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Power networks could struggle by 2030 under soaring electric vehicle popularity ET

There is a lot written regarding the replacement of fossil fuelled (petrol and diesel) cars with electric cars. Some suggest it is easy, others suggest it is impossible. I decided to look briefly at the electricity requirements required to do this (This is based on Germany but I would expect the figures would be similar for the UK).

First step how much petrol and diesel is currently used?

From the IEA
www.iea.org/.../GermanyOSS.pdf
Germany petrol and diesel consumption 2010-2011.
Petrol 450 000 barrels per day
Diesel 1050 000 barrels per day

As a cross check on the total consumption:
world.bymap.org/OilConsumption.html
Total consumption petroleum consumption for Germany 2015
2 372 000 barrels per day

Next step what is the electrical energy equivalent of 1 barrel of Petrol/Diesel? From a couple of sources:

peakoil.com/.../how-much-energy-is-there-in-a-barrel-of-oil
1 barrel (crude) is 1,700 kilowatt hours

letthesunwork.com/.../barrelofenergy.htm
A barrel of oil contains about six gigajoules of energy. That’s six billion joules or 1667 kilowatt-hours

If we take 1.7 MWh per barrel for petrol annual automotive energy input is:
Petrol 765 000 MWh per day= 765 GWh per day = 279 000 GWh = 279 TWh

Assuming an efficiency of 20% for a petrol vehicle the energy required for petrol automotive use in Germany is 55.8 TWh per year.

Taking an overall efficiency for an electric vehicle to be 80% (electricity transmission losses, battery charging efficiency) replacing the petrol vehicles with electric vehicles would require 70 TWh per year.

What proportion of the diesel is for automotive use against road or rail transport is not obvious. Suggesting a total of 100TWh for the annual automotive consumption seems reasonable.

If all the diesel consumers were replaced by electric vehicles the annual electricity consumption would increase by around 220 TWh per year.

Currently Germany produces around 600 TWh of electricity annually.
www.cleanenergywire.org/.../germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts

Increasing this to 700 TWH to allow for the charging of electric cars is not trivial, nor is the reinforcement of the distribution infrastructure. Increasing to 820 TWh to replace all fossil fuelled transport is probably impossible in the suggested time scales.

Is this a reasonable assessment or have I as usual dropped a 0 somewhere?

Best regards

Roger

0 Former Community Member over 4 years ago

Opening up an old post but the IET forum would seem to be the best place to move the discussion forward after a couple of years.
Some time ago I wondered where all the power was going to come from and how it was going to get distributed, and did some rough estimates. The New Zealand Transport Agency publish annual spreadsheets of all the vehicles registered here. They have very comprehensive details of each vehicle including the engine size and power.

Taking 2018 as an example (the stats for 2016 and 2017 produce similar results)

There were 214,000 vehicles of all sizes, scooters to HGV’s registered in NZ in 2018, of which 164,000 were powered, including EV's of various types. The average power of the vehicles was 128Kw. If the average annual mileage is assumed to be 16,000km (10,000 miles) at, say, an average speed of 50km/hr then the average usage is 320hrs/year. Those vehicles aren't going to be driven at full power so let’s say they are driven at 20% of their max power.

Had all the vehicles been electric that would have been 164,000 vehicles, 128Kw at 20% for 320hrs = 1,343,488 MWh of power consumed per annum. With 8,760 hours in a year that would require a 153MWh power station running 24x7

New Zealand currently has 5 million vehicles and the government has stated that they are expecting 80% of all the vehicles to be electric by 2050. So 4,000,000/164,000 x 153MWh = 3,732GWh of additional power generation plus the transmission line infrastructure to move the power to where it’s needed.

The real concern is what is all this going to do to consumer power prices in order to pay for the build the required infrastructure? In the UK the problem must be 10 times that of New Zealand?

I may be well off the mark here but I can't find any references to any short,medium or long term integrated planning. Just piecemeal solutions and an air of somehow it will all come together.
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0 Roger B over 4 years ago

There are many uncertainties in all this as Neil noted above. When you get to using solar panels to charge a battery to be used to charge your vehicle battery there is another layer of infrastructure that has an energy content and an energy loss.

The one certainty is that there is no short, medium or long term integrated planning in any renewable energy solutions. Currently wind and solar operate parasitically on the existing grid and are supported by the rotating synchronus generators of the thermal power stations. Who is going to pay for a new infrastructure to work with intermittent wind and solar? Certainly not those reaping in the subsidies ?

Best regards

Roger
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0 Former Community Member over 4 years ago

Roger

Somebody must be doing the in-depth studies, not the “What’s the answer you want? Here’s the report” type of glossy brochure. Hopefully, there are IET members out there that can fill in some of the gaps?

Pete
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0 mapj1 over 4 years ago

well right now (April 2019) there are 35 million cars taxed and ready to run on the roads in the UK

210,000 of them, that is approximately 1 in 140 or so, are electric. They tend to seen be more in cities, which makes sense with shorter journeys, and more charge points.

However, there are already reports of a few substations already overheating, as load creeps up, so multiply by 140 and it will become a serious problem, and I think it is fair to say that the political class have not got a grip on the size of upgrade required.

To get an idea of the generation energy mix the gridwatch website is good. It is quite telling that this is not being done by any official body.

The old department of energy was subsumed by the dept of business and industrial strategy, which rather sums up the relative importance given.
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0 Former Community Member over 4 years ago

There has been a bit of a discussion on the forum for the Model Engineer magazine. One of the contributors has a Tesla and he has been sharing his experiences. He stated that he had to charge at 35amps for an hour to do 21miles. So lets say charge to do 100miles that's 44Kwh being drawn at night time That's for one property, scale that up for a street full of EV's and the sub stations will certainly be struggling. If everybody in the commuter belts were to arrive home and do the same, off peak could soon become peak time. OK there will be ways of load sharing between properties during the night but there would soon be a lot of disgruntled people if they do not get the power they expected to receive overnight. There is also an assumption that people will plug into their domestic supply. How is that going to work for high density housing like tower blocks? The parking bays will need dedicated charging infrastructure installing, in what is generally low social economic areas. So its unlikely to happen and the tenants will be stuck with petrol and diesel vehicles until forced to change.
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0 Malcolm Davies over 4 years ago

This ongoing discussion about air quality, the demise of nuclear power station, and the urgency to introduce BEVs as part of the solution, is missing some very important questions. E.G. WHY do we need to charge up a 1500 kg BEV every night in order that a 75Kg employee may drive 20 miles to work the next day, when the Telecomms and Data Comms Industry has already solved the problem with ADSL Broadband. If the majority of office workers were to be allowed (in planned stages) by their employers to work remotely from localised Data and TeleComms Centres - built within easy walking, cycling, or public transport distance of their homes, rented out by their employers, then we would solve the air polution issue overnight! (Or within a very few years if we applied ourselves to the transition programme). Clearly, those working in jobs that are essentially 'hands on' (non, fully robotised) e.g. on manufacturing production lines and in goods/food distribution etc would still need to travel to the factory or warehouse.

Surely, putting between 22KwH (Old Leaf) and 64KWh (New Kona) of mains electricity into a 1500 Kg BEV every night in order to deliver a 75kg 'payload' to work each day is the height of mechanical inefficiency? If we really MUST 'travel electric' then every BEV purchased would necessarily include a 4KW Solar Panel Installation for the owners rooftop. Thus all those who can afford £28k for the BEV plus say £6K for the chinese solar panel installation - are home and dry so to speak.
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0 Malcolm Davies over 4 years ago

Sorry gentlemen - I forgot to add the home battery storage powerwall to collect the solar energy during the day - say up to 20KWh stored (and not used in the home) per day in the sunny months - this could be either a re-purposed (refurbished) 22KWh BEV battery or similar at say around £8k. Total cost less than an entry level Tesla!
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0 Former Community Member over 4 years ago

