen which looks pretty much ready for prime-time. Go on YouTube and search Harry's Farm interview with JCB.
The contract is awarded to Capita* to implement a national UK EV charging system at a cost to taxpayers of £1.3 billion. Come 2033 there are still no EV charging points except for some at Capita's headquarters in Reading. Capita offer to remedy the situation at a cost to the taxpayer of another £2 billion.
* or insert parasitical service corporation of your choice.
I am trying to get a picture in my head that makes sense.
The govuk through the OS offices wants some free solutions to a question it doesn't understand, once there is a solution/s, it will select a random publican to implement one or more of the solutions at a cost of billions.
Then abandon it a while later.
Well, it's after all what this is all about: An opportunity to make lots of money without doing any actual work. Spouses, family members, friends, they all get a chance for a cushy job doing nothing but just occasionally showing up. You can't believe how many well-paid committees, councils, boards, and other think tanks you need to do nothing fast.
As for those famous charging points, it's obviously the market which will decide who gets them first, who second, and who not at all (because it wouldn't be profitable). And I think we all know who is who.
A lot of cars spend a lot of time parked. That seems fine until you realise it means one charging unit per car and a great deal of unused infrastructure. Suppose my car is parked at my home for 12 hours each night. In a garage I can hook up some wires and leave it. But as for public charging points... If the charge time on most days is say 2 hours, then that's 10 hours when it is occupying a charging unit doing absolutely nothing. Of course I could get up at 1am and move it (where?) to allow somebody else access.
Many residential streets don't have room for cars, let alone charging infrastructure.
One solution might be to have lots of charging at workplaces, but somehow I can't see that happening except in the few places with dedicated employee parking taking a tasty government subsidy.
The other problem is cars hogging the points. We were in the deepest Yorkshire Dales where charging points are few and far between. However there are 2 in the dales center at Aysgarth falls.
Not that anyone could use them, because they had cars parked in them, and the owners had just gone off for a nice long walk.
Basically its a bit like Germans and towels. Arrive early, plug in and bugger off
THen you need multiple leads per charging point.
A single charging point can sit in the middle of 6 parking bays, and has 6 leads to plug into cars.
Each lead is supplied on a round-robin basis (until each car is full) to keep the overall current draw reasonable.
If one car gets there first it gets 100% of the current, until another one is plugged in. Simples!
That only really works if the cars are parked for longer than 6x the charging time. Fine if you at work for 8hrs, but would you want to rely on a supermarket charging point if you didn't know whether charging to full would take 1/2hr or 3 hrs?
(Although, if you were to drive up, plug your car in, then lock some sort of cap over the other charging plugs before starting to shop, you could guarantee that when you came out your car would be fully charged. Just a thought...)
"One solution might be to have lots of charging at workplaces, but somehow I can't see that happening except in the few places with dedicated employee parking taking a tasty government subsidy."
In some places, (maybe all?), those parking spots at work are a cost to the employer. Specifically, in some city centres, up to a defined radius outwards, there is a surcharge on employers parking spaces specifically to fund local transport systems. See the Nottingham Workplace Parking Levy for an example.
It is not clear at all. Hydrogen isn't any better than petrol, since around 99% of the stuff is produced cheaply from a high temperature endothermic reaction between methane and steam (invariably heated with fossil fuels):
CH4 + H2O → CO + 3 H2
and then a bit more hydrogen is squeezed out using an exothermic
CO + H2O → CO2 + H2
This whole process currently accounts for 6% of global natural gas use, and 2% of coal consumption, pumping out 830 million tonnes of annual CO2 emissions.
One minor problem with hydrogen is what happens when it escapes (*); some will simply leave the earth's atmosphere, some will interact with the ozone layer, and some will combine with hydroxl molecules which would otherwise have reduced the amount of methane.
(*) mass manufacturing pipes, tanks, etc which wont leak hydrogen is not cheap
The answer to the charging problem is:
Do not ban ice cars
1 for ~90% of the population
a. Buses - lots of buses that are cheap. Really cheap and really frequent.
b. Ban ice cars from town and city centres
c. If you (still) need a car and have no place to park it, rent it.
