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Edukator I thinks is fair to say that your personal circumstance which allow you to rely on the Zoe are different from the generalities which are being quoted here.
I think we all accept that a short trip/home charging scenario kind of works now in the UK. But the medium/long trip away from home is not supported or sustainable, and the type of vehicle desired to support that has a far greater cost ,margin to ICE that you example. Currently.
Is that fair?
Check out the charge network using something like Chargemap, Kryton. I've travelled around France, Garmany, The UK (just two weeks) and Spain with the Zoé 40 and it's getting easier all the time. With fast charge and another 10kWh it's going to be a lot easier. So "support" OK and getting better all the time.
As for "sustainable", that's the whole point. In my example even a Sandero driven very gently gets through two times its own weight in petrol in five years.
I'm not suggesting you buy an EV now, Kryton. From your description of the driving you do, about the only EV that would not be an inconvenience would be a long range 75 kWh Model 3 Tesla. And that is beyond your budget if I've understood correctly. I'm hoping that the next time you change your car there will be an EV that fulfils your needs that you can afford.
This area is my new Job.
In the next 5 years, domestic smart chargers will probably be mandated to be controlled via the smart metering infrastructure. This will mean that your energy supplier and other energy market participants will be able to control the start and end of charging within around a minute.
In practical terms this will mean that as a user, you will set a % charge you want and by what time and the infrastructure will stagger start and end times to optimise the load according to local DNO constraints. This will avoid unnecessary upgrade on the system.
Smart chargers will arrive out of the box set to charge off peak this way, you will have the option to over ride this, there will be an additional charge for this. This will probably be mandated by gvnt.
In addition to this, I think a market will emerge for EVs sitting on your drive doing nothing. These big batteries have the ability to sit at around 50% charged and absorb/discharge in response to National Grid frequency modulation requirements. This could be with c£500 to householders in 5-10 years time.
The final thing to think about is that many are predicting a move away from car ownership towards mobility as a service, the car club model, meaning that these cars will be charged on commercial infrastructure.
Even with all this planning, our demand for electricity could rise by 40% by 2050 so we are going to have to build a lot of new renewable and nuclear capacity as well as local embeded generation and storage (big batteries)
Thanks for the clarity. Its interesting that as a non EV user I (we) clearly haven't felt the need to explore the infrastructure so an awareness of this is important. And...
I’m hoping that the next time you change your car there will be an EV that fulfils your needs that you can afford.
...me too. I don't want to enter into a £50k EV PCP agreement just to satisfy the environmentalist which is not to stay that stance isn't important, but its a balance of paying the mortgage and providing for two kids. When there is more parity in ICE vs EV overall that decision would be much easier to make.
I think the %age of new vehicles sold as electric (currently very low - 2 or 3%) will jump hugely next year as a result of the BIK changes..
Currently a 320D msport company car (pretty normal fodder) would cost a 40% tax payer £4800/year in tax. From next year, a tesla model 3 (or vw ID3, or whatever) has zero bik - thus for the same cash impact to your salary, you can effectively spend £200/month extra on the 'car'.
An electric car tends to cost ~£50-100 more per month on a new lease than a base-engined ICE car - so the 'default' choice will now become electric on purely financial terms - you'd have to really want an ICE to pick one over the electric car, I'd suggest the reverse is true today.
It's quite a headache for residential blocks as they will have to up their incoming supply on the worst case scenario that at some point the car park is full of EV's all wanting to charge.
I'd argue a large chunk of the people who can afford brand new electric cars also fit into the suburban house with a drive demographic. The on street charging will only start being a problem when the second hand market is filling with EVs at less thank £10k
Interesting that some public infrastructure cannot already meet demand. This was South mimms services yesterday, there was a queue too.
A bit of a curveball on this thread but my current thinking is that in the next year i might get a hybrid to bridge the gap for the next few years while the EV market/grid improves. I also live in a flat so i cant run a cable out the window and down the street to charge up. Enter the hybrid - the best and worst of both worlds
Thanks djglover. Interesting stuff!
Err, might have missed it - BIK?