Malcolm

Yes that can be done, but it is another example of a the piecemeal approach and may be a way ahead for a small minority of the community who want to do the maths and spend the time and effort going it alone. I'm looking for the integrated plan for the masses who just want to get into their transport in the morning an go to work. They are being sold EV's but don't really care about how it all fits together, However, they will when the cost of the necessary infrastructure improvements end up as dearer electricity charges or taxes, even if they don't own a vehicle. Cheap rate will be no more as load spreading is done 24x7 and vehicle licence revenue is applied to EV's.
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0 Malcolm Davies over 4 years ago

Thank you Peter - I can see the truth of your forecast for the future. Whether we qualified or not (my home did not) - we all paid through increased energy tariffs for the 'free' loft insulation to be topped up to reach 270 mm of mineral wool. We are all still paying for the 'free' smart meter 'roll out'. My feeling is that my solar powered wrist watch is an 'appropriate' use of technology, as is my solar powered PIR security lamp outside my back door. I.E. their functionality is wholly independent of any external source of energy (save that used in their manufacture and eventual eco - friendly disposal/recycling at end of their useful life). However, upwards of 10 million x 75Kg employees in the UK driving to work each day in 1500 Kg motor vehicles is clearly an unsustainable modern luxury - regardless of the motive force (Petrol or Diesel ICE or BEV or Hydrogen/Battery/Hybrid etc). Such behaviour was unaffordable for most families in the early 1960s when hoards of cyclists could be seen streaming away from the local factories at 5 pm every weekday. In essence, the use of motoer cars to travel to work is NOT an Appropriate use of technology. I do not advocate widespread 'working from home' (due to the inevitable domestic distractions) other than as a temporary measure on a transition path to the building of fully equipped local telecommunications centres for 'remote working' for all those who typically spend all day on the phone and/or on a desktop PC. Recent events re cyber attacks on major corporate servers and valuable central databases - show that the current obsession with a centralised office working environment is not actually inherently more secure than distributed/remote client-server arrangements. Surely it is up to UK Government (and global governments) to step up and take the lead in this and insist that corporate employers provide/facilitate/encourage 'remote working' whenever and where ever feasible as appropriate - if we really want to substantially reduce the current excessive generation of CO2, NOx, Particulates etc in an attempt to stabilise our climate and improve air quality ?

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0 Simon Barker over 4 years ago

Mr Malcolm Davies:

This ongoing discussion about air quality, the demise of nuclear power station, and the urgency to introduce BEVs as part of the solution, is missing some very important questions. E.G. WHY do we need to charge up a 1500 kg BEV every night in order that a 75Kg employee may drive 20 miles to work the next day, when the Telecomms and Data Comms Industry has already solved the problem with ADSL Broadband. If the majority of office workers were to be allowed (in planned stages) by their employers to work remotely from localised Data and TeleComms Centres - built within easy walking, cycling, or public transport distance of their homes, rented out by their employers, then we would solve the air polution issue overnight! (Or within a very few years if we applied ourselves to the transition programme). Clearly, those working in jobs that are essentially 'hands on' (non, fully robotised) e.g. on manufacturing production lines and in goods/food distribution etc would still need to travel to the factory or warehouse.

Surely, putting between 22KwH (Old Leaf) and 64KWh (New Kona) of mains electricity into a 1500 Kg BEV every night in order to deliver a 75kg 'payload' to work each day is the height of mechanical inefficiency? If we really MUST 'travel electric' then every BEV purchased would necessarily include a 4KW Solar Panel Installation for the owners rooftop. Thus all those who can afford £28k for the BEV plus say £6K for the chinese solar panel installation - are home and dry so to speak.

Something doesn't add up right there. The new 64kWh Kona will do over 200 miles on one charge. Maybe even 250 miles. If your journey to work each day is 20 miles, you don't have to put in the full 64hWh every night. Either plug it in every few days, or just give it a quick top up.

Most EVs get about 4 to 5 miles per kWh.
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Power networks could struggle by 2030 under soaring electric vehicle popularity ET

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