New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law All new cars and vans bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035, according to the latest legal mandate updated this week. The date for all new petrol and diesel cars to be banned was originally set for 2030. However, in September, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pushed this date back to 2035. The government says this is giving …
Norway grid != UK grid... Norway has mostly hydroelectric power, the UK has a mixture of natural gas, coal (yes, still) nuclear, wind, and a smattering of others. (Our hydroelectric capabilities are mainly aimed at balancing out temporary blips in the mis-match between generation and consumption.)
I am fully in favour of us going to EVs in the UK, but that *will* result in higher domestic power bills, because we will be increasing the amount of natural gas (and possibly coal) that we burn, and that is likely to push up wholesale gas prices. II'd suggest this will result in "normal" electric tariffs having peak and off-peak prices, rather than that being limited to specific tariffs (octopus flux, economy 7 (does that still exist?) etc.)
Nuclear?
With all of our existing nuclear due to be shutdown by 2028, will need some good luck to have Hinckley Point B, Bradwell B and Sizewell C up and running at full capacity by 2035; these being expected to generate circa 18% of the UKs current electricity demand….
Looks like the numbers are not going to add up…
We import quite a bit of electricity. France will make up the shortfall with their extensive nuclear capability. Assuming, of course, our renewable program grinds to a halt. A lot of people have trouble with the notion that we're in a transition. It will take many years to fully switch over to EVs and get renewables into shape. That's why the targets are a long way in the future.
France will make up the shortfall
France imported electricity this summer because it had to shut down 50% of the atomic plants due to high river temperatures. And if 100% of all new vehicles in France have to be EVs also then no, France will not make up for the shortfall. Please ask another country. Actually, you can spare that time: there is not enough electric capacity in Europe for 100% electric vehicles.
But anyway, since there aren't enough raw materials in the world to manufacture the needed batteries, this is only a rhetoric subject : it will not happen, physical laws have precedence over human laws.
> But anyway, since there aren't enough raw materials in the world to manufacture the needed batteries, this is only a rhetoric subject : it will not happen, physical laws have precedence over human laws.
Right, but of course by the time everyone realises this, all the ICE car and engine companies will have gone bust.
Only the rich will be able to drive their own cars
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Or a Cuba style scenario where people keep old cars limping in use - fairly easy so long as replacement parts available for popular ICE cars *, someone eventually could have a car of Theseus
* Not always a given from motor manufacturers themselves, but if there's money in it likely someone will manufacture them.
Except Cuba doesn't have road salt, which dissolves UK cars over time and repairing a unibody that's corroded isn't easy or cheap, add in newer cars with components like boron steel that is often glued rather than welded (yes there are adhesives that strong and they have to be used in defined ways.....however that wont stop "old Steve" down the back street garage telling someone's parents that its "utter crap, just a fancy name for steel and ive not met a steel I cant weld yet, the old oil cooled stick welder gets the job done or ill just dig out the old gas welding kit"
"My current petrol car cost £800."
For that price it must be so old that it's carbon footprint must be awful. Maybe Jeremy Clarkson can use it for his stunts.
Also, nobody wants to buy the pair of boxers I purchased 10 years ago and I put on eBay last month (I photoshopped the holes, though). Now I have to go and buy new ones but the local council declined my request for subsidies. It's all the Tories' fault again, I tell you.
My Golf diesel cost £8K at 6yo with 80K miles on the clock and I expect it to carry on returning 60mpg until it retires after I put another 100K or 6 years on the clock.
Running costs excluding fuel and insurance are circa £700pa (all mtce, tyres, and MOTs).
Perhaps the 10mm feed to my house and my four neighbours' houses will have been upgraded by the time I'm in the market for a replacement car and I can consider an EV.
An EV charges at less than an electric shower 7.2kWh vs 8.5.
At 12,000 Miles a year it costs £9 a week on fuel. 26 quid cheaper than a diesel.
Service cost was £350. with 200 of that to replace a pothole damaged tire.
The feed to your house is probably capped at 60A but you can upgrade to 80 if you fear you will be showering and charging at the same time.
You wont be unless you are showering between 12:30 and 4:30. The charger will back off first.
The absence of first gear however is the best feature as it allows you leave BMWs et al in the wake of your fat corsa (US nova).
One of my work colleagues believed that i would be unbearably smug with electric preconditioning. Dear reader I was.
Yes, but an electric shower runs for a few minutes, possibly tens of minutes max, whereas an EV charger can run for hours on end. Its a totally different sort of load so far as the electrical grid is concerned.
Don't expect the economic advantage to last, the loss of fuel duty on petrol/diesel will have to be made up somehow.
The basic problem really is that governments have grown used to fuel duty as a revenue source, and a way of demonstrating their fitness to rule. Admittedly this boils down to "We are great leaders because we won't crap on you more than we are doing already", but the effect is the same.
The problem is how you replace fuel duty when electric cars can be recharged from household or other electrical sources and where some of these sources can be solar, hydro or other non-grid electricity. Pretty much every solution that tries to put a levy on car charging comes up against "User has control of hardware and can/will circumvent control systems".
Road pricing is another control freak wet dream: it requires that you monitor where vehicles go in order to charge them at those times, and will also allow for automatic issuing of speeding tickets and so on. Once again, the problem is that the end user has control of the hardware and a huge incentive to circumvent the charging system. Various activist groups would also find such a system to be a gold mine for their uses, since spoofing the system into fining drivers unjustly rapidly creates a groundswell of discontent against the government; this is always the hardest part of any campaign of political action (even terrorism) but if you can get your intended target to behave unjustly towards your target audience, you've got it made in publicity terms.
That a government would give up most road pricing and simply use Zero Emission Vehicles as a public good will likely have occurred to nobody.
The problem is how you replace fuel duty when electric cars can be recharged from household or other electrical sources and where some of these sources can be solar, hydro or other non-grid electricity. Pretty much every solution that tries to put a levy on car charging comes up against "User has control of hardware and can/will circumvent control systems".
Exactly. An ICE car getting, say, 50MPG, will use 240 gallons, about 1000 litres, for 12k miles. That's around £750 in fuel duty and 20% VAT, or £14/week. Add that to your electricity costs and any advantage vanishes.
Holy shit! You guys only have 60A electric service as standard?
I upgraded from 100A to 200A over a decade ago when I put in a heat pump, and that's because my house was probably last upgraded in the 1960s and I decided 100A wasn't quite enough. 200A is the standard for new houses in the US, I've seen 400A service in some big houses.
I've got a 40A EVSE because I decided 80A was more than I really needed, but it wouldn't have been a problem to do 80A just to charge a car.
Yes but we run most of our appliances on double the voltage so half the amperage.
So 60amps would be 120amps in the USA
UK houses are smaller and many are heated by gas so the electric demand until now has been far lower (albeit a 60amp BS88 Fuse will run for quite lengthy periods at 80+amps)
Biggest issue is substation sizing and street cabling sizes to the extent the local dno (read power company engineering division) now wont upgrade the supply without an application form, a justification of the need for an increase in supply amperage and then them doing a detailed study on current local demand, anticipated future local demand and any particular local constraints....transformer capacity often being a big one
| For that price it must be so old that it's carbon footprint must be awful. Maybe Jeremy Clarkson can use it for his stunts.
Not at all, the embodied carbon in its manufacture has been well and truly amortised. All that's left is the variable cost of using it. If its not used a great deal then the incremental emissions will take a very long time before they match the emissions of manufacturing a replacement.
I'm in exactly the same position. 17 year old petrol car. Can use it in all the ULEZ zones so it must be "clean". Gives me decent fuel consumption because I drive sensibly rather than as if the riders of the apocalypse were after me. Only do a couple of thousand miles a year with it.
If that car is old then depends how you look at carbon footprint might not be that bad
Car manufacture uses a lot of energy (Carbon footprint equivalent) to produce each car.
Lets call this X
If that car is scrapped after5 years and a new car purchased and cycle repeated, then in 10 years 2X of carbon footprint from manufacture alone,
Conversely, the old (lets assume at least 10 years old if only cost £800) car will only be X Carbon over 10 years
.. Obviously there is yearly mileage Carbon costs, but if the old car is a small engine and not heavily used then overall costs might not be that bad.
I drive a light 1litre car (well, 998cc IIRC), and plan is to drive it until its uneconomic to maintain.
Do not do that many miles (live in rural area with non existent bus services locally so either need a car or have to pay huge amounts of cash on taxi fares to do basics of life such as shopping for more tahn a few items etc. (that cannot be done by cycle))
It is already over 5 years old, and yearly C footprint on mileage is low (notably lower than average mileage & I drive in a fuel efficient style).
.. If I kept it 50 years (wont last that long obv), it would still probably have chalked up nowhere near the C footprint of an average mileage SUV in 5 years.
That's perhaps a narrow world view, the rest of the world isn't going to be banning motors any time soon. The companies aren't going to go bust, only your subsidiaries if any. If there's no more manufacturing in the U.K. there will be importation from companies in countries glad to have the business.
> But anyway, since there aren't enough raw materials in the world to manufacture the needed batteries, this is only a rhetoric subject : it will not happen, physical laws have precedence over human laws.
Yeah sure. Sodium batteries are a dead end. Not enough Sodium in the oceans. LOL.
> physical laws have precedence over human laws.
You seem to know neither.
Almost none, actually.
There's no shortfall.
"Reserves" is a technical term meaning "There's already a mine there and we know how much it'll cost to extract this much"
It's not a hard limit, most existing mines have more than their reserves, they're just not sure enough about how much to put it on their balance sheets and risk the wrath of Wall St.
Ooops... fixable.
Also note:
"Sodium-ion batteries are a promising technology for electric vehicles, the energy grid and other applications because they are made from abundant materials that are energy dense, nonflammable and operate well in colder temperatures."
[...]
"One solution is to modify the battery chemistry to introduce a strategic disorder to the particles just before the flawed transition phase, according to Huang."
Nobody wrote "Sodium is non flammable", pay attention people. We've all been at school. Especially engineers in the Sodium-ion battery business.
The batteries though are made with non-flammable, non aqueous electrolytes. It's an active field of academic and industrial research. Just google it up, FCS!
Really? I hear this said by people who don’t back it up with anything other than an ad-hoc reckon. Quite apart from anything else it’s likely batteries made from really abundant materials will become more widely used. There’s already a small city car available in China that uses a sodium-ion battery
Hah! No it won't, the interconnects are already regularly used at 110% rated capacity.
Even if France do bring all their plants back online, they can't export any more to the UK because there simply aren't the wires.
The internal Scotland to England interconnects are being upgraded to handle their wind exports, but the UK is really, really going to suffer due to the political short-sightedness of the last 30 years.
Punting it down the line has become more and more stupid, the current lot are the most idiotic and cruel of all.
Nearly always import. I check most days.
European interconnects nearly always 100% towards UK with a small proportion re-exported to Ireland (~0.5GW). This will be French nuclear.
Norway interconnect nearly always 100% towards UK. Very occasionally reverses because they buy our wind power when its very cheap so that they can stockpile their hydro and sell to us later. Very canny.
"We import quite a bit of electricity. France will make up the shortfall ..."
But France also has to make the changeover. They will need the capacity that they currently export to us. We can't rely on France for electricity any more than we can rely on Russia for gas - even if for different reasons.
> As a quick example, Sizewell B expected life to 2035 could be extended to 2055 ...
Okay Sizewell B is the only one of the five currently operating nuclear power station's not listed as being due for closure by/in 2028, however, it is listed as being due for closure 2035. Depending on whether you want to mislead or not, I suggest it should not be included in the (initial) list of power stations operating in and beyond 2035.
Yes, EDF are expecting it to be granted a 20 year extension; I also anticipate given the situation, attempts will be made to extend the operating lives of the other currently operating reactors. These however, are distractions from the real issue - the UK isn’t in a situation to turn off its fossil fuel power stations and switch to nuclear, within the next 20 years….
Ah yes, the common cry of the renewables zealot.
While the headline is undoubtedly true, it's "somewhat misleading" - as are the other claims like "no fossil fuel used for a whole day", "zero coal used for ..." and the like. In summer, when demand is low, and many plants go into scheduled maintenance shutdowns, it's not hard for renewables to do the bulk of supply.
Come winter and it's a different matter. As I type this, Gridwatch puts CCGT at 44%, and wind at just 15% - it's really not that windy at the moment and won't be for a few days. Nuclear is humming along at 11%. And demand isn't even very high at just 32GW. And coal is running at 0.24GW, so around 0.75%.
We have a very very VERY long way to go before adding an EV to the grid doesn't mean turning up the taps on a fossil fuel plant for most of the year.
Absolutely. Any additional demand added to the system as of today is demand being fed by Gas, Imports or Coal; in that order.
Wind and Nuke are "already running" to make money, if they can run, and so unless one or the other has been paid to switch off, adding demand means one of the above.
Concerning Imports; anyone thinking they are "clean" is sorely mistaken. It just happens to be whatever is on the other end of the line. Interconnectors are useful, but I do hate false claims made about their green credentials. It is just as easily that coal in Poland being switching up to meet your demand as it is a Danish windmill.
EVs aren't a bad idea to get us unhooked from haemorraging cash offshore but generation must also be sorted out for that that to be a reality.
Quite. I consider myself a renewable zealot myself; but one cannot ignore economic and scientific realities. To do so is inviting bad decisions. When it comes to the continued functioning of the UK (or other western economies for that matter), making good decisions is worth investing the time in. And even if one does not buy the climate argument, the economic argument for not buying our energy abroad when we can make it at home is a VERY strong one.
I am a huge fan of the late David Mackay's book Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air, which is freely downloadable. Anyone with a modicum of interest in the subject should read it before blurting off their opinions! The intro calls out why books written by respected economists come from renewable zealots and oil hawks, and why do they come to such different conclusions? Can you use analysis to refine those arguments?
His analysis then goes through each element of the supply and demand chains of the various fuel sources to do just that.
The book is a few years old now but it's central premises still hold up. One has to have a plan, and that plan has to be funded. Whether it's reverse completely and burn coal or to invest massively in Nuclear - and all the pitfalls that can have. It doesn't actually matter which plan is picked; provided that plan adds up. It should go without saying, but like most things, a mix of technologies and solutions is the best way to de-risk our gross dependency on burning stuff. One size does not fit all.
The worst of all worlds occurs where the plan doesn't add up. If we say NO to everything (good 'ole NIMBYism) then the resulting plan will most assuredly not add up. There are some rather prominent examples of that in UK politics of late, not least of which was Priti Vacant joining the "Just Stop Pylons" campaign.
Norway's population is 1/10th that of the UK, has a well-funded grid and government services, and is mostly powered by hydro.
To say that the situation is very different in the UK is understating it massively.
In other news, OVO just changed my "storage heating" price to actually be more than my "off-peak" price, because they presumably literally don't want me to use my storage heating overnight. I don't anyway, but it's the first time I've ever seen a storage heating price go above standard off-peak pricing.
It would, hence, literally be cheaper for me to plug my storage heating into my normal circuits, or run an electric fire, than use it for its intended purpose - part of which is from the original 70's design of struggling to cope with peak demand on the UK electrical network and pushing people to do energy-heavy things overnight.
If they are discouraging that, why you think that several million cars (and an order of magnitude more population) switching to electric cars in the UK won't have a detrimental effect, I can't fathom. Hell, in 2022/2023 we literally had warnings that the grid may have to move to a rolling-blackout system if the load grew much more in a cold winter.
Whole grid capacity is 80gw/hour. Current use right now is 40.35gw/hour. Overnight (from 11pm to 6am) looks like it's about 28gw/hour. So there's 7 hours worth of 12gw available (to make night match day). That's 12 million hours (or 300 million miles) worth of home charging available every night. Not everyone will need to charge every night, and there's already tech out there that balances when people charge. If there was enough generation to run flat out then your overnight capacity jumps up to 52gw/hour, which is 1300 million miles of charging capacity.