Currently a 320D msport company car (pretty normal fodder) would cost a 40% tax payer £4800/year in tax. From next year, a tesla model 3 (or vw ID3, or whatever) has zero bik – thus for the same cash impact to your salary, you can effectively spend £200/month extra on the ‘car’.
Hang on, isn't it already like that? BiK on electric cars already very low due to zero emissions?
i might get a hybrid
Good solution IMO. Most PHEVs can do 30 miles or so on electricity - that'd be good enough for our daily use, for sure. We'd only need petrol for our weekend trips which are usually 160 miles round trip to my parents or long distances at holiday time.
Err, might have missed it – BIK?
BIK is a tax you pay if you have a company car, basically a percentage of the value of the car is classed as 'income' (somewhere between 15 and 35%, based on emissions, typically around 20%), and taxed (ie taken off your salary as a deduction) as such. For example, if you have a 40k car with a bik rate of 20%, its assumed the same value as £8k of extra income, and you (if you're a 40% rate payer) will pay £3200 in tax per year
Hang on, isn’t it already like that? BiK on electric cars already very low due to zero emissions?
the current bik rate is 16% for electric cars, which is lower than a diesel (which probably sit at 24% or so for a clean one) and might save you a grand or so per year - the discount coming in next year is much more significant
I’d argue a large chunk of the people who can afford brand new electric cars also fit into the suburban house with a drive demographic. The on street charging will only start being a problem when the second hand market is filling with EVs at less thank £10k
As someone who now falls into "the suburban house with a drive demographic", my first foray into EV ownership is likely to be a used one, well under £10k, primarily for local use.
We certainly can't afford to piss £30k+ away on a car, we've got a stupid big mortgage to pay.
And unfortunately I can see us having an ICE car for quite a long time to come, in order to cover long distance journeys and due to their being relatively cheap to buy (used)...
TBH There's not that many used EV's about for sale, those that there are, are priced high due to demand. It's going to take several years for truly affordable EV's (new or used) to be a thing. Of course once you start dangling finance in front of people their understanding of "affordability" can change quite remarkably....
Good solution IMO. Most PHEVs can do 30 miles or so on electricity – that’d be good enough for our daily use, for sure. We’d only need petrol for our weekend trips which are usually 160 miles round trip to my parents or long distances at holiday time.
Pretty much where we're at. 30 miles covers my commute. The cost of second hand PHEVs isn't quite down to our range though (5k - 7k ish). Mitsi Outlander is very much on the radar for that point in time though and only a few years deprecation from that price. Next car maybe.
I'm not sure the 'rented mobility' thing will have a huge takeup. People do so very much just love their shiny toys.
The market has changed a lot in recent years, people aren’t buying £50k cars, £25k cars or £10k as much, they’re buying £500, £300 and £150 a month PCP deals. Yeah there’s still a healthy cash/loan market, but it’s getting smaller.
There are already signs that the bottom is dropping out of the PCP market, dealers are struggling to sell new cars, there’s a huge glut of ex-lease cars around now and nobody’s buying those either.
It’s showing at work, the number of cars coming in at the moment is way below what it was earlier this year, around March; we were getting 200+ cars in a day for a while, we were run off our feet, and struggling to find space for them.
Now, we might get 50, we’ve got big empty spaces in our off-site storage areas which were crammed in March/April, one area had over 1000 cars, there’s probably about a third of that now.
Dealers now have overflow storage to hold the overflow from the overflow from the main storage area! One driver I was talking to today went to pick up a car from an overflow storage site at a dealership, there were several Skoda Yetis there, brand new, with moss growing around the windows and green algae on the paintwork.
Hmmm.
Question needs defined better.
Can your service cable cope? The local distribution grid? The transmission grid? The generation fleet?
Overnight charging helps with today’s network and generation fleet, but less so if solar (and to some extent wind) become a larger proportion of our energy source.
V2G services mentioned previously by someone is a spectacular resource but difficult to access at scale - it will happen but possibly as a way for a homeowner to buy their electricity when it’s cheap and plentiful and use it when they want.
