PS – the UK grid was generally designed to domestic load of 2kW ADMD, 15kW individual peak.
Everyone running at 3kW simultaneously for a reasonable length of time would cause significant problems on the LV system – blown fuses, melted wires that sort of thing.
Really, truely.

Well current demand is at its lowest since 1994:

Analysis: UK electricity generation in 2018 falls to lowest level since 1994

which suggests that the grid is less stressed than it has been in recent years.

igm speaks the truth on this matter and from a position of considerable knowledge and experience.

For me I think the way forward is in a balance across all these transport and charging etc solutions, plus much better housing development. So many of the new homes we build are suburban in nature and located such that they make car travel to work a near necessity for the vast majority. Many of our neighbouring countries develop much more sustainably with better city planning and the positive impacts that has on sustainability, with also good living standards, happiness and prosperity. Shared EV use as mentioned above then becoming more useful and more practical (and less frequently necessary) for more people.

As for the transfer of emissions from tail pipe to power station, once you account for the impacts of every step along the way (on both sides of the debate) the outcomes per mile driven are very different. ICEs are gobsmackingly thermally inefficient plus you have to get the fuel to the pump. It all adds up.

So I am on the cusp of buying an EV. I am not a buyer of new cars or expensive ones but at this point in history it is, in my view, right to take this relatively financially expensive step. If I was a buyer of new cars, as many are, I calculate that over its reasonable life the EV option is already reasonably competitive. It is therefore only because I’m normally a pretty cheap per mile car owner that this is for me an expensive step.

I also think I have the opportunity to power mine from more than half PV, which makes a considerable further emissions difference. I have off street parking and a suitable bit of roof, which is nice for me and not something everyone has, but it’s hardly unique either.

I worry not a jot about charging. (edit: but then I don’t need it kerbside, so apologies for going off topic!)

I think EV are quite possibly the answer, but that the question is probably the wrong one.

Where is everyone travelling to? What % of the population do jobs that couldn’t just as easily be done from home, meetings by video conference, public transport or even under your own steam. Admittedly this also needs a lot of infrastructure improvement, but I think we are looking for the solution to the wrong question. Doing more locally reduces the majority of travel. More time for biking too with less commuting.

lol, they already do.The grid in many areas was sized for electric heating

…but presumably when there were far fewer houses.

Our Zoe recently has been getting ~3.5mpkwh, which is significantly less than your 4.4 presumably due to lower temperatures and different journeys.

As larger cars come onto the market the nationwide average will fall further, so I would agree with a figure nearer 10kwh.

Edukator –

Well current demand is at its lowest since 1994:

I thought it was about 2003 (from my recollection of DUKES) but it depends how you count it and you may well be right there.

Certainly been dropping for around 15 years, but transmission grid take and electricity consumed (even after allowing for losses) are not the same thing, so how you represent the figures gives different answers.

In 1994, I was working out how much asset replacement a REC needed to do. I wasn’t doing system design until 1997.

Sense yes, but eloquent?

LOL, what I meant was, there are lots of people on youtube who are wafflers and verbal stumblers, they can’t naturally orate or think on their feet. I find him quite good at presenting and putting across his natural thoughts. Fair enough if you don’t agree.

I still can’t decide if the whole battery leasing/replacement thing is actually a strength or weakness for the zoe…

I don’t know about the numbers in financial terms, but background is Jeremy Clarkson made a comment a few years ago that all EV batteries would need replacing within 3 years, which turned out to be complete bllcks. However, long term battery life was an unknown at the time, something he picked up on. I think Renault attempted to cover that concern with battery leasing. I don’t think they offer it anymore now that myth has been busted. Standard car warranty on new EV batteries is now 8 years or 100000 miles.

Everyone running at 3kW simultaneously for a reasonable length of time

27 million households simultaneously charging their car isn’t going to happen. Even taking your 10kWh per day which you now admit is pesimistic and 30 million cars to charge then over the day .4 kW x 30 million = 12giga watts. That’s if everyone has an electric car and the ability to charge it. Well on some days that could be a problem. Peak demand reached about 55gigawatts a few years back and at that instant another 12 would have not doubt been too much, but most of the time the system would cope right now. In just the same way as the grid copes with people having 18kW of power available and maybe enough appliances in their house to get there if they really tried but people don’t.

You said the grid is designed for 2kW domestic load (which corresponds remarkably well with that 55gW peak demand which passed without incident) on the basis of your own number it’s going to take electric cars being adopted faster than they can be manufactured to maybe create problems for a few cold days in the year, maybe, assuming no investment in infrastructure, assuming nobody seeing there’s money to be made, assuming…

FFS electric car sales are 1% and you’re trying to convince me that they’re going to destroy the grid, get real.

