More power to UK, say 'leccy vehicle makers. Seriously, they need it A lack of power remains a problem to electric car manufacturers in the UK – with one unnamed maker setting up shop in Austria over Blighty due to a dearth of capacity, MPs heard today. Speaking in front of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, David Wong, senior technology and innovation manager at the …
I live in Rochdale. My son lives in Norfolk. It's over 200 miles to go and see him.
OK - I can buy an electric car that will probably have the range to get there. But when I do, then what? He lives in a terraced house on a street with all the parking spaces filled up with residents cars (no off street parking). So, how do I get home again?
This has not been properly thought out.
Alan
I agree it doesn't seem likely that an electric vehicle is for you. And not for me, either, as I rarely need a car, and when I do it is usually for similarly long distances (usually I just hire when I have to). Nevertheless, there are those who make many small(er) trips in cities for whom it might well be ideal. And perhaps some two-car households could convert to having one hydrocarbon, one electric.
You shouldn't write off the whole electric car idea just because it is of little use to you (or me).
As a 3 year EV owner, the one thing that p****s me off is that the public charge networks each require a dedicated RFID card or mobile app, and some of they requite pre-payment or annual subscription.
Step up Instavolt, their units accept credit cards.
But the point is valid: you don't refuel your petrol car at the destination, you do it at the nearest convenient public facility. As long as the car has enough range - 300 miles seems to be a sweet spot, and setting aside Tesla that is coming in planned models, you don't need to charge at home.
How far does the average electric car drive after a five-minute stop to top-up?
Because my old petrol car can do 500 miles, then after five minutes at a petrol station, it'll do another 500 miles.
Electric cars may have the theoretical capacity to do such things, but they would have to be carefully planned (if nothing else, to ensure you DO remember to stop off at the electric points and/or find another quickly if you forget) and you're into reliance on everything working perfectly - the range of the car, the indication of the charge, the charger being available, the margins being right, and you knowing all this in advance.
If I wanted to drive to Scotland, I could get in my car, fill up whenever I pass any station, as necessary, and not have to think about it or rely on fine-margins.
If I wanted to do that in an electric car, I have to plan it perfectly and everything has to combine to work well. One diversion, traffic jam, refuelling station missed or out of order or closed, and you're stranded. And when stranded... you need to be towed. You can't just hitch a ride to the nearest station with a jerry can.
EV's are no doubt fine for short trips only. Everything else you have to stop and think if it will make it and plan ahead and hope for the best. To be honest, that's not why I own a car in the first place. I own a car to stop me having to worry about if the trains are running, what time the bus arrives, will there be room on it in peak hours, and can it get me to where I need.
As pointed out - maybe fine for going to a nearby workplace. But visiting relatives? You're into starting with a full charge straight away no matter what, charging en-route (and presumably on the way back), and the time cost associated with such. And if you live in a flat where the car can't park near your power supply? Yeah, game over in terms of owning one before you even start.
I just did a map of electric charging points near the town I work in. There are maybe a dozen (as in TOTAL number of cables available, not just charging stations). All of different types, connectors and capacities, all with different companies. Most of them are in places that shut at certain times too, e.g. shopping centres and town halls. There are 100,000 people in my town, and it's inside the M25. There are as many charging POINTS as there are petrol stations. But petrol stations have a dozen pumps, and it takes 5 minutes for someone to use them. EV stations... not the same. And one of the EV points is actually just a 2KW ordinary mains plug connector...
I'm all for the concept of EV, but they need much better batteries (they literally become a no-brainer at that point) and/or hundreds of charging points, not a dozen. To be honest, even if it came to that, I still want the battery capacity more than the reliance on constantly being able to find a charger.
Because my old petrol car can do 500 miles, then after five minutes at a petrol station, it'll do another 500 miles.
Unfortunately for me the point is moot, because my bladder can only do about 200 miles at a time :( My current dino car manages to 2 pee's to a tank of fuel. A self driving car with pee bottle accessory would be handy, however it is fueled.
Where's the old giffer icon when you need it?
"You shouldn't write off the whole electric car idea just because it is of little use to you (or me)."
While this is true, the problem is that we may not have a choice in the matter. The UK government has said that petrol and diesel cars will be banned by 2040 - not just new sales, but all of them - and recent reports have noted that this is quite a bit later than other countries have promised (India says 2030, for example) and may well be brought forwards. And this is supposedly considered a long term plan. That's 12 years from now. For comparison, Hinkley Point C was proposed in 2008, and might be finished in 2027 if we're lucky.
That's what some of us are worried about. I'm all in favour of electric cars; they're both necessary and inevitable. But as plenty of other people have pointed out, our current infrastructure is simply not capable of supporting a wholesale switchover. And at the moment, far too many people are talking about forcing everyone to be all electric, all the time, within a timeframe that we're demonstrably incapable of actually upgrading said infrastructure. If it takes 20 years to build a single power station, how can it make any sense to suggest changes that will require many more than that in half the time? Or to suggest we can somehow get the power cables installed to cope with charging demand at every house when we can't get basic fibre cables to more than a small fraction of them?
I don't think anyone sensible writes off electric cars as a whole. They make sense for some people in some situations, and a gradual roll-out with ongoing improvements in support and infrastructure, as well as the underlying technology, sounds like a great idea. What many of us write off as stupid is the idea that we can suddenly change the entire country over to electric cars within the space of a few years simply by banning everything else. There are plenty of reasons why they're not appropriate for many people in many situations, and fixing that will take far more time and money than is currently being allowed.
It has been thought out, you just haven't been paying attention.
They are fitting fast charging points at service stations, and supermarket car parks are getting charging points also. People who don't have driveways do tend to go shopping. People driving long distances tend to pass service stations. That's most of your objections demolished.
@ Steve Todd: They are fitting fast charging points at service stations, and supermarket car parks are getting charging points also. People who don't have driveways do tend to go shopping. People driving long distances tend to pass service stations. That's most of your objections demolished.
I cannot speak for anyone else but when I (or Mrs Commswonk) go to a service station I am probably there for about 5 minutes. Time in a supermarket car park may well be a bit longer, but probably doesn't exceed 30 - 45 minutes. I don't think your "fast charging points" are going to achieve much in either time. Even a stop on a motorway probably doesn't exceed 45 minutes either.
So how many people are going to be happy to go to one of your chosen locations to find they can't even get in because others are kicking their heels waiting for their cars to charge up?
Those minor constraints aside, have you considered the fact that at the moment the electrical distribution infrastructure is incapable of carrying the likely load current, and will need to be (very expensively) replaced? Those infrastructure limitations will, untimately, go right back as far as the availability of raw power at the generating stations.
I think that's most of your "solutions" demolished.
Actually Mr Commswonk, the UK has plenty of power, it's the ability to delivery it that is a little wonky.
BUT as +60% of people will charge over night on their driveway, others can charge on the new public 'lamp post' chargers (when they are more available) and many others can charge at work. The few that charge on rapid chargers (the ones that take 30mins) at the supermarket or motorway service station will be very few.
So I think that's *your* objection demolished!
Plus, it's not like everyone will bin their dino fuel cars overnight, we have a decade to roll out enough chargers before this gets to be an issue.
Actually Mr Commswonk, the UK has plenty of power, it's the ability to delivery it that is a little wonky.
Not the case. To replace the amount of energy consumed by road transport and supplied by diesel/petrol today would double the amount of energy the grid would need to supply. That would mean the whole generating infrastructure running flat out, 24/7 every day of the year. Not possible, even if the grid could actually get that power where it's needed. How many more Sizewells can we build, and how quickly?
"Actually Mr Commswