Electric vehicles

[Cheshirechappie]

Indeed ! Words from politicians about what will happen in 15 years time are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

IMHO, we are addressing quite the wrong problem with worrying about what fuels cars. More we need to worry about why people need to spend so much time charging around like blue-pineappled flies by all forms of transport - like providing a sensible distribution of housing and employment, encouraging work from home, technological alternatives to face to face meetings, etc, etc.

Indeed. But - you can't tax those as easily, can you ....

 

[Bodgers]

This is not a statement of intent to actually do anything, just a space-chimp-like expectation that the world will have moved on by then.
In the same way that we can still see horse-drawn vehicles, I'm sure we will still see ICE vehicles in a few decades time.
I think it is difficult to appreciate the pace of technological change.
Quiz question: a century ago, the largest single consumer of British-mined coal was?

The action is stop the sale of cars. That will happen, but the dates may change.

Yes, you'll see ICE cars, but you probably won't be able to buy a new one. Or if you can, it will be a low production expensive exotic.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Indeed ! Words from politicians about what will happen in 15 years time are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

IMHO, we are addressing quite the wrong problem with worrying about what fuels cars. More we need to worry about why people need to spend so much time charging around like blue-pineappled flies by all forms of transport - like providing a sensible distribution of housing and employment, encouraging work from home, technological alternatives to face to face meetings, etc, etc.

I live in the middle of nowhere, in a foreign country, but when I'm in the UK the over-riding questions are: "Don't these people have any work to do?" How can everyone afford to be on the road, all the time? Where are they going? What are they doing? Why aren't they at work? The difference in traffic is astonishing. It's not just white vans delivering Amazon carp, although there is a fair amount of that.

 

[Bodgers]

Indeed ! Words from politicians about what will happen in 15 years time are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

IMHO, we are addressing quite the wrong problem with worrying about what fuels cars. More we need to worry about why people need to spend so much time charging around like blue-pineappled flies by all forms of transport - like providing a sensible distribution of housing and employment, encouraging work from home, technological alternatives to face to face meetings, etc, etc.

It is possible to do both. They aren't mutually exclusive.

 

[dangles]

I read this on a "green" site and admittedly it was from 2017 and I've read that some manufacturers throw one in for "free" and the government give a grant of upto 75%.
With the recent huge boom in the number of electric car owners, more and more people in the UK are choosing to install electric car charging points at home. However, they don’t come cheap. A typical cost for a charge point plus installation is £1000 .

 

[Woody2Shoes]

I read this on a "green" site and admittedly it was from 2017 and I've read that some manufacturers throw one in for "free" and the government give a grant of upto 75%.
With the recent huge boom in the number of electric car owners, more and more people in the UK are choosing to install electric car charging points at home. However, they don’t come cheap. A typical cost for a charge point plus installation is £1000 .

GB subsidies are about 3000 ukl per vehicle (but luxury car tax can be a nasty surprise for some). Some manufacturers offer a 'free' charger install with a new car. I wonder how long it will be before EVs are taxed - that will be an acknowledgement that they are truly mainstream.
The answer to the quiz question earlier was the Royal Navy.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

Indeed ! Words from politicians about what will happen in 15 years time are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

IMHO, we are addressing quite the wrong problem with worrying about what fuels cars. More we need to worry about why people need to spend so much time charging around like blue-pineappled flies by all forms of transport - like providing a sensible distribution of housing and employment, encouraging work from home, technological alternatives to face to face meetings, etc, etc.

I live in the middle of nowhere, in a foreign country, but when I'm in the UK the over-riding questions are: "Don't these people have any work to do?" How can everyone afford to be on the road, all the time? Where are they going? What are they doing? Why aren't they at work? The difference in traffic is astonishing. It's not just white vans delivering Amazon carp, although there is a fair amount of that.

I remember visiting a small town in rural India and being taken aback by the number of people walking around the streets. It later dawned on me that the population density at home is similar but we're all whizzing around in cars.
The car use that really seems barmy to me is the number of people who will drive three or four miles to take the dog for a walk - we're in leafy open countryside.