We wanted to do projects with second life EV batteries – too degraded for cars but with some capability left. Sadly it’s hard to get hold of them because they don’t seem to be degrading fast enough.
Except in Arizona or somewhere in the West Indies. Strange.

How much in the way of demand side response and take up of local/domestic generation and battery use is required to ease grid pressure? It must be helpful, especially now the no subsidy PV calculation is so straightforward.

For me I plan to install PV but no battery as things stand. It seems to me to be a pure financial play with a net negative impact on my environmental sustainability (making a battery is bad, the clean energy I generate will be used by someone if not me).

Also, there will surely be a point fairly soon in the take up of EV numbers that we get better at demand side response and the chargers choose their moment to fire up. There’s no new tech in that, just application.

One of the best things I’ve seen recently was where big EV users (not domestic ones) who could plan to charge at low prices and sell back spare charge stored in their big batteries if they needed to 🙂 Maybe those smart meters are a good thing….

I don’t think they offer it anymore now that myth has been busted

They do

Edukator – I’m trying to convince all and sundry EV shouldn’t destroy the grid provided we’re sensible.

We don’t get everyone on a local HV/LV substation taking 3kW simultaneously for an hour. It doesn’t happen. So we don’t melt the LV system. Today. If everyone charges at 3kW at every house on a local substation then it will cause problems. But they don’t do that either (even if and when they all have EVs and chargers). Diversity means that all those 3kW chargers don’t run at the same time and the resultant addition to existing peak is closer to 1kW per 3kW charger (than 3 per 3).

And the 55GW doesn’t tie up with 2kW times 30 million, because at that level the diversity drops the domestic figure closer to 1kW but then you have to add in non-domestic load.

And 10kWh per day is a pessimistic but sensible figure to use. And dealing in tens makes the arithmetic easy. 😉

Actually Edukator, I don’t think we’re really disagreeing, there are just some odd subtleties to how diversified loads build up and what different bits of the network were designed for.

I absolutely accept that some people will use less than 10kWh, but if I can show it works at that level, then it will work at your far more ecologically sound usage level. And 10kWh really isn’t that high in the UK.

More interesting is where does the generation come from a thermal plant is retired. Nuclear and hydro is great, but there isn’t much in the UK, and if a significant part is wind and PV then night time EV charging might not be a great idea – PV means daytime and wind means anytime / all times. Unless we are going to charge stationary batteries during the day to charge mobile ones at night. Ouch.

On the other hand, and again interesting, 30 million or so EVs at say 40kWh per EV (last year’s LEAF – no?), is 1.2TWh or about a day and a half of GB (I think, might be UK) demand at present. That’s a lot of storage. We need to make good use of that.

Everyone else.

Flexibility, DSR etc – good
Home generation (low carbon) – good
Home generation (low carbon) straight into your car – good
Smart meters – should be good at some point
Minimising double storage – good
Storage (possibly V2G) to keep lights on after faults – good
As above using the existing LV network to sustain communities after HV faults – good

Anything I missed?

It wouldn’t even get me to work & back on leccy only.

You live too far from work.

Before Drac piles in on anything I say, I’d like to say the following I agree with.

PS – the UK grid was generally designed to domestic load of 2kW ADMD, 15kW individual peak.
Everyone running at 3kW simultaneously for a reasonable length of time would cause significant problems on the LV system – blown fuses, melted wires that sort of thing.
Really, truely.

It’s on topic, and kept within the invisible boundaries he seems to think exist.

Now, Drac can have his 5mins of moaning about something I’ve written..

Off you go …

🤷‍♂️

Anything I missed?

Well, I had a grand vision of V2H from my Sono Motor Sion. charge the car at cheap tariff overnight, then power my home all day and eve from the car (so, running my home on Octopus Go night tariff 5p per kwh, 24/7 or nearly). It wasn’t much of a saving, maybe £200 per year, but God I’d feel like a cutting edge pioneer. Do you really want to kick sand in my face?

Banana – go for it. In the short term, why not? Longer term, the overnight tariff may well not be cheap, but get some PV on your roof and when (if) you have a car parked at home during the day you can power yourself overnight.
PS – you need to check if the pound notes work out, and the viability will vary by both country and lifestyle.

You’re not meant to use the 13amp plug in chargers for 24/7 usage. A fast charger is the way to go.

We have a 7kW. Takes around 4hrs.

Although I managed to break the end off with the wheelie-bin going past it. And the cables and plugs are expensive.

Also in the US, a few folk have the Tesla power banks and solar panels combination. Some great films on you tube about this.

Everything is just going to get better – think how long it’s took for the ICE to reach its peak.

Looking at a Telsa Powerwall and solar myself for slightly different reasons than car charging – but it’s certainly worth considering when the prices align.

