UKC

After the announcement on no new petrol after 2030, I am left wondering again how most people would charge there cars if/once electric becomes the norm.

Drive-owners, no problem of course. 

Street parkers? With our residential parking permits, all I know is I'll probably get a space within a few roads of my house. Not going to be able to run a cable out to it am I?

A news article suggests that there are already 30,000 charging points, more than petrol stations. Ignoring that each station has 12 pumps and you're only there for 3 minutes or whatever, not 30 minutes for a "rapid" electric charge.

Will we see a dramatic project to install charge points at 4 metre intervals on every street or something? Or perhaps my perception that the car needs plugging in every night will be left behind with better batteries etc.

I think it will be this. You do not, after all, fuel a petrol car at the parking space. The current situation where there are not _that_ many charging points and you need to charge fairly frequently means that overnight charging is almost indispensable however I think the future is for a lot less of this and a lot more of the charging at specific charging stations.

I would think that it'd be easier to install chargers at every public parking space, rather than in residential areas. That way you charge your car whilst you're out, rather than at home - unless of course you can on your drive, in your garage etc. It'd take a lot more planning on the drivers part, staying shopping for an extra 20 minutes if you're planning on driving to see granny at the weekend for example. After all, a lack of petrol pump at home doesn't stop anyone! One would assume that charger tech and battery range will be somewhat improved in 10 years time also, making things 'easier'. 

I would assume a combination of at home charging, community charging points, charging in public and private car parks and yes, better battery technology.

Another way to think of this is that the majority of journeys are relatively short and if a car is charged up overnight then there will be no need to charge it during the day so the demand we see at petrol stations in normal times will be satisfied largely by overnight charging.  Thus more capacity at the charging stations for those on longer journeys or those who cannot charge up at their own homes overnight.  I could also foresee that councils will have to install "pay as you charge" points, similar to parking meters at the moment - in fact one thing could do both jobs, as could street lights and telegraph poles.

How far do you drive each day? If your car has a range of even 200 miles, chances are you won't need to charge it up much beyond once a week.

There may be 30,000 petrol stations, but each one of those has an average of, say, eight filling points, and each fill/pay cycle takes about 10 minutes.  Added to which, my car only needs to be filled up every 600 miles, which provides a certain degree of latitude as to when that's done.  And the range doesn't drop noticeably if I turn the heater or aircon on...

Some pidgin maths on how long it would take to fuel electric and hydrocarbon-fueled cars in any number makes some uncomfortable answers. 

Blimey, how big's your tank?! I'd be surprised if it were in fact any more than 4 or 5 minutes, unless someone was buying their weekly shopping inside the kiosk.

You could elect a council that will. That road was a field once, if it can become a road because it's needed it can become a road with charging posts if they're needed.

At present.

Nobody imagines the existing infrastructure is as good as it can be technically nor that we're anywhere close to having enough of it quite yet. Those petrol stations we built to deal with this issue when we adopted the ICE, they represent a massive investment only 15-20 years out from near obsolescence, do you think the owners sit back and let the asset rot or invest to provide a new service, generate a new revenue stream?

Do you think the supermarkets and multistory car parks might also want a cut of that action (like they did with petrol)? Do you think there might be incentive schemes for workplaces (having the space) to generate solar for parked cars (a form of distributed storage boosting network resilience hence the incentive from state and or energy companies).

Hundreds of thousands of grid connected cars represent a fantastic tool to improve the load factor of renewables so as energy companies are increasingly leaned upon to clean up their emissions it'll be in their interest to invest here both in the creation of the physical power infrastructure and the development of IT and business models to maximise the utility. Likely that means providing end users (semi automated) access to a real-time supply/demand controlled energy market (with some smarts to maintain stability. That's good for buyer, seller and environment. Potentially we could go further when the battery stability to price ratio permits and elect to automatically sell back a fraction of the stored energy for the right profit.

The fuel tax problem is knottier IMO involving our reasonable mistrust of state surveillance and our dislike of both change and taxes. Very soon we're going to have to accept road use pricing or a shift in how road's are funded from road users to the wider tax paying population. Does the government have the courage to try, the capability to get it working and the authority to make it stick?

Probably some but not so many (and you'd only need one charge point per car pair if you did do that). For most users a weekly ish charge will suffice and in most weeks most people can leave their car near a charger for an hour or two.

jk

I was being generous - can't win!

It's waiting while some dickbrain buys 2 coffees and 4 filled baguettes. .. .

The local council charging station near me has been removed due to lack of use.

We are going to have to build a lot more wind turbines and power stations in the next decade. A lot of the base load nuclear capacity is due for retirement. The switch to air heating units mentioned on a few threads recently is hardly going to help with the capacity issue either.

separate issue, but what about the raw materials required to build all the new batteries? Is that another kind of environmental disaster around the corner, or not? (I genuinely don't know, am asking a question not making a statement?

If fast chargers in public car parks become the norm, you'll charge it while doing your weekly shop or go for a coffee to charge.  Indeed, I can see forecourts becoming convenience stores with a cafe, a few tables and charger connected parking spaces to offer directly to this market.

Though the cynic in me reckons people will run cables out of their window and will get even more possessive about the piece of public road outside their house.

It wouldn't be as effective, but one way to do "road pricing" without surveillance is to increase the security of odometers on electric cars and you just get a bill with the MoT (or equivalent) each year based on miles driven and class of vehicle.  As that could be a big bill, you could have the option, just like you do with your gas and electricity, of a monthly payment plan based on estimated mileage.

This would be a near-identical replacement for fuel tax.

Im going to throw something else out there. Theft, vandalism, practical jokes.

Are charging cables valuable? Could the raw material be used as scrap? Lead and copper cable get nicked all the time. There will be huge value dangling all over in the streets, overnight.

With cars parked on streets might you have pesky teenagers, drunken fools or spurned lovers damage, unplug or something else?

I ask all these questions as someone who hasnt got an electric car or looked into some of the detail.

Induction clamp on your cable to charge my car. Thanks!

The easiest way is for cars to be fitted with a standard universal battery pack, rapidly interchangeable. Just pull into a battery station and change the pack over for a fully charged pack, leaving the old one for re-charging. Street charging infrastructure would cost billions and be easily damaged or vandalised.

Forgetting the lack of charging infrastructure (at the moment), where is the power going to come from? For years now industry and utility companies have been paid to turn things off during peak times in winter because we can't cope with demand. 9 years is not a lot of time to build both more generation and distribution. 

I can't understand why the manufacturers of electric car cannot standardise car batteries and connections so that instead of driving into a petrol station and filling up with petrol we go to a "battery" station when the charge is running low. At the battery station you exchange the discharged battery for a recharged one(for which you pay. The discharged battery is then recharged ready for another vehicle. Existing petrol stations could surely be modified thus saving demolition and existing staff retained.

The law change doesn’t ban hyrbids so we don’t need to be exclusively battery electric by 2030 - or even by 2045 assuming hybrids get sold for another 5 years and aren’t mandated off the road within a decade of their sales horizon.

So the charging is a total non issue for this law change.

Undoubtably - as better batteries allow longer range and faster charging.  BEVs are hitting 400 mile range.  Let’s pretend the only improvement on this in the next decade is a reduction in cost; the average UK mileage is 142 miles so your average driver in 2030 will have to charge once every two weeks - probably in 15 minutes by then.  Someone who drives more than 2x your average can get a hybrid.  More realistically I expect we’ll see 800 mile range as an option by 2030 and motorway chargers that can put 500 miles back in in 20 minutes.

There’s a lot of working going on to reduce rare earth usage on the electrodes and a lot of work going on to move from lithium to aluminium which is much more abundant.  2040 seems a bit close for both of those to fully pay off.  Search for batteries on arstechnica.com for a lot of really good content.

That is the real question.  No shortage of answers but it’s going to take an awful lot more investment and an awful lot more “integrated smarts” to make it all work.  If the “smart” meter rollout is anything to go by, it’s not looking great for it all coming together...

You honestly think that all the makers of electric cars, throughout the world, along with all the governmental bodies, can actually agree on one single standard battery pack !!

And if they did, what about packs of different ages, having been (mis)treated in different ways, so that you could end up swapping a brand new one with a 400 mile capacity for a knackered old one that couldn't hold enough power for 100.

As for development (of better batteries etc.), that would be stopped or at least heavily delayed if one single battery pack was settled upon, as replacements would have to conform to dimensions and connections, as well as an extremely large number being made available on start-up.

Additionally, car batteries are not going to be AAA ones, they will be heavy and awkwardly located - NOT easy to swap over.

Batteries wear out, and gradually become less able to hold charge.

Plus, how do you deal with a half discharged battery, when you need to go to a distant location and need a fully charged one for the journey.

It does raise the interesting issue of when/how leaving your car on public roads became acceptable. Could people learn to cope if only people in houses with parking space could own a car?

As Wintertree says, batteries are going to get a lot better, and soon.   Only a few years ago a Leaf getting 120-odd miles was impressive.  My eNiro does 280 miles, and costs me less to run overall than an equivalent ICE.  In a few years we're going to see bog standard cars doing 4-500 miles.  I expect to see new technologies (Al-air is looking interesting) appearing in high end EVs giving 1000+ miles this side of 2025.

Charging is going to be a combination of lots of different solutions, I think.  We don't have to have this all figured out immediately - you will still be able to buy a brand new ICE car in late 2029, so they're still going to be a major part of the UK fleet until 2040 at least.  It's not as if we're scrapping every single ICE on Dec 31st 2029!

Slow overnight charging has enormous capacity.  Very roughly UK demand is 20GW overnight but peaks at 40GW in the daytime, so we still have a full 50% of capacity sitting there.  The grid is steadily decarbonising as we add more green generation and much of that (especially hydro and wind) is available overnight.  For the next few years, brand new EVs will still be on the expensive side of things and so a fair proportion of the buyers will tend to have driveways.  So daytime charging demand isn't going to become a real issue for some time to come.

The standardised replaceable battery pack isn't going to happen.  The main problem is where in the car the battery needs to go - you want it as low as possible to avoid excessive body roll, so it's not an easy shape to remove and reinstall.  Battery tech will have to get an awful lot lighter to be able to put it in the boot.

You can lock your cable onto your car.  I accidentally locked mine on the other week and had a total panic when I couldn’t get unplugged.  Thankfully I realised before doing myself a mischief or breaking my car.

They can’t even agree on a single standard charge connector let alone on a comms protocol to allow you to plug in and charge with the car and charge point taking care of billing.  I have 4 different Apps and 2 rfid dongles for public charging and they all suck in their own annoying ways.

Have you any idea what percentage of the population live in terraced streets, flats or high rise blocks ?

Your suggestion is great for the suburban middle classes, but screws the majority of the population.

We no longer live in factory terraces, where work is within walking distance an we doff our caps to the gentility.

Furthermore the car, whether you like it or not, freed the masses and enabled them to actually enjoy sport and activities (like climbing and walking !!!) that were previously the preserve of the rich.

And before you bring it up, the train system has been pretty useless since Beecham, and the bus services are no good either.

The EU pushed the standardisation on usb for charging phones. We just need an XXXXXXXXL usb plug.

Has Norway sorted this out? They buy lots of electric cars.

youtube.com/watch?v=eaE57tChPQM&

This might interest some of you. Chris Harris chatting to a fella from the National Grid about electric cars.

I certainly wouldn't want to give up my nice, shiny, expensive, new battery for an old one.

The only answer I can think of is some leasing scheme. Maybe provided by the existing oil companies. They'd have to have some sort of exchange agreement so you weren't tied to one battery station.

Youd need robotic battery changing mechanisms, and storage and charging facilities. But that's all doable. Storage/recharge capacity might be an issue for high throughput location, or peak demand times.

Someone mentioned the capacity for generation load balancing. That's all very well, but I'd want to be able to know that I could put my car on charge, and know that I can come back in, say, half an hour, and know it would be charged. I'd be a bit pissed off if I came back and it said "oh, we turned off the charger to help balance generation load; I might be done in another hour..."

Next to the arguments above about people not wanting to swap their new batteries for old ones and cars being built by squeezing batteries in all hard to reach places, it also doesn't work on an economics point of view. The basic economics of electric vehicles is expensive cars but therefore cheap recharging. You can always recharge your car at home for a few euro, so people aren't going to pay a lot more at other charging stations. Storing and managing a reasonable amount of few-100 kg batteries for a few euro doesn't work.