 

[Bodgers]

I read this on a "green" site and admittedly it was from 2017 and I've read that some manufacturers throw one in for "free" and the government give a grant of upto 75%.
With the recent huge boom in the number of electric car owners, more and more people in the UK are choosing to install electric car charging points at home. However, they don’t come cheap. A typical cost for a charge point plus installation is £1000 .

No.

With the OLEV grant it is more like £300-500.

I have just paid £300 to PodPoint to get mine installed. And that's everything included.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

I read this on a "green" site and admittedly it was from 2017 and I've read that some manufacturers throw one in for "free" and the government give a grant of upto 75%.
With the recent huge boom in the number of electric car owners, more and more people in the UK are choosing to install electric car charging points at home. However, they don’t come cheap. A typical cost for a charge point plus installation is £1000 .

No.

With the OLEV grant it is more like £300-500.

I have just paid £300 to PodPoint to get mine installed. And that's everything included.

A typical charger will cost about £500 plus perhaps about half a day's installation. The OLEV 'grant' is 500 or 800 in Scotland so you can see how the numbers work out.

 

[AJB Temple]

Be wary about installation costs. It is cheap and easy as long as your consumer unit is reasonably close to the location where you want the charger.

It needs a beefy cable and this gets expensive over distance. Higher amperage charging is good and 3 phase much better.

In my case the garage is 50 metres from the incoming supply and I wanted a fast charger. If you need to trench it and cable it with thick armoured, then cost goes up by a few hundred pounds at least (I am my own digger operator).

 

[AES]

@Bodgers: Re your "Err...I think you have completely reversed what I was saying...".

I did realise that you were replying to someone else's point (about not relying on electronic maps but paper maps instead - amongst other points in similar vein), but having re-read your post I really don't think that I misunderstood (or reversed) your point about MRI scanning.

BUT it's late at night and I'm tired, so if I did misunderstand you then I apologise and immediately retract the yellow card! No harm done I hope?

Whatever, this remains an interesting thread for me, even though at my age I doubt I shall be driving long enough into the future for it all to make much difference to me personally - in 2035 I shall be 90, and whatever "target date" today's Govt have put on a "definitive change" (ahem!) I doubt that much will come into effect to make a real difference to me. That's why I said above that I don't have a dog in this particular fight.

 

[RogerS]

As a related point, trains.

I was having a conversation recently about HS2.

I am totally against building HS2, not because I don't want better transport connections for the north and the south (though it will never help me living in the SW) but because it is a waste of money that will be all but useless when it is finished.

We are looking at 10 years before the first trains run and a projected build cost of up to 100billion.

......

Came across this chart. Similar amount of money. DITCH HS2. That's a no-brainer

 

[jeremyduncombe]

Doesn’t that just prove the 2012 Olympics were a terrible waste of money ?

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Doesn’t that just prove the 2012 Olympics were a terrible waste of money ?

Allegedly UK spends 5.5% of GDP on education. 2018 GDP was 2.11 trillion (again,allegedly according to the internet), and 5.5% of 2.11 trillion is 116 billion, possibly. 20 billion plus or minus - not really worth talking about. Small change down the back of the sofa

I'm sorry to keep harping on about the fact that there isn't the capacity to power all these cars. Again allegedly, according to the briefest of internet searches, it costs $7 billion and takes 12 years to build a nuclear power station, and we have already ascertained that we need 45+ new nuclear power station's to replace the oil used currently to power all the transport. You could use solar or wind power instead, but that is even more expensive than nuclear power. Allegedly. 45 X $7 billion is $315 billion, which makes a bit more of a dent than the 5% of GDP mentioned in the graphic.

France built 58 nuclear reactors over 15 years and has generated over 400 TWh with them. The inflation-adjusted price was $330 billion.

Germany spent $580 billion on solar and wind to get about 220 TWh. This was four times more expensive than France.

Global Solar and Wind has to increase by about five times to provide all of annual increase in electricity.

Solar and Wind need natural gas or some other power plant backup or massive battery farms that have not been built yet.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/05/n ... -wind.html

 

[Terry - Somerset]

I have also done a swift google. A lot of sites are selective with figures to reach the conclusion wanted - thus the situation gets more confusing:

It seems that around 6 Hinckley point nuclear reactors would be required to power all EVs. This is much less than above - possibly because Hinkley point is new, being constructed, and possibly designed to be higher output.