Merchant storage to soak up solar in the day and then charge cars at night will have its place but it’s expensive, it will soak up available battery production and will lose 10% of your solar generation due to round trip efficiency.
Colin Herron is worth reading up on - bright man and starting to do a “Without got air” type analysis of the EV market.
In short, the “grid” can cope, probably, though fast charging will not help. The generation fleet may be able to cope. The question is multi-faceted and needs capable people to keep working on it.
Which isn’t a simple answer.
The UK has just laid a massive cable to France
I just layed a big cable.
Anyway...
As above I do LSO wonder about our domestic electrical systems. In Germany, Poland, Belgium and I and sure other countries 3phase is common. With all of the push for no gas boilers plus electric cars I think that our household supplies will need to be upgraded.
Anyway #2...
I am not convinced electric cars are the answer. They are part of the answer but not the answer. I think they will work for probably the majority of people but a very significant minority number of people they will not work. There is a fundamental problem with any battery powered system that a full battery weights the same as a empty battery and to get good range you need a big heavy battery. A form of liquid fuel is required for medium to long journeys, heavy loads even most medium vans. This may be hydrogen fuel cell or Some form of manufactured hydrocarbon.
The Zoé 52kWh weighs 1475kg, the Brick, less than some versions of the Golf. And the top of the range Land Rover Evoque 1880kg.
Energy recovery on braking means that the impact of weight on energy use is less than ICE cars. Even hybrids have limited energy recovery compared with full electrics.
Batteries are getting lighter as technology improves. The original 23kWh battery in the Zoé weighed 290kg, the second generation 41kWh battery 305kg. Nearly double the range for 15kg more. I don't have the weight for the latest 52kWh battery but the car weighs only fractionally more than the original 23kWh car.
If weight is a problem for you the first type of car to attack is the ICE 4x4 SUV.
There are already signs that the bottom is dropping out of the PCP market, dealers are struggling to sell new cars, there’s a huge glut of ex-lease cars around now and nobody’s buying those either.
id say thats a good sign that the markets confused more than anything.
What do you buy today if you want a new car.
expensive EV ? a small turbo petrol ? the last of the diesel interceptors ?
there was no clear good option when i looked so i kicked the ball down the pitch and bought second hand again and in 10 years time when my current car is at end of life ill look at the options again.
Overnight charging helps with today’s network and generation fleet, but less so if solar (and to some extent wind) become a larger proportion of our energy source.
I guess that's where the intelligent chargers come in?
I think they will work for probably the majority of people but a very significant minority number of people they will not work.
Such as, almost everyone who lives in an inner city type environment, and does not have ready access to the 2.4 children semi detached urban driveway. That's a lot of people.
What electric cars do do for us is move us off the fossil fuel dependency. Long term there is nothing bad about that.
What replaces the fossil fuel network, we don't yet know.
What replaces the fossil fuel network, we don’t yet know
Cables and sockets where possible and inductive chargers where not.
mrmonkfinger
Overnight charging helps with today’s network and generation fleet, but less so if solar (and to some extent wind) become a larger proportion of our energy source.
I guess that’s where the intelligent chargers come in?
Sadly intelligent charging on its own will do very little here. Still good to have though.
Won’t the majority of cars be charged overnight when the grid is doing not very much anyway?
Except that if cars are all recharging at night, it willbe doing something.
There are already signs that the bottom is dropping out of the PCP market, dealers are struggling to sell new cars, there’s a huge glut of ex-lease cars around now and nobody’s buying those either.
It’s showing at work, the number of cars coming in at the moment is way below what it was earlier this year, around March; we were getting 200+ cars in a day for a while, we were run off our feet, and struggling to find space for them.
Now, we might get 50, we’ve got big empty spaces in our off-site storage areas which were crammed in March/April, one area had over 1000 cars, there’s probably about a third of that now.
Dealers now have overflow storage to hold the overflow from the overflow from the main storage area! One driver I was talking to today went to pick up a car from an overflow storage site at a dealership, there were several Skoda Yetis there, brand new, with moss growing around the windows and green algae on the paintwork.
I'm not surprised it's slowing, it's like Smart Phones, at some point everyone's got one and the market is saturated so you only really see growth in line with population growth. I can only speak for people I know these days, but everyone I think would go that way, has (and quite a few who I thought would never 'rent' a car or get into 'debt' for one.
I don't think it's because everyone's suddenly seen 'sense' and is handing back their PCP'd Smart Hatch or SUV to go back to buying 5 year old cars with hard earned savings or a bank loan, or swapping for a cycle or bus pass, but given everything going on in the UK and globally I would guess a lot less people are dancing into the showrooms to chop in their PCP early for another one. I heard the other Day that Ford let one of their customers keep their Fiesta for it's entire term the other day, unheard of!
This is a normal residential street in central London. Clearly you don't need a drive and on street charging does work in city centres.
If weight is a problem for you the first type of car to attack is the ICE 4×4 SUV.
It weight relative to the car. Of course SUV are inefficient. My point is not that electric cars are bad but as I said it's that they are part of the solution not the solution. Except that they are not the answer for many problems. The weight and energy density is why they don't work very well for medium to long distance travel and and medium to heavy weight transport. You can't change that. Different solutions to different problems.
IMO trying to put bigger and bigger batteries in is an example of trying to fix this problem with electric cars. Keep them short to medium range, say 150 ish range (allow for battery inefficientcy in cold) and have a different solution for the the medium to long range. Smaller battery mean greater efficiency, cheaper to buy and maintain.
inductive chargers where not
The coupling on this is too poor for high power. This is why transformers (which is what inductive chargers are) have iorn or ferrite cores and physically really close.
I worry that some of these solutions are like the solar roadway bullshit that was going around a few years ago.
Well BMW have a 3.2kW inductive charger that works. it's not ideal which is why I said cables and sockets first and inductive where not. Inductive works for phones.
Gas and Electricity consumption in the UK has actually dropped by over 20% (10% electric) in the past 10 years and CO2 emission have dropped by 30% in the last 15. All that despite a more than 10% increase in population.
However, I think peak generation capacity might also have dropped? We have reduced our trade deficit to the EU by around 8% by reducing the amount of electricity that we import...
Be careful with the terms power, energy and consumption. They are related but not the same. It is quite possible for peak power to fall while energy use rises.
Power generation capacity and energy generation capacity are two different things too. Think about a 10MW solar or wind farm for a while.
Both energy use and peak power have dropped - about 15% over the last ten years on our network. Around a third of this (5% out of the 15%) is, we believe, self generation. The rest is energy efficiency and lifestyle changes. We think. Quite difficult to track power / energy that wasn’t used.
EVs in the UK (or GB I’d have to check my figures) will add around 300TWh to our existing average daily use of 800TWh - rough figures and assuming nothing else changes.
Such as, almost everyone who lives in an inner city type environment, and does not have ready access to the 2.4 children semi detached urban driveway. That’s a lot of people.
Yes, but those people on average probably have shorter commutes as they already live in the city. Thus draw fewer kW's to charge their car.
So either:
On street charging points, or charge at the 'petrol' station, or at work, or at the coffee shop, gym, supermarket. If there's a demand, someone will figure out how to capitalize it. It's probably worthwhile for most shops/car parks to offer charging.
Basement car parks in blocks of flats get charring points, and related to my first point, they won't all be rep's Teslas needing to go from 0-100% overnight, it'll be leafs going from 50-75%. I'd have thought the average load would be less than say the electrical heating in the morning, or everyone putting the oven on at 6pm.
EV's might have a few problems if they can't mine enough Cobalt and other rare metals for the cars' batteries. Currently deep sea mining is being tested for cobalt as it apparently mainly comes from one mine !
I'm sure i've seen something on the TV about deep sea mining and it didn't look like it was any good for the environment down there.
Reckon it was either Octonauts or Go Jetters!!
EV actually could provide the solution and not the problem to our grid and it's energy resource!