That's based on current numbers, not what it's going to look like in 11 years. According to https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/summary we need about 700 million miles of capacity per day to cover every car out there.
In the chargers at work;
- It's charged during the day
- It's paid for by the user (we used to have 2 free chargers but we have 6 paid for chargers now). We also put in points for whole car park but we do need to upgrade the local substation on the business park.
- The users generally keep the car connected for most of the day. There is a WhatsApp group so people know when points are free. We have ~400 cars on site although most are currently petrol/diesel or hybrids.
No matter how you frame it, my electricity bill is up by 20%, so I am only using a little more power a day than before.
If I need to plug in the car all the time if it only charges when power is available, that’s fine…. But I can’t see a point where EVs will cause a problem on the grid in terms of consumer power draw. Peak power draw has always been at meal time.
The issue isn't so much one of generation as it is of how much demand goes down a cable at the same time. Yes, generation is changing and needs new kit to enable, but consider what happens to the last leg onto your street?
A few houses with a few EV's the distribution networks can take. Load up 80% of houses on the street with chargers, and all of a sudden, the rated capability of those cables and transformers will be smashed. No DNO in the land had to plan for the situation where lots of people draw large currents for multiple hours at the same time.
The only counterbalance is that not everyone needs a 400 mile charge every day. My own "low" use is such that I need two 400 mile charges once a year, plus maybe a drip feed of 10 miles a week the rest of the time. An average user is higher than me, but reality is that no street is likely to need to cover a 400 mile charge every day times every property.
A/C as employed in the sector. I was ratings engineer for a few years so I could quote the relevant tech specs and international standards if you like. IEC60287 is a good place to start.
"So 400 miles or so?
Which is how much average person drives in a month"
It's actually a little over 600. But I suppose it depends on what you mean by average. Mostly, when we say "average" we mean the "Mean". Mode or Median may be what you meant since people like me who are high mileage drivers are probably skewing the "Mean" average upwards. But then there's a lot of cars out there, especially 2nd cars, which do far less than 400 or 600 miles per month. My recently retired friend isn't using anywhere near a full tank or petrol per month nowadays, more like half a tank :-)
Which is how much average person drives in a month
Averages are meaningless, you need to look at totals.
In 2021, road transport in the UK consumed 38 MToE (megatons of oil equivalent) of petrol/diesel, or 420GWh. Slightly less than half was by light vehicles, HGVs used slightly more than half. That's around 200 GWh of energy for cars & vans. Even if you assume EVs are 3x as efficient as ICE vehicles, that's almost 70GWh of additional electricity you need to find, each year, which means more than doubling grid output. Then add it again for HGVs. Then add in heat pumps.
If my car is totally flat (which, obviously, it'd never be) then it'd need 51kWh. I normally charge at about 50% so 25kWh at -say- the 2.5kW that the "granny" charger can supply would need ca. 10 hours. Off a 7kW wall box, make that ca. 3.5 hours. I'd add a few hours longer at a couple of hundred watts every month or so, to balance the batteries.
I don't know if your ovens are particularly crap over there, but American ovens are 5000W, and yes, that's at 240V, we have that here for high power appliances.
Nobody is running a car battery to zero and charging it to full every day, a typical day is maybe 5-20 kWh depending on weather and how much you drive.
Well, the sort of fan oven that I cook my turkey in has various elements. The one around the fan is 1400W, and the grill has 1x 1400W + 1x 800W. But in normal "fan oven" mode, it uses only the one around the fan, and to stay at 170C, it's less than 50% duty cycle at steady-state.
I expect that your 5kW "American Oven" only uses that much if cooking in several compartments at once, and even then, not for a high duty cycle
You could use one of those big old MayTag ovens to park an electric car in.
My double oven can do about 3KW with both ovens. My hob is induction tech from the 1990s so much lower power than those old spiral ring elements from the 1950s, or those bizarre halogen things from the 1970s. (and cleaner and tidier than a gas one from the 19th century).
I've decided I'm going to self power my oven in future. A Peltier effect device in the oven will supply all the power it needs forever.
Quite rare. But there's always an exception. The taxi driver down our street charges to 100% at home every night and sometimes tops up at a Rapid mid afternoon in his KIA Soul.
I look at the longest trip I might make on the spur of the moment (visiting grandkids) which is a 120 mile round trip so I'll not let my car (KIA eNIRO) drop below 150 mile range before it gets a four hour cheap overnight charge that adds another 110 miles(ish) range. One charge usually lasts a week for me though.
If you pay through the nose and pay twice the Diesel cost.
Otherwise it is 7.3kWh at one third the cost of diesel.
Comparison is between a 2010 Hyundai i30 diesel and a Renault Zoe.
I have only paid diesel rate for 22kWh (three phase 7.3 kW) six times since getting a home charger.
they are also running out, in terms of what we can get out of the ground
No they aren't. This is a standard comment from someone who doesn't know the difference between resources and reserves. For a humorous explanation of why we won't be running out of oil or gas for a long time, see The No Breakfast Fallacy (many will recognise the author as a previous contributor of El Reg articles).
The TL;DR version. We have known reserves for something in the order of 30 years (give or take, just rough order of magnitude, and it tends to go up/down in cycles). Reserves are stuff that we both know are there, and know how to get out and turn into something on the market, and probably have a reasonable idea of what it'll cost to do that. All the time we have individual elements of those reserves (i.e oil or gas fields) running out, but also we have companies exploring for more, and doing the work to convert a resource (something in the ground that we may or may not know about) into a reserve (we know it's there, we know how to get it out, and we know what it'll cost to get it out).
i used to work at the national grid (as was) in Penwortham back in the 90s. The demand vs max load vs availability was quite close most of the time. Infrastructure has not changed even if generation sites have.
there is a reason power stations are all over the place. The grid would not be able to handle the demand even if availability matched.
You are confusing “People [like myself] Can” with “People Must”. Is there a *law* that people will charge at home from 11pm-6am, and how is this enforced? For starters, people don’t spread out their charging overnight, and don’t even have capability to do so even if they wanted. They plug in…..when they get home. Or maybe (if you give them some Economy 7 incentive) at some particular time. But thereafter, the car charges at the domestic current available.
For example, if you set an 11pm-6am night tariff, then those people who have upgraded their domestic supply to 350kW because they have a Tesla fastcharge…..their charger turns on at 11pm sharp, sinks 350kW for 20minutes until 11.20, and then shuts off again. That’s if they were empty. But if they were 90% full, they still charge at full-rate…for 2 minutes, starting at 11pm to 11:02pm. There’s 50GW of Tesla fastcharge starting at 11:00:00 pm exactly. What’s your plan to stop this?
Remember, not “what clever new signalling server could be installed to negotiate and spread the charging between different regions, makes of car, charger etc”. Literally, what technical network element is in place today? If you need some new gizmo like a Smart Meter, then who is responsible to buy it, what does it cost, when is it available in the next 6 years, which companies have been given a constract to make it, what standards organisation is in charge of the spec and design, who has trained an army of installers to install it, who polices it?
This isn’t a Plan, this is a science fiction story.
"Oh the humanity"
It's unfortunate that the big old dirigible was filled with hydrogen. It would have been much better if it had been filled with something less flammable, like petrol for example.
Had the doped fabric caught fire with petrol inside the envelope then the liquid would have washed over everybody on the the ground instead of venting upwards like the H gas did. And there would have been no disastrous event.
If we do not produce enough electricity to charge EVs directly how do we produce enough green H2 to run the same cars? Each kWh of energy produced by a fuel cell using H2 needs about 3-4 kWh of electricity to produce, compress/cool, and ship the H2 to a fuel station.
Also in the news:
Oil can be imported. Green H2 can be imported too. Ask Namibia, Canada, Australia, Morocco, Chile.
Green H2 can be generated on dedicated floating off shore wind farm with >70% load factors. No need for cable to link to the ground station. Ask Engie.
Green H2 does not have to be produced at the very moment you fill your tank (unlike the power that goes into your battery). It does not need a power grid. Ask Uniper.
Green H2 can be produced by people themselves, or by communities, or by the gas station. Ask Total Energies.
"Oh now I understand why people talk about H2 for decarbonation. It does not only address GHG from power generation. It goes beyond that. Thanks AC! I love you.
More questions?
Yes, Why in gods name would you build an off-shore wind farm to generate electricity, then instead of running a cable to the shore where we could consume electricity, you use it to generate H2 to be stored (difficult) and shipped to a plant on the mainland for storage until distribution. And then, once you get it on the mainland, why would you drive it around the country in tankers to put in cars, rather than just burning the H2 in existing CCGT plants to generate electricity?
I have other questions but lets start there shall we?
I'm all for H2 as grid storage generated from excess electricity - great idea, once we have enough generation to make that excess, which we currently do not. But burning it in cars, or home boilers or whatever other shit idea the government and their fuel company donors come up next is just stupid.
Why in gods name can't you ask yourself why companies with thousands of engineers and decision makers are working on it if it's so stupid? Are you smarter than the whole lot? Or could it be that your reasoning might be over simplistic?
ANSWERS
- Electricity prices fluctuate a lot (because it has a naught shelf life, thanks to Maxwell and 'C', as everyone knows). H2 much less so.
- So we don't care about technical yields. Because if you map the cost/prices of both commodities on the same chart, there are periods when one conversion is profitable and other periods when the reverse conversion becomes profitable too. The real business case is driven by the financial yield. That's what people like you can't apparently wrap their head around.
- Floating wind farms have a much better load factor. That's because you can install them where the wind blows continuously, instead of being tied to the coast for water depth reasons. They can be very high (i.e. the kind of height where you get 15MW from a single wind turbine. On the downside they can be quite far from the coast-line. Therefore, an HVDC cable is not practical. But then we can generate H2 there, instead of generating the same amount of H2 on shore with wind farms having a much lower load factor.
- You don't have to care about the large cable to the ground station. Boats will harvest H2 containers periodically. Production is unattended anyway.
- Decentralised (off shore) H2 production means that there is no single point of failure. The farm can still operate in case of outage (cable or otherwise).
- The price of the generated power is not going to be affected by over production when all the other coastal or onshore wind farms of the area will flood the grid with too much power and spot prices will drop. Nor will it contribute to that price drop either.
Also this scientific paper makes some additional points.
"Why in gods name can't you ask yourself why companies with thousands of engineers and decision makers are working on it if it's so stupid?"
Because its funded by fossil fuel producers who know that it would buy them another 15-30 years of producing blue hydrogen and car manufacturers who think that the idea of building cars that need their most expensive components replaced every few years due to hydrogen embrittlement is a good one. To anyone who says b.bb.but they will find a fix for that somehow gets past the fact that hydrogen is the smallest element in the universe and that it gets through everything, then I say to them we will most likely have cold fusion or burned the planet to a crisp well before that point
>>> Because its funded by fossil fuel producers who know that it would buy them another 15-30 years of producing blue hydrogen
Pray, can you elaborate on the process to produce blue hydrogen from floating offshore wind power?
>>> find a fix for that somehow gets past the fact that hydrogen is the smallest element in the universe and that it gets through everything
Man, stop thinking of molecules as little spheres escaping through little tunnels. You're not in grade 3 anymore. Leakage estimation is about fluid dynamics. With a lot of different models depending on pressure, laminar or turbulent flow and a lot of concepts you don't have any idea about such as kinetic diameter.
Or if you stick to your pinball model, then try to understand that the size of the H2 molecule is only relevant for "tunnels" (cracks) larger than that of the H2 molecule but not larger than the size of the CH4 molecule. Said otherwise, the proportion of cracks too narrow for CH4 to leak out earlier but now just large enough for H2 to leak out is insignificant. CH4 and H2 molecule kinetic diameters are in a 3/2 proportion (CH4 is only 50% larger than H2 when in a gaseous phase under normal conditions). So maybe H2 is small but vitreous or crystalline lattices are still structured in a much tighter arrangements. You must be confusing with electrons in semiconductors or maybe quantum mechanics tunnel effect.
"Pray, can you elaborate on the process to produce blue hydrogen from floating offshore wind power?"
Yes, its called the bigger picture, without a hint of irony they lobby govt to make sure some hydrogen is made that way to guarantee that hydrogen has a market. They then produce vast quantities of blue and grey stuff to undercut it, or to where transport of green hydrogen is more of an issue and/or just use creative accounting to make people buy it thinking it was produced from renewable sources.
Stop demolishing straw men. Presuming you're the same AC that kicked this off with "H2 cars are the future, why bother with EV", you're now banging on about molecule sizes. Lets take the facts:
* transporting and storing hydrogen is well known to be harder than (say) bunker oil. Yes, there are solutions, but at a cost.
* I see now you're suggesting deepwater, floating wind-farms generating H2 far off-shore, in particularly windy locations. Possibly the most hostile environment for industry on the planet, and yet your idea of reducing a single point of failure is to not run a cable to the plant, in favour of generating and storing massive amounts of hydrogen in tanks for offloading to tankers. I can't see how a risk assessment of this project would conclude that an electricity cable (already run in the hundred to every existing offshore, shallow water windfarm) is a problem compared to your proposed floating bomb.
* "Green H2 does not have to be produced at the very moment you fill your tank" - no, it doesn't, and again as a grid storage technology I think it's a great idea. Green H2 is a way of storing excess electricity, and viewed that way it's excellent. I'm arguing against burning it in cars, which was your original suggestion.
* "Green H2 can be produced by people themselves, or by communities, or by the gas station"
Now you're just being silly. Green H2 is produced from electricity. Can communities run their own solar panels? Yes, they already do, and they put the electririty straight in their car batteries. I do this myself, it's passive and uses relatively simple hardware. The idea that anyone should be cracking water to H2 at immense pressures and temperatures instead, incurring a 20% conversion cost (roughly, as I recall from last I estimated this) is just ridiculous.
H2 is good. H2 in cars is not - it doesn't solve any problems we have now, which is basically lack of charging infrastructure and (more long term) lack of generation capacity. H2 currently has *no* charging infrastructure and is generated from electricity that could otherwise be used directly. It's not a solution, and you haven't made any argument that says it is.
> "I see now you're suggesting deepwater, floating wind-farms generating H2 far off-shore"
I'm not "suggesting" anything, personally. I'm reporting industry trends. Why don't you call these multi billion Euro companies and tell them their ideas won't work. Surely, they will be interested.
> ""Green H2 can be produced by people themselves, or by communities, or by the gas station""
Surely it can't happen. Can it
> "H2 currently has *no* charging infrastructure"
Did you mean in the UK. Or in Europe? Germany has nearly 100 filling stations.
Aah, so you are the same pigheaded German AC from the nukes vs mr. Burns thread.
Of course, you desperately want a renewable hydrogen solution after you closed all your nukes on a knee-jerk and are now burning megatonnes of lignite along with US and Qatari LNG after Gazprom turned off the taps.
Unfortunately you have been sold a lie. Of course, multi billion euro companies will tell you it can work when they know it won't, for as long as you are willing to hand them subsidies it's great for them, and when it doesn't work, coal oil and gas are your only options, they have you (quite literally) over a barrel.
Shell used to have one H2 pump at its Cobham service station on the M25, just east of the M3 junction. But i never saw anyone use it, it looked horrendously expensive, and afaik it is no longer in service. How much "green hydrogen" does Germany actually use in vehicles from those 100 filling stations, I wonder? I would guess that more H2 leaks out of them than is actually used in a vehicle. But it doesn't matter when the objective is simply a bit of greenwashing.
