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London Electric Vehicle Chargers Proposal.

How many?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/cars/article-7150191/London-need-50-000-public-electric-car-chargers-2025.html


Z.
  • 50000 for 300000 cars sounds very optimistic to me.


    If you have your own dedicated parking space with an electricity supply, then you hardly need public chargers.  Just plug in when you get home, and unplug when you want to go somewhere.  Public chargers are just for long journeys.


    People using on-street parking will want to do much the same.  The cars will be left plugged in for hours on end.  Which would leave an awful lot of people with nowhere to plug in their cars.
  • It is also worth pointing out that London does not generate the electricity it uses, as with many other services, and for that matter food,  it relies on the rest of the country to support it. Therefore the energy to supply this extra load too, will be largely need to be brought in - sound bite  ambitions to have 15% of generation embedded within greater London by 2030 is not going to quite hack it I suspect.
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member
    I watched a program recently about the problems of electric vehicles (privately owned) and the problems of charging them.  as we all know, parking in London is at a premium and getting worse everyday.  the program highlighted the parking problem, especially off road parking and that most properties don't have drives and that the residents have to drape extension leads from their homes across pavements, both at floor level and overhead to charge their vehicles.  Are the government or local borough councils going to install multiple charging points in most streets?

  • I watched a program recently about the problems of electric vehicles (privately owned) and the problems of charging them.  as we all know, parking in London is at a premium and getting worse everyday.  the program highlighted the parking problem, especially off road parking and that most properties don't have drives and that the residents have to drape extension leads from their homes across pavements, both at floor level and overhead to charge their vehicles.  Are the government or local borough councils going to install multiple charging points in most streets?



    I can't speak for London, but I know the policy around here (where we also have areas with a large amounts of terraced housing with no off-street parking) is for rapid chargers in short-stay car parks (e.g. supermarkets) to serve such areas - so people can top up when they're out and about rather than overnight at home. Not ideal from a grid load point of view, but can serve a reasonable number of people with a small number of charge points. Plus of course, the on-going policy to shift commuters from cars to public transport (which one day hopefully central government will gets its act together on). Maybe too we'll see the European approach of renting spaces in residential area car parks rather than street parking - where you could have your own off-street charger.


       - Andy.
  • This idea is a non-starter Andy. We simply do not have the spare grid capacity during the day, so a supermarket with 500 off 100kW chargers would be a disaster. The incoming pylon line would have nowhere to connect! Perhaps a few solar panels would solve the problem, at around 300-400 kW per acre best case in summer, the entire surroundings would have to be roofed! The whole idea of electric vehicles for all is entirely impractical. I still want to know who pays for the infrastructure.
  • I doubt that planning for 500 charging spaces, each with a loading of 100Kw, at one supermarket is realistic.

    A large supermarket near me only has about 300 spaces in total.

    To suggest an increase of over 50% in parking provision, AND that EVERY space will have a fully loaded 100Kw charger is very OTT.


    A more realistic provision might be 10 fast chargers each of 100KW and a similar number of 7Kw chargers, and a few 2.5Kw charging places. With a bit of diversity, that should be achievable at LV from a dedicated substation near the load. Charge controllers are already available that link together a number of chargers and slightly delay charging or slightly slow the charging rate when needed to avoid overloading the supply.

    With such automatic control, I suspect that at least 25 chargers each of 100Kw could be connected to a nominal 1Mw supply. Remember that with 25 charging spaces, that a couple will be taken by vehicles not yet charging (owner still parking, and looking for their payment card) Others will taken by vehicles that are charged but not yet removed because the owner is still shopping. And a lot charging at less than 100KW because they are smaller vehicles, or are nearly full.

    The limiting factor is likely to be heating of the 11Kv transformer, so in cooler weather a total loading of 1,200Kw should be fine, and in sunlight an extra 200Kw could be available by PV modules over the parking areas.

    Automatic load control, though needed to avoid breaking anything, would very seldom actually operate.
  • My local shopping mall has over 6000 parking spaces. Many other supermarkets here have 500 spaces or more. A local one has 16 fuel pump spaces and has permanent queues although "charging" only takes a few minutes, probably 200 cars an hour at least. Are you having some kind of joke? Fundamentally the problem with electric cars is that fueling is unsupported by the available infrastructure, and that building it is fearfully expensive. The case for electric cars is very weak anyway, and could perhaps make a temperature difference of a couple of hundreths of a degree, even if the climate lobby is entirely correct in its estimations, and no fossil fuels are used for electricity generation, which at present does not have a technical solution even if we went entirely nuclear. I repeat the question, who pays?
  • I suspect everyone who wants to live on the planet pays. It would be a more convincing direction of travel if we could first manage to finish electrifying the railways - after all we started electrification in about 1890 with electricity on the underground in London. I suspect from the quality of the ride the last time I was there that some of the original.hardware  may still be in use ?

    Similarly the idea of electric lorries at megawatts each is a hard way to do things - train based transport for freight, and then to smaller machines for local delivery would make more sense, however to do next day delivery that would require a degree of slickness that rail freight seems incapable of managing these days - which is odd when you consider we could do first class post next day to the other end of the country in 24hrs with steam trains.
  • Unfortunately Mike that is not the case. China currently has an order book to build over 1000 coal fired power stations! Is that everyone, certainly not. The UK going mad to reduce emissions is looney to say the least. We have about 1% of world population and perhaps between 1 and 2% of emissions. Is "virtue signalling" going to make any difference at all?
  • By a similar argument, I shouldn't bother picking up my own litter as its only a tiny fraction of what everyone else is dropping. Is picking up my own litter "virtue signalling"?