As EVs get ever bigger batteries (over 2 times the average energy capacity compared to 4 years ago) people don't actually drive any further. In fact, thanks to increasing traffic densities, IT infrastructure costs, people are driving less distance on average than they used too.
Take my "little battery" i3. It has just 22kWh, and my daily commute is 32 miles, which would be considered a long commute (average uk commute is ~11 miles). I average just over 4 miles per kWh, so my daily driving energy requirement is 8 kWh. That means, even with my 4 year old, small battery EV, i have something like 10 or more kWh i carry around with me, that could be used for short term storage and load levelling.
Today, most people are at work during the day, and at home at night, which means for example that solar generation is of no use to most private transport needs. But, if we made laws / gave tax incentives to install solar at our places of work, we could charge our cars where they sit in the day, and take the power home with us to run our houses over night. And that "storage" is, effectively free for the network. The vehicle owner can earn money by letting the network access their excess energy buffer, and can minimise their costs by buying 'lecy when it's cheap, and selling when it's expensive.
It's worth remembering that a typical passenger car in the uk is actually parked up for typically 98% of it's life! Using that time makes sense to me 🙂
I’m sure i’ve seen something on the TV about deep sea mining and it didn’t look like it was any good for the environment down there.
I think the summary is it's pretty catastrophic for the ecology of the volcanic vents being mined. But that's offset by the fact that you only need to mine comparatively small areas of a very big ocean. BUT, that in itself isn't without it's problems, these ecosystems are so specialized it's possible they contain species that don't exist even on other vents.
The solution isn't more cars, it's EV's to replace some cars and less traveling in the first place so less cars overall.
Even if you charge your EV from a solar panel it still has a huge carbon footprint, the car, the solar panel, the road, etc all have a footprint, not just the 60% reduction in the carbon footprint of the fuel.
The solution isn’t more cars, it’s EV’s to replace some cars and less traveling in the first place so less cars overall.
You can say it till you're blue in the face but that greenwash is hard to shift.
I agree!
install solar at our places of work, we could charge our cars where they sit in the day, and take the power home with us to run our houses over night.
Always wondered why we have massive roof acerage on retail and industrial parks without any solar panels and yet perfectly nice looking (especially older houses) are being ruined aesthetically.
Always wondered why we have massive roof acerage on retail and industrial parks without any solar panels and yet perfectly nice looking (especially older houses) are being ruined aesthetically.
Or even just car-parks...
https://www.ablecanopies.co.uk/canopies/solar-canopies/grange-mono-pitch-solar-canopy.html
Always wondered why we have massive roof acerage on retail and industrial parks without any solar panels and yet perfectly nice looking (especially older houses) are being ruined aesthetically.
I think.......the feed in tariff that encouraged home owners didn't apply to large scale installations?
Also a lot of industrial building is incredibly cheap. Like a design life of 25 years kinda cheap. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the roof of some wouldn't be up to the extra weight!
And in most cases those buildings are leased.
EDF have signed a deal with Tesco to use their new roof mounted solar panels and I think Ikea have had their own for a while. But it's a very good point.
Energy efficiency in retail is shockingly bad, look at all the tin barns that need heated in winter and cooled in summer, the acreage of black tarmac and the open chiller units everywhere. You could use the car park as a heat sink for GSHP, insulate the buildings, utilise the roof space and put doors on the bloody chillers. Does my head in standing in a fridge aisle with a hot air blower right above me, apart form the environmental aspect how much does that cost per year?!?
Worked well for Walmart.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/20/walmart-tesla-lawsuit-solar-panels-fires
I guess unsubsdised solar in the UK is of questionable economic value. Any subsidies for large scale solar farm were probably easier to get with solar farms in fields. Cheaper to build and maintain.
Your right Suirrelking. Things are changing in France and Germany: a local Lidl has:
Doors on all the fridges
Blocks with grass growing through them for the parking places
Solar panels on the roof
A building to the latest energy standards (which still aren't good enough IMO)
4 EV charge points
I don't Know about the air-con. I'll have a look the next time I shop there
Maxtorque - now we’re getting there. 😉