I find interesting this idea that the environmental good is not a major motivator for EVs. For me it is and since the prices don’t align yet in most people’s eyes, I’d assumed for them likewise.

For those of you considering using batteries to profit from an arbitrage between cheap night and expensive daytime power, is this a part of your motivation at all? You could argue some environmental positive but it’s unclear I think, as my earlier post.

For those of you considering using batteries to profit from an arbitrage between cheap night and expensive daytime power, is this a part of your motivation at all?

The day time tarriff seems too steep currently on those to make it work for me.

Have skimmed all the above and the usual arguments for and against all seem to have been raised

– no cleaner than ICE because of the power stations needed to make the electricity

– cars don’t have enough range

– don’t make the cars I want in EV versions

– lack of charging capacity

and so on.

None of which are necessarily outright wrong, but most have counters to them.

The issue as I see it is that we actually can fix all of those if we wanted to. It’s not as if we are waiting for some technological advancement to make it feasible, it’s all do-able. We could upgrade our electrical capacity, we can build networks of power points, we could standardise batteries so that you can pull into a service station on a long run, drop out the old one and fit a new one in a few minutes while you have a piss and a coffee….. what we lack is the impetus to do it, and what we have is the attitude that when we solve all those issues then we’ll make the change.

We need to get the impetus and flip that attitude around; because we MUST make that change we have to make solving those issues a priority.

The thing is; we’ve done this once before. 1780-1807 in fact. We used human labour, specifically slave labour for our power needs. We knew it was wrong but persisted because of the benefits we perceived it brought us, irrespective of the cost. And then Wilberforce and others brought forward their acts, and from that the industrial revolution* was born. Not vice versa.

We need a collective Wilberforce moment that will force us to the solution (which we already technically have, unlike the IR that had barely seen a steam engine at that point), not wait for the solution before having the moment.

* yeah, I know that’s turned out well and in some respects is what has created the EV vs ICE car debate, but I’m not going to accept that we should have stayed with slave labour because of emissions criteria no matter how anyone makes that case.

Power generation is getting cleaner so that is a weak argument…more renewables in the mix, fossil fuel stations moving to gas, prospect of more nuclear in the future….stop using this as an excuse…its far easier to address this than waiting for millions of individuals to get over themselves and keep kicking the can down the road. We as individuals can only do our best to reduce our own personal impact. Blaming stuff on others is just a feeble excuse.

Cars don’t have enough range…what for every journey you do? Every time you use your car you’re doing a journey of over 150 miles? I don’t believe you, and if you’re clocking up over 150 miles a day then your in the minority so not an acceptable excuse for the vast majority of us. I suspect an EV has plenty enough range for the vast majority of your daily driving. People need to be honest about their car usage. Also we have to accept that for those longer journeys we might have to plan for a stop or two to charge up. It’s a small price to pay.

Don’t make cars you ‘want’ in EV versions? Well that’s a first world problem and the days of cars being fun toys are waining and they’re becoming practical tools. Anyway more and more EV’s are hitting the market so that will soon change.

Lack of charging capacity – is this not the same as point 1 or do you mean lack of charging infrastructure? Again wont be an issue forever and we have to accept that we may have to plan our journeys to include a planned stop for charging.

I don’t think people get it…..we do need to change over at some point, the sooner we do it the sooner the demand will be created and better EV’s and infrastructure will happen. Time to stop blaming others and taking some responsibiity. There will always be a small proportion of people wher EV’s will nto be viable solutions, but in the whole most poeple could, with a bit of effort and forethought, can make them work with minimial inconvenience.

I’m no raving environmentalist but realistic about things and realise that we do need to make the switch to EV’s if we want half a chance of retaining individual transport before governments start taxing cars off the roads altogether. Bring it on I say. Embrace it. As consumers lets take control (and be responsible) and dictate things. The less we leave to politicians the better, the obviously don’t have a clue.

@wobbliscott

agree entirely, you may be misreading my post as excuses why -> I <- don’t want to change.

I’m making the point like you that all the reasons are either irrelevant or can be fixed if we want to, but we need the impetus to do it – that Wilberforce moment. If we keep saying that we’ll make the change ONCE all those reasons are resolved, it’ll be too late. And leaving it to the collective to do it, it won’t happen any time soon.

fossil fuel stations moving to gas

is gas not a fossil fuel?

EV’s are great, but you cant buy one for a £1000, so I’m out. even if i could get one cheep, I couldn’t charge it at home, or at work so I’m stuffed. I’m looking for a e-bike for commuting and general pottering about/shopping, but again cant find one worth having for the same budget. If my company adopted C2W, that would help. My fear is that the hole push over to EV’s will mean private cars will become something for the wealthy, as most people will be priced out of the market.

igm

Subscriber
Banana – go for it. In the short term, why not? Longer term, the overnight tariff may well not be cheap, but get some PV on your roof and when (if) you have a car parked at home during the day you can power yourself overnight.
PS – you need to check if the pound notes work out, and the viability will vary by both country and lifestyle.