Another clue that H2 haters are often nuke-bros. The same folks who are selling you nukes as the panacea against global warning can't stand green H2 despite its potential to be the cornerstone of the decarbonisation of the economy. Just because Green H2 ruins their key argument of low carbon baseload in power generation. No better way to implicitly admit you don't give a damn about global warming and just using it to push your atomic lunacy.
And no, I'm not German. But probably, the UK could learn a thing or two from Germany.
As an aside, you could have come across the idea that FCEVs make a lot of sense for heavy vehicles, like busses, if you don't want to carry one tonne of battery around. We do have busses in the UK, don't we?
Still nothing to support your "burn it in cars" suggestion I see.
H2 in heavy commercial vehicles, maybe. You could have also suggesting burning it in hugely energy intensive things like smelters, I would have bought that. But still not cars.
> Germany has nearly 100 filling stations.
100? Wow, that's just amazing. The EU has 400,000 fast DC EV chargers.
Oh, and your community electrolyser is an R&D project put in by an energy and gas network. Which is fine, but there's no evidence it's commercially viable, and even the article you linked to says it will produce hydrogen "from surplus electricity" - which presumably they'll have by over-provisioning the village with turbines. My point, the point, is that the EU energy mix does not yet have surplus green electricity.
Run cars on electricity. Build enough clean generation to do this without fossil fuels. Then build more capacity to convert the excess to H2 for storage. That's the order things need to be done. H2 in cars is a distraction.
You two are boring.
You claimed all electrolysers needed platinum. So, I proved you wrong with the AEM technology.
Then you claimed. "Oh but that's only in the lab". And I proved you wrong again.
And then you said "But they don't have any live". And I proved you wrong again.
And then you said "Oh but they don't have any live above 1MW". And I showed you the most recent example. Now it's not "commercially viable"
You also claimed that there was no H2 filling infrastructure. And I showed you 100 filling stations in Germany.
They you said there's no use for H2 on vehicles. And I gave you the exampled of heavy vehicles, which is well admitted by reasonable people.
> "My point, the point, is that the EU energy mix does not yet have surplus green electricity."
Yeah. that's why we have negative prices once in a while, I suppose. LOL.
I remind you the article is ABOUT 2035. And so was my prediction. What kind of magic divination power do two anonymous dudes, mostly wrong on the present situation, think they are blessed with to claim that there is no room for Green H2 cars in 12 years time. This is just laughable.
Why don't you talk to BMW who have a iX5 on the roads today, and more projects in their R&D and explain them "their mistake".
"The pilot fleet of the BMW iX5 Hydrogen is not intended for sale." - from bmw.co.uk. It's another research project.
I have two EV cars. No ICEs. I can drive across Europe (did so two weeks ago) and go from 10-80% in 18mins, which - after two hours driving - is fine by me. You're telling me that H2 is better because I can do it in 5 minutes? That's nice, but I'm weighing that up against being able to charge at home - in summer, for free from my PV panels - where I do a measured 80% of my charging, I would lose that unless I put an electrolyser in my shed or my community. In addition I wouldn't be allowed in the channel tunnel (no LPG, certainly no H2), and physics says I'd be at least 20% less energy efficient, because there's about a 20% cost in cracking water to H2 - presumably there are more losses in the fuel cell converting back to electricity, I don't know anything about that. But if you're making a green argument, efficiency matters.
You've shown a lot of research projects, and some fairly specialised uses. And I've conceded that for HGVs the argument is stronger. But your original post specifically said "cars", and you stil haven't convinced me of this. Nor are you going to convince the rest of the market either unless you can demonstrate a generational improvement over EVs - a good solution that has wide support and is already well established on the market. In twelve years time? They will be even better established.
This has been fun, but I'm going to find something else to do now.
You can't predict today how cheap Green H2 will be in 2035. Your physics yield is not the main predictor of its future popularity. It can very well be that Green H2 is so abundant that the physics yield penalty is cancelled by the drop of price.
You can already buy your own electrolyser for storage purposes in Australia. They have been on the market for at least 2 years. That's also an option complementing a domestic solar panels installation.
Thank you, that's another interesting link - you have many, I'll give you that. I'm pleased because it confirms my 20% estimate and also completes the other part of the equation, losses from fuel cell back to electricity, which we can now estimate at 25% (they state total efficiency is "above 50%").
Green hydrogen is manufactured from green electricity, so is by definition going to be more expensive per kW. And even if we imagine that we somehow achieved a huge excess of green electricity, and therefore a huge amount of Green H2? I still don't see the argument that converting the worlds car fleet to fuel cells is the best approach. I'd burn it in CCGT, myself. Here's a fun paper on this (which reminds of the the late-great David McKay's book - I'm a sucker for a good "what if"). Key takeaway: we're a long way from a having a glut.
There's something else you don't seem to understand. Without conversion of the excess electricity generation, renewables cannot carry on growing. What's the point for any renewable investor to invest into the last percentage of capacity if this investment is going to be useful only 10 days per year and sink the prices the rest of the year?
Therefore, think of Green H2 as a byproduct of renewables. But we are blessed because H2 has a lot of potential uses. Countries betting on the Green H2 economy and having a low pop density, lots of sun and wind, like Australia, Morocco,Namibia or Chile are the perfect setting for over production of renewable and generation of Green H2. That will hit the market at some point. There's no way GREY H2 will be able to compete against this low cost GREEN H2. So it WILL be displaced (transport innovation permitting - another roadblock to dynamite).
IT MIGHT VERY WELL END UP CHEAPER THAN THE AVERAGE ELECTRICITY PRICE OF THE IMPORTING COUNTRIES (per kWh equiv). It's still going to be synthesised and sold by producers because THEIR PRICE of utility grade renewable electricity will be much lower than that of the importing country (like <10$ / MWh in Morocco or Portugal and 70$ / MWh in the UK).
So your reasoning about physics yields is irrelevant. Consumers won't care. All they will see is the price.
Mr AC, since you know so much about economics, supply chains and electrochemical engineering, can you tell us how much Platinum is required to build a 500MW green-hydrogen electrolyser? And how much that might cost in our reactive, finite-supply market?
Hint: each pair of electrodes allows you to convert 1 Volt, give or take. So to convert a 1000V supply, you need 1000 electrolytic cells in series. Then divide 500MW by your stack voltage to get the current needed.. (In this case, 500,000 Amps) That gives you a rough idea of the surface-area required of each electrode in the stack
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AEM (Anion Exchange Membrane) electrolysers don't need any rare metal catalyst. Enapter has a whole portfolio of them available today. So still zero.
Just admit you were proven wrong about low-cost catalysts electrolysers being only in the labs.
Nexus 1000 is being deployed for siz energieplus in Braunschweig Germany. Plenty more smaller AEM are live.
P.S. Nobody cares what you believe of claim to believe. Walkers are shaping the world. Not talkers.
I agree with this, but the time line may be short, because of the lack of investment to build the H2 infrastructure.
With solar panels and rain, one could possibly makes his own H2 which could be used for cars, trucks, heating, cooking... No need of batteries whose lifetime is unknown, no need to extract lithium, and a total autonomy regarding energy.
> H2 is "generated" using "the grid"; so that won't alleviate the pressure.
Utter total nonsense. Read the rest of the thread. Where do you come from?
You can't have you nuclear power station. But you can have your own solar panel and electrolyser. Especially if you run a wind farm and anticipate some excess generation. Why can't you check your simplistic ideas before commenting?
The charger itself should have some built-in signalling, via the Internet to communicate with your energy billing company to select the cheapest option given the car's reported state of charge when it's plugged in and the user's configured requirement.
It's pretty easy to ask users to set up "I want my car charged to >90% by 6am every day, do it the cheapest way"
Trouble is of course that nobody is even publishing the necessary data for a charger to figure it out - Octopus might be, but nobody else does.
I think you're being a little economical with the truth with saying you can upgrade your domestic supply to 350Kw, what exactly would be the point in doing so?
As you point out you could fully charge 21 100kwh cars with that supply from 11pm-6am.
Why would you want this in a domestic environment?
> For example, if you set an 11pm-6am night tariff, then those people who have upgraded their domestic supply to 350kW because they have a Tesla fastcharge…..their charger turns on at 11pm sharp, sinks 350kW for 20minutes until 11.20, and then shuts off again.
See icon. My keyboard is completely ruined.
Nobody will have a 350kW fast charger at home, you plonker. They will be lucky to charge at 7kW at home. (That's still 30A off their 230V supply, so their car may have to pause charging while they take a shower..)
It would be stupid and expensive to fast charge at home, even if you had your own 11kV substation in your garage. It wrecks the battery and borks the grid, the only reason to fast charge is if you have conked out at a motorway service station and need to be on the road again urgently.
But even with 2kW-7kW trickle charging, the overnight load is going to be a problem if everyone is forced to drive EVs, because diversity goes out of the window as everyone uses 2-7kW at once. More if everyone has heat pumps struggling overnight to collect enough heat from the air for their morning shower
Well, it's not really a valid comparison. Norway has a touch under 5.5 million inhabitants, of which 83% live in urban areas mostly situated in the south of the country. They are a quite rich nation, so their infrastructure is generally more modern, and the majority of their power is generated from hydro electricity,
They have a mostly electricity based power system with some district heating, with a high capacity grid that has been modernised regularly to cope with the fact that most of the generation is done away from the centres of population.
They are in a much better place than the UK to allow for the switch to EVs, and a smaller overall number of vehicles overall to replace. And they have a taxation break system that means that even Tesla can compete with ICE cars on a financial basis.
I'm interested in seeing whether there are many electric snowmobiles, or whether these are remaining petrol powered. I'm also interested in whether electric chain saws are as prevalent as EVs.
Seems to be 20mph everywhere now, not just wales. Not that anyone seems to have slowed down. Around here people have spraypainted over all the 20mph signs, and people seem to be speeding faster than ever.
I suspect the real reason for the 20mph zones is energy efficiency for EVs. EVs are at their most efficient at 20mph, whereas ICEs are well outside their optimum efficiency band
That one is new on me!
The council here are accusing the public of vandalising the signs.. You are saying they did it themselves?
In a statement, a spokesperson for Southampton City Council said: “We are appalled by the senseless vandalism to the 20mph signs, which will of course result in a cost for their replacement.
A lot of councils are putting up 20MPH signs before they've passed the required laws, so they're spray-painted to mask them. As soon as the legislation is passed, they just have to clean the paint off.
That makes no sense. The "legislation" is to make 20MPH the *UNSIGNED* default. The current unsigned default is 30MPH, so if you want a 20MPH zone you simply put up a 20MPH signage (after the neccessary orders). Spray-painting 20MPH signs would be what you would do *AFTER* the legislation comes in, as then they would be erroneously superfluous.
What you would do is erect obscured *30*MPH signs in the areas that are currently unsigned default 30, and would become unsigned default 20 after the legislation is passed, and then remove the paint afterwards to remove them from the new unsigned default 20 zone, and make them signed *30*.
Yep, all of this.
I read *UNSIGNED* as "National Speed Limit", because different class of vehicles have different limits, although *currently* it's 30MPH across all classes for vehicles in built-up areas (apart from Wales, where it's 20MPH).
See here - https://www.gov.uk/speed-limits
it's 30MPH across all classes for vehicles in built-up areas
Being pedantic, no it isn't. There are quite a few classes of vehicle which are not listed on that page. For example, the speed limit for an agricultural vehicle is 25mph. There are some (e.g. JCB Fastrack) which can do a lot more (I believe the Fastrack can do 40mph), but they would be speeding - the higher speed is actually more a case of allowing them to do 25 without the engine revving it's nuts off, but some people use the higher gear and still rev the nuts off.
OK, I'll get my coat.
The "legislation" is to make 20MPH the *UNSIGNED* default.
Not quite, if the roads have street lights they are 30 by default under national legislation. If the local council wants to make them 20 in parts of the council area they have to put up signs for 20, which takes a few weeks. If they put the signs up before passing the local legislation to declare a 20MPH zone it is potentially misleading, but if they pass the legislation first they run the risk of legal challenges for any drivers booked for doing 30 in what has been made a 20 zone apparently by stealth.
The solution is to put up painted-over 20MPH signs over a period of weeks, and then on the day the local legislation enters force the signs can all be quickly cleaned off.
I agree it can seem illogical, but take it up with Gloucestershire councils if you disagree, it's what they've told us.
Wait until they post emission data for ICEs at 20mph. We all know it's massively inefficient but it'll be yet another nail in the coffin as UK ICEs are designed to operate comfortably in 4th gear (5th for taxi drivers) at 30mph.
This is gonna sound super left-wing / conspiracy, but poor people are being priced out, and legislated out of car ownership. Meanwhile public transport is not a drop in replacement.
The "20s Plenty" brigade are mostly people who are sick of people barrelling along at 40-50 through the existing 30 zone, and think that reducing the limit will magically prevent it.
It doesn't, because the problem is the almost total lack of traffic enforcement, not the limit.
The council put a little lay-by at the edge of our village for a traffic cop, and it's crazy how many cars flash their lights to "warn" the speeders about it on the rare days when there's someone actually there.
Yes this was one of my points that I was being downvoted to oblivion for.. Maybe people think i'm pro-speeding, i'm not.
They needed to enforce the 30 limits. But by lowering the limit to 20, they are reducing the possibility that it can ever be enforced.
They need more speed cameras, but they can't put them in because the punishment (3 points on your licence, banned from driving at 12) is excessive for those caught doing 25 in a 20
If they could adjust it so the points were proportional to the overspeed, and a fine say 1% of the value of the car to get the knobheads in the porsches, i'd be all for that.
They could easily put automatic enforcement of speed limits into the cars based on the sat-nav road database, but that will be highly unpopular and a vote loser, so they will get labour to do it.
The only enforcement that works is highway engineering, not humans. Build the road infrastructure so that it is impossible to drive faster than 20mph.
A section from a paper I wrote last year:
When demarcating an area for a 20mph limit, Highways and Police want to see an area
which is clearly defined, and has a small number of entry/exit roads. This makes it
easier for clear "gateway" signage making it clear to motorists and pedestians that
they are in the restricted area. So, for instance, #### ######## has three access roads:
####### Road, ######## Avenue, and ######## Avenue. That would make it easy for
clear signage at the three access roads. Similarly, ###### #### has two access roads,
each end of ###### ####, and ###### with each end of ###### Road. ###### is even
better with a single access.
The Police regularly remind people that they rarely have the resources to enforce
signed 20mph signs, and they prefer speed restrictions to be implemented with
road engineering works. With this in mind, a suitable area would be where the roads
already make it difficult to exceed 20mph, either because of narrowness, bends, or
already existing road humps and/or chicanes. #### ######## is an area where the
topology already contributes to restricting speed, with a lot of corners and
junctions to navigate through. Similarly, it is difficult to get past a brisk
walking pace through ###### Park.
You you ever tried taking a 90 degree corner into a side street at 70mph? The Porche driver attempting that would be continuing along the A### at 65mph in a pile of scrap metal. Additionally, as stated in the above extract, you don't have 20mph zones immediately off 70mph roads, as that is not "a suitable area [...] where the roads already make it difficult to exceed 20mph"
Driving around south Cambridge, I've got used to the 20mph limit, for example in Addenbrookes and between the hospital and Cherry Hinton. I'm quite happy to stay at 20 with the auto limiter set on the car though I didn't like it at first.
I think without a limiter then a person would spend too much time looking down at their speed.
There are those that don't want to do 20 and will harass those that do, but they are thankfully few.
I don't mind 20mph limits in highly urban areas like central London where there are a great many hazards to contend with, it really reduces the stress of navigating around and you tend to just roll along at a constant speed gliding through all the traffic signals so your fuel consumption may actually be better. As opposed to the flat out away from red light, slam brakes on at next red light that most drivers tend to adopt.