It's the other way around. Autonomous driving will remove car ownership but not the cars. It will probably outcompete busses, taxis, medium-distance trains and bikes.

Remember this policy has been announced by Boris Johnson.  So it's not like its a real thing...

Gives SKS an open goal at the next election to push it back to 2040 and take back all the Red (diesel) Wall seats

Sorry; I meant cars that one owns and parks outside the house on the street.  

Cars in some form will surely hang around, although I think the move to autonomous EVs will radically change that in urban areas, as it massively changes the marketing driven approach to cars and it breaks the kitchen sink mentality of "I need 1000 kg of load capacity once a year and I need AWD for 6 days of the year and it needs to be crash safe at 70 mph for the kids".  

I think once "on demand" autonomous cars are common and urban area manual driving is either banned or only allowed with autonomous safety, the economics will make sense for ultra-compact single-seater runabouts, two-seater in-line things, un-aerodynamic bricks on wheels (low speed urban area only) for more density of people.   The car as we know it - status symbol, jack of all trades, sending most of its time parked cluttering up streets - will be almost completely gone.

I think it will kill busses dead - and as a cyclist, pedestrian and car driver and past bus computer I can't wait for the day they're gone and replaced with something better.  The economies of scale of role-optimised personal transports as a service will consigned busses to the scrapheap where they belong, raising the energy economy and road usage economy of all areas plagued by the bloody things.

This is definitely where I see things going, personal cars being the property of the very wealthy and the rest of us summoning a driverless car via whatever replaces the smart phone, this is of course if people can get over the perception that taxis are expensive. 

On a day to day basis it can be far cheaper to drive that use public transport let alone a taxi (driverless or not) because most people only look at the instant cost of £x per trip and manage to forgot things like insurance, tax, maintenance and depreciation 

I can't go electric, there isn't a viable van on the market for me but I have been trying to convince the wife that electric is the way to go. 

She won't have it though, mainly down to range, her favourite seaside town is a 250 mile round trip but other than that she does less than 100 miles a week, it would be cheaper to go electric and hire a can for 2 or 3 big trips a year. 

If my wife and I switch to electric cars that's another 5,000kWhrs per year. (20,000 miles at 0.25 kWhrs per mile). So our electricity bill goes from 3,000kWhrs to 8,000kWhrs per year! Like you say we had better start building some more capacity.  40 million cars in the UK at the moment, I think we need to look at the wisdom of everyone driving round in two tonne tin boxes!

Not at first no, but it’s a bit like vhs and betamax...eventually there will be a popular standard. As for changing out heavy battery packs, well that should be an easy operation at an automated battery station. Battery stations could automatically assess battery condition and swap out the ones at a certain minimum standard for re-cycling. As for the rest of it, in the end folk will just have to accept that getting from a to b is the thing. Ferrari’s and Chelsea Tractors will be a thing of the past

Exactly. This seems the obvious solution to me.

I can't see why automated changing couldn't be done in less time than it takes to fill a tank with petrol. Also having battery stations means you only need to supply the extra electricity to 30000 odd locations rather than a few million houses.

I got about 3500 kWhrs from 12.4 square meters of roof over the last year.

The power is there; if every new build had solar panels integrated in lieu of roof tiles everywhere possible...

Back in the 80s I worked on modified fork lift trucks (AGVs) which you could swap the batteries out of in a lot less time than it takes to fill your car with petrol.

Yep.

Imagine you drive into a battery station which looks a bit like a car wash. You drive over a pit and a robot removes the battery from below and measures the amount of charge it has left before sending it to the recharge station. The robot then replaces the battery with a fully charged one, noting how much charge there is in it. The battery station then charges you the difference between what is in the new battery minus what was in the old battery.

With a standardised battery, or maybe two or three standard sizes I can't see why it wouldn't work. Someone tell me why not.

Fork lift trucks aren't really known for their cornering abilities.

The battery in a full EV is pretty much the entire floorpan of the car; it has to be to keep the CoM low.  That makes it quite difficult to remove and replace.

You have clearly not witnessed the FLT handling skills of the employees at Pirelli, Burton-upon-Trent. (Probably long since closed 🙁)

Using your figures: we need 2500kWh per EV per year.  20 million cars therefore need 50,000,000,000kWh, or 50,000GWh.  

There's about 20GW spare capacity in the grid for around 8 hours per night - just look at today's figures at https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Over the year that's 58,000GWh.  So capacity literally already exists today.

Obviously they can't all charge overnight, but the fact that this sort of back-of-a-fag-packet calculation shows that there is that sort of available energy before we even begin the nine year countdown to the ten year end of lifetime of full ICE cars tells me that we can probably manage.  

B or C?

Actually forget that, in the sunlit uplands of brexit we'll have a 2 pin BS73 plug in bakelite, none of that foreign rubbish.

I don't buy it. I can see the attraction of the idea but it's not even remotely feasible. It makes no more sense than suggesting all conventional cars should have standardised on a single engine design to make repairs and servicing easier.

For starters, the battery design has to vary to suit various different body shapes and designs of car. Any car designed around having the batteries in one standard-shaped lump that's easily accessible to remove and replace will be at a massive disadvantage to the cars more conventionally designed with custom, well-integrated battery packs. They're even talking about moving towards utilising batteries as structural elements in the vehicle to save weight.

Secondly, battery design and technology is one of the key areas that different companies are competing in. Tesla hold entire headline-grabbing press conferences purely about batteries. There's not a snowball's chance in hell that everyone suddenly agrees to either use an inferior standardised battery pack or share the results of the billions they've spent on R&D with all their competitors.

Couldn't they just convert the old petrol and diesel engines to run really big generators and use those to charge Electric Vehicles?
Saves the unnecessary scrapping of good engines and solves the problem of charging EV's at the same time.


  

Time will tell. Personally I think the massive infrastructure challenges to allow every driver access to efficient charging points will force a more pragmatic approach. I wouldn’t be wooed into buying a flash car that I had to plug in for a couple of hours in a motorway service station over a standard vehicle that I could swap the battery over in five minutes and then carry on. A national network of battery stations and a standardised swap out facility would be the way for any savvy car manufacturer, they’d sell in their millions. The masses would keep rolling while the Tesla drivers queue to plug in at the RoadChef.

Turn all but the most essential chargers off too during those peaks then bring them back on line as capacity or imminent need of the vehicle rises. Having a long term stable draw but the short term ability to remotely manage consumption means EVs en masse act much like grid connected storage despite the fact they don't actually feed power back to the grid. If you do have them able to sell power back the situation improves further but that needs a bit of tech added to cars and a new business model to compensate and incentivise.

We can already generate most of the energy needed to electrify cars, we just need to charge in the consumption lulls normal life creates.

jk

That's just hyperbole. The bog standard Ecotricity points charge at a little less than 50kW between 20% and 80% battery level.  48 mins delivers an additional 170 miles range on my car.

Given that you'd start a long journey with a full 'tank' of 280 miles, that means it can do 450 miles: ie a round trip from Oxford to Kendal and back with a 24 min charge stop each way.

The newer 150kW chargers are being rolled out, making everything even quicker.

Technically I don’t think it does.

Vehicle to grid works by the DC charge ports which are directly connected to the battery HVDC bus in the car.  The car and the external charger communicate with the car telling the charger what current or voltage limit to adhere to and the charger provides what it can within that limit.  Plug something in to the DC port and talk the right protocol and - tada - the contractors engage and you’re directly connected to the battery and can drain it via an external inverter to the grid.  This I think is how the new Nissan V2G units work.

So what you need is an external inverter/charger that talks ChaDeMo or V2G and is programmable with a “safe” discharge profile for your car.  Very expensive compared to a standard charge unit which is just a fancy 240 V AC cable that has extra circuit integrity protection and ground protection and tells the car how much current it’s allowed to draw via its on board charger.  Particularly so as the DC voltage is typically higher than single phase mains so you need an high current high voltage boost converter for charging.  Not good news for efficiency that.  I imagine the car to grid inverter is trivial in comparison.

(well, my vehicle to microgrid works by a small grid tie inverter with 90 mm2 cables and crocodile clips but that’s only for zombie day - the DCC converter in the Leaf that powers the 12V system can sustain about 1.5 kW).

Hi Phil. We took the plug and brought a second hand 3pkw Nissan Leaf in September. Realistically that's about 110 mile range. Life would be really easy If we had off road parking, however we don't, we live in a terrace on a main road, so it's just quite easy. 

So far weekly driving is easy to recharge at Tesco (where its currently free). Once lockdown is finished we will be charging at work, or overnight at the local car park where the council is installing chargers this month.

Rapid charging on the go has been simple and its been quite easy to time charging with bathroom and meal times when on a journey. The leaf is not the fastest charging car, especially compared to the new models but if you have some reading or you tube to watch it's never a drag to be plugged in for a few minutes. 

It's probably only saving us half the cost per mile in petrol, it would be much cheaper if we could charge overnight though. It's a really fun driving experience, so smooth and power at any speed.

I can say for certain I will never be buying an ICE car again. 

Apparently, the amount of electricity used to simply refine petrol to drive the average car one mile could power an electric car for 3/4 of a mile. (nevermind the drilling and transportation). With the majority of charging happening overnight The electricity generation gap Is just not a problem. The UK is already using about a  third less power at peak than a decade ago so we definitely have the resources to add capacity back to the grid. 

I suppose if you think about it, who heats their home with 2-bar electric heaters now, and how many of us have changed all the lighting to LED, meaning it draws about 0.5A rather than 5A for the whole house?  And we have LED-backlit LCD tellies (or OLED if posh) which draw far less than CRTs.

I think battery storage at home and feedback into the grid is already commercially available and technically feasible. Supposedly economically viable in sunny California.

https://electriccarhome.co.uk/battery-storage/tesla-powerwall/

A car is basically a Tesla Powerwall on wheels so no fundamental barrier.

I think there is a real issue if there are enough customers with solar and battery who feed in but do not consume from grid. At that point maintaining a grid powerful enough for peak demand is no longer viable. Also grid no longer under stable control as lacking ability to tell generators to switch on and off.

Yes, it’s being trialled with Nissan and a utility supplier in the U.K. I think - Ovo?  My point was that it’s not about the tech in the car so much as the tech in the charger.

Very different battery chemistry and trade offs and no grid inverter in the car, and none of the anti-islanding protection.

Powerwall uses lithium ion batteries produced in the same Gigafactories. 

https://www.bmwblog.com/2020/09/28/polestar-opens-up-about-the-emissions-of...

If 50,000 miles is required to use less carbon, what's the point? Never mind the filthy lithium.

I'm not against electric cars, but like many things nowadays everything is politically rather than engineering led.

Decentralising employment, increasing building energy efficiency and reducing air miles would be a better thing to concentrate on, at least until fuel cell technology is up the task.

What you do is you have standard batteries that fit in the places that everyone uses - lets say a fore-aft line under the two front seats and back seats.  The manufacturer then puts additional capacity wherever else they like. Those two standard units give, say 20kWh each and there's another xxkWh tucked away which can't be swapped at a station. The car prioritises use of the swappable batteries so they're always flat or nearly flat when swapped out. Essentially you standardise what you can and just swap that out as necessary.

The tech will exist in a year or so if not already. You'll get home, plug your car in and tell the system when you next want to drive and how far. It then charges up to a minimum 'emergency trip to local hospital' amount before talking to the grid and the internet. From the internet it looks at the weather forecast and generation forecast then charges appropriately. If it knows there's lots of wind until 3am it will deliberately charge up more than it needs to in order to then send some back to the grid when the wind drops, stopping when it gets to the level required for the predicted use the next day.  Powerwalls already do the weather forecasting thing when hooked up to solar panels, it's not much of a leap to involve a car as battery storage.

This seems to be very interesting technology:-  "French company Nawa technologies says it's already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long."

https://newatlas.com/energy/nawa-vertically-aligned-carbon-nanotube-electro...

I think car ownership will change. It's just logical. Folk often spend £10-40k on a car, every decade, which reduces in value and likely spends 23 out of 24hrs sitting idle. This would solve parking and charging instantly. 

You are forgetting the key thing. Lithium mining and the associated pollution happened somewhere else. 

The UK can sit smug being carbon neutral urging the rest of the world to follow our lead ahh but not you though, we need you to providing us with all the shut we want but don't need. 

Can the infrastructure cope with millions of super high powered chargers switched on every night or will the circuit beakers trip/cables fry? 