2 for ~9% of the population who live in the countryside
a. Cars.
b. Park and ride if you want to go into a town / city and drive an ice car
3 for the ~1% who have houses in the town/city and country
I feel deep sympathy for you
but you and your friends will make a lot of money from the articles you will write complaining about the drawbacks in the papers etc.
The actual answer to the charging problem is:
Ban ICE cars, no matter what
Let the market sort out the ensuing chaos, while keeping an eye open for opportunities to make a quick buck.
(Obviously this will cause lots of problems to all sorts of people, but you can't make omelet without breaking other peoples' eggs...)
The main problem is money, or rather, a government that really doesn't want to spend the amount of money it is going to take to solve all this. They would much rather do nothing and allow "the market" to come up with a solution, which probably means that it will end up a dog's breakfast and many people will still be driving petrol and diesel cars well into the next decade.
What we need are large areas with big entrances and exits into which cars can drive and exit, and have charging points where they can get charged up, or pumped up I suppose you could say. We could put these "pumps" in a row and even have two rows if there was room. We would need these places to be located all over the country, and along all the motorways, they could even have buildings on site where drivers could go in and use the loo, they could even sell things in the buildings like newspapers and snacks etc. Like a shop or something. What do I win?
You missed the whole issue with EVs: That, unlike petrol cars which can refill in a couple minutes, they take ages to reload their batteries.
Without this problem there wouldn't be anything wrong with EVs, even with their reduced ranges: You'd just need to stop more frequently to refill, which might be mildly annoying if it takes 1-2 minutes each time, but gets prohibitive if it takes an hour (remember, it's about going from empty back to full, not just topping up a couple %).
For EV charging in towns and cities we could pay people to come round the streets and parking areas charging cars from a portable power pack of some kind - preferably one on wheels they could manoevre along the pavement (sidewalk) rather than yet another vehicle.
Sort of modern day lamp lighters; they could even form a guild or something.
Of course this would increase the cost of charging an EV, but then this is all about saving the planet, not saving money.
It's a nice idea, but the portable power pack would have to weigh about the same as the electric vehicle battery that it was charging. It could not have a higher energy density because vehicle batteries are about the best there are.
An electric car battery weighs 400-500 Kg. I suppose it could half-charge a car, or maybe the car is already at half capacity, but that is still only 4 cars per ton of trolley. Pity any pedestrians who get squashed by it.
I doubt that the UK's EV problem is any different from anyone else's EV problem. I have a PHEV, and it's great to use around home, but when I'm away I'm basically running the ICE all the time, because there aren't enough public charging points, and over half of the times I can't use the point I find - it's broken, it can't connect, the phone app fails with an unhelpful message, the phone app fails because there's no Internet connectivity, the charging point is occupied by non-EVs, the charging point is inside the town's traffic-restricted area, the charging point is in a closed-off road, the charging point does not actually exist - I've observed all of those and more. Even when everything is working properly, power from a public charging point is so overpriced that it costs barely less, per mile, than methane or LPG would.
Of course, even if everything worked like a charm (and, eventually, I'm sure it will), there still wouldn't be anywhere close to a tenth of the charging points that would be required for everyone to run EVs. And if there were, there wouldn't be enough power generation to supply them. And if there was, delivering the power would be tricky - a spot with an equivalent capacity of a gas station would take, what, ten megawatts at peak? More? It's not exactly easy wiring.
Mind you, it's not like H2 looks any better. Generating enough H2 to run every car would require at least as much power generation as running EVs, probably more. Unless you generate it from CH4, as it's done now, in which case you are not really solving anything as you're still putting CO2 in the air by the gigatonne. But even assuming that you somehow get the power, then you have to store the stuff, and/or run it in big pipes, at extremely high pressures. The highly volatile stuff that slowly eats steel. I honestly don't know whether it would be harder to deliver 10 MW to every gas station, or to maintain large and safe H2 storage tanks inside them.
Since the core problem is power generation anyway, has someone run the numbers on synthesizing hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2? I mean, if I have to dream that we can double power generation while still keeping it green, I might as well dream that we can triple it, and then run something off it that's inefficient but at least bypasses the other logistics issues.
"the phone app fails with an unhelpful message, the phone app fails because there's no Internet connectivity"
I fail to understand the fucketty fuck why any outfit running charge points uses anything else than a simple contactless debit/credit card for the primary means of payment.