But for the main road through a small town/village, that is *also* well-built with good wide carriageways and well-separated pavements I completely and utterly fail to understand the need. That's just Nanny State-ism. And, yes, I fully understand the death/injury relationship with speed of contact.
The fact is that there is next to no active enforcement so speed limits are seen as irrelevant by a very large section of the population. Where there is enforcement its automated by cameras and the badly behaved simply slow down for the 50 yards or so that they are in the detection zone then hoof it again. Same thing with "calming" measures. If by calming you mean slam on brakes from 40mph, smash the car into the hump bottoming out the suspension, then gun it back up to 40.
impossible to drive faster than 20mph.
That just increases sales of Chelsea tractors that can swallow speed bumps at 30, even though smaller cars have to bounce over them gingerly at 15, likely damaging their tyre sidewalls. The alternative of full-width road humps causes thump-thump vibrations from heavier vehicles that are known to damage houses. Ironic that the same people who oppose fracking because it causes "earthquakes" of 0.5 local magnitude are happy to support the installation of traffic obstacles which cause vibrations of 4x that.
The better solution is always to put radars associated with anti-tank missiles for shooting at offenders.
With modern technology, said radars would also be able to fire automatically at any SUV, just to be on the safe side and enhance the carbon footprint of the country.
"Evs are charged at night."
If that were universally, or even significantly, true, then the entire thrust of this article - namely the need to do something re public charging provisions - would seem to be rather pointless, no? I mean, if most/all EVs really are being trickle charged overnight (which implies home or perhaps workplace charging for those doing shift work at an EV-friendly employer), then why would there be anywhere near as much of a need to provide other means of charging them? As EV proponents also like to point out, the number of people who actually need to be able to drive hundreds of miles a day is so small as to be irrelevant as an argument against EVs in general - on a case by case basis, SOME drivers might genuinely be hindered by the present maximum range available in an EV, and would therefore need to be able to recharge, preferably ASAP, whilst away from the home, but if EV proponents are correct then there aren't nearly enough people like that to justify the need for so much additional charging infrastructure.
And yet, here we are, with an article stating quite clearly that there IS a lack of charging infrastructure, and that something DOES need to be done about it in order to facilitate the growing demand from EV users. Which is entirely at odds with your claim that EVs are trickle charged overnight. You're correct in implying that many of them ARE charged like this, but it's not valid to go from there to a position of "there's not going to be a problem with the grid", because we're not talking about merely having more EVs trickle charging overnight, we're talking about having more of them fast-charging whilst en route from A to B...
What about the white vans? Currently diesel, there'll be a clamour to change these to electric; how will those be trickle charged overnight?
Lorries? How will they do an 8 hour driving shift with electric charging?
And how will you charge all the cars parked in the street? Lots of cables to trip over.
oh they most certainly do. Parcel companies use them. We know thia because the 4 public charging points in our village have 4 vans almoat permanently plugged in. Because there are very few cottages that have parking outside the house, most of our village park in two little car parks. EV simply wouldnt work unless there was a massive charging station (larger than a motorway services) put in. These would be public points so would not be cheap at all.
While the article focuses on motorway charging, the real need is safe and secure local charging in places where people don't have a driveway, and every night you are hoping to get a spot in the same postcode you reside.
You can't hope to move people to EVs if their only charging option is expensive service stations or the need to spend 2 hours at Sainsbury's so you can go to work tomorrow.
Poorer people often have to travel longer distances to work because they can't afford to move closer. For example, if you are on unemployment benefit in the UK, you are expected to apply for work up to a 90 minute commute away or you could be sanctioned.
but they ARE generally charged at night, we already know this from those that own them, this is all about averages, the average motorist drove 6-8000 miles a year in the UK pre-covid and thanks to home and hybrid working its now lower. Contrary to popular belief 2/3rds of the UK population has access to off-street parking and for those that dont we still have 10 years for infrastructure to catch up
At an average of 3 miles per kWh We dont really need that much to top up, according to the National Grids calculations it will only take us back to the early 2000s in terms of overall energy use.
The national grid only controls the 132kV and higher distribution network. Everything from that voltage downwards is managed by the local distribution networks. The issue is at the point where the voltage finally reaches 240V.
The hybrid working has only affected the basic desk job. All the other jobs that don't revolve around answering the odd email, putting a graph in a spreadsheet or watching homes under the hammer still require someone to travel from home to a place of work. And we still expect the post and amazon packages to be delivered.
> but they ARE generally charged at night, we already know this from those that own them
Are you sure there's no selection bias there? Those with EVs now are still relatively early-adopters (even if things have matured past what we'd usually mean by that) and people tend not to spend thousands on a car that won't meet their needs.
So, there's a strong possibility that the majority of those who've bought an EV are those who can charge at home (and therefore probably will charge overnight, assuming they're not a shift worker).
The article and planning is about encompassing the needs of those who don't fit into that mould - you can't reliably predict what percentage of the userbase that'll be by looking at the current EV userbase
"> but they ARE generally charged at night, we already know this from those that own them
Are you sure there's no selection bias there? Those with EVs now are still relatively early-adopters (even if things have matured past what we'd usually mean by that) and people tend not to spend thousands on a car that won't meet their needs."
Yeah I'm fairly sure, don't get me wrong there will be some, but not as much as you seem to think. Put it another way, at night when you are home from work and when electricity is cheaper, why would you opt not to charge it then and instead say no, sod this for a game of soldiers I'm going to wait until the middle of a journey when its less convenient and costs significantly more to charge up instead?
Contrary to popular belief 2/3rds of the UK population has access to off-street parking
Whether it's true or not, it's a very misleading statistic.
Would that include (e.g.) development where "off street parking" is a wild-west where (just picking numbers for illustration) the first 10 to get home from work get a space while the other 15 are on the street ? In that example, 25 people would be listed as having off-road parking, but only 10 can actually charge off-street.
And then there's the assumption that the off-street parking could realistically have charging facilities added - either at all, or without needing to win the lottery. Example, I own a property in a development of 9 - and it's one of only 2 where the parking is adjacent to the property. 7 of them would need long cable runs (some longer than others), crossing someone else's property and/or needing civils (i.e digging up and wrecking the car park*) - certainly not in the cost bracket that an "average" earner could contemplate these days.
There's a similar problem where there's a block of flats/apartments with perhaps hundreds of properties. All of these could be classed as having off-street parking, but even where each resident has an allocated space, there is the practical problem of actually getting supplied to each parking space. In reality, it would come down to the management company putting in "semi public" chargers (i.e someone other than the flat/apartment owner is putting the chargers in and operating them) - which immediately puts the charge cost up as they'll add a hefty mark up for the trouble.
And then there's the situation where a property does have off street parking - for (say) one car. Again, listed as having off-street parking, but doesn't have off-street charging for the 2 (or 3 or 4 where it's a family) cars based there.
Now, when you can come back with a statistic of what proportion of cars fit the description of "can reasonably be charged off street" then I'd be interested. But I strongly suspect that no such statistic exists.
* If one of the other owners proposed to dig up the car park then I'd be strongly opposed to it given that the repaired bit (or rather, the inevitable joins) would never have the same lifespan as the current undisturbed tarmac surface - hence exposing me to additional future costs when it's decided the whole thing needs sorting out and they want to split the cost 9 ways. One person isn't going to offer to resurface the whole thing, and you'd never get all 7 to agree to doing their charger installs at the same time so the resurfacing cost was shared - at present not all residents even own a car so why would they pay to install a charger ?
This is actually one of the most short sighted, blinkered statements I've ever read. Very much along the lines of 'your doing it wrong', 'you didn't plan your journey' or 'every EV owner charges overnight on a home charger'. No they don't, and they never all will. The current infrastructure is woeful, and an installed charger does not mean a) it's actually connected to the grid, b) it's actually working or c) can provide anywhere near the charge it's capable of. A 250kW feed to 10 chargers, if they're all in use, means a max of 25kW per charging point, which is pretty slow (2 hours for a decent amount of electrons), which is unacceptable to almost everyone if they have to use the cripplingly expensive public charger network, and you will have literal riots because of it.
Now just imagine that 10-20m EV's plugin overnight on a 'trickle charge' as you say, which is highly likely to be 7kW or the max on a single phase supply for at least 4-6 hours. That overnight quiet period that the Grid normally relies on is now extremely busy, and I won't even mention the problems we'll have with over-demand and rolling blackouts.
Finally, in Norway, a large percentage of cars sold are EV's because the government there massively (and I means MASSIVELY) subsidizes every single EV sale, technically making them cheaper than ICE cars to buy. Take that away, and it would be a different story - the same as most regions that subsidies them. Case in point - Germany. They've just stopped all EV subsidies, and EV sales have crashed.
This is actually one of the most short sighted, blinkered statements I've ever read. Very much along the lines of 'your doing it wrong', 'you didn't plan your journey' or 'every EV owner charges overnight on a home charger'. No they don't, and they never all will. The current infrastructure is woeful, and an installed charger does not mean a) it's actually connected to the grid, b) it's actually working or c) can provide anywhere near the charge it's capable of.
It's fine. As long as the diesel tankers can still get to the generators tucked away at many public charging points, the illusion of saving the planet will be maintained.
which is unacceptable to almost everyone if they have to use the cripplingly expensive public charger network, and you will have literal riots because of it.
Those wil be acceptable losses in this great 'Net Zero'* experiment. It'll make no difference to CO2 levels though because India, China and most sane countries haven't drunk the Kool Aid.
*Net Zero refers to the collective IQ of our politicians that are proposing this insanity.
*Some* EVs are charged at night, specifically those with access to own driveway or garage, which is 56% of households apparently. What are the other 44% of vehicle owners supposed to do? I know three EV owners without off-street parking, who each individually thought they had a plan how this was going to work out (“cable across pavement”, “local shopping centre”, “work car park has chargers”. All three have sold and gone back to petrol. All early-adopter types, eco-enthusiast, sufficiently well-off to write off a two-year depreciation loss of £30k on a Tesla as “well it didn’t work out”.
Currently, 86% of U.K. EV owners have access to off-street parking, and are very happy. The other 14% EV owners try it, realise it just don’t work, and hand the keys back. On current measures, only 56% of the U.K. population can practically own a vehicle, if EV is the only option. Norway has only 20% of its population in cities, lots of off-street parking, and therefore it works for them.
"This statement, although parroted extensively, is false."
No it isn't. Fast charging an EV requires massive network capacity. In layman's terms the network 'pipe' has to be massive to supply a charger fast enough to charge a car rapidly and big pipes are very very expensive. There is no way any network in the world right now could handle all that load. They can of course be built to handle it, but it will be enourmously expensive - the fee you are paying now at fast charging points will have to massively higher to cover the costs of beefing up the grid to that point.
"Evs are charged at night. There is plenty of electrical bandwidth for trickle charging."
Firstly I see EVs being charged during the day all the time. Secondly you do realise peak electricity usage, when spare network capacity is almost non-existent, is at night when people get home from work right?
And the article talks exclusively about fast charging, not trickle charging...
Ah! Another Art Student who Cant Do Sums.
Try computing the energy content of all the road fuel sold annually, taking an reasonable fraction - say 30% - and converting to KWh, and dividing by the hours in a year, to get the *average* amount of extra electricity required - even assuming the grid is up to it.
It comfortable exceeds existing generating capacity. Do the sums. Preferably without taking your socks off when numbers greater than ten are involved
Charging at night does not help al that much. The total energy required to charge just cars (ignore vans, buses, lorries, motorcycles ...) is greater than we have available.
Just look up the stats on total miles driven each year, multiply by the charge requirements (about 260Wh/m last time I checked) and compare it with our spare generating capacity. Then there is the question of whether the local distribution network can handle the extra load. I fear that much building of new power stations/wind-farms/whatever is necessary, plus extensive upgrading of the network. Without that the changeover just aint gonna happen. But that's a problem for Labour, so this government doesn't give a toss; they can trumpet their "green credentials" secure in the knowledge that it is Someone Else's Problem.
The grid can cope. How do i know? The National Grid say so: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
for those like me, who are too hard of click:
"Do the electricity grid's wires have enough capacity for charging EVs?
The simple answer is yes. The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.
Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.
Nevertheless, at National Grid we’re working with the distribution networks, government, the regulator and industry to provide the green energy infrastructure around Britain – the wires, the connections to charge points – to support the needs of a decarbonised transport network into the future.
We’re constantly evolving and upgrading the grid to make sure our electricity networks are better equipped to carry more clean energy, in order to prepare for an increase in EVs and other aspects of the clean energy transition."
The national grid wires might cope but the local distribution is not under their control.
It has taken over 4 years to get the chargers on the southbound side of fleet services hooked up.
The IET say the grid needs major upgrades to cope with EV charging.
At the local level the grid is massively overstretched due to lots of building and not much planning ahead.
Yep! I2R strikes again!
230V cables just weren't designed to carry tens never mind hundreds of kilowatts!
I'd live to see the IET pull their finger out and raise the threshold for domestic voltages, i.e. a 1000VAC standard specifically for EV chargers would be nice, but as it stands we have nothing between 400V and 11kV
Now that's a great exercise of gaslighting. This article is full of logical inconsistencies.
Not really. All you have to do is remember National Grid is National Grid Plc, and John Pettigrew thanks you for your generosity. Like most the UK's privatisation projects, it only privatised the profits. The costs are still very much socialised.
I'm going to do some maths on this, hold tight everyone, here we go! And if anyone else here is seething like I am at how so many contributors here are conflating power and energy as if they are the same thing, relax, you're in safe hands here.
UK government stats says that in 2022, roughly 250bn miles were driven by cars in the UK - just cars, not vans or lorries etc. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2022/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2022-headline-statistics
How many Watts does this translate to, if all those miles were driven by EVs and were all charged nice and slow overnight to keep the grid demand down? To put it another way, what would be the grid demand if we all moved to electric cars and could all charge slowly and gently, could the UK grid cope with this extreme minimum demand?
250bn miles in a year is about 685million miles per day. If we assume an EV efficiency of 4miles per kWh, that's 685,000,000/(4x1,000,000) = 171 GWh per day. If we all slowly charge over the same 10hr period, that's a grid capacity increase of about 17GW (maintained for 10 hours), just for electric cars. That's about 26% of the 62GW peak in 2002 quoted above and a bit more (but not much) than the quoted 16% drop in demand since then. So, rough calculation suggests that it's possible for the existing grid to meet EV demand.
This all changes of course if everyone insists on rapid charging like we do currently with petrol and diesel. And I haven't worked out how many daily kWh are needed per car, and therefore if the domestic 10hr overnight charge would be enough, on average.
I look at this challenge as needing a culture change, the way we have changed mobile phone charging. We mostly slow charge our phones overnight these days because they don't last all week anymore. Some power users/drivers will be driving long distances everyday and that's the use case for oil powered hybrids or range extenders, like how some people carry a power bank for their phone today.
Point in fact, we do not 'slow charge our phones overnight'. That may be the intention, it is not what usually happens.
The majority of modern phones fast charge up to 50% and then slow down after that, and even so it's a long way from slow charging over a standard USB connection.
I've tried slow charge/big battery, vs smaller battery/fast charge and can attest that a faster charge and a smaller battery is always the way to go if you have to make that trade off
I'll take your figures at face value and, absolutely, the average case is not the concern here its the worst case, or 95% percentile or whatever, but you can entirely forget about culture change. If that was possible then we'd all be driving our IC's around with a feather like touch on the gas pedal and thereby cutting transport emissions in half. But we don't because we are only slightly evolved from our Ape-like ancestors so we drive everywhere as if the Riders of the Apocalypse were behind us.