It was just an idea based on the first car to market that will have bi-directional charging (11kw input and output), so you can power a home or charge other cars from it. It has a 3 pin plug in the body, so you can power household appliances on holiday, in the garden etc. It also comes with all body panels completely covered in PV cells. AND for the utilitarians on here, it comes with ridesharing and carsharing tech (not sure how I’d feel about lending my car to someone). And it’s quite cheap by current EV car standards, only in LHD at the moment tho.

Wireless charging strips that run under the road and charge your car as you drive, or your e-bike. Or your hover board.

@timber agree 150% cultural change is what is needed

and if you live in sunny California – visit your local park for a solar recharge….the panels track the sun…suspect that if you take a whole life approach not that environmentally friendly but as to what can be done shows the way and will get more agile and hopefully greener

*bike powered by craft beer nearly 100%

Wireless charging strips that run under the road and charge your car as you drive, or your e-bike. Or your hover board.

Not worth considering. Expensive and inefficient.

which suggests that the grid is less stressed than it has been in recent years.

If our generation is down I think this would be due to the age of the plants and them shutting down, because of this we would import more energy, but it all would still through the grid I think?

Looks like we are currently importing from France, Netherlands and one other: http://gridwatch.co.uk

My fear is that the hole push over to EV’s will mean private cars will become something for the wealthy, as most people will be priced out of the market.

If anything it should be the opposite,
1) Because EV motors are so much more simple than ICE. No complicated engine and requisite parts, no gearbox, no exhaust, no cat. EV’s have something like 200 moving parts, whereas ICE vehicles have something like 2000 moving parts (complete guess-timate but you get the idea). The only reason they are expensive right now is that it’s all new tech, on small scale production and the most expensive part (the battery) is also not manufactured on a massive industrial scale, yet.

2) If ‘they’ are correct, in a few years, people won’t be able to give away their ICE cars. In fact, Jeremy Clarkson will be paying you to take his Lamborghini off his hands.

I can’t add anything to the charging debate, but i had my first drive of an e-car today, a Nissan leaf. Its a works vehicle so has its own space with charging point.

It was an odd experience, but I guess you get used to it. I found it really odd feeling like you’re free Wheeling everywhere with little sense of speed. I had to really watch the speedo closely to avoid speeding, even up long hills where in my own car I’d know I was going up a long hill.

I tried the e-brake option where the one pedal brakes and accelerates, but that was just too odd. Again I assume you get used to it.

So first impressions driving were great. Its a windy day here and pretty lumpy and that didn’t have any noticeable effect. Did about 50miles. I just have to watch I don’t speed!

If anything it should be the opposite,

The problem tat unless things like the right to repair are tightly protected and standard open source interfaces are not required that as the cars are even more reliant on electronics and software home and independent workshop repair becomes evermore increasingly difficult. This is not a ev only issue but ev do add to the problem a little more. I say this as someone with reasonable electronic knowledge and good software knowledge. (Given time I could more or less build a ev from scratch / component level or moduel level at least on many items.)

EV’s are nt going to get cheaper than ICE’s for a long long time yet. If anything they will get probably get more expensive as the demand for battery’s increases and the resources for them get harder to extract/find. If and when they become a lot, lot cheaper (2nd hand) ICE cars will have been outlawed or taxed off the road /excluded from built up areas. What will the large percentage of the population do then, who cant afford to enter the EV market. At this point where ICE cars are not permitted anymore, 2nd hand values will increase (they already hold there value) as demand will increase further. Car manufactures could charge what they want to a captive market. Back street garages wont be able to service them (already a problem with some modern cars), increasing service costs. 1st generation batteries on older EV’s wont be up to much and replacements will be very expensive. What guarantees do we have that manufacturers will continue to provide updates to the software & batteries of older EV’s  maintaining the second hand market? I fear EV’s will become like white goods. Until the technology progresses from fixed charging points they will be a non starter for a lot of people, if they can even afford them. Its going to happen, there is no stopping it, but we need BIG changes in planning and lifestyle strategies if its going to be a workable option, and that is generations off. Just legislating against ICE cars and forcing people off the road is not on. The change should start with freight/industrial/government vehicles first, forcing the infrastructure to be put in place. Rather than forcing the cost onto private users.

Linear motor installed in the fast lane of dual carriageways and recharge the v through it’s regen braking system.

Mad, but it might just work.

No idea what that means, but it sounds a long way off and expensive. Will it get me on the road for 1K before i’m priced out/excluded from car ownership?.