It also seems that the additional capacity required to accomodate all EVs depends on the charging regime. Spare capacity at night would/could be sold at much lower prices than daytime charging. So the additional capacity required could be a factor of 2 or 3 time different under different pricing and charging regimes.

There is also some debate whether battery storage could be used to supplement the grid at peak demand times by feeding power back into the grid. This would impact on additional capacity requirements but there are some technical issues to be sorted

The final point is that the transition is not going to happen this year or next year - it will happen progressively over the next 15-20 years. The general proposition is that the number of cars sold pa will remain at around 2-2.5m pa. Given a national fleet of 32m private vehicles it would take around 13 years to replace them if ALL new vehicle sales were electric. This is unlikely to be the case as many will replace current ICE with ICE for several years to come.

In conclusion:

(a) future plans need to assume a significant increase in generating capacity
(b) plans should include upgrades to distribution networks
(c) it is reasonable to assume a median case not worst case in terms of capacity needed
(d) as the changes will happen over 15-20 years we do not need to be in panic mode
(e) if properly managed some costs may be offset by savings in not upgrading conventional fuel supply chains.

 

[MusicMan]

Rather than doing simplistic calculations claiming to show that vast new numbers of power stations will be required, why not look at National Grid's own forecasts?

https://www.nationalgrid.com/group/case ... future-evs

They point out that it is not at all sensible or realistic to assume, as T_N did above, that the large predicted numbers of EVs will all try to charge at once at peak times. That indeed would need an impractical number of power stations. What they are planning is smart meters that measure and charge in half hour intervals throughout the 24 hours, linked to the price and availability of power. They don't seem to be concerned about coping, as long as the 'smart grid' is brought in nationally, plus maybe a 10-15% growth in generation power,

It does not take all night to charge a BEV. The 40 KW Leaf takes about 5-6 hours for a full charge, and most days many drivers will only need a popup charge. It is already possible to use an app to control when this is done so as to get the cheapest power.

And this is not futuristic hopefulness. I have just ordered a smart meter from Octopus and a charger from EO that will do this already, and also take account of when solar power is available from my roof panels. The Octopus Agile tariff charges in half-hour intervals. Most of the day it is around 5 - 6p a unit, in the small hours it is 3 - 4p but between 4 and 7 pm it is about 24p. It doesn't need legislation or enforcement to persuade people to charge when the power is cheap. This compares to roughly 15p a unit charged by the big power utilities and even Economy 7 is 8p.

And in those peak hours, it is already possible in some areas to sell your surplus stored battery power back to the grid (Ovo and Octopus have extensive trials working now). The combined storage power of, say, a million BEVs that have 80% charge left at 4 pm is in the region of tens of GW - that's roughly five major power stations or Dinorwig hydro storage installations, which will make a huge contribution to the grid. And there is plenty of time after 7 pm to charge your car ready for the morning.

BEVs are not the complete answer nor the answer for everyone. Hydrogen or (perhaps better and safer) ammonia fuel cells may be the best for heavy transport, though they are still a long way off making a major contribution. They will not alone fix the CO2/greenhouse problem in time. They will make a serious contribution to reducing CO2 (yes even when you take manufacturing costs into account) and a massive contribution to cleaning up air pollution in cities. Of course many other changes will be needed, especially in agriculture and diet and in consumption generally.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Rather than doing simplistic calculations claiming to show that vast new numbers of power stations will be required, why not look at National Grid's own forecasts?

https://www.nationalgrid.com/group/case ... future-evs

They point out that it is not at all sensible or realistic to assume, as T_N did above, that the large predicted numbers of EVs will all try to charge at once at peak times. That indeed would need an impractical number of power stations. What they are planning is smart meters that measure and charge in half hour intervals throughout the 24 hours, linked to the price and availability of power. They don't seem to be concerned about coping, as long as the 'smart grid' is brought in nationally, plus maybe a 10-15% growth in generation power,

It does not take all night to charge a BEV. The 40 KW Leaf takes about 5-6 hours for a full charge, and most days many drivers will only need a popup charge. It is already possible to use an app to control when this is done so as to get the cheapest power.