The apocryphal initial use of Dinorwic was after a TV event to cope with the surge in demand when everyone put the kettle on. Kettles are typically 3kW.

Somewhere above 150kW fast chargers are mentioned. We may have the capability to generate this energy but can we deliver it? 

I really wouldn't hold out much hope.  There simply isn't a political bloc with enough clout to make it happen and too much to gain at the moment from differentiation. 

This is going to be an Apple versus the rest phone charger turf wars.

The trouble is, the 1 hour a day you need your car (to get to work), so does everyone else.

The short answer is no we can't. But no one wants to address that because it would be a massive undertaking for very little return. I've mentioned this many time on topics like this, only to be shot down by the usual forum know-it-alls. Even new builds near me aren't being "future proofed" with regards the cable size required to supply the site with enough power, no one wants to pay for it. 

150kw is around 60amps. The main fuse in your house cutout is 100a. Add on the 10kw shower, the Induction hob and electric cooker and maybe another EV as well. People aren't going to leave their car half charged when it's easy to just plug it in when they get home and have it fully charged, surely that's just human nature ??

The other thing AGVs had was "opportunity charging" so if they weren't required to move stuff around they went to a charging point (contacts in the floor). I guess nowadays we could do wireless charging (like a phone)

They use different chemistries for the “ion” electrode.  They are different cells and are optimised for different things.

Yeah, I guess that mitigates some of the disadvantages. Though at the cost of compromising on the one advantage the system had!

People aren’t going to have 150 kW fast chargers at their houses.  That would be silly.  Really silly.

At home you charge over night.  1 mph of charging = 0.3 kW (approx).  10 hours x 20 kW = 200 miles of range overnight.  We normally recharge at 1.5 kW overnight but can go to 8 kW if we want to.

We only have an 80 A fuse and we’ve never had a problem charging an EV.   I suppose if we did have a problem using the oven, electric show, hair dryers and so on (like ALF), I’d just set the charge timer to start at 11 pm after we went to bed.

I agree cables should be oversized but that’s a more general point about decarbonisation.

Most of the cars I’ve bought over the last 2 decades had over 80,000 miles on them at purchase, one of the two that didn’t had over 50,000 miles at sale and the other is headed that way.

A modern car should last to 150,000 miles or more so there’s the point....  It’s the lifetime impact of the vehicle that matters, not just the impact in its time with its first owner...

Not now society has finally discovered home working. 

Plus if more folk cycle, walk, train, bus to work it reduces the need for cars too. As a car obsesssed culture we are approaching the car problem from the wrong direction. 

20 million cars? There are double that number, now.

Yes, but there aren't 20,000,000 EVs right now.  Pre-COVID the UK bought around 2.3 million cars per year.  Even if we strat buying cars at that rate again today, and even every single one of them is an EV from now on, it'll take nine years to get to 20 million.

I've just shown that we have capacity to charge something in the order of 20 million EVs overnight.  Today.

Yes, the lithium is a problem, definitely.  But it's not going to be the dominant battery tech for all that much longer.  In not very long, a Li-Ion EV giving 4 miles per kWh will look to us like a car that runs at 20mpg on 4* petrol now.

And we can go back to DC mains, every company with its own voltage

I live in China and cars are already going the way of share bikes, i can walk up to a car on the street, scan the QR and be driving away within 1 minute, they are becoming common all over China, these are actually petrol cars right now but the potential to do this with electric is obvious.   I think a system where you dont own the car let alone the battery has great potential for EVs.  You solve so many charging problems by sharing the car. 

Changin batteries does not need to be difficult, there are areas of china where only electric taxis are legal, they are all owned by the same company and the drivers just lease the car, I have been a passenger when the batteries been changed  and it takes no more than 5 minutes, changing batteries is not necessarily a big deal.

And half of those same cars will still be on the road in ten years time, running on petrol and diesel just like now.

Yeah, that's wrong.  No idea what I meant.  10 hours of charging at 6 kW = 200 miles of range gained overnight.  That's not going to melt anyone's mains fuse and is more than the vast majority of people need.

My point wasn't really about homes but the supply to them. 

The environmental impact of cable upgrades, potentially across the whole grid would negate the benefits of the move to electric vehicles for many years.

Here's an idea. Take a refined form of the fuel burned to generate electricity and store it in the vehicle for use on demand, cutting out the inefficiencies of generation. Provide a network of facilities where this refined fuel can literally be poured into the vehicles in a couple of minutes. 

And my point was that overnight charging is much lower than typical peak domestic usage, so there isn't actually a problem.  No distribution cable upgrades are needed to support EV use.  Heat pumps may be a bigger problem long term than domestic charging of EVs.   In terms of the whole grid, there's a lot of spare capacity at night.

Gee, that's a swell idea.  Where are we going to get such fuel from that doesn't release a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere or displace food crops or carbon sequestering plants?  We could make it from renewably sourced electricity but you might like to do the maths on the electric > fuel efficiency and the efficiency of combustion engines or fuel cells generating electricity...  

Why do we need to upgrade home supply?  A normal home supply is 230V at 100A, or 23kW.  

My EV charges at 2kW.  Even if I got a fast home charger, it'd be 7.2kW.  

You can run a fast EV charger, an electric kettle, and a decent electric shower, simultaneously, and still have 3000W left for running the rest of the house.  And anyway, you're hugely incentivised to charge the EV after midnight.

Agreed - pretty much the same as you do with gas bottles for BBQs and so on. You'd need some way of paying just for the capacity you've used (you can't drive to a change point with an empty battery) and you'd still need to have charging from home as an option. Scenario would be along the lines of charge battery at home, drive to destination, changing battery on the way somewhere, as required.

This also gives the possibility of carrying a spare battery, but batteries are big and heavy and some people will struggle to change them.

I've always wondered what's to stop someone unplugging your car (possibly in favour of theirs and you getting charged for it), with the downside that when you get back to your car, it isn't charged.

Also, if you've left your car all day and it only needed a couple of hours to top up, you've prevented someone else using it.

Edit - just seen Birdie's comment about having part built in/part replaceable batteries, which would solve some of the issues of changing an empty battery.

Does the Leaf have the battery bus accessible at the charge connector? My folks' one certainly has AC in with an AC-DC charger built into it. I don't think it has high power charging which I presume utilises a DC link getting the costly, heavy, hot hardware out of the car. IIRC correctly (it's been a while since I looked at this) the onboard charger reuses some of the boost converter hardware which sits between battery and the motor controller but I don't think the circuit would be reversible to provide 240/50 out with just a firmware update.

Car to grid power flow is most useful where the car is long-term connected (whenever parked ideally) and all the energy the car has isn't needed imminently (not the typical situation at a fuel station/services).

Yes, a DC link would mean the fixed 'charger' did the bidirectional conversion work. Interesting to see if that's the norm or whether low-power low cost kerbside AC outlets (and onboard AC-DC conversion) win out. I suspect until the sector matures significantly high power DC charging AND lower power AC input will be included as base spec' even if not fully standardised across makers/continents (Tesla are still doing their own thing here, right?).

jk

Would you go to the Alps in it?

Bang on - and it's all down to short-sighted cost savings*.

We moved into a brand new 5-bed house a few months ago. While having some electrical work done (added in a supply for 32A induction hob), we discovered that the main cable into the house is only rated to about 60A, not the 100+A I was expecting for the size of the house. Theoretically, I could blow the main fuse by putting the hob, oven and kettle on all at the same time.

I think the theory is that because all the lights and appliances are now that much more efficient (LED, A-rated, etc), you shouldn't need as much capacity as before (as mentioned higher up by others), but add in 2 people working from home and running laptops and multiple monitors and the kids watching the TV and lights/heating/hot water in the winter and it all adds up.

Granted you'd mainly be charging your car overnight when you're not using all the rest of those things, but it leaves very little slack if I have to charge the car during the day.

I know next door charges his Tesla fine, but he's not running an induction hob (still on gas hob) and there's only 1 of him. Seeing as we've used the only spare slot on the consumer unit to add the hob in, any attempt to put in cabling for a car charger is going to be VERY costly to upgrade that, too!

* As an aside, I was staggered to find out the reason the ceilings are about 4" lower upstairs than in our old house was due to the cost savings of laying another course of bricks!

The grid connected vehicles are at differing states of charge, and typically the smart grid will buffer demand dynamics by flow in, around and out of what effectively becomes a National battery bank. According to most of the models I’ve seen thisistheonly way 100% green generation can be realistically enabled. SW England is now problematic as the amount of energy coming from renewables hasn’t enough storage buffer.

The hydrogen/fuel cell vector seems to be off the radar ar the moment, but it won’t be for too long if my last visit to BMW was anything to go by. Fuel Cells and combustion in IC engines is still very much on the agenda.

Yes; it's the bigger connector under the charge port. All you have to do is say pretty-please in the right protocol you get chunky pins @ 360 V DC that can sustain at least 100 A for quite some time in either direction.  If you wanted a portable power source for some sort of directed energy project, that would be quite the boon...  It's what the Nissan V2G unit uses I believe.  If you pop the bonnet you can trace the two chunky cables (inside orange conduits) from the DC port to the inverter unit atop the traction motor.

The inverter for the motor might tough if you got friendly with it...  I suspect the inverter for the A/C+heat pump compressor might be more suitable for a gentle grid feed but I doubt either have the requisite design parameters for a grid tie inverter.  

I've only seen DC stations at a few places, mainly service stations and dealers.   My recollection is that the Gen 1 Leaf had DC and AC - the optional upgrade was from 16 to 32 amps on the on-board AC charger.  There are also some vehicles with 3-phase AC inlets.  Tesla have some with "standard" sockets now and some custom, and some adapters for Teslas to use some standard.  There are different incompatible "standards" for each of AC and DC, as well as different maximum currents at different AC chargers.  Only Tesla have a comms system that let the car and the charger settle billing automatically, although that is coming to some 2021 model year cars for other chargers.    It's a mess.

I don't disagree that the Government should have been forcing developers to future proof new estates, they have known they were going to have to back the EV transition anyway so why not support it in other policy. However, I dont think retro fitting is going to be such a big problem as it is likely the grid will be able to cost effectively use "neighbourhood" batterys to deal with peak demand at choke points.

We have pretty much managed to keep on top of the Internet broadband infustructure over the past decade when demand has soared (due mostly to Netflix) and I have no doubt NationlyGrid will work in the background to do the same for energy supply. 

Why not?  Get a free charge at the Eurotunnel whilst waiting to board in the afternoon, so set off in France more or less full.  You'll make it to Reims or thereabouts with a quick top-up whilst having a coffee.  Make sure your hotel has a 7.2kW charger and you'll begin day two full, and you'll make Chamonix with one charging stop.

If you want to do it all in a day, this isn't the car for you.   

Essentially though it's an engineering problem.

If you wanted to design a battery that could be removed you could do it.

I think the charging standard in Europe has now been settled on CCS - with both Tesla and Nissan now supporting it in their newest modules. I can't see the next leaf update sticking with CHADAMO surely.

I think it's pretty good for the industry to accept a standard within a decade, it took nearly 30 years for phone chargers!

Tesla will probably do their own thing (and do it very well) like Apple, but CCS, which has V2G capacity coming will be widely adopted. 

I'm a 2017 leaf owner and know that CHadamo won't be around forever and may not grow at the same rate as CCS but I am confident the current infrastructure will be supported for as long as the car will last. 

Nio in China have been doing it for years 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DhTsrDpsYHrw&ved=2ahUKEwiD6fTnxY7tAhUC...

Very simple system, it has not been popular in the West for some reason. Elon is confident that its not nesassry now the charging speeds are up to 350kw's and he has a good point. Its now so fast to change (adding nearly 1000 miles and hour at peak!) that you might as well just use the advantage of making the battery part of the car body.

The consept should definitely work well for Scooter and Bike battery's in urban areas though and swap systems are very popular in Taiwan. 

The Nissan Ariya will be using CCS which makes it all the more odd they put ChaDeMo on the 2019 model Leaf.

Well, let's hope it actually happens...

Slower charging is better for the battery life and hardware cost. 5kW is about 20mph which is plenty for most users and it's comparable to an oven.