And also remember we are supposedly also decarbonising space and water heating using, guess what, more electricity. So you will need to factor in all the natural gas and heating oil consumed each day. Most households use something like 3 or 4 times as many kWh from gas as they do from leccy, factor in a HP COP of 3 or 4 (fantasy but makes the numbers easy) then you are going to need to deliver twice as much leccy to each. And these forms of consumption are much harder to time-shift. I want my house to be warm when I'm sitting in front of the telly in the evening, not during the night when I'm asleep or first thing in the morning just when I go to work (ever lived with storage heaters? they're crap). I want to have my shower first thing in the morning, not late afternoon after the sun has warmed up the tank. So you have deeply ingrained peaks and troughs in demand that really don't match well with the intermittent nature of weather. Which brings us to storage...
National Grid thinks that they will be able to cope.
In this video a representative of National Grid is asked if the Grid can cope with increased numbers of EVs, they replied with a single word "Yes". She also mentions that people switching to LED light bulbs has significantly reduced UK power demands and National Grid have plans to build more capacity.
https://youtu.be/LeHakmL6eEc?t=2200
Here is National Grid's page on this topic.
> Can the UK grid cope with the extra demand from electric cars?
>
> As electric vehicles (EVs) become more widespread, one of the most common questions we’re asked is ‘How will the electricity grid handle the additional demand for electricity when more people are charging EVs?’
>
> The transition to EVs is happening … and we’re ready
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
Forbes article
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2021/11/13/electricity-grids-can-handle-electric-vehicles-easily--they-just-need-proper-management/?sh=754a417b7862
As Frankie says, Relax. Refurbished to showroom spec will be the new new. Given increasing poverty levels, which won't revert to pre-Brexit levels, new cars are increasingly off the option menu anyway.
Pending the unveiling of this garbage, and any subsequent legal challenges.. I'm thinking of setting up a used car business. Would depend on who could still buy new ICE vehicles, but a short lease of say, 1 week and then your new car was a used car.
>or best not, there's no way it's in any shape to deal with the entire nation switching to electric vehicles.
However, in 2016 there was an estimated 47 years worth of oil left at current usage levels. By 2035, this will be down to around 25 years (its currently 39 years). So, we can keep using ICE engines until we run out of oil or are paying something ridiculous for each barrel extracted. Or we can transition PDQ to something else.
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/
If divided equally among the entire global population, we've each got around 37000 miles of driving an ICE vehicle left. Obviously plenty of people use far less, but that kind of puts it into perspective. If we want to own a car long-term, we need to move away from oil. Same with planes, trains and plastic usage.
The National Grid have published an article on this. Short answer is that electric cars are not necessarily a problem.
The key points are: a) not everyone charges at the same time, including development of infrastructure to ensure this: b) oil takes a lot of energy to refine, so we should recover 4.5kWh for every gallon of petrol not used and c) electricity consumption is falling from it's peak in 2002 by about 16%, while the grid has remained the same, so we can add 16% of energy use back without problems, of which about 2/3 would be enough for electric car needs.
And, of course, all of this is happening over time. It's not a single point in time. The grid is being rebuilt anyway -- consider recent interconnect with Denmark, new sea routes Scotland to England. If the Tory moratorium on onshore wind was removed that alone might be enough to increase capacity in a way that was (reasonably) distributed across the country.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/electric-vehicles-myths-misconceptions
If you read today's Private Eye you'll find that the National Audit Office report (on whether Biomass is carbon neutral or not, whether CCS can work at all, and whether BECCS really is "negative emissions") is overdue, while Drax is fervently lobbying everyone in government to continue its subsidies that it collects for chopping down forests in Canada and South America, milling and drying the wood into pellets at great CO2 cost, shipping the pellets to the UK in diesel-powered ships, and burning them in their old coal power station at a fraction of the MWh/MtCO2 efficiency even of the coal that it replaced
Drax knows that the government's targets cannot be met without them, which gives them a lot of lobbying power, but nobody knows if Drax's carbon capture technology works at all, because it doesn't exist yet
We could have cars powered by steam engines billowing black smoke wherever they go, but as long as we shovel imported wood chips from foreign felled forests into the boilers, it would be counted as "zero emission" under the rules currently applied to Drax, and you should be subsidised for it!
1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.
2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.
3. Charge spots, there's just 4 in my 60,000 pop size town about 10 miles outside London!
4. Fast forward to 2045 when all those batteries will need replacing, you mean we don't have plans to set up huge plants to handle recycling millions of batteries a year?
5. Average new EV cost today is around £50k and average 2nd hand petrol car is around £5k, inflation and people's budgets's stretch already.
6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min.
7. Are the RAC, AA, GreenFlag, etc all ready to head out and repair EVs? I assume they're already doing some of the work on the road. More spares in vans needed during the final 5 year countdown.
Just the few I could think of while I'm on lunch break.
1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.
2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.
After you uprate the home distribution boards you'll need to uprate the underground cabling and put in more local 11kV transformers - not cheap! And then you'll find the 11kV local distribution system is overloaded and need to build more 33 and 66 kV mini substations. Really not cheap! Then lo and behold the 33/66kV grids are overloaded and we need more 132kV subs. Only Then will we suddenly realise the 400kV national grid can't take it. Too late, the lights just went off!
We are decommissioning two out of our three energy distribution networks (the gas grid and road-hauled petroleum) and placing their combined loads onto the one which is already the most overloaded, most expensive, unreliable, difficult to restart, and vulnerable to attack ...
Are we so sure that this is the best thing to do given the state of the world? Suppose our enemies turn round and say Thanks for getting to net zero by destroying yourselves for us, we'll burn all the fossil fuels from now on, btw it was all a big hoax from our propaganda dept.
Soon the Dutch will pay for their overthrow of James 2nd
Considering a third of the Netherlands is below mean sea level and another third is below mean high tide level, I think they've already thwarted your plans.
Fun fact: Schiphol airport is the only international airport that's located at the same place as a major naval battle.
1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.
Vast majority of EV charging will be overnight, which will be fine.
2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.
Most EV owners don't need anything more than a 13A plug to charge their 10-30 miles overnight.
5. Average new EV cost today is around £50k and average 2nd hand petrol car is around £5k, inflation and people's budgets's stretch already.
Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand? The first reputable article I find for this says that average used car price (including the trifling number of EVs) is £17,815.
6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min.
Not true, doesn't take much research to see what transfer rate the higher end chargers have.
I personally wouldn't post things that are so easily disproven.
> Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand? The first reputable article I find for this says that average used car price (including the trifling number of EVs) is £17,815.
Who in their right mind would buy a second-hand EV? You have no guarantee that the battery hasn't been 'abused'.
But yes, it should have been new vs new comparison, excluding subsidies and loss-leaders
> Most EV owners don't need anything more than a 13A plug to charge their 10-30 miles overnight.
Most people who drive more than 10-30 miles a day DON'T DRIVE AN EV, so this argument doesn't stack up
> Vast majority of EV charging will be overnight, which will be fine.
No, because as soon as people making longer journeys and vans/HGVs are forced to be electric, we will need a LOT more public fast charging
"Who in their right mind would buy a second-hand EV? You have no guarantee that the battery hasn't been 'abused'."
That's just stupid. You have no guarantee that a used ICE vehicle hasn't been driven by a boy racer who ragged out the engine. But the vast majority are absolutely fine.
A second hand EV is a great way to dip your toe in.
There's a fantastic website, https://flipthefleet.org/ which publishes and analyses huge amounts of data on EVs in New Zealand, particularly the Nissan Leaf. If anyone is considering a second hand EV, there's a lot to read there. The NZ climate is a little different to the UK, but I think not enough to make a massive difference.
The first EV I bought (second hand 2016 Leaf) had been almost entirely fast-charged, something I didn't know how to check at the time. I suspect this has had an impact - I'm pretty close to the bottom of the battery capacity curve for an 8yo car as a result, which is irritating. However even then we're really only looking at 5-10% less capacity than average. Considering it was a lot cheaper than new, and in the 5 or so years I've owned it it's had basically nothing spent on it in terms of servicing, it was still a good decision.
"Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand?"
Perhaps because in most peoples minds, EVs still are thought of as something you buy with delivery miles on the clock, rather than something for which the used car market is equally viable. And looking at Autotrader right now, where across the whole of the UK, their EV listings account for a mere 4.4% of all vehicles available, it's not hard to understand why this would be...
Leased cars still go on the used market.
That's how I got a really good deal on a plug-in hybrid, bought it off lease when it was 3 years old for a really great price because gas prices were down. That was nearly 8 years ago, it's been the best car I've ever owned, and the battery is still in great shape.
My next car will be a used EV.
"Most EV owners don't need anything more than a 13A plug to charge their 10-30 miles overnight"
That seems about right. There are 33.58 million cars in the UK, covering 658 million miles per day. That's an average of 19.6 miles per day. At 4 miles per kWh that's about 5kWh. Just looking at my fairly standard kettle here in my kitchen, that's equivalent to that kettle running for about 2 hrs. It's well within the capacity of a 13A socket, not even running overnight, just for a few hours, to deliver an annual daily mileage.
A standard 13A socket can deliver almost 3kW. Using that to charge overnight for 10 hrs will deliver 30kWh, or 120 miles.
I hunted for some distributions of individual car journeys to see how many single day mileages exceed 120 miles. The best I could find was some US data taken from drivers of one particular model (a hybrid by the way, so no range limitation). It suggested that while there is variation across the week, on no single day are more than 4.5% of daily mileages greater than 200km (about 124 miles), on average (mean if you were wondering). Or to put it another way, if the US data translates over to UK driving, then a 10hr overnight slow charge from a domestic socket will be good for over 95.5% of driving days across the whole population. It might be be even better than that in the UK as average mileage is lower than in the US (19.6 miles per day compared to 37 in the US).This might translate into lower individual day mileages if the general distribution of daily mileages has the same profile across the week. That 95.5% might be more like 97.6% if that were the case.
I'm going out on a limb and saying that if you drive more than about 120 miles in any one day, you are part of 2.4% of the driving population on that day, or about 1 in 42, which goes to show that Douglas Adams was right all along.
"Just the few I could think of while I'm on lunch break."
Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle - I haven't asked those nice meerkats to do a recently recent comparison, but when I did one last year to see where the market was at the time, the quotes I was getting back for EVs were quite frankly insane compared to those for equivalent spec/size/etc ICE cars of a type I had any interest in using as my commutemobile - *well* into 4 figures for EVs vs mid-high 3 figures for ICE. And from what I hear from others who have been looking at insurance costs more recently, including EV owners themselves (so not the sort of people you might expect to come out with negative comments re EV ownership), the situation really hasn't improved.
"Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle"
That really isn't my experience - I'm on my 2nd EV now and will be moving to my 3rd in a few months time, and the insurance premiums have been pretty much the same as what I was previously paying for my ICE cars, despite the EVs being considerably more expensive and much higher performance. Comments I see about insurance in various EV forums suggest that this experience isn't unique to me. My wife went from an ICE Mini Cooper to an Electric Mini EV and her premium went down by almost £100/yr.
Of course insurance premiums can be very obscure, in the way that a slightly different vehicle, a different postcode, a different description of the same job or a different brand from the same insurer can cause premiums to double or even worse, so I've no doubt there are some people in some circumstances who may be getting obscene insurance quotes for EVs, but I don't think it's a general 'thing'.
As for 17 year olds driving 500+ bhp vehicles though, that's going to be a different matter, just as it already is with ICE vehicles.
Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle - I haven't asked those nice meerkats to do a recently recent comparison
It'll be fine-
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/bills/cars/electric-car-drivers-face-500-hit-insurance-tax-bills-rise/?mc_cid=176855beeb
Electric car drivers face £500 hit as insurance and tax bills rise
Insurance costs rising, VED being applied, and then the biggy.. Replacing the money the government will be losing on road charging. I mean fuel duty. Look at how tobacco costs have risen over the last decade for an idea of what's coming. On the plus side, it'll reduce congestion so our lords & masters won't have to be stuck in traffic with the plebs.
Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle - I haven't asked those nice meerkats to do a recently recent comparison, but when I did one last year to see where the market was at the time, the quotes I was getting back for EVs were quite frankly insane
I think that's more because they have little data on the likely safety and life of batteries after even a minor bump. Rather than sanction repairs which might come back to bite them, they're just writing-off EVs that have anything more than cosmetic damage, in case the battery has hidden damage. Even a small accident then becomes a 30K+ payout, instead of a 3K repair.
It might change after 10-20 years of experience.
"1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.
2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.
3. Charge spots, there's just 4 in my 60,000 pop size town about 10 miles outside London!"
Yes, the grid needs to be upgraded across the board and across all levels, from home breakers all the way through the grid including public charging infrastructure. It's a massive cost ( quick Googling revealed an estimate at £54bn : https://www.power-technology.com/news/national-grid-upgrade-network/?cf-view). However as far as I can work out that's over an 8-year period, making it £6.75bn/yr. Average per household electricity bill £1923 X 25.2 million households gives a total household electricity spend of £48.5bn. Domestic consumption is 35% of total electricity usage (but industrial rates are cheaper, so broad-strokes estimate I double instead of triple to get total spend). That gives approx £100bn/yr electricity spend. Set against that, an extra £6.75bn/yr is a significant, but not unsupportable, increase.
4. Fast forward to 2045 when all those batteries will need replacing, you mean we don't have plans to set up huge plants to handle recycling millions of batteries a year?
I don't know about current plans, but 2045 is far enough in the future to both make and implement said plans. That's also not considering improvements in battery technology giving longer useful battery life that will extend this timeframe.
"5. Average new EV cost today is around £50k and average 2nd hand petrol car is around £5k, inflation and people's budgets's stretch already."
Apples and Oranges. Non-EV is about £5k less than equivalent EV, but costs same or more over lifetime to run.
"6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min."
Only partly true based on older EV cars and infrastructure. Current EV models (eg Hyundai Ionoq) can charge at 200+kW, which is less than 15 min for a 250km range top-up. Still far from petrol/diesel, but newer charge / battery technologies and better infrastructure will bridge the gap
"7. Are the RAC, AA, GreenFlag, etc all ready to head out and repair EVs? I assume they're already doing some of the work on the road. More spares in vans needed during the final 5 year countdown."
They have plenty of time to prepare and train up! Also, EVs have considerably less moving parts so will be less prone to mechanical breakdown. Still to be seen what the electric / electronic reliability is like (but given how much electronics already are in ICE cars I wouldn't think much different). In any case vast majority of RAC etc callouts are related to flat starter battery or tyre-related
"EVs have considerably less moving parts so will be less prone to mechanical breakdown"
So far it appears that EV failure modes are dominated by software failures or catastrophic electrical failures. Neither of these are fixable at the side of the road.
A colleague from a previous job had a Zoe that dumped him by the side of the road. It went to Renault for diagnosis who reported NFF but replaced the entire motor and control unit as a precaution (still under warranty thankfully) and it promptly died on the side of the road again.
Ford have just bricked some of their EVs with a failed s/w update and not long ago there was a recall as the safety plugs were melting and stranding drivers. A Kia in Canada (I think) has been written off as it grounded out on some rough terrain and has bent the battery pack causing an internal water leak.
"Ford have just bricked some of their EVs with a failed s/w update and not long ago there was a recall as the safety plugs were melting and stranding drivers. A Kia in Canada (I think) has been written off as it grounded out on some rough terrain and has bent the battery pack causing an internal water leak."
Maybe, but OTA s/w updates aren't unique to EVs, Modern ICEs are drive-by-wire and are just as software dependent and prone to this. Likewise, they suffer from catastrophic faults that strand drivers. And they have mechanical vulnerabilities. Several early (modern) ICE Mini Cooper S's had their engines trashed sat at junctions if a car drove across in front of them through a big puddle and splashed water into the supercharger/air intake on the bonnet.
