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More Car Charging Juice Needed Humphrey? Yes Minister.

Well I never. Haven't we said so for years? Ministers are catching on at last, bless 'em.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/cars/article-7894719/UK-electricity-network-needs-upgraded-cope-rising-EV-demand.html


Z.
  • I wonder if someone has actually read my posts here and now has realised the problem? Amazing!


    I estimate the cost of distribution only for electric vehicles could be £100 billion. Add 10 more 2-3 GW nuclear power stations and we get to £300 billion. Talk about unafordable public expenditure, and all for some kind of "virtue signalling".
  • A universal switch to electric  vehicles is just fantasy without huge investment. 

    Ask the guy at the motorway services. Apart from actually getting enough chargers installed apparently  the customers don't want stop, so they are installing drive through coffee shops on the slip roads to humour them, despite the danger of congestion backing up onto the motorway. 


    Andy Betteridge
  • Perhaps I am getting this wrong? You buy a public asset at a knock down price, you don't invest in the improvement and maintenance of your now private asset that you own, you extract as much cash as you can from the company. The asset decays and starts to fail and then you have a few options.


    1. Give the now knackered asset back to the government, or better still sell it to them. Government spends huge amounts of tax payers money upgrading the asset. Buy the upgraded asset back and repeat cycle.

    2. Go to the government and ask for a huge amount as a grant of tax payers money to invest in your company. Spend 80% of that money on the asset and pocket 20% as dividends and fees. Repeat cycle.

    3. Go to government and ask for a huge increase in tariff as an emergency measure and use Smart meters to ration demand.


    Well that's the network sorted now what about the generation of electricity to pipe through the new network?


  • I agree it is good that folk are waking up to the fact that some engineering is needed, and that some of our electrical infrastructure is a bit creaky already, without adding a significant extra load, quite a lot of it is more than 50 years old.

    I am not sure of your price estimates. Given that car tax (vehicle excise duty) brings in 6.5 billion /year (ref. here ) and fuel taxes currently bring in about 28 billion/year  ( ref. here ).

    Taking your numbers, then we need infrastructure that will last a few decades to make it worthwhile from the treasury perspective, and that assumes make owning an electric vehicle roughly the same cost to the end user as a traditional one, at the moment a significant incentive to use an electric vehicle is that it is much cheaper.

    Equally new generation projects seem to be costed in price per MWhr generated, which makes immediate comparisons a bit hard when we do not know how long they will last.

    an example of confusing reporting These 'strike prices'  are always a bit off compared to the retail price - even a high £100 per MW/Hr is only 10p per retail unit (kwH).
  • Are electric cars actually being bought as second cars by people who have shared access to a petrol or diesel car for quick getaways and long trips?


    Andy Betteridge
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member

    Sparkingchip:

    Are electric cars actually being bought as second cars by people who have shared access to a petrol or diesel car for quick getaways and long trips?


    Andy Betteridge 




     

    To some extent, yes


    I've been looking at an all electric VW lease deal - and the deal would also give me up to a certain amount of miles or days in a larger, non electric or hybrid vehicle. So basically, I use my all electric day to day, and then drop it off and pick up a bigger hybrid for those longer journeys  - family holiday perhaps


    It's actually quite a good deal if I buy into it via a French VW dealership (Brexit notwithstanding)


    Regards


    OMS
  • Will technology move on quickly with EVs never becoming main stream?

    Hydrogen could be an alternative  but is still reliant on lots of electricity being available. 


    Andy Betteridge 


  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member
    Storing hydrogen is an absolute nightmare - it leaks through pretty well everything


    Do we really want several thousand bombs all lined up nicely and travelling at 80mph, just waiting for the inevitable shunt ?


    Regards


    OMS


  • A better solution may be to produce methane from the hydrogen which consumes CO2 (Sabatier reaction etc) giving a closed CO2 cycle. Methane is somewhat easier to handle than hydrogen although it still will not liquify at normal temperatures.
  • Hopefully someone is also counting all the fossil fuel needed for large construction projects as an electric bulldozer or scraper has yet to be invented. Then there is the concrete (cement) and steel and every other material one can think of except wood. Then there is the huge amount of lorry transport needed to move all the materials to site, no electric ones there either. Adding up all this fossil fuel cannot amount to anything much different to that used by the original liquid fueled cars, particularly when the construction of all those electric vehicles is included.


    I also notice that the original article wants to have massive storage available to cover the time when the wind is not "friendly" enough, or the windmills fail or whatever. More massive construction.


    There are a number of big windmills along the river Severn near Avonmouth and one of these has been broken for some time. Recently a huge mobile crane (1000 tons capacity) and a fleet of lorries carrying its accessories has arrived and has been slowly assembled next to the windmill to lower something heavy from the 250 - 300 feet it is high. The recent windy weather has prevented much happening, probably too dangerous as a good gust could easily tip the whole lot over during a lift, despite the huge counterweight. This maintenance must be costing a huge sum, and from info. from a friend who works for another turbine company, new projects are off the table because of lack of profitability.


    The economic problem is thus exposed, and also the extremely dubious idea of electric everything to "save the planet". It appears that we cannot reliably build ONE nuclear power station on budget and extended timescale, so how do we manage to build all these others, and all the new pylons to carry the electricity, and dig up all the roads to reinforce (replace) all of the low voltage distribution?


    This "smart  charger" idea is also dead before it starts, because in all cases the charger is built into the car and most do not have the smart charging power control built in. Like smart meters they are basically useless because there seems to be no one tasked with designing the whole system before we start, otherwise vehicles themselves would be class 2 appliances and much easier for the rest of us! The whole electric economy idea needs serious engineering input NOW before it is too late and the whole lot fails at enormous cost. I suggest a good place to start would be some of us Engineers who understand the challenges, rather than a load of politicians who don't, and stopping the propaganda from the BBC and others that the world is going to end. It certainly will for this country unless some sense is used by those who should know a great deal better than to promise the undeliverable. However they will find a way to blame the Engineers when it all goes wrong!


    Take note!

    David CEng etc.