Where to? Yes is the simple answer but it is going to take some work. I can't see individual/standalone 150kW chargers being very viable in the real world, that's still 300+ amps at 450V, there won't be many sites that could stand more than one or two without significant upgrade. I can maybe see supermarkets and roadside fuel stations, where possible, investing to upgrade their grid connections with a local substation so they can deploy dozens of maybe 50-100kW ish (200-400mph) chargers. There's something to be said commercially for slightly slower chargers as add-ons to existing businesses if it persuades the motorist to get out and spend while the car fills.

jk

Do these youngsters do anything with their lives, or is their life centred around night clubs and the like ?

This sort of arrangement does seem to need an awful lot of technology, space, and manpower - hence also cost.

Some of them commute to work daily by Uber - I was very surprised the first time I met someone doing this up here in the North.   One kind of assumes having a job is how they pay for the night clubs and so on...

That's alright when you live in a semi or detached house - built on a GREEN FIELD site - not exactly helping the system as this would inevitably mean yet more miles travelled by vehicle just to get to shops/work/entertainment.

I just WALK or cycle from my terraced house, so don't have to use a car all the time in the first place. Use a small motorcycle for the wok commute, and save the car for longer journeys or ones carrying a load.

Maybe if people didn't use a car for popping down to the corner shop or taking the kids half a mile to school then we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. It's noticeable how comparatively empty the roads are when the schools are on holiday.

Well possibly! The problem is the future and the fact that it's not only private cars ( a small sector in the demand) but all other aspects of the economy are going to be competing for a limited amount of "green" electricity. Germany is looking at needing 50% more electricity in the next 30 years which means building the infrastructure now. No doubt the UK has a similar need unless of course Brexit takes you back to the middle-ages

We're not all rich you know. Most private cars are second (or third etc.) hand. My current vehicle is an ex-service engineers car (that already had 100,000+ on the clock) that I bought for 2K almost 4 years ago, and I have every intention of running it for a considerable number of years yet.

Is there a fuel siphoning equivalent for electric cars yet? If I had an electric car I would like to be able to plug mine into someone else's and pinch their juice 😁

You think that Eurotunnel (or anyone else) is going to give you electricity for free, and happily pay the increased electric bill they'll get - you and how many others ?

I'm not convinced we will ever get to a point of interchangeable battery packs but have wondered if someone will come up with the idea of a renting a range extending pack that goes in the boot front boot (whatever you call that) or even rear-mounted or towbar (maybe). You could conceive a model where these are relatively easily available on major trunk roads and could be fitted or swapped quickly. Removing a lot of range anxiety and also meaning people don't need to haul around a huge 400 mile range battery on their daily 20 mile commute.

I think cars are a collosal waste of money and buy a car that is reliable enough to always start and not stop unexpectedly. I think run them until they are just not viable to repair, last one reached around 16 years. There will be cheap petrol cars around for a couple of decades. I'm keener to use my cash to clear mortgages early and retire young, than drive around for a few hours a week in a shiny money pit.

Cars are expensive, but if you spend a lot of time in one sometimes its worth paying a bit more for more comfort and convenience. Electric cars are even more expensive, but if you need a car, why not get one which has no emissions and is very cheap to run, if you can afford the outlay/lease. 

I'd agree. Our next will be electric. We'll make the leap as it's likely to be a long term purchase.

Petrol or diesel... It's just pi$$ing money away for the sake of gadgets, or an engine that might take you up to cruising speed 5 seconds quicker on your hour long journey. Or just costs more to run because if you floored it then it might do 140mph, but you never will etc... or the number of folk who have a massive car but only fill it 2 weeks a year, just buy a roof box instead. 

I agree, I don't see why big SUVs are so popular. Ego maybe.

My wife and I are both in the process of changing to electric cars and I'm trying to work out the best way to charge both of them at the same time (assuming they'll both fit on the drive) without overloading the house electrics.   

Understood. I was a bit slow on the uptake,  I thought you were trying to make the case that there was enough current generation capacity for charging the number of cars that are on the road now (40 million) if they were all EVs. I can see now that wasn't your point.

Whilst on the subject of generation, are you concerned about the amount of nuclear base load capacity that will disappear before the end of the decade, ie probably all of the AGRs?

Half my fault.  Maybe I'd have been clearer if I'd shown that we have 60% of the required capacity for all 40 million.

Yes, the loss of the nuclear baseload worries me.

If we all drive home from work at the same time and plug the charger in before going in for tea , we trip the National Grid. We are so far off being ready for this.

It's a good job we've got 20 years before everyone is driving electric cars so we can upgrade the infrastructure then.  

Drive home from work! Move work nearer to home and residential areas in general. Solve the travel problem and there will be less cars anyway. 

Honestly that really doesn't work.  They're not standard (though they could be) . But you would need a 'garage' large enough to store and charge many large battery units, and for a busy garage that would be a number in the 1000's, so a rather large facility

Ripper - as a guide to the availability of various elements required look at the price over the last 10 years.  It's going down as supply goes up indicating no shortage.

I'll keep on charging overnight - I'm so oversupplied with renewable leccy that it's got a negative cost at night- too much rain   In the future in the UK it will obviously be a mix depending on circumstance.

Fairy story.

I mean, they do...

Nonsense. Your car draws less than your oven and comes with the possibility of waiting for oversupply before coming to full power* unlike the oven which is slave to your appetite.

*careful planning and regulation will be needed to ensure lots of smart chargers don't act really dumb en masse.

jk

I don’t see anything in that paragraph that really doesn’t work...

https://www.eurotunnel.com/uk/travelling-with-us/vehicles/electric-vehicle-...           

So 4 days travelling.  I can't see it being a preferred option for all those people who head down for a weeks holiday -  plus all the range anxiety of queues, diversions, border chaos at Eurotunnel etc. 

The good thing about electric cars is they don't use any energy when they are not moving (in traffic) and are more efficient at slower speeds.  

Seems Jaime just got stuck , has lost his hotel booking in Reims, and won't be making it to Chamonix on time to use the mountain guide he booked and paid for 2 months ago. The holiday is ruined, he's about a grand out of pocket, and is stuck in Folkestone trying to hook up some duracells to the car to see if he can make it to a charging point to head back home which, God willing, hopefully will be working. Oh, and it's raining...

Please be advised that the universal car chargers at our UK Terminal are currently unavailable.

Tesla chargers remain in operation.

I can’t see 2,000 miles of driving being the preferred option for a weeks holiday for most people, regardless of the vehicle being  electric or internal combustion.
 

That said it is still viable with an electric and with the technology improving all the time, it becomes even more so.

I would be very surprised if the next Leaf and NV200 updates does not make the switch to CCS (in Europe anyway). Maybe they will wait till we see the Ariya in 2022 to do it to get some more use out of the current production lines. 

It's not as crazy a proposition as you're making out. According to Telsa, ok take the manufacturer's stated performance with a pinch of salt, a model 3 from London to Chamonix would require 1 hour and 40 minutes of charging en-route assuming that you left with a full charge.

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/trips#/

Of course the other manufacturers are a bit behind but give them 9 years and it seems more than likely that there will be other models offering this performance and hopefully at a lower price

All that because of a 1 hour delay?

There are about 20 public chargers in Calais that I found in a two minute google search.  I think I'll be fine!

Really, Mr Ford, you think they're going to build one of these... whaddyacallthem... gas stations... every 30 miles or so just so you can refill your automobile?  Why would they do that when we have perfectly good horses ?

2,000 perhaps a cut off, but I take it you haven't seen the numbers of cars from the UK heading down the Autoroutes for a weeks skiing. 

Dutch and UK plated Tesla spotting is a common activity down here in the Alps during tourist season.

Also range anxiety isn't a thing anymore. Even average EVs will do 200-od miles - more than enough to drive before needing to take a break. Unless you're a David Brent type road warrior that's going to suit you for 99% of journeys.

Hire a flash petrol car with all the money you save on fuel and road tax the rest of the year for your holiday road trips if you need to.

I’ve done it, it wouldn’t be my first choice to do the drive for a one week trip. However, as I said, it is still viable with electric. The mid and high end cars in the current generation and virtually all of the next generation have a 250+ mile range and fast charging capabilities.

Hopefully they are working and available. If there's only 20 public chargers serving the whole of Calais i wouldn't take for granted them not being already taken by other cars in the afternoon

Can electric cars charge each other? A bit like some phones now allow you to share charge? There may be a possible business idea for a van full of batteries giving charge to electric cars that got empty now that i think of it. Any posible investors reading this pm me to arrange my royalties?

Don't worry my esteemed adviser. Even though there's no whaddyacallthems yet my mate Theo Roosevelt is banning the sale of new horses by 1910 and putting a levy of 1 gold nugget per pound of horse feed and/or square foot of grazing land. So whaddyacallthems or not in a few years they will have to have one of my petroleum powered vehicles if they want to be able to go to work. My uncle leaves by a petroleum field in Texas and really likes the idea, so that's settled.

By the way, i don't suppose you have a contact of a landowner with rubber trees do you? I only really have enough wheels for about a dozen cars or so...

P.S. #Gascan

I'm afraid your business idea has already been taken my friend

https://chargefairy.com/

They turn up in an electric ENV-200 VAN full of even bigger batterys and do the rounds at night. Perfect for resedents in terrace houses. 

I've not done a trip to the Alps in one day for a very long time.  If I had from Sat till the Sun of the next week, I would set off on Friday afternoon, eat on the Ferry or train, and aim to get to somewhere like Reims late in the evening.  Then I'd be in Chamonix around midday Sat, not knackered.  On the way home I'd set off late Sat, aiming to get to somewhere near Nuit-St-Georges by nightfall.  Sunday morning is then spent buying burgundy and champagne before a leisurely drive home!

I agree that trying to do Oxford-Chamonix in one hit in an EV with 280 miles of range is going to be dull.  

Because the service cable to your house may be 40-50-60 years old. It's may be too small to take the current needed to charge your car. It may feed nextdoor as well.  People living in a terrace row may have to share their service cable with lots of others. The main cable in the road may not be big enough (New estates aren't putting the biggest cable available even now) The high voltage sub station may get overloaded. The cable feeding that may be too small (Almost certainly) The cable it's connected to won't be upgraded. We just keep adding more and more on, and think everything will be ok. 

No one wants to pay for these upgrades. We move miles of overhead wires for new buildings. We stop at the boundary, if there is a small gap between another development, a short section of the wires get left up. Neither developer will pay to take it down. The underground cable we use is the smallest we/they can get away with because those who are paying to have the wires removed don't want to pay any more than needs be. It's madness.

I'm not arguing that the capacity isn't there to supply the power needed to charge all the new EVs, my point is that the cables in the ground and in the air, simply aren't big enough to take the current required when everyone charges up their car as soon as they get home. Which they will. You've only got to remember the toilet roll panic buying to see people's mentality with regards to being prepared.

We've upgraded someone's service wire today, the existing wire feeding the house was 16mm2. There's loads like that.

Who's going to pay to have cables and wires upgraded is anyone's guess.

Uh, that's an even better idea. I was thinking more of a road recovery AA type of thing. Wonder if they top up in one of the free chargers and then go around at night charging people for it. Ha, ha

You didn’t reply to my last post to you...

If the cable to my house is going to melt with my 6A charge current -  which can fill the car from empty overnight  - I’m going to have a major problem when I try and use my electric oven,

Overnight charging does not need high power levels.  

This is not a problem.

OK.

Well, a fast charge only takes around 40 minutes, so I won't be waiting all that long.

Stretching this analogy to its limit: if the horses are hastening the climate apocalypse, then I can only applaud Mr Roosevelt!

I do take Arch's point that on a street level, we may be about to run into problems.  If we can cope with every single oven being on at 2pm on Christmas Day, then we can probably manage quite a few EVs, though.  Once again, smart charging (intelligent at a local level) might well be needed...

Reminds me of the £60k Tesla owner telling me how much money he was saving in fuel! 

Range anxiety definitely is a thing, hearing from same owner - panic when he couldn't get to the Eurotunnel charging point, and when down to something like 2 miles on a diversion, rolling into the resort after 2 days then off to find a hotel where he could charge up!

Well he was saving a lot if he was driving a 60k Tesla rather than a 60k BMW.

You're talking about exceptional cases. I've had range anxiety in my diesel car running on fumes trying to make it to the next petrol station.

For 99% of journeys an electric vehicle makes sense. Are they perfect? No. Are we 100% ready to switch today? No. Are they ideal for every type of use? Not yet.

If we were inventing the car today for the first time, anyone suggesting we power it based on refined-oil would be laughed out of the development meeting.