The fact that EVs have similar vulnerabilities to ICEs doesn't really seem to take the debate in any direction.
Longer term, as the software improves, EVs should become far more reliable.
They probably already are, in fact, but statistics are hard to find.
However, while it's likely to be far, far longer between failures, an EV failure is less likely to be possible to bodge at the side of the road, as the only moving parts are the ones that couldn't be fixed if they broke on an ICE either.
"7. Are the RAC, AA, GreenFlag, etc all ready to head out and repair EVs? I assume they're already doing some of the work on the road. More spares in vans needed during the final 5 year countdown."
I'd strongly suspect that most breakdowns in modern (ICE) vehicles are already in some way electrical or software related, or of such mechanical complexity that a roadside repair isn't going to be achievable. The days of giving the starter motor a whack to release a stuck solenoid or having a spare part on the van that's compatible with 90% of cars on the road are well and truly gone.
The days of giving the starter motor a whack to release a stuck solenoid or having a spare part on the van that's compatible with 90% of cars on the road are well and truly gone.
Being winter, we've already been treated to photos of cars in floods. Both EV and ICE will probably be write-offs. We've also been treated to pics of cars stuck in the snow. Those will be rather harder to get moving than a friendly AA, RAC or squaddie with a jerry can of gas or diesel. They'll also become stranded faster given EV's can only produce heat by draining their batteries faster than an ICE would drain it's tank.
1. Most home charging is off-peak and within the current demand envelope.
2. Forgive a technical response to this one: bollocks. Mods to my own supply arrangement were simply the addition of two big breakout terminals on the feed from the meter. Nothing else was changed or uprated.
3. Why are you worried about the number of charge points in your home town? There's only handful in mine. I've never used them. I happily charge overnight at home.
4. There's several battery recycling plants building and more scheduled. By 2045 I'd expect to see better, longer lasting batteries anyway. Possibly along current development lines of solid state batteries.
5. Cost us rapidly falling. A decent new leccy car shouldn't be much more than 30k now, and falling.
6. Last time I did a long run (380 mile round trip) both my charge stops just a lot gave me time for a quick cuppa and a wee. Just.
7. I have AA assist AND recovery (at a decent level) included as part of the servicing deal, and at a positively excellent rate.
"6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min."
As others have already pointed out, your 3-4 hours is way off the mark. But regardless of that, this illustrates the mindset change that people often fail to make when considering EVs. Yes, a mile-for-mile recharge v refill out on the road certainly does take longer, but the more important consideration is the significance of that, especially if you've got home-charging facilities. Like most people, when I was looking at making the switch to an EV, charging infrastructure was foremost in my mind. 6 years later, with 70,000 miles under my belt, I've public-charged 5 times, and the only two 'full charges' were in the middle of 400-mile drives which served as a welcome chance to rest and eat. Other times when I've needed a public charge to get home have been much quicker as you only need to charge what you need; you don't need to 'fill it up' when that'll happen overnight when you get home. When you get in your car every morning and you've got 200+ range in the tank, then for some people that's always going to be enough.
Of course there are people in very different circumstances and EVs certainly aren't (currently) viable for everyone, so I personally don't get upset or angry whether people ultimately do or don't choose to go EV. However, it's frustrating to see people making those decisions based on incorrect perceptions, false or outdated information, or legacy ICE fuelling mentality.
"Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins"
Yes, and you can charge an EV in 2 SECONDS. That's how long it takes to plug in. Then you go inside your house, and have your choice of hot beverage.
The time it takes to charge doesn't matter. The time you have to stand out in the cold and wet does.
3. Charge spots, there's just 4 in my 60,000 pop size town about 10 miles outside London!
Just like the future, charging spots are here, they're just not evenly distributed.
In my neighbourhood alone, a mostly late Victorian/Edwardian housing estate of ~500 houses, we've got 7 on street chargers, each capable of charging two cars. The city council has installed/is installing 70 charging points in its car parks and there are ~100 public charging points in total. This is for a city with a population of ~120,000 where 26% of journeys is by bicycle.
was an appalling row back on climate policy, this was done after the Uxbridge by-election as he thought that he could curry favour with the electorate -- thus putting party before climate; what a pathetic leader. He is accused of having ‘fingers in ears’ over climate change.
Pushing the date back helps to cover up inadequacy of provision of charging points - yet another government failure.
Democracy, if the people voting for you don't care about the environment then your duty is to not care about the environment.
That's why Blair won such a large mandate, working class voters are really pro middle east wars. While upper class voters preferred wars in the south Atlantic
The growth in EV sales isn't linear, it's more like exponential. Remember: ICE cars have had over a century of development, so this is as good as they'll ever be. EVs are beating them in most areas already, and are still improving all the time ... very rapidly. Price is coming down, range is going up, safety is going up, charging infrastructure is going up. The transition will be all-but-done by around 2030, regardless of what the government does. That's why the likes of GM, Ford, Mazda, Toyota, Honda are already circling the drain (maybe VW too). In a few years nobody is going to want to buy a noisy, smelly, polluting, dinosaur-powered car. Yeah it's true the grid will have to be built-out to accommodate the change, but that's already underway. You don't have to agree with me but ... for the sake of your own wallet ... ditch your legacy-auto shares!
> Price is coming down, range is going up, safety is going up, charging infrastructure is going up
All of which are exceedingly good reasons to buy an electric car ... in the future.
A future where prices are lower, cars are more reliable and safer, batteries last more than a few minutes and there is a wider choice.
"In a few years nobody is going to want to buy a noisy, smelly, polluting, dinosaur-powered car. "
Define "a few"... Because, rest assured, there are very, VERY, many drivers out there who, in the next few years (where my definition of "a few" is "1-5 years") very much WILL still want to buy an ICE vehicle for one or more reasons which will still be entirely valid despite whatever improvements are made by that point to the whole EV ecosystem and ownership experience - it's not just a question of how good the vehicles themselves get, the whole package has to be there.
Put it another way. No matter what your definition of "a few" is, it's going to be *long* after this point in time before the demand for ICE vehicles drops to the point where it's not entirely unreasonable (except to anyone who's a fully paid up member of The Guild of Nitpickers) to simply state that "nobody" want to buy them. Until then, for the forseeable future, there very much will still be demand for ICE vehicles, if not from new buyers once the ban on selling new ICE vehicles comes into play, then most assuredly from the huge number of people who rely on the used vehicle market to meet their needs.
Remember: ICE cars have had over a century of development, so this is as good as they'll ever be. EVs are beating them in most areas already, and are still improving all the time ..
Oh dear. Couple of quick links-
The Electrobat was one of the first electric automobiles. It was designed and built in 1894 by mechanical engineer Henry G. Morris and chemist Pedro G. Salom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrobat
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan
A jerrycan or jerrican (also styled jerry can or jerri can)[1] is a fuel container made from pressed steel (and more recently, high density polyethylene). It was designed in Germany in the 1930s for military use to hold 20 litres (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 US gal) of fuel, and saw widespread use by both Germany and the Allies during the Second World War.
The early EVs were obsoleted for much the same reason as they should be today, namely the cost and complexity of transporting and storing fuel. When will we get the Jerrybat?
Such a lovely middle-class law, where only the people who have a driveway can ever have a car in the future. Screw the millions who don’t have a drive and so can never have an electric car! For this very reason, there is absolutely no chance of any of this becoming a reality in the UK with things as they are, as if you take away the means of earning from 20 million people you’ll have heads on spikes. But the are many other reasons: Without a viable means of transport it’s not possible to work any more (cue the lucky ones who can work from home, unlike the working classes). Without massive investment in nuclear power it’s just a daydream (cue the greenies who’ll bleat on about solar and wind power as if they are anything other than a slightly useful addition when conditions are favourable). Without massive investment in infrastructure such as a complete upgrade to the national grid and all domestic electricity supply, even the laws of physics agree it’s not possibe (cue the ‘battery technology is improving all the time’ folks). We all need to face it, the notion of electic vehicles replacing ALL the cars currentlyl on the road is UTTER BULLSHIT and it’s time we started looking elsewhere!
There are 4 lamposts on my street and around 100 cars, no problem at all plugging 25 cars into a single lampost I’m sure, and the wiring fitted for a 50W lamp will have no problems supplying a megawatt!! Running a 13A cable to a car overnight might get you a few miles before you run out of juice, but hey, the local scrotes will have unplugged it long before morning :-) And of course, all this is only possible if you can actually park your car outside your house, which is about a 1 in 50 occurrence around these parts.
Think of the Romanians*! All this talk of large lengths of copper cable lying about will be making them swoon. You've only got to leave an old telly in a skip for about 10 mins in a city before it's in the back of a van and off.
And just look how often rail cabling gets nicked.
*other nationalities with "recycling" interests are available.
but hey, the local scrotes will have unplugged it long before morning
There are even telly ads running at the moment which make a feature of somebody wandering up to an EV charger and unpluggng the person using it. Is this *really* the image they want to project? EV drivers are selfish sociopathic morons who cannot comprehend the existence of other people and their needs.
Maybe it's stealth advertising to turn people off EVs.
the MiL, their car park for 50 flats, has parking for around 20 cars, no lights and no way to get charging down to it.
The flats where I lived, 42 flats in each block (8 blocks and numerous masionettes), parking was fine when I was a kid (70's), but a joke when I left (early 90's). There are some lights, not enough.
I also see it now the local supermarkets and even hospital parking. There are a few spaces for EV cars. Often see an EV car parked - not plugged in, just parked
Your first suggestion implies that you can guarantee being able to park in the street directly outside your property. Is this realistic? And does anyone know what the legal position is re trailing cables across the public pavement (sidewalk for our US friends)? Who gets sued when someone, perhaps with sight issues, trips over a cable?
And does anyone know what the legal position is re trailing cables across the public pavement (sidewalk for our US friends)? Who gets sued when someone, perhaps with sight issues, trips over a cable?
a) Illegal
b) Whoever ran the cable
I'm all for the green revolution, and everyone having EVs, but there is a lot logistically to work out. Its going to cost a lot, and its going to require a lot of investment, and laws to encourage/force that investment. It might be that for the average driver, driving 18 miles a day, they can get a trickle charge overnight on the street giving them 50 miles or less, and will need to use community high speed chargers for long trips. The idea that each household will have access to their own 22kwh charger is pie in the sky.
Run a cable across the pavement? So who is liable when someone trips over the cable? We may not like the reality we live in with ambulance chasing lawyers, but it is a bad idea to ignore it when formulating national policy.
Ok, so you dealt with the lawyers… how about the copper thieves who come down the street in the middle of the night and steal all the cables?
Or the pram pushers trying to push a pram along that pavement? Are we really convicnced that making pushing prams and pushchairs difficult is really a great policy?
Just run the cable over the pavement,
Just run over the cable on the pavement. Do that a few times, especially where it crosses a curb and there'll probably be an insulation fault. Before then, there'll probably be a lot of insurance claims from trips and falls. On which point, I wonder who'll be liable, the car insurer, or the home insurer? Or could I make a claim against both?
Yes, and it doesn't want to stump up for grid connections and substations for these rural new builds either.
(How can a new build estate where every house must have a 7kW charger and a 5kW heat pump put 100 houses on one 500kVA transformer.. The answer is it's called Diversity. The statistical likelihood of them all being used at once. Diversity factor is low for something like a 40A electric shower or a cooker. But given the long lengths of time that EV chargers and heat pumps are switched on for, the diversity factor for these loads is going to be much closer to 1. I don't know if this is reflected in the electrical codes yet..)
Nor does the government stump up for proper sewerage for new builds. The developers are told to put in separate surface water and foul drains but then these just flow out into the same main pipe ..
If we all go electric, albeit at a slow pace, then the loss of fuel duty will have to be recovered from somewhere. If the price is added to the charging point bill then folks who recharge at home will be better off. My guess is road pricing will have to be introduced.
At the same time it would be sensible to remove VED (and lose the Swansea head count) and just roll it into one. Then, quite fairly, those that use the roads more will pay more.
However they do it, the Government of the day will not be popular.
> You're aware of the transport select committee report stating that private car ownership is incompatible with net zero
LOL. In 2024, poor people await global warming in the same way as early Christians awaited the Second Coming. As a Deus ex Machina way to reset the counters of "social inequality".
Not a chance we'll give up on freedom of movement. It will be greener, that's all. Prometheus gave us the fire. Now we can forge iron, dump silicone and slice graphene. Forget DSaaS*
*Donkey Sharing as a Service.
Used to be a big problem. Since Gridserve took over the Ecotricity chargers and started rolling out newer and faster chargers things have got a lot better.
That said, I did a close to 500 mile trip on Tuesday in some horrible weather (wind and rain) from SW of London to Sheffield, down to Bristol and back to SW of London. I used just ONE Motorway service area charger.
1st charge at the BP site at the NEC (Just off the M42)
2nd charge (a quick splash and dash while having a comfort break ) at Morrison s Sheffield
3rd charge at the BP site put 55kWh into the car in 22mins (170 miles of range). Just enough time for a quick coffee and a visit to the loo at the adjacent Starbucks.
4th charge was to be at the IONITy site off the M4 near Chippenham. Here, only 1 of the 6 chargers was working.
4th charge at Reading Services (M4). BP charger 44.5kWh in 18 mins.
With more and more ultrafast chargers (350kW+) coming online, the time to get a lot of miles into modern EV's is coming down.
Yes, it is expensive to use these chargers but weighed against the 4.5p/kWh that I pay at home to charge the car, the overall cost is lower than using an ICE.
All you EV naysayers can downvote this post all you like. Using an EV for long distances in this country (at least south of Perth, Scotland) is possible today in the first week of 2024.
"Using an EV for long distances in this country (at least south of Perth, Scotland) is possible today in the first week of 2024.”
Of course it’s possible, when the number of EV owners is easily handled by the grid it’s no problem, but to suggest that we can ALL have an EV is fanciful at best.
There's a lot of selective prediction in this discussion, and this is a prime example. You're willing to extrapolate to more EVs, but implicitly assume that the number of chargers won't flex to meet that demand.
This is not to say that the problem is simple - it isn't. But there's nothing insurmountable.
- Battery capacity (Kw / cubic inch) and efficiency (miles / Kwh) have both improved over the last 10 years, and can reasonably be expected to improve further in the next ten.
- Charging speeds (KW / min) has improved as well, so recharges take less time, which means a single charger can serve more users
- All of the UK's forecourt businesses are investing in providing charging capability. Motorway service stations that do not will inevitably lose business to those that do, so standard economics will drive development. The same will be true of the supermarket industry, and probably shopping centres too.
- For those who have the capability to fit chargers to their homes, public charging will be very much a secondary method, anyway, due to both cost and convenience. The "pain" of plugging in overnight is merely a behaviour adjustment.
- For those who do not have capability, and who are not addressed by the public charging network, the possibility of workplace charging exists, so instead of "park at home overnight and charge ready for the morning", one might "park at work for a couple of hours and charge ready for the journey home" - it's the same thing, just time-offset.
- For those who live in flats, AND have cars, but have to park on street, AND have no access to workplace charging, in 10 years time - yes, there'll need to be another solution. Lamppost upgrades are viable, as are parking meters and even disused phone boxes - all without impacting on existing street furniture. I've seen the capability for bollards to extend out of the pavement on demand to reveal a charger, so that's a capability that exists today.
- Swappable battery packs are still a possibility, albeit small. Inductive charging works, but may be hard to scale.
- Most white vans, postal workers, and the like probably do less than 250 miles a day, which means work all day, charge all night is achievable. Those that do more will potentially be limited slightly in 10 years time - this can be coped with.
- HGV / PSV is the biggest issue if we're considering what we know today - there are electric HGV today, but the scale of battery improvement will have to be significant to enable the distances needed.