How many petrol pumps expect normal public users to have an app? How many restrict use to subscribers? How many need a special RFID card?
Sure, have preferential rates for subscribers but surely Every. Single. Charger should be primarily contactless payment or free vend. End of.
"I fail to understand the fucketty fuck why any outfit running charge points uses anything else than a simple contactless debit/credit card for the primary means of payment."
It's simples. All the charging network operators are focusing entirely on market valuation and floatation and M&A and not on providing a service anyone wants to use. Apps allow customer acquisitions and the MBAs know that numbers of customers downloading your app is a great metric for the prospectus.
Since the core problem is power generation anyway, has someone run the numbers on synthesizing hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2? I mean, if I have to dream that we can double power generation while still keeping it green, I might as well dream that we can triple it, and then run something off it that's inefficient but at least bypasses the other logistics issues.
I remember reading something about the US navy doing something like this to generate jet fuel.
Apart from the above observations re the how/where of EV charging, I reckon that the One Big Thing that has been overlooked is that the local oiks/pikeys/teal leaves will have a field day - abundant supplies of "free" copper conveniently laced twixt post and car just for the taking. Don't even need to break in to a substation: Simples!
Can't think how to mitigate that risk.. Brighter sparks (ho ho) might suggest inductive charging via say coils in the parking spot but I wouldn't like to walk near one of those with a pacemaker fitted.
(there, popped my cherry..)
That's an interesting map. But they desperately need the detail and expertise of the OS rather than Google to be properly useful. Of the 5 nearest to me charging points, One is the local fire station, one is a Siemens factory and one is over the river in a different town that;s about a 10 mile drive rather than the 0.5miles shown on the map.
Interestingly, Siemens, who are quite big in the electrical world, are only noted as having a single charge point. Probably all they could get a grant for. It's not like a company dealing with electrical systems would want anyone using electric cars and charging them while at work now, is it?
by going along to 'Fully Charged Live' at Farnborough (hants) on the 3rf/4th/5th September
https://fullycharged.show/events/fully-charged-live-2021/
There are sessions on many of the issues that have been raised here.
I'm not associated with the show but will be going.
If the battery packs for vehicles were standardized and interchangeable (like AA batteries), then a refuelling station become places where you swap out your battery pack. The station can automatically recharge the power packs using dedicated chargers and equipment, making them available for a future customer. The recharging station stocks enough spare packs to meet its "typical" demand (like a petrol station only has a defined quantity of petrol)
As a customer you may have a shiny new car and end up with an end-of-life battery on your first recharge - but that can be adjusted for by not buying a battery with the car. Batteries become a separately tradeable commodity, and you pay for the KwH the battery contains when you install it, even at the refuelling station.
This retains the use of refuelling stations as dedicated centres for fill up, removes the "I can't charge my car at home because I live in a high rise", reduces recharge times to a few mins (if battery packs things are well designed for this idea). Sure - you can still trickle charge at home if you have the space/capability.
Doesn't this fix many of the "practical" issues?
It fixes some practical issues, but causes new ones. Chiefly, standardizing EV batteries is really hard, if not impossible. They are big, which means that they can't be placed just anywhere. Their size, shape, and ease of access are severely constrained by the vehicle frame, by other fittings, by weight distribution, by safety - and probably more things that I'm not aware of.
I suspect that the only practical way to design a system like you describe would be to, basically, have only one basic EV design, or no more than a handful (e.g. city car, family, sports, heavy), where different models within the same category would differ by little more than the paint job. Technically doable, but I don't think it can be sold socially and/or politically.
On top of that, battery size/shape/location would still be a moving target, even if you forced every manufacturer to adhere to standards, because of the rapid pace of evolution in this field. An infrastructure like you describe would need to be an investment that lasts decades at least, but nobody can be sure that EV batteries won't run on some new tech ten years from now, and if they do, nobody can be sure that the new tech won't apply different design constraints.
Consider this: we cannot manage this trick for cellphones. We could not manage this trick for cellphones even back in the days where cellphone batteries used to be removable; every model still had its own battery, which wouldn't fit any other phone. And cars have the same problems, and then some.
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