FWIW I've got an expensive gas-guzzling 4x4 sat on the drive. It will undoubtedly be the last ICE car I ever have.

50,000 miles to be carbon neutral is still very poor. It is very dubious that it would be worthwhile to change so many vehicles, whilst causing vast environmental damage through mining lithium. Never mind disposing of all the used batteries. At best all we are doing is making ourselves look better by moving the problem elsewhere. Lithium cars will probably be looked at in the same way diesel cars are now; what a great idea that was!

That doesn’t make any sense.  A car is cleaner over its lifetime or it isn’t.  If it is, that is good.  If it’s cleaner already one third of the way through it’s life, that’s great.

Indeed; radical idea - how about we recycle them to reuse the lithium in them?

I agree that we are hiding from the ugly side of lithium - and cobalt - production.  I disagree strongly that it’s in any way equivalent to rising CO2 levels globally.  

I don’t think it will be so long before aluminium displaces lithium from EV batteries.  Aluminium is kicking about in massive quantities already.

I think it's all solvable without cable upgrades.  Incentivising charging at a lower current or high current charging in a limited time window overnight lets any local bottlenecks be jittered around without causing problems.  It does need some degree of smart billing and smart charging that was absent from all the kit installed under the OLEV grants...

Very few people will need to use anything like full charge power over a whole night.  Then again, every house using full charge power on a 16A or even 32A brick is still well below what the systems are specced for.   Like I said, a 6A charge overnight for 12 hours is about 200 miles of range (> 250 for the most efficient EVs).  That's peanuts compared to a lot of household's evening usage.  

It means there will be no net reduction for five years, not including the carbon that needs to be expended putting all the infrastructure in place.

You don't get it do you ?? You sound like the perfect EV owner, someone who charges their car up slowly overnight, and only when needed. Thank you.Wonderful, the network is grateful.

But for every one of the Mr perfect wintertree EV owner, they'll be umpteen couldn't care less EV owners who'll arrive home at five pm, whack the car on full charge just because they can, and think they may need to travel miles later on that night. Bugger off for a shower, stick the kettle on without a care in the world for the overheating main cable outside their houses that's getting seriously overloaded because it was installed back in the 1940s when most people didn't have lots of electrical equipment,  but is now expected to cope with all the extra load required from today's technology. 

​​​The power cables in the ground today aren't going to be able to cope with all the extra demand required to do all the charging of cars and whatever in the future, we'll burn them out. They're simply not big enough, and if someone does want a bigger supply, it just simply  gets tapped on to an existing older cable.

Those are really quite pessimistic figures, based on the presumption that the EV is charged at the European CO2 average. Depending on your charging habits, you can achieve significantly higher carbon savings. The UK grid is a lot less carbon intensive at night, for starters. And as the grid steadily decarbonises, every EV in the country gets better! ICEs remain as bad as the day they were built.

No need to dispose of them. They are lasting better than we'd hoped - there's a reason that every third taxi is a Prius! There is already a rapidly developing re-use industry: Powervault will sell you a home battery made from re-purposed EV batteries, and they're making significant progress in using this network for smart balancing.

Really?  How many people drive over 240 miles every day (typical range of an EV) and never sleep?  

People have to sleep.  If their car charges when they have to seep, charging the car is not an issue in terms of peak current.

Perhaps some people only come home to shower and have a brew then go out again.  In 20 years time - when hybrids sold in 2020 are still on the road and can still be filled with petrol - I dare say they’ll be able to charge there cars at the place you seem to think they work for the other 23 hours a day.  Every place I’ve worked in the last 8 years has had EV chargers.  Supermarkets have them *now*.  Gyms have them *now*.  

If it’s just people whacking their car on to full because they think they might need full range in an hour, I suggest you’re making worries up.  Typical EV range: 240 miles.  Average daily mileage in the UK: 20 miles.  So for half of motorists the car will 92% full at the end of the day.  Only for very few will it be less than 50% full giving some sort of urgency to immediately recharge it lest the voice on the telephone suddenly say “Cannonball”.   Even then, incentivising sensitive charging through good electricity pricing will get most of them on board.

I think you’re tilting at ghosts.

This is now.  It’s fine now.  Pure ICE cars are being sold for another 10 years and will be on the roads for another 20+.  That takes care of people doing > 600 miles a day.  Hybrid cars are still on sale in 2020 and likely until at least 2025 and on the roads until 2035.  That takes care of people doing > 250 miles a day.  There is no problem, no drama, no crisis, no barrier.  EVs can work for an awful lot of people now.  Battery capacity continues to rise, rapid charging time continues to decrease.  By the time hybrid combustion vehicles are off the road in say 25 years I think there’ll be 1500 mile cars that you can recharge in 15 minutes at a service station.

If the cables buried under the roads are a problem, they’ll get dug up and replaced.  It’s happened with lead water mains, with cable TV, with sewers, with fibre broadband etc.  This isn’t beyond the wit of man.

I think the Venn diagram of EV owners and arseholes has a relatively small area of overlap.

Also, most EV owners are heading towards tariffs that hugely incentivise late night charging. Octopus Go is literally a third the price between 0030 and 0430. We're all using timed charging: you plug the car in when you get home but it doesn't start to charge till the off-peak tariff kicks in.

A funny way to frame the vehicle producing a net reduction in carbon over its lifetime.  No new thing reduces carbon the moment it’s made.

Indeed. We need to make fewer things.

One answer might be battery exchange stations that mimic petrol filling stations - with the facility for easy removal/replacement/recharging a range of standard battery sizes. There would have to be legislation in place to force car manufacturers to standardise, and the technology in place on individual cars to assess the condition and mileage range of charged replacements to avoid substandard capacity of older units.

Spent car batteries that fall below a certain capacity can be dismantled and most of the components and rare minerals recycled after around 10 years, as long as the volatile electrolytes can be handled safely (and profitably): 

https://www.drivingelectric.com/your-questions-answered/840/how-recyclable-...

Recycled Li-ion batteries might fall short in their capability to power cars after the first recycle, but companies like BMW, Mercedes and Nissan are looking into 'second life solutions', such as static power storage, instead of just chucking them out into landfill.

Sodium ion batteries apparently aren't far off having similar capacity as Lithium, and just as recyclable.  Lithium is a finite resource, sodium much less so.         

I don't get the fascination with battery exchange.  

The new Porsche Taycan 4S can recharge at 225 kW - that's 200 miles in a 20 minute motorway rest stop.  If the Porsche had the economy of the better Teslas, that would be 300 miles in a 20 minute stop.  This needs no fancy robotic machinery, no large and compromising changes to the structure of the cars, no need to standardise batteries to the lowest common denominator over different models, it doesn't "lock out" innovating in battery tech, and that's now.  We've got at least 20 years before ICE is off the roads - given that the 2020 ban does not exclude hybrids.  Battery capacity is going up, battery charging times are going down.  Investing heavily in battery swap technology would be to totally ignore the direction of travel of all the technologies involved and is solving a problem we don't have now and a problem that we won't have in 10 or 20 years time.  

In 20 years time I'll wager the best BEV ranges exceed the best ICE ranges of today with 1,000 miles likely an option at the high end, and that they will be able to recharge 600 miles in a 20 minute stop; how many travel drive 1,600 miles in a car on less than 20 minutes of downtime?   Excluding Cannonballers, zero.

It would have made some sense 15-20 years ago as a stopgap to get more EVs on the road faster* but the price would have been stifled tech development and a distorted market biased toward a technically poorer old standard when that development did eventually occur.

*maybe even more recently if you assume battery innovation is long term stalled and range only increases by piling in weight and cost (which is briefly what happened).

200+kW chargers are a pretty extraordinary piece of electrical engineering though, if that sort of outlet is to become commonplace it doesn't happen by tweaking what we have (like providing 5kW/240V posts), a row of proper fast chargers is a serious engineering project.

I'd be surprised if widespread chargers go quite to that extreme. For practical pack voltages (600-800V, allows the use of not that extraordinary 1200V rated electronics) that's approaching 1000A charging. Without ambient temp superconductors for the interconnect it's getting pretty impractical and wasteful, the lead would be as thick as your arm and weigh 30odd kilos. Maybe if there's a drive-over pick-up standard developed (like the tube's third rail but cleverer and safe) so we don't have to physically handle the link. Who knows, 20 years is a long time but it's still a lot of current or a ridiculous voltage.

jk

There's quite a few posts on here that considering battery exchange. It's worth noting that Tesla did roll out a series of battery swapping stations for the Model S in California in 2013. This was capable of swapping out the battery for fully charged one in 90 seconds with the driver staying in the car. However, due to lack of use Tesla have discontinued it. I'm not saying that it doesn't have a role in the future but the evidence so far is that drivers aren't that keen on it. This may because currently most people currently buying electric cars have a driveway to charge them on and with the Model S' range the this particular demographic have little need for such a facility. Perhaps swapping stations will gain another lease of life once more people with no at home charging facilities start to buy electric cars but I'm not betting on it.

But we won't. So we do need to make better things and of course to extract as much value from the obsolete products they replace when the time comes.

jk

I think the only places it'll be seen are where it's actually needed - motorway charge stations and race tracks.

600 miles in 20 minutes with the current best in class (not 20 years hence) energy efficiency is 150 kWH or 450 kW.   For an 800 V pack that's much closer to 500 A.   That drops the weight of the cable by 4x from your estimate.  

You could always connect a pair of cables to halve the weight again...  Or have a robotic cable; another gimmick Tesla have demonstrated long ago and apparently gone nowhere with -  youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI&

The Taycan can already charge at 800 V and 280 A now.  20 years of innovation in high current, high voltage power conversion is going to be a really boon for the high energy home hobbyist.  

Who knows, in 20 years time we might have room temperature superconductors....  Maybe...

battery exchange would make second hand electric vehicles a much more affordable proposition.  As one of the less affluent I could imagine that not having to worry about the state of a permanently installed battery would take a lot of the worry out of buying a second hand model

A much more egalitarian solution as it spreads the load over a much greater number of vehicle users

In addition to that, I know I'm getting old, but can you do 1200 miles with a 20 minute break, safely? What percentage of road trips involve 3/4 adults in a car who can share the driving?

For me, the ideal fast charger would be one that could do 210 miles of range in 15 minutes.  That's three more hours of motorway driving, and after that I will want a 15 minute break!  Any faster is superfluous, and probably detrimental to the battery anyway.

At the current typical economy of 4 miles / kWh, that means we need 50-odd kWh in 15 mins, or 200kW.  I'd settle for 150kW; I'll just take a bit longer over my coffee.

The other thing to remember here - which plays into the removable battery thing, the charging speed question, and more or less the whole deal: that figure of 4 miles / kWh is coming down.  It is quite hard to imagine that we have already maximised the range per unit of energy!  As that figure increases then the charge time drops (or, if you prefer, the power required to achieve a certain range in a certain charge period drops).  The CO2/mile drops, the break-even against manufacturing embedded CO2 gets shorter, your electricity bill gets cheaper.

Having read this thread, I'm now of the opinion that in 10+ years time, the main delay, during a journey to the Alps from Cumbria, won't be charging the car. I can't say what it is, because my wife might read this.

I doubt anyone can.   A team of 3 who can sleep in cars would be fine on that kind of distance with a couple of brief stops to swing drivers and re-fuel.  A team of 2 can manage this over 2,800 miles from sea to shining sea...

But soon enough the cars will do it for us...  

Currently our favoured option is to use the overnight Hull/Harwich - Rotterdam ferry to break up the journey.

If I don't have to drive, that advantage will be negated. I'm one of those people who tends to sleep in the car when not driving.

That 4 miles / kWh figure probably isn't going to increase much. The motors themselves used in electric cars are probably operating above 90% efficiency already and the other main sources of losses, drag and rolling resistance, have already been heavily researched on ICE cars for a very long time so I see no reason to expect these losses to dramatically reduce in the near future. One way of making them a bit more efficient is to make them smaller but people like to be able fit gear/kids/tall people and even sleep in their cars so I can't see that option being too popular.

Sure, if you can improve battery performance then you can probably get the weight of the battery down which will help a little with rolling resistance but it isn't going to be game changing.

There's still one significant gain in EVs - improved regenerative breaking.  Ours can put more than 3x as much power out through the motor as it can recover to the batteries so unless you drive in the appropriate style, a lot is wasted through the thermal breaks.  EVs also loose a lot more efficiency from regeneration when nearly full as safe charging currents plummet for nearly full batteries. 