A point on secondhand EVs - someone said "why would anyone buy a secondhand EV, not knowing what state the battery is in". Well, actually, an EV can give you a far better guide to the battery health than an ICE car can about the engine.
You forgot that we are living in a capitalistic society.
Once all cars are EV, there is no incentive to put in place more charging stations, you'll raise the price to the maximum value people will be able to pay, and the stockholders will be happy.
And with the best politicians money can buy, you'll ensure that the police force will be there to take care of any discontents...
The problem with your anecdote here is that, for many of us, the idea of having to make *any* refuelling stops during a 500 mile round trip would be completely alien to us, because with a full tank of dead dino juice when we set off, our vehicles would manage such a trip and still leave enough in the tank on our return to not be worried about having to get to a filling station right there and then.
Meanwhile, as positive as your story is from the PoV of at least showing that such a trip is now feasible in an EV, the fact that it required you to expend an additional hour or so on charging *during* the trip would be somewhat offputting to many. No, I'm not suggesting that driving an ICE car avoids the need to make any stops en-route, but when planning a journey there's a marked difference between having to
a) merely consider the availability of services *somewhere* along the route at which, if needed at that point in the journey, you can pop in for a quick comfort break, grab a coffee/food, and be back on the road in under 10 minutes if time is of the essence
and
b) having to carefully plan the route you take to ensure that you pass at least one (and, given your 4th charging attempt comments, preferably two) location within the range of your battery, and knowing that even if you do then combine it with a comfort break, you'll still more likely than not be stuck there longer than you'd have needed to be if it was *just* a comfort break you were stopped for.
So yes, you're right, using an EV for longer journeys IS possible today. But let's not kid ourselves that it's as convenient/easy/without potential difficulties (e.g. what would have happened if the chargers at Reading had also been busy/out of action?) as doing the same journey in an ICE vehicle. THAT'S the issue for mass adoption (well, that and bringing the upfront costs down, and massively increasing the availability of EVs in the used market, and doing something about the insane costs of insuring them...), because whilst your anecdote means it's now feasible for someone who is already of a mindset to want to make the switch to EV and will put up with it still being not quite as easy as being an ICE driver, it's still not realistic to presume that the average driver would be happy to put up with a journey like this.
Personally, I only had to check once that every motorway services between my home and my most common destination has chargers - after that I absolutely CAN take it as read that I can stop *somewhere*.
And it really isn't a long break - If my total journey would need 120% of a full battery, then stopping anytime after 80% to chuck 20% in is a fairly easy adjustment.
Also, the days of 500 miles on a tank are a) not common, and b) fairly recent - my 1986 Cavalier had a maximum range of 320, and I'm sure there are lots of ICE cars with mileages a lot less than your 500 figure. The longest range EV's I think are over 400 miles already
My old Chevy Blazer had a 200 mile range. My LeBaron was about the same. The longest range ICE car was a Chevy Tahoe, I could go almost 400 miles with its 30 gallon tank - which didn't seem like a big problem back in the '90s when gas was under a dollar a gallon.
Maybe I'm a little unusual then, in always considering range as one of the priorities when I've bought a car, because I've never had a car that wouldn't get at least 500 miles on a full tank when used for the sorts of longer distance journeys (e.g. between SE and NE England) where the majority of the mileage was being done at a steady cruise.
So given that the oldest of my cars was built in 1998, "fairly recent" does at least mean within the past quarter of a century, and I suspect if you could be bothered to search through all the car data available for models built pre-1998 then you'd continue to find some that were similarly long-legged going back even further. Which means that, to an increasing number of drivers today, there'll never have been a time in their motoring lives where that sort of range wasn't available. And it's these more recent experiences which we need to be comparing against when seeing if EVs offer a feasible alternative, because the more of the ICE positives you can tick off the list when looking for a suitable EV replacement, the easier the decision becomes to make the change...
Not sure about big engine cars with big tanks, but my 1 litre car, with small petrol tank, gives over 500 miles range as gets around 60 mpg, but would probably be less on an all motorway journey as about 55 mpg at 70.
It has done a UJ holiday trip of 200 miles each way and (plus some unknown amount of miles pootling around doing local sightseeing trips on the holiday) on a tank
But agree that decent range is a relatively new thing, not that long ago, when cars were much less fuel efficient would have been a lot less range Remember decades ago, as a kid, when dad drove us from N Midlands to Cornwall on holidays (about 300 miles, larger tank & larger engine car, 1.5 or 1.6 l IIRC) there .would typically be a fuel stop en route.
weighed against the 4.5p/kWh that I pay at home to charge the car, the overall cost is lower than using an ICE.
That's because almost half the cost of diesel/petrol is tax & duty, compared to only 5% of your home electricity. If the exchequer has to recover that revenue from EV drivers the difference vanishes.
Two good questions.
1) I prefer to use the M40 over the M1. It is easier for me given the horrible road works at J10 on the M25(for the M3) to head to Bagshot and then to the M40 via Bracknell. Plus the new BP site right next to the M42 was on my route. I could have gone up the M1 and made a small diversion to the services at J1 on the M6 but that gets clagged up these days. Yes, it is a few miles farther but I wanted to check the site out as I was going to use it again later in the day.
2) I'm on an EV Tariff. Suppliers like Octopus and EDF have these. They make cheap power available in the early hours. The rate from 00:00 to 05:00 is 4.5p/kWh. Outside that, it is 35p/kWh. I fixed it in 2021 and runs until June this year.
Thanks for asking
There has been only one comment so far on the subject of actually using cars less, thinking instead of public transport or active travel. Sure there are many for whom car travel is essential, but also many for whom car travel is a luxury; perhaps a working sustainable ecosystem is an essential rather than a luxury.
“In 2021, 25% of trips were under 1 mile, and 72% under 5 miles.“
National Travel Survey 2021: Mode share, journey lengths and public transport use
And, yet, our (rural) district council just did a "comment on our development plan" thing - and most comments mentioned that public transport needs to be massively improved before building all the proposed new houses - jobs, schools, shops and doctors are no longer in any of the villages but in regional towns - in some cases 20 miles away!
But the council say there is no money to restablish the pre-Beeching train lines, or build modern, fast and flexible bus/rail/tram services connecting the villages to the towns. And the government won't allow them to force the developers to build them.
"There has been only one comment so far on the subject of actually using cars less, thinking instead of public transport or active travel."
Yep, this! ICE Cars weigh a ton and a half, electric cars around 2 tons. Yet most often they are used to lug around 1-2 meatbags (approx 150kg if its a male and a female), and their stuff (mostly less than 10kg unless it's some very heavy shopping). That means 80-90% of the energy used to transport people and their stuff is actually being spent on transporting the car itself. Surely for the vast majority of trips an electric bicycle (or tricycle with load area for improved stability and carrying capacity) would be both sufficient AND far more efficient?
Not to mention that the cost to upgrade roads to include proper, segregated lanes for bicycles and other smaller vehicles would be offset by reducing the necessary cost for electricity grid upgrades
The weather in the Netherlands and Denmark is just as grey, rainy and hostile as that in the UK, yet there everyone cycles there for short trips. Many people there have load-trikes or saddlebags to do their shopping if a rucksack won't cut it. I can understand if you live in a rural area and it would take 20 minutes to cycle to a supermarket, but the vast majority of people in the UK live close enough to a supermarket, or pretty much most places they need to go to cycle, especially if it's electric.
Just put the right equipment for the conditions, the bad weather is just an excuse.
Agreed - public (or at least communal) transport *should* be the solution, but the government doesn't dare even flirt with delivering that - the last budget was explicit about "supporting Britain's motorists" when they should absolutely be supporting alternatives.
So what do they do? We're incapable of building new railways in the UK, and to a similar extent in the USA too, due to private interest and NIMBYism. Also in both cases the politicians want instant results as that is what gets votes. (and in the USA to appease and enrichen their political donors)
Public transport in rural areas just doesn't work. An empty bus driving around just in case someone wants to use it is just creating pollution.
It only works in dense urban settings and even with good transport options and road charging these areas are STILL clogged with traffic.
"It only works in dense urban settings"
QED the focus ought to be on those who can make a change but simply don't want to; why people enjoy sitting in endless traffic day in and day out is baffling.
Naysayers to active travel seem to cite "this weather" and "weekly shop" as applicable to every single short journey.
Even replacing one journey a week down the end of the road to pick up a prescription by walking there instead is a start.
Tell me that's not true without telling me you cannot be bothered.
Yes, but it needs huge (expensive) improvements in public transport. A car is essential for me now, but it was not when I lived in cities with good public transport and did not have kids. I never even owned a car back then. I did rent a few times for trips.
I think another thing that would help a lot is encouraging the use of smaller cars. A smaller car is less polluting (to make as well as run) damages the roads less, causes less injury in an accident, and generally makes cities better than a similar larger one (i.e. ICE vs ICE, EVE vs EV, etc.).
THis could be encouraged by taxing cars be weight and size, and by reserving parking spaces for small cars.
Having worked in strategy for longer than most people I meet have been alive, I am keenly aware that the main way people look at the future is on a purely "me" basis.
This works fine until you become a stone in the river of progress.
Cars are almost the poster child for this. Everyone will counter visions of the future with why it doesn't work for them.
They can't *all* be right.
And witness the total and utter collapse of the country... The only way an idea like that would have ANY hope of working would be to first ensure that
a) EVs are available at all required price ranges, performance levels etc to be truly comparable to the current state of the national ICE vehicle fleet
and
b) public transport provision is dramatically improved such that, for many people, it finally becomes a realistically viable alternative to private transport
Otherwise all you'd be doing is what countless governments have done before, and beating people up with the increasingle well-used stick long before you've even thought about dangling a carrot in front of them first. Give people realistic alternatives to continuing to use ICE vehicles and you WILL see a shift away from them, driven by people making that choice for themselves because they can see it makes sense to do so. Make the use of ICE vehicles artificially unpleasant, and all you'll do is breed resentment amongst the masses. Look at what's happening in London with the attacks on ULEZ cameras as a glimpse into the future of how the population might respond if they feel they've been pushed too far by leaders seemingly out of touch with reality and who think people will simply be happy to comply with whatever new restrictions you throw at them...
> So privatise the roads. £10/mi to drive an ICE, £1/mile to drive an electric = problem solved
Also there's no way a privatised road network would be charging more for ICEs than EVs, given how many more potholes the heavier and faster-accelerating EVs seem to make, as well as the expense of providing charging stations along the privatised road!
You don't need the cash - haven't you seen the explosion in the number of vehicles in car parks being stripped for parts by thieves over the last few years? Premium cars are no longer the targets of thieves, it's now the out-of-warranty Fiesta and Yaris drivers who need to worry.
Not to mention all the ways of interpreting "new" and 'bought":
What if the manufacturer simply leases the cars, instead of selling them, a bit like the aircraft industry does?
What if the manufacturer sells the new ICE cars to a subsidiary somewhere where that's still allowed (opportunity for IoM or Channel Islands to become "ICE havens"?), and then that subsidiary sells the delivery-mileage "used" cars to the actual buyers?
There's a whole new refurbishment industry waiting to be created, buy 10-year-old ICE vehicles, and bring them back to new spec. They rarely rust away these days, and modern engines are good for 6-figure mileages, so it's mostly cosmetic + replacing wear&tear items.
target of having six or more rapid or ultra-rapid electric vehicle chargers at every motorway service area in England.
Considering how long it takes to charge an EV, compared against how many fossil-fuelled cars go through the pumps at a service area within that same timeframe, a minimum target of 6 chargers feels ridiculously low
At busy times, you can get 8-12 fuel pumps constantly occupied. Given that electric chargers are likely to be occupied for longer, you need double that. Not to mention that they need to be capable of all operating at full capacity simultaneously, ie you need 250kW X 20 charge points (5MW) not 250kW shared by 20 charge points.
That's why lots of chargers are being put in at many sites.
The Moto Services at M6/J1 has 30+ Tesla Superchargers and 12 350kW DC CCS chargers. Both are very well used. Gridserve need to put in another 24 Chargers just to meet current demand.
Given many of the current crop of cars can charge very fast as shown by the example posted before, the time spent at the charger is coming down.
No there will just be carve outs and loopholes
It won't apply to 'trucks' so everyone will buy a pickup or off roaders will be exempt so everyone gets a Chelsea tractor. Or somebody gets their hatchback classified as a van - like the PT Cruiser
Result is massive increase in oil consumption
Ah our wonderous politicians strike again.
Half baked plan, no idea how to actually makes soemthing work? Never mind just chuck it out there and "The Market" will sort it out.
Because of course what ever voter wants is minimum service delivery for maximum cost, coz that's all we seem to get from "the Market". If you ban every other option those citizens will be delighted to comply. And if all else fails just get the tax hammer out and club people into ticking those boxes you promised they would then throw in your resignation and pick up that golden goodbye before you step into your 3 day a month boardroom seat at the energy firm you've been taking brown envelopes from all along.
Plus problems with the grid, not enough electricity generation or storage capacity, who cares! It's in the enxt parliamentary cycle anyway so not your fucking problem.
> problems with the grid, not enough electricity generation or storage capacity, who cares!
The tories care! Because this sort of problem requires specialist business consultants, quangoes and the like, to think up bullshit that never actually solves the problem but makes a chuffing fortune out of it! Exactly what you need an ex-minister to run, nudge nudge wink wink, your old chum will be out of his parliamentary seat soon
Nah, this is just an unachievable poison chalice being left by a failed Government who know they wont be the ones who have to find a way to deliver it, and so it will either give them something to moan about come the 2034 election period, or that will cost so much and cause so much upset that it will have the same effect.
EV Driver here btw, but only because I benefit from cheap home charging. Inner city / apartment charging infrastructure is never going to get there in this timescale.
There are several issue that the Uk gov are failing to even acknowledge -
- the capacity of the grid, I have yet to see a proper indipendant report that states the Uk power grid will be able cope.
- a lot of insurance companies are refusing to insure EV's as a result of the fire risk. Of if they do the insurance is set so high (£5000) as to be un-practical - https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/30/the-quotes-were-5000-or-more-electric-vehicle-owners-face-soaring-insurance-costs
- There no current in-place plan for E-motorcycles, or a way for them to be charged along side other EVs.
Submit a FOI request to the various power network operators for the thermal ratings of their equipment, by circuit, along with the material properties of that equipment.
The data all exists. You'll then need some well qualified power systems simulation analysts to compile all of that into appropriate models, and run scenarios against it. Such analysts are pretty rare and most of them work in the utilities or universities already on considerable pay cheques.
OR, you could ask the ESO, which is being legally broken off National Grid into a not-for-profit entity in it's own right within the next 6-12 months to do it. Which they already do.
No independent has done it because there is no commercial reason to do so, and not really much of an academic one beyond the work already done and published by the utilities.
The current government failing to acknowledge anything is par for the course. Unless there is something quick and easy they can do to improve their image, or make a fast buck, they won't do it.
Happy friday!
It's quite amusing coming to this article 24 hours after the usual arguments are rolled out... Coming to this from the POV of someone actually employed in the sector:
Transmission needs new equipment to connect up the many, many new generators coming, and needs to continue to replace older equipment as it is already doing. The problems in this sector are not unsurmountable, if funded adequately and not blocked by Priti Vacant and her recent appearances with "Just Stop Pylons" As far as I am concerned she's as bad as Just Stop Oil.