And this is not futuristic hopefulness. I have just ordered a smart meter from Octopus and a charger from EO that will do this already, and also take account of when solar power is available from my roof panels. The Octopus Agile tariff charges in half-hour intervals. Most of the day it is around 5 - 6p a unit, in the small hours it is 3 - 4p but between 4 and 7 pm it is about 24p. It doesn't need legislation or enforcement to persuade people to charge when the power is cheap. This compares to roughly 15p a unit charged by the big power utilities and even Economy 7 is 8p.

And in those peak hours, it is already possible in some areas to sell your surplus stored battery power back to the grid (Ovo and Octopus have extensive trials working now). The combined storage power of, say, a million BEVs that have 80% charge left at 4 pm is in the region of tens of GW - that's roughly five major power stations or Dinorwig hydro storage installations, which will make a huge contribution to the grid. And there is plenty of time after 7 pm to charge your car ready for the morning.

BEVs are not the complete answer nor the answer for everyone. Hydrogen or (perhaps better and safer) ammonia fuel cells may be the best for heavy transport, though they are still a long way off making a major contribution. They will not alone fix the CO2/greenhouse problem in time. They will make a serious contribution to reducing CO2 (yes even when you take manufacturing costs into account) and a massive contribution to cleaning up air pollution in cities. Of course many other changes will be needed, especially in agriculture and diet and in consumption generally.

I freely admit to not having the expertise or time to look into this properly, but I started out by converting the annual amount of oil used in the UK to electrical energy as an equivalent amount of energy. I then divided that by 365 to give an amount per day, as an average. I'm not looking at peak energy requirement, just the amount of energy needed in a year, as provided by either oil, of nuclear power stations as an equivalent. My number came up with an outrageous 1,000 power stations required, just based on the energy used annually. However, I have since been put right and downgraded to 45 new power stations required. It is very easy to lose track of zeros when dealing with TerraWatt hours, and different people have differing numbers as to what constitutes "one nuclear power station equivalent". I was only out by a factor of 20

If the UK is already producing sufficient electricity to completely replace all fossil fuels, but are currently throwing it away through inefficient use of electrify, that is a) brilliant news, and b) ever-so-slightly unbelievable. I wait to be convinced.

 

[RogerS]

.....
It also seems that the additional capacity required to accomodate all EVs depends on the charging regime. Spare capacity at night would/could be sold at much lower prices than daytime charging. So the additional capacity required could be a factor of 2 or 3 time different under different pricing and charging regimes.

That's a specious argument by those propounding it. If everyone charges their car at night then there won't be 'spare capacity'.

.
There is also some debate whether battery storage could be used to supplement the grid at peak demand times by feeding power back into the grid. This would impact on additional capacity requirements but there are some technical issues to be sorted

Sheer lunacy and dreamt up while in a drug-induced euphoria. "Oh, sorry dear, we can't go shopping, I've just emptied the car into the grid". Leaving aside the technology, the cost.


In conclusion:

(a) future plans need to assume a significant increase in generating capacity They do....refer to the National Electricity documents
(b) plans should include upgrades to distribution networks They already do....refer to the Western Power Distribution document I linked to
(c) it is reasonable to assume a median case not worst case in terms of capacity needed But if we assume that 'worst case' is all EV cars then surely that is the worst case and MUST be planned for.
(d) as the changes will happen over 15-20 years we do not need to be in panic mode
(e) if properly managed some costs may be offset by savings in not upgrading conventional fuel supply chains.[/quote] Any more information on this ?

 

[RogerS]

Just a thought. Where is the night time generation going to come from ? Certainly not solar. Wind is not consistent. If the frequency starts to drop then automatic power-shedding occurs as happened in August last year.

 

[RogerS]

.... What they are planning is smart meters that measure and charge in half hour intervals throughout the 24 hours, linked to the price and availability of power. ....

If they bring in charging by the half-hour and hike the price up between, say, 4 and 7pm then can the differentiate between those houses with a charging point and those houses without ? Seems a tad unfair if they can't.