A kWh or so of super capacitors and the request power converters could go a long way there, and there's a lot of working going on over that. 

I don't think standardisation always equates with a dumbing down of innovation.

My main concern is the affordability of cars, the high price of which will be imposed on everybody, by law, after 2030. Should long motorway journeys be the preserve of the wealthy, who can afford to take advantage of the bespoke tech developed by manufacturers like Porsche and Tesla, and who have a driveway for home charging?

Although the initial cost of installing robotic machinery for rapid battery exchange is likely to be high, would the cost thereafter likely be similar to storing petrol and diesel when transport and tank maintenance are factored in? There's potentially plenty of room around motorway service stations anyway for accommodating the extra warehouse space for the charging and storing of standard car batteries, which could be charged at night when it is cheaper and with more grid capacity.

I understand the concerns about car design and the challenges faced in accommodating standard batteries. One problem is aesthetics, and the perceived status such a car might have, in which the car is designed around the battery rather than vice versa. If the primary motive is for getting from A to B sustainably, then that should not matter (but alas, it probably does!). 

Of course, one objection to electric cars is the limited range when undertaking a long journey. The logical place to top up the charge is at a motorway service station, but these are generally located some distance from large towns and I read that although the owners would like to install more rapid chargers they are receiving quotes of £10m or so just to upgrade their electricity supply to the required extent.

Thanks for that info. I had no idea Tesla trialled battery exchange.

Maybe drivers weren't that keen at the time because sustainable driving is expensive and optional, and not yet written in law.  

A rather well paid job if they can afford a taxi for their daily commute - wish I was that rich.

Or on the other hand:

• They've got a load of cash they didn't sink in to a car which is burning at 20% per year, or they haven't got a PCP agreement sapping their monthly income
• They're not spending a penny on regular car servicing, sporadic repairs, tyre replacement and so on
• They're not paying for an MOT every year
• They're not paying car insurance costs - notable how much more they are for younger adults
• They're not paying for VED
• They're not paying for fuel

I would argue that for many people using Uber or similar can be cheaper than owning a car.  They probably wish they were as rich as someone who can afford to run a car.

I don't think it's at all one-sided.

I looked at it, it said; "Please be advised .... currently unavailable ..."

And please note, I was referring to the future, with many (most ?) wanting to do so. While they may be happy for the current handful (?) of cars to charge up, just how many chargers would they need to PAY to have installed, just to give away free electricity ? It just wouldn't happen.

Super capacitors are currently pretty high cost and weight for their energy capacity.

60-0 in 4 seconds is about as harsh as most people would routinely be on their brakes on the road, in a 1500kg car that's 0.5MJ at 125kW. Into a small 25kWH pack it's only 5C charge rate which isn't actually that absurd for higher power density cells of the current generation. It's a very manageable 2.5C into a bigger 50kWh pack (likely to become considered between small and standard I suspect) especially given most people don't really mash the brakes like that frequently. Near future packs will likely suck that up without a problem.

Shorter term I wonder if generator-flywheel storage might prove cheaper than supercaps (or hybrid Li-Ion/LiPO packs) to deliver the power density for capable re-gen. It's really more of an issue for hybrids with their excess weight and small packs but they're already at a cost disadvantage so I doubt we'll see loads of tech and weight piled into them, more likely they remain a compromised tax/ULZ workaround for niche users and in the super car form (risky investments).

Capable re-gen braking does lead us toward 4wd which is a bit pointless and expensive (£ and lbs) for most users. Or we accept at least 20% of every stop will get dumped into the rear disks (and losses) for brake balance.

jk

Where do they park in terraced streets to do this charging without blocking the road ?

Or do they have up to a hundred metres of cable run out for people to trip over ?

This would work in suburbia, where people ALREADY have off-road space to park said vehicle, but not in the centres of our towns and cities.

A rather large number of those ovens are still gas.

Now if those are replaced by electric as well ....

There is a lot of R&D going on though, and some if it's not so different from some of the R&D around fabricating better battery electrodes.  Crushed coconut shells is where its at.  

I'm not sure how kind it is to subject a pack to that kind of thing on a regular basis though.  There's all sorts of weird (bad) stuff goes on under high fields in the cells, and charging is normally done under pretty controlled conditions when the pack isn't as hot as it's going to get under driving conditions.  

I've got a few Maxwell 3 V 3000 F devices for a hobby project.  Everyone should have one...   Ten would take the energy from a car at 60 mph and would mass about 10 kg.  The problem isn't so much the capacitors as the buck converters and charge balancers needed to charge them and the buck converters needed to get the charge out efficiently.  

https://www.maxwell.com/images/documents/3V_Flyer_3001369_EN_1.pdf

4wd has some EV benefits as you can have a high power optimised motor/inverter at the front and a higher efficiency motor/inverter at the back and shift power between them as needed - Tesla do this to get better economy out of their AWD variants than the RWD variants.  There's also the embarrassing matter of the differential and axle in the current EVs; dead weight and efficiency loss that could be removed with per-wheel drive using smaller motors.  Lotus have some horrific looking thing that's allegedly going to do this; then again so have other auto makers that never got anything to market (Morgan LIFEcar for example).   

It's tricky this one. The simple answer is we haven't got close to optimising them. We could today do probably 2x as good if were willing to buy an 'ugly' car (judged against its peers, tastes do change) with some compromises and built in pricier materials or with fewer heavy luxuries. Probably more like 5x as good if we accepted something much less car-like (but still more car than solar-racer or velomobile which are several orders of magnitude more efficient). The realistic answer is it's very hard to see how we make the leap from our current picture of the road, filed with stupid heavy Rangerover-alikes (guilty as charged unfortunately) to one where the norm is more like a smoothed out Elise or Calibra (remarkable aero for the era), and a Prius is considered a big tall car. Big upright cars with big wheels are always going to be draggy, you can smooth the front, duct the wheel wells and sharpen the back to a degree but the cross sectional area term in the drag equation is impossible to ignore.

The electronics and drive-train are already remarkably good, they don't actually offer much scope for significant efficiency improvement with the exception of better re-gen for stop start low speed urban use (currently mostly limited by battery tech and inverter cost).

jk

Nothing is free? They will either charge for the service, or put the price of a crossing up to cover the cost. Either way, no reason it should be a major problem and it will be cheaper than a full tank of fuel.

Do they fill your car with petrol or diesel for free now? No.

 Can you buy fuel whilst you wait to board? You certainly can.

Possibly those of us living in such places might just have to adjust to the notion of not owning a car

Well I never.......

Give over.  What do you think it cost to instal all those fuel tanks and pumps at a motorway services?  How many people pass through a motorway services?  The cost can be passed on to the customer acceptably...  

Or they could turn the forecourt covers and building roofs in to solar PV arrays and add stationary batteries to smooth out peak demand and so on.

Its shocking I know that we have to spend money and innovate to get off fossil fuels.  It’s just as well no other past improvement to our quality of life needed innovation and investment else we’d all live in muddy caves.

You didn't look it up, you just thought I was making it up.  The chargers at the Eurotunnel have been closed off since the most recent lockdown, that's all.

Offering free charging is quite a common thing - it's a cheap way to buy goodwill.  Electricity is cheap - a full charge for my car is about £7!  There's been free charging at Eurotunnel for years.  The newly opened Westgate shopping centre in Oxford has 50 EV-only bays with free charging.  This isn't unusual.  You can insist that it isn't happening, but the fact is - it is.

A further minute on Google tells me that the market share of gas:electric ovens in the uk is steadily shifting towards electric and is currently almost exactly 1:2.  Yet we seem to survive Christmas Day...

Yep.  My Niro is obviously rather limited by the fact that the PHEV and SC hybrid variants all have to fit on the same bodyshell, and all EVs are limited by the fact that we (apparently) want them to appear recognisably car shaped!  

I wonder if we're about to see some dramatically different designs, optimised for EV, that will be regarded as cool precisely because they are obviously not ICE.

So you are advocating some version of apartheid, depending on where you happen to live at the time. The parents of pupils at the private school I live next to have suggested that we locals shouldn't park in the streets in which we live - the reason; they want it as a free car park for themselves (and their children when they drive to school).

You do also realise that, assuming people can actually find the money, this will lead to yet more green field sites being built on (for homes with off-road parking). Towns and cities subsequently becoming full of rather jealous people without cars, some of which would see no  problem with stealing the cars parked there by out-of-towners and joy-riding them. Parking a car in town could become a dodgy exercise in such a divided future.

So why should people get free electricity - especially considering that it's the better off who can afford new cars.

Now if we could all fill up with free diesel or petrol, that would be fair, after all, we all pay for our tickets at the same price.

In a couple of years, the cheap second hand cars will also be EVs.  All technological advances appear at the high end first.  It is quite likely that my six-year-old niece's first banger when she turns 17 will be an EV.

Are you actually railing at the idea of a gesture aimed at those who are trying to make a difference to the climate crisis?  A gesture that costs pennies, not pounds, and is worth far more in convenience than it is monetarily?

Fine - you carry on.  We'll be over here trying to work out how to stop the planet burning.

I get your point about better off people benefiting, but isn't it just a way of encouraging a "greener" way of travelling? 

You would have thought that would have happened already.  But no.  They all have to look the same.   The Tesla model 3 looks very boring.

Going back to your original point.

At the moment they are not "happily paying the increased bill" that tiny amount is being passed onto all customers.

When everyone is using EV's they can either increase the cost of a crossing or charge those who use the chargers.

At some point when the ratio is 50:50 they can either charge £7 a charge or add a couple of pounds all crossings.

I imagine your reaction - based on my own upon reading that - was to encourage them to piss off and just have their children walk to school

They wouldn't be jealous if they didn't need one

Can you imagine the effect on house prices if parking on the street was banned ?

Can you see inner city voters accepting that ?

Can you imagine the compensation that would be demanded ?

Can you see any government (or party) that proposed such an idea actually getting elected ?

As for needing a vehicle - outside of the major conurbations public transport is a sick joke, and if forced to rely on it hardly anybody would be able to get to work and back.

Now if we actually had a useable public transport system -  timewise, route sensible and at an ACCEPTABLE cost, more people might use it, and fewer would NEED their own transport.

Try the carrot approach, and stop using such a large stick that just happens to suit your own views.

It has been suggested that charging points could be incorporated into street lights - I guess even that would mean upgrading the electricity supply to the light though.

These already exist. I tried to use one the other day, having been sent there by Zap map. Unfortunately both spaces within reach of the lamppost had ICE cars parked in them, so I never got to try it.

The kerb weight of cars has increased massively over several decades. A MK1 VW Golf is under 1000kg but a MK8 is almost 1500kg. 

I appreciate much of the weight gain is due to safety features but there must be a good proportion that can be trimmed back. I had a Toyota RAV4 as a hire car last year, it was ok, nothing special but it struck me the amount of electrical equipment (5 or 6 way adjustable front seats with an equal number of motors and wiring). For something rarely used it is a lot of weight to move all the time.

Big efficiency savings can be made by reducing kerb weight, either by lower equipment specs, the use of lightweight materials or both.

Potentially yes. Historically lamps have been fed with a 4mm2 cable and may be looped together.

And very clean. The game at the moment is getting it working while looking 'normal'. The devil is in the details, particularly around the wheels and at the back but that's true for the current crop of ICE vehicles too.

Jk

Yes and no, it depends how the vehicle is used. Weight dominates the calculation for urban use, aerodynamics for cruising. Ideally you'd get both right but long low and thin makes for difficult parking and a poor mix with existing urban traffic. Make it light and it's expensive (or compromised) too. Light, upright and slow (think Smartcar) has a lot going for it until you try to drive one to Berlin, which most people won't.

Jk

I believe if the road really is that tight they said they would block the road (at 1am) if required, their cable was about 3car lengths IIRC but being with the van can move it really easily. I doubt this will be the main solution in busy streets, most people would use destination charging/lampposts charging, but I'm sure it will remain part of the mix for some. 

From what I read the main company doing lamppost charging now finds that most posts,which have switched from old halogen/filoment bulbs to LED have sufficient spare power to now (slow) charge a car. Perfect for overnight and no upgrade required. All they do is replace the access hatch in the bottom of the post with one with a plug, wire it in and swith it on. The ones in Liverpool can be used by anyone with an App or I believe regulers can get a smart cable which is linked to the account and works immediately when plugged in. 

Yes, I get that there was once a problem with people thinking electric was not normal.  I agree with Jamie "I wonder if we're about to see some dramatically different designs, optimised for EV, that will be regarded as cool precisely because they are obviously not ICE."

Tesla have missed out.   Because most people don't even recognise their cars.

I was tempted by Model 3.  The 'ordinary' looks put me off spending that much.

That's unfortunate, the ones in Liverpool tend to be in groups but I can imagine the whole road being full. I think they are intended for use by whoever usually parks on the road (residents and workers) rather than people driving round specifically looking for a charge. It would certainly not be fair to make the streets EV only for now. Most of the car parks in Liverpool now have dedicated EV spaces for that purpose. 

There are quite a lot of lamppost chargers around Oxford now.  If they have 4mm conductors they can carry 7kW; LED lights are essentially negligible (the ones I bought a stock of to replace streetlights on the estate I live on are 21W).

Yes, I'm not sure I'd actually have been able to use it even if the space was free. There are a few companies in London now who effectively do charging for residents only, but I can't find out a way to filter them out in Zap map so I keep finding out the hard way. I'm just getting my head round the maze that is public EV charging. TBH it's a nightmare, and it's very rare to get a hassle free public charge. Luckily I don't do that sort of journey very often or I would be getting rid of the Leaf sharpish and buying a car with a decent range. Or an ICE.

Street lights are always on the house side of the pavement, not the kerb side, and are a fair distance apart (30 metres ?).

It would mean cables being draped across and along pavements, not much fun for the infirm, prams, or in fact anyone in dark or icy conditions.

Look on any terraced street during the day with on-street parking and you’ll see plenty of cars - not all of them sure commuting vehicles.  Those cars could use the streetlight circuits to charge during the day when the streetlights are off...  

As you say though the switch from high pressure sodium to LED lighting releases a lot of capacity in the circuits.

So I'm simply imagining these?

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/ubitricity+Charging+Station/@51.7641977...

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/ubitricity+Charging+Station/@51.7431886...

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7560776,-1.2149171,3a,75y,277.57h,84.94t/...

Some of the images are out of date; these street lamps are all powering a car club Leaf these days.  There are tens of these dotted around Oxford already.

Hahahahaha, how quaintly Oxford!

There's only space for one car.

Where I am in Manchester, lights are spaced about eight loosely packed cars apart, either along the same side of the street or staggered along both sides. Lights on house side of pathways. If everyone was plugging their cars in, there'd be cables strewn all over the pavements and roads.

Everyoen doesn’t need to.  

Destination charging (work, play, shopping).  Home charging.  Street lamp charging.  Public charge post charging.  Van-delivered charging.  Rapid charging at service stations.  The average motorist only needs to charge once every 6-7 days (going off facts on annual mileage).  

The solution to the almost non-problem of EV charging is in a diversity of solutions.  So it’s daft and pointless to take one in isolation and make the case it doesn’t work for “everyone”.  

For people where it just can’t work, ICE is sold for another 10 years and on the road for 20+.  Hybrid ICE/BEV is not being taken off the market in 2020 and is likely going to be sold for minimum 20 years and on the roads for 30+.  But in 20 years time I think BEVs will have options for 1,000 mile range and very rapid charging meaning that in practice they can be used much like ICE vehicles now by even the biggest distance drivers.  Most people however will have stopped looking for problems and will just be enjoying the low hassle approach I’d never having to go to a fuel station again...

OK, so there are 8 cars per streetlight.  A bit of paint can delineate one space either side of each light, mark them out as EV only, and you've just powered 25% of the entire fleet.

We don't have to do this all at once.  You just add more EV spaces as they become more common.  They're not even going to stop selling new ICE cars for another nine years...

So sink cable troughs into the pavement like they used to do for terrace downspouts. Fine people for not using them.

Jk

I refer you to Wild Cyclist at 14:50 Sat.

Same situation in Worcester. Oh, and pretty well everywhere else in this and the surrounding counties as well. Not to mention South Wales, .....

If not covered, troughs are a permanent trip hazard.

If they do have covers, (as troughs for water do have, but permanently located ones), then people have to remove and replace them - which means they will become loose after a time and then become even more dangerous.

Why can't people think about pedestrians, not just cars ?

Electric? A few years into Brexit and we'll be back on horseback 

A few years into Brexit and we'll have eaten all the horses.

Don't worry.  We can all tuck Into Tom's inexhaustible tidal energy, virtually for free.

Oh bolloxk,  what have i just done ?

Worry not. UKC will be powered by a helicopter on a turntable.

I'd like to see the range figures for electric cars given at various speeds. Ignoring the other concerns (price, charging infrastructure, charging times, lifetime of battery, resale value) the range of, for example, the Nissan Leaf e+ of 329 miles makes it very attractive. However, at what speed can I expect something near that range?

If its at 60mph then fine, if I'd need to travel at 30mph then its a no go.

Dave

I've only driven more than a few miles in my e-Niro once so far - getting a new car mid lockdown is a bit disappointing!  The only conclusion I can draw from that one long drive is that having all the heaters and the aircon on because you got soaked, in driving rain, at steady 70mph in heavy winds, returns something like 75% of the claimed range, according to the dash readouts.

The guy who dropped it off reckoned that, at a steady 60mph on a normal day, he easily exceeded the claimed ranges - he claimed he'd got more than 300 miles out of an e-Niro (claimed 282 miles) and still had 15 miles on the clock.

Based on my 2017 Leaf, 50mph is roughly advertised range, 60mph drops a bit and 70mph is a big drop. My car is just not practical for motorway journeys, unless the motorway is the M25 in which case doing 70mph is so rare that it's not worth worrying about.

It's just like a petrol car. The more you rag it, the faster you drive, the more energy you'll use. Range is indicative, just like MPG is.

A quick Google finds this:

https://ev-database.org/car/1144/Nissan-Leaf-eplus. 

Highway, cold weather is the least efficient - this will give you around 230km. Or about 2 hours of driving. If you regularly spend more than 2 hours driving on the motorway (what are you doing with your life?) then its obviously not the car for you.

However it will fast charge in 35 minutes. So stopping for a break and a recharge makes it pretty viable for most people.

The Reanult website has a really good tool for comparing range at different speeds, temperatures, and with the heating on or off

https://www.renault.co.uk/electric-vehicles/zoe/battery.html

It's called CCS.

Thanks to those who replied about electric car range and speed.

Cheers

Dave

It will be convenient for government if people end up using public infrastructure chargers rather than running a cable from their house because it will make it easier to tax the electricity being used to charge cars separately from domestic electricity.   If they don't tax the electricity used to charge electric cars they are going to take a huge hit when they stop getting money from taxes on petrol and diesel.

We'll need untaxed red electricity like red diesel.

Mutters from side of mouth: "Anybody want to buy some dodgy red electricity?"

There are technical solutions based on road usage tolls and presumably mandatory GPS trackers backed up with number plate readers all over the place. All very big brotherish.

For the geeks: is there a hypothetical blockchain solution? Car transmits the mileage daily which gets incorporated into a blockchain so you can't roll back the milometer to reduce tax. 

Governments will prefer something big brotherish.

The trivial solution is a tax payable at MOT, based on your odometer reading.  

This seems the obvious solution. The only downside I can think of for it is that it might incentivise people to try and avoid getting the MOT done due to the cost. But that should be manageable by allowing people to spread the cost throughout the year.

Any solution based on toll roads, GPS trackers or ANPR is going to need a lot of infrastructure put in place.

Add in that privacy concerns would make it a hard sell to push them through parliament and I don't see these being viable options.

Or a tax on tyres!

I think new cars are MOT exempt for the first three years. 

An article in today's Times states that because of the vast amount of energy and resources required to manufacture their batteries, electric cars only match the carbon footprint of petrol cars after 50,000 miles. So ironically, a technology which is seen as a method of reducing carbon emissions will result in a vast increase in emissions as it is more widely adopted.

I'm not sure that any method that involves people paying after the fact is going to succeed. 

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion here.

By their maths an EV becomes carbon neutral by 50,000 miles.  Given that the average milage when a vehicle is currently scrapped is over 100,000 miles that means the EVs are net carbon negative over their lifetime, even if you take the Times' statement on energy usage at face value.  Considered holistically their article apparently proves that an EV - if replacing an end of life ICE vehicle (which is what happens, fleet-wide when you consider the chain of purchases, sales and scrapping) an EV leads to a net carbon reduction over its lifetime.  

I say currently as EVs may well end up having longer lifetimes being bereft of most of the mechanical troubles that end up taking old ICE vehicles off the road... 

Then of course as the energy supply for manufacture decarbonises more, the point in their lifetime at which they become carbon negative decreases.  Then as battery manufacture improves, the same happens more.  Then when you consider that the batteries don't go to landfill but get reused or recycled, the calculations shift again.  So, they're already ahead and only becoming more so.

The important number is how much it will cost in energy once these are truly mass market and another 10 years of investment has gone into the technology and the recycling infrastructure is in place.

The Volvo/Polestar figure is an odd one and doesn't agree with most estimates.  But even if it is true, it still shows that over a car's lifetime EV is substantially lower CO2!

And, as before, EVs get greener the better the UK grid becomes.  ICEs remain as bad as they were they day they were built.  The Polestar statement includes that fact that the break-even point is 31,000 miles if charged on green electricity.

It's a very simple method - it would require much less infrastructure than any sort of dynamic road pricing.  It's not that hard to imagine that you have to pay the bill at every MOT; when your MOT expires we already have ANPR to capture a car being used with an outstanding tax bill.  You'd need to have mini MOT checkups for the first three years, of course.

It's a bit clunky but it'd still be much easier than any sensible alternative I can think of.

I realise all that, I'm just pointing out the irony of the initial spike in CO2 production.

Why is it ironic?  

The net effect with a progressive roll out of EVs over the fleet during the next 20 years is a near continuous reduction in instantaneous global CO2 output and in per-vehicle lifetime CO2 output.  

Statistical mechanics.

These cars are already full of electronics and almost certainly have a GPS chip for other purposes e.g. reporting location after an accident which deploys the airbag.

It would make more sense to charge for using congested roads rather than distance travelled and to tax by the month rather than handing people a huge bill once per year.

The Polestar is also nicer to drive, and yes I have driven one.

## Most of the article is behind a paywall so I assume they're taking the numbers for a largish car (Volvo) and using savings from small cars , or a particularly dirty fuel mix

### I'm still currently charging overnight so still on a negative energy tariff.   Renewables are cheaper

Let's say the average driver does 50,000 miles in a year. For every electric car manufactured, five years' worth of CO2 emissions will be created before the car travels a single mile. Obviously, over 20 years net emissions for that vehicle will be lower, but in the course of that 20 years 20 years' worth more electric cars will be manufactured.

I am not saying electric cars are bad - my next car will probably be an electric one. I'm just pointing out the irony of the initial spike in CO2 production.

It's not ironic.

When someone adds insulation to their house, that costs carbon up front but it's not ironic.

When someone fits double glazing to their house, that costs carbon up front but it's not ironic.

The initial spike in CO2 production may not even appear at a national level in a progressive roll out of EVs as the savings of those on the road may outweighs the costs of those in production.  This depends on a ratio incorporating the time components are in manufacture to the time they are on the road, and the number of cars in manufacture vs those on the road.  

As the average age of a vehicle on the roads is about 8 years, and as the roll-out of EVs is progressive, I'm not convinced that the spike you mention is even real when you consider the fleet as a whole.

Is an Odometer legally required, a Speedometer isn't ?

From memory, both are. Haven't read that bit of the IVA rules in a few years but I remember jumping through hoops to comply.

Jk

When we get our "Sunshine Electricity" it will be so cheap it won't be worth charging for. Well that's what they told us when we were kids.

Very still day today. Drove over a hill on the way to site and there in all it's glory was Ratcliffe power station in full "Bloom" Same as yesterday.

We had to turn off a single wind turbine today as part of the circuit we needed to make dead to maintain a sub station. We had to get their power back on by 4pm so the turbine could come back on line. I drove past it on the way home and it wasn't even moving.

!!!!

That's not quite as utterly incorrect as your 'all street lights are on the inside of the pavement' statement, but it is pretty close.  All cars built after 1937 are legally required to have a speedometer*. 

Yes, there's no requirement for an odometer, but short of a few kit cars and barely road legal things like MacLaren F1s, they all do.   When did you last see a car that didn't have one?

* well, cars are exempt if they are limited to 25mph.  So are agricultural vehicles limited to 20mph, but given that they are tax exempt (thus red diesel) anyway, we don't need to worry about them!

Shit. I meant 10,000.

This thread went a bt quiet. Here's some fuel fresh from the oven

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/nov/28/electric-cars-porsche-chargin...

youtube.com/watch?v=OYtAqswEM9A&

Ir might be the car's fault Them Taycans seem a mite unpredictable.

At least the launch control seems to work.

I read that, and struggled to understand.  Why on earth did they set off on a 130 mile journey with only 45 miles in the tank?  That's a very ICE mindset, and you do need to plan differently with an EV.  

Even if they'd started out from home full, driven out 130 miles, and then tried to go straight home again, they'd have only been a few miles short, given their 250 mile range.  That quick charge at the Porsche garage would have been enough.  But it looks like they've not planned ahead, and just run their battery down and down, and  assumed they'd be able to refill whenever they wanted - exactly how you behave with an ICE.

They've then been incredibly unlucky.  In four years of owning my previous PHEV, I have been pulled up to Ecotricity points at motorway services to to find an out-of-action charger (I think) three times.  And I've found them full and had to queue exactly once.  Other than that they've been free and working literally every time.  And surely they knew that the Tesla points don't work with their car?

I wonder if the network maintenance is in a bit of a mess because of Covid?

That's the root of the problem. If you can't set off with 45 miles in the tank, expecting to be able to top up to the car's maximum within that 45 miles, then the system isn't good enough.  How will you convince the ICE mindset that this is normal if you choose to go the electric route?

There is an upcoming job for us to upgrade the supply to a small group of 9 houses in the grounds of an old hall. One of the houses has purchased a Porsche EV. He requires a 70KW charger. Some of the houses are "looped" together, ie, they share a service cable between 2 houses that cable will be 35mm2. The main cable feeding the whole 9 houses is an overhead 95mm2 cable and is simply not big enough to cope. There was some discussion as to whether to just upgrade the one house, but sense prevailed and the whole site will now be done, but it was a close decision because of who would pay for the other work.

So, 2, 300mm2 underground cables will be installed in the entrance road, but the development has some sort of legal clause with it to do with the road, so we can't just dig a trench and reinstate that, the whole road will have to be re-laid. Then to give each house it own service cable and spread the load out evenly, those that are looped will now get there own feed. That's assuming they want one and will allow us to do the work. I dread to think of the cost of this work will be and it's only 9 houses.

There seems to me to be something of an etiquette problem here - you go to visit your friends in deepest mid Wales, and your car needs charging overnight. The nearest public charger is 50 miles away, so you are compelled to use your hosts' electricity supply. I guess you have to offer them a tenner or whatever it costs.

The gods alone know why anyone would want that kind of charger at home unless they live on a racetrack...

I thought they might have 10 cars. At least the other houses will now be able to have an electric shower if they want.

No ice yet though but some nice bouldering

Its really not difficult

I'm normally quite sceptical of new tech, (self driving cars in particular), but a lot of the objections to electric cars are probably the same as those when ICE cars were developed:

"But I can set off with a hungry horse and just refuel it on a convenient patch of grass. These car things will need a huge road and rail distribution network for a special, very hazardous liquid fuel, with huge underground storage tanks every few miles with electrically powered pumps (we don't even have domestic electric lighting yet!), and 24/7 cashiers on site at these expensive 'gas stations'. The cost and inconvenience is astronomical, how will this ever be practicable?"

To misquote Galileo, "But yet it now exists".

Speaking of EVs and mountains, one of my goals in life is to drive a decent EV up Pikes Peak.  To really appreciate the experience I'll need a point of comparison.  Like say driving a Mustang  with the 5 litre V8 up Pikes Peak.  

The system is just different.  We have to adapt.  Some people just take a bit longer to adapt!

In reply to arch:

I don't think they do.  They might think that they want it, for some misguided reason.

In reply to John2:

Yep.  Been doing this for years.

I'm not objecting to electric cars. i'd love a Taycan. 

But it's going to be difficult to sell them to the public if currently the EV journey planning as mentioned by Jamie W means that you don't leave your house with less than 50 miles in the tank.

It just means you plug it in overnight if you know you have a big journey the following day.  These muppets didn't.

My car just gets plugged in every night, set to slow charge up to 80% max (because keeping it at 100% all the time isn't great for battery life).  If I know I have a long trip coming up, I override it and bring it up to full.  These people set off, knowing their trip was greater than the remaining range, and didn't do anything about it until they were nearly empty.  That is exactly how we've been conditioned to behave with ICEs but it doesn't work so well with EVs.  Literally all they needed to have done to avoid their problem was to have the foresight to plug in the night before.

EDIT: on reflection, I guess that it is possible that they had an emergency that took them out on this trip, having just arrived home from a previous long trip, and so they had to set off with less than full range.  If this is the case then I've been unduly harsh on them - although they should still have been aware of the impending problem and looked out for fast chargers much earlier on.  But I don't get the impression that this is what happened.

Personally speaking I don't even behave like that with an ICE car.

If I have a long journey I fill up the night before. I generally fill up if I'm passing a garage and I've got less than 1/4 of a tank, I certainly don't drive around thinking "I've still got 28 miles of fuel according to the trip computer, I'll fill up at that petrol station 27 miles away".

Maybe that's due to being skint as a youth and having to walk 8 miles to the nearest petrol station after running out of petrol because I was trying to eke it out, or having to fiddle under the bonnet in the dark to prime the injectors after running out of diesel, or now living in a rural area and thinking about what happens in a fuel shortage.

Failure of some people to be able to think more than 5 minutes into the future isn't an excuse not to develop new technologies.

In the article says that it was the return journey that got them in trouble. Perfectly possible that wherever they stayed overnight there was no means of charging it, or that this was a round trip and they were expecting to be able to fill up before/during the return leg.

Yes, but the round trip was only 260 miles and their car had a 250 mile range.  Ten minutes of charge anywhere along the journey would have been sufficient - IF they had started out full.

I'm gonna guess that the manufacturer given range of 250 miles goes the same way as the manufactuer of my car claiming it does 80.7 mpg...

Discussed above.  In normal driving conditions you'll typically achieve the claimed range at around 65mph; at 70mph you will be a bit under, at 60mph you will likely exceed it.  In really nasty conditions you'll be way under - I got down to about 70% a little while back, but that was heaters and aircon on full in driving wind and rain.

<pedant mode engaged> your car's manufacturer doesn't actually claim that it does 80.7mpg.  That's just the result of the (incredibly outdated) NEDC test that they are legally obliged to report.  The NEDC was never really intended to make a real world prediction, just to give you a metric to compare one car with another by.  

NEDC really showed its limitations when the first round of PHEVs came on the market.  Because they could do almost the whole test on battery alone, they reported insanely high fuel efficiencies, but these still had to be legally reported.  Hence all the people being disappointed when their Outlander PHEV didn't return 170mpg in the real world.  The newer WLTP test is supposed to make a rather better job of measuring things.

Hilarious! How on earth did she do that?

If you're referring to the driveway incident it was apparently a male driver who had owned it 5 days. A few other Taycan owners have since commented that it is very difficult to move from an uphill hold postion to creep forward. Looks like a poor mix of car choice and driveway desigm.

in another version from someone "close to the horse's mouth" the driver had owned it for two hours and was reaching into the back seat when the incident occurred.

There was an article in the Grauniad yesterday saying that a huge number of charging points are out of action because they are not being maintained properly.( Surely not in Britain.)

Add to that that there are several different plug configurations, getting a charge is a nightmare.

A couple in their electric Porsche took nine hours to do a two hour trip, and had to get a charge at a Porsche garage.

Nuts!

17.55 Sat 

It's almost as if the last 20 posts hadn't happened...

Except of course no-one actually sat down and thought that in 1888 (and they would have probably known that Godalming had a public electricity net already). Replacing something which grew organically in response to market forces over half a century with a government influenced infrastructure in a decade is a "challenge".

Where are you getting “a decade” from?  Infrastructure roll out started a decade ago, pure-ICE is sold for another decade, hybrid ICE doesn’t have a limit (yet) but call in two decades from now.  Give another decade for those hybrids to come off the road.  So 40 years from the start of BEV infrastructure rollout to the switch being complete.  Close to half a century...

Whether there are 10m or 40m electric cars on the road is irrelevant, you need a complete charging infrastructure if ICE cars are going to be prohibited without discouraging potential customers. If charging isn't attractive then in 2030 people will just buy normal cars and keep them longer. 

Yes, and my point was that it can roll out progressively over close to half a century so I see no problem here.

But Ridge is of the opinion that people are saying otherwise

Not to my reading.  There’s plenty of infrastructure out there now for the level of vehicles on the road now and it’s keeping pace with them.

Some motorists can’t figure their range and power/fuel points in to their route planning.  That’s a flaw that affects all kinds of vehicle and has been since the start.  The only major difference is what happens when you run out of juice - EVs have more options in some ways but none at the roadside; although there are (I learnt on this thread) now mobile recharge vans and it’s not beyond the wit of man nor the AA to build a mobile rapid recharge van...

The difference is that, back in the day, you could carry cans of extra fuel (petrol) with you. If you lived (or indeed nowadays still live) miles from a garage, then this would be normal, and, more to the point, easily practical. (I have a fuel can down the cellar, in case extra fuel is possibly required - i.e. for a long trip to for instance the Highlands).

Carrying spare batteries is a whole different ball-game.

I just about remember this, but thought it was mainly due to inaccurate fuel gauges? A friend had a  Series 2 V8 Defender and an extra gallon would get him about 12 miles.

Why? A spare to get you an extra 10-15 miles could be an optional extra, but I don't think many would want it.

Sounds like a bit of a fringe case because of relaying the whole road (how does the utility company end up eating that?). Anyway, your upgrade should be physically good for what, 50-70years? Plenty of time to amortise the cost. I guess the existing cables date from somewhere 1970-90 so they've earned their keep too. Imagine having this attitude to electrifying homes in the early 20th century. Except then it was viewed as a commercial opportunity and a public good.

Frankly I don't think we really need home charging above about 10kW (compatible, with care, with existing infrastructure) but until new roadside infrastructure is developed everyone is going to want their own which is a bit mad.

Jk

They have to reinstate the road back to it's original state in this case.

Anyway, your upgrade should be physically good for what, 50-70years? Plenty of time to amortise the cost. I guess the existing cables date from somewhere 1970-90 so they've earned their keep too.

LOL.

How often do you think the network is upgraded ?? We changed a pole earlier this year that was dated 1949, just the pole, nothing else. We only changed that one because it was rotten. The rest of the circuit, which was a 33kv circuit, so quite important, was the same age and wasn't touched.

Imagine having this attitude to electrifying homes in the early 20th century. Except then it was viewed as a commercial opportunity and a public good.

It was all new back then, just like Broadband. Everyone's got Electricity now. Upgrading the network would be a massive job that unless is backed by the Government will never be done. No DNO will ever pay for it and imagine the disruption. Every house would need re servicing.

Edit; Anyway, what's the point, you seem to have the answer for everything, my little bit of electrical utility knowledge counts for nothing, so I'll leave it there. 

The view from the Nissan Leaf forums seems to be that this couple must have been relying on the charge point data in the cars satnav. They probably drove past the brand new shiny ionity fapid chargers IN Bournemouth that would have filled there car in 15 minutes. Its unbelievable how bad the data in the on board systems of all these cars are (except tesla). This is a £80k plus car and it doesn't link to the Zap map database! This is not an EV problem it's bad product design. 

For anyone who hasn't had the pleasure Zap map is constantly updated charge point finder that now has so many chargers around the County it's hard to choose which one to swing by. The amount of rapid (DC) 50kw+ Chargers added just this year is unbelievable. No stress, bearly any need to plan, the app works out if and where you should stop.

I struck me that while up in the Highlands early this year thatefor people living in remote areas (longer range) EV's would actually be massively more convenient. Some people at the end of roads must have to drive 20 or 30 miles to fill up with fule. We certainly had to plan fule stops. With an EV you can drive locally for as long as you want just charging at home. For any rare longer trips you just have to reach the nearest rapid charge station which could be 100 miles away. No need to drive into town for fule.