Distribution, including from substation-to-substation and last leg from substation to property have serious issues. The continuous rating of the cables running into your house from the street is probably about 60 Amps, however, they tend to be rather shallow buried and are therefore vulnerable to changes in atmospheric conditions. If running "hot", continuously, dry-out of those cables can compromise those ratings and lead to faiures. Similarly; distribution transformers on the last-leg to property are not even remotely scaled large enough to handle the demand down to domestic areas UNLESS some seriously clever control electronics are introduced to smear demand out in a manner that users find acceptable. This is possible; but requires competent regulation, metering and telecomms (and contingencies for when these things inevitably fail).
Concerning Generation : 50GW+ of connections are in advanced stages of planning or construction. Over 100GW+ are on the TEC register (and therefore applied to some extent). 50GW is roughly double existing generation capacity; and that 100+ takes the UK up to triple+ levels. Nobody needs to be worried about generation UNLESS the government of the day refuses to let us get on with it in timely manner.
But overarching all, the lack of an equivalent of the Ford Escort in the EV market priced at similar levels, this is the ultimate blocker to uptake. Despite being in the sector and an advocate for change, I still own a couple of petrol burners and will continue to do so until the producers stop selling EVs at premium rates.
Nice post.
Up there in the noise, I mentioned a need for a voltage standard somewhere higher than 400V but less than 11kV. Maybe 1kV. Suitable for connecting directly to the power electronics of an EV charger without a transformer. A small domestic transformer for the home to supply other appliances
Is this being talked about or is it a pipe dream?
Also, as someone employed in the sector, what are your views on phasing out gas, biomass good or evil, and long-term storage of renewables? I heard the UK is officially 'giving up' on hydrogen, so what next?
The only real blocker to putting higher voltages into the last leg of distribution are how you handle the safety issues arising in the domestic environment. At 240V you (more or less) have to contact the line. At 1000V, the spark gap in air is less than a millimetre; not nearly as tolerate to mistakes as 240v is. The standard of work becomes critical and you really don't want "anyone" with a screwdriver to be able to do stuff. One untightened screw and you have a nasty fire risk in waiting.
One could consider having a higher voltage line and a step-down transformer at the property (to avoid meddling hands) on the higher voltage line, but then you have a bunch of transformers that are life-limited by their very nature to maintain in perpetuity (and the transformer itself will introduce losses).
Given the piss-poor standard of work done by many so called qualified electricians it's a hard safety case to make. The performance advantages are very large, I squared R says the 1000V line gives many more watts of power for the same cable temperature.
Three phase supply has been the default to make fast car chargers on service stations etc. possible; but the practicality of running three phase everywhere speaks largely for itself.
I think I'm with you on a higher voltage feed being the best "technical" solution. This all requires co-ordination between manufacturers and power networks, you know, the sort of thing our regulatory bodies and standards committees are supposed to do. HAH!
Biomass - unless it's locally sourced "and would have been spare to burn anyway" - evil. Shipping forests from the other side of the Atlantic to set it on fire to claim some ill-thought out renewable subsidy is, from the perspective of CO2 end-to-end AND finances, considerably worse than extracting and burning natural gas. Biomass cannot be produced in sufficient quantities to power the entire globe in any event.
Long term storage of any electricity is a losing game. The top lake of Dinorwig, if full, gives if I recall 8 to 12 hours of operation of that plant at full tilt. Dinorwig at full tilt can supply on a day like today maybe 1/30th of national demand. When the studies to find the site for that particular station were done, three sites were shortlisted as the "best ones". Two of the three have been used. The only locations that would scale up to genuinely long term storage (as opposed to what Dinorwig does) are the Severn Estuary or perhaps some of of the Scottish Lochs. It is a big environmental red flag to commit to re-inventing geography in such a manner. Possible; but the sort of thing that 19th century politicians could push through not the red tape and NIMBYism we have now.
Short and medium term storage such as batteries or dense-hydro (see RheEnergise) are useful capabilities and can be constructed in large enough numbers to make sense without exorbitant cost or planning permission nightmares. For the record, I have bought a storage system to go with my Solar Panels. Since 2022, my usage has been cut in half with this system in place. Cut EVERY domestic demand in the land by half and you make a massive difference to overall power flow requirements. (Noting that there are other issues introduced in terms of frequency forming and reactive power within the distribution networks; not unsurmountable, but requires thought if to be seriously expanded).
I heard a tidbit from Ofgem the other day that they are thinking the phase out of gas will be just 15 years away. This is an utter fantasy, which is what I have come to expect of the current government and it's quangos. Gas for generation will continue to be necessary to some extent; depending on Nuke and Wind availability. Gas for domestic heating is very hard to beat on price/performance. Heat pumps are getting better but right now the average consumer unit is a liability. Their reliability and cost of ownership needs to reach the point where they are in line with how good a boiler is to persuade people to switch (myself included).
Hydrogen is useful, but it is a really, really bad idea to introduce it into existing domestic networks because hydrogen can leak through ANYTHING (sheet steel, copper pipes, you name it). Hydrogen is ruinous to metals, embrittlement is common, and if there is any trace amount of sulphur present (which there is in miniscule quantities in domestic gas pipework), it will form Hydrogen sulphide. Combine that with a little water and you have the recipe for sulphuric acid inside your boiler. This is BAD.
Hydrogen as aviation fuel, and/or on purpose built medium term storage facilities can work and the safety issues mitigated. There's a facility in Germany doing the latter already.
Nuke is very useful, but NIMBYism is par for the course and decisions have to be made well over a decade in advance. UK baseload electric (ignoring heating demand) is about 15GW; therefore it makes enormous sense to have 15 to 20GW of Nuke installed. At current rates we'll maybe have 8 to 10GW by 2035.
On what next; a late acquaintance of mine wrote "you have to have a plan that adds up" - Dr David Mackay in his book Sustainable Energy Without Hot air. I am agnostic to what solution is used, provided the plan does add up. Net zero objectives are admirable; but there are too many holes in the cost-of-transition problem for those on average wages. There are things we can do to make this better.
My own plan would be to aim for 30+ GW of Nuke. Add to this a massive oversupply of wind, distributed around our coastlines not just in one area. Beef up domestic Solar production; make buying these things a tax break through employee benefit schemes to encourage installation. Gas phase out is only possible with much, much better heat pump tech; enforcing much stronger guarantees for consumers buying such devices will aid in this. We should also act on the recommendations of groups like Insulate UK. Every MW not needlessly wasted through poor insulation is a MW we don't have to find elsewhere. I think I'd also start pushing energy efficiency measures and tax breaks on high-demand users. E.g. if you're a glass plant and you can invest in that plant to reduce wasted energy; then make it a tax break to do so. The excess of generation I advocate for is "expensive" to build; but it would create competition in supply and reduce costs to consumers; while also being an exportable item - sell the excess to Europe (and therefore address some of Britains problems with negative Trade Balance).
As for transport; the other solution that comes to mind is one that appeared in the ancient video game "Quarantine". Cars in that game had a battery to allow them to go "off-grid", but the major roads had pickups to power them. It seems silly; but rather than lugging big heavy batteries up and down the motorways; if instead we drove Dodgems, this is a very neat solution to most of the distribution problems.
Rural areas obviously need other solutions; and I have no illusions that gas engines will continue in those environments. But if we can bring the "majority" of traffic down thats a huge win. I would also seriously start re-investing in light rail. I don't mean token solutions like the (useless) Birmingham tram system, I am more thinking on the scale of e.g. the Tyne and Wear metro. Systems like that can really alleviate road and pollution issues.
I'd better stop there before I write a manifesto; but hey, it's a good question.
Buried? Buried???
You metropolitan types are so funny!
Anyway, who would want to get rid of their overhead lines (power and phone)? The free spring light shows when the trees cause complete surprise by growing into the wires with fireworks for all would be really missed - who wants to wait for November for fireworks? It mostly seems to be the Elms in the hedges - new ones still grow every year, and survive a few years before dying of Dutch Elm disease - but normally at just about the point they have reached the main electricity line running down the street. They then remain, dead, for another year or so wearing away the insulation, before going out in their glorious firework show!
And every couple of years some neighbour or other cuts the power line while trimming their hedge or trees. For some reason it is the power line more often than the phone line. One year the neighbour hired a tree surgeon who managed to not just bring down our power line but even rip off the bracket the wires were attached to on the eaves of our house! Oh, such fun!!
Phone lines are already on their way out, with many providers opting to go to phone-over-ethernet alone. I'm not terribly convinced this is a good idea, but Openreach are forcing the issue. To cater for emergencies many providers are now dumping battery packs and 4G routers out as backups in the absence of a proper phone line. Waiting for the day for a story of a 999 call that can't be made because of this. Only a matter of time.
YES, I will accept the mobile phone mast on the hill because the phone line doesn't effing work anymore so I can call for an ambulance.
Overheads enjoy much better cooling than buried cable, and so aren't nearly as problematic for thermal ratings at distribution levels. On tree cutting, why pay do do it out of company coffers when you can leave it to the customers to screw up and then make a fat wad of cash by charging for the repairs no doubt! (Or something to that effect) I imagine goes through the mind of certain execs...)
This comments section is depressing. I would normally associate Register readers with intelligence and the ability to select out conspiracy theories and news peddled by GB News and big oil companies, but apparently not.
1. The grid will not collapse (source: National Grid[1]). The average person drives less than 10 miles per day to work, so that's about 3 kWh of electricity, filled up when there's an overnight surplus. Charge at work? Even better.
2. We won't run out of lithium. There's loads of it, it'll just be more expensive to dig out of the ground. The quoted figures are, as others here have suggested, based on current mine capacity. If there was an upcoming lithium shortage, you won't find in products literally sold to be thrown away (those awful vapes), and it doesn't seem to stop people buying phones.
3. Big energy companies like Octopus have been campaigning for the link between electricity and gas prices to be broken. This is what's driving the disparity at the moment. I don't disagree that Instavolt and Osprey etc are predators.
4. Laws need introducing to protect charging facilities. For example, Tesla put 20 Superchargers in a Marriott carpark at Heathrow but f***** up the contract. Marriott now charge £5 just to plug in, before any electricity is delivered. Can you imagine BP or Esso having an access charge on their pumps?
5. There is a massive education problem (see these comments ^^). EVs don't randomly run out of electricity on the motorway, and if stranded in snow etc will outlast most internal combustion vehicles without the risk of poisoning the driver. FWIW, a modern diesel may not produce enough heat to keep the cabin warm when idling.
[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
Charging points need to be able to accept a debit or credit card just like every self service petrol pump in the land.
And to have the price displayed on the charger screen, if not on a sign at the entrance.
There are chargers in a local car park which do work that way, but for the chargers at a recent hotel stay I found that I needed to download an app to even find out the cost, which was £1.50 just to connect, and 40p/kWh. Not worth it, app deleted.
there does seem to be a few Gammon Broadcasting News viewers around, like you I find it a bit strange in our industry we aren't normally so reactionary and "opinion" rather than evidence led
"5. There is a massive education problem (see these comments ^^). EVs don't randomly run out of electricity on the motorway, and if stranded in snow etc will outlast most internal combustion vehicles without the risk of poisoning the driver. FWIW, a modern diesel may not produce enough heat to keep the cabin warm when idling."
don't try and confuse the hard of thinking with FACTS. Its like all the EV fires, whenever there is any story about a car on fire it must be an EV, when the FACTS are ICE vehicles are something like 2 magnitudes more likely to catch on fire.
Have you managed to tow a caravan 1000 miles non stop in your EV yet!? hahahahahah
"3. Big energy companies like Octopus have been campaigning for the link between electricity and gas prices to be broken. This is what's driving the disparity at the moment. I don't disagree that Instavolt and Osprey etc are predators"
yep and electric is too expensive in the UK and this is partly to do with Green Taxes paid on electric, which is a bit odd, as regularly over 50% of electric generation is by renewables. Perversely no green taxes are paid on Gas and there is hardly any Renewable gas!
Starmer's GB Energy proposal is an interesting way to work on this particular problem, if it is made big enough.
Orsted (and others) refused to bid on certain wind farms as the CfD was set "too low" - at least that's the official excuse. A publically owned utility would be able to compete and put energy into the retail market much closer to generation costs than a commercial outfit that has to pay dividends.
The very act of entering the market and being competition also means others, if they want to sell into the market, have to become competitive (provided GB energy is big enough). It could get big enough, quickly, by buying up a bunch of property. Lot of wind farms already caught up in various investments you can buy off the shelf.
The Tories laughed at this proposal and then came back with GB Nuke a few months later; which would have similar effects though the e-2-e cost of generation (including decommissioning, etc.) and planning permission hell make Starmer's idea a whole lot quicker and affordable to pursue.
The only other route to break the link is a re-write of the market rules, which the Tories won't do because it will hurt they and their benefactors profits.
>> This comments section is depressing. I would normally associate Register readers with intelligence and the ability to select out conspiracy theories and news peddled by GB News and big oil companies, but apparently not.
There's always going to be more losers than winners. As per definition of winners. Especially when progress and competition are picking up speed (the pace being set by these selfish winners).
Now, a well known socioeconomic phenomenon, is that losers never accept responsibility for their poor performance. Otherwise they would pause, react, improve, and migrate to the winner side of the success spectrum. So you only get losers who manage to convince themselves that "it's obviously somebody else's" fault. The government, the wokes, the Poles, Europe, you name it.
Granted, they could also stop trolling on social networks and invest their time in doing something more useful and profitable. But then, they would improve, be more successful and they wouldn't feel the need to vent their misdirected anger to the world at large. Here, on Twitter and what not. So social networks (or comment sections, like here) are a non representative sample of opinions.
Don't lose faith in mankind. Yet.
On (4), those access charges perhaps somewhat reflect that many EV's in circulation are company cars. As such, on company business they are probably being just bunged through on expenses.
It's shit and I won't defend the practise, but if we don't socialise the cost of installing chargers somehow, then they won't magically appear out of nowhere just because they are the right thing to do.
The obvious way to do is to fund it from oil and gas takings directly.
Some of this is basic growing pains stuff that will be resolved with time, some of it requires legislation… maybe a bit of carrot and stick for charging networks to focus on availability. There’s a surprising amount of crap firmware out there and that leads to a poor user experience. I’ve come across chargers marked as failed which are absolutely fine but I understand why someone couldn’t get it to work. ABB chargers that kernel panic in certain circumstances seem common.
I do enjoy all the “experts” commenting on battery chemistry and supply chain here. Very entertaining
The Government is clueless
So no mention of the road tax changes due in 2025 for EVS
The excessive road wear due to heavier cars and the batteries.
And worst of all the scrappage and recycling of EVS after 8 - 10 years due to excessive battery process being more than the car will be worth.
Yes you may have a 8 year warranty on the battery but that will only be complete failure in that time but will not to cover the reduced available range due to age related battery stress.
The damage being done by mining ,shipping raw materials , processing the materials then shipping the batteries to the manufacturing plants around the world.
And no mention of Electrical infrastructure. not seen many charging points halfway up a mountain or in the middle of a national park.
"The damage being done by mining ,shipping raw materials , processing the materials then shipping the batteries to the manufacturing plants around the world" as opposed to drilling, shipping, refining petroleum products around the world! Remind me about all the physical disasters that have been caused by the petrol chemical industry...............................
"And no mention of Electrical infrastructure. not seen many charging points halfway up a mountain or in the middle of a national park." not seen many fuel stations halfway up a mountain either. Can't talk about other national parks but Dartmoor are currently installing EV charge points in some of their carparks. And just like if I were using petrol and not wanting to run out you do this thing called planning your trip! My nearest petrol station is 5 miles from my house (and you get robbed blind at £1.49/l of petrol) the next is 12 miles away also robbing, the nearest non-robing is 20 miles away and thats £1.39/l To charge the wife's Tesla it is a distance of FECK all as we charge it at home for 7p/kwh or about 2.5p/ mile
Is it me or are there a lot of Gammon Broadcasting News viewers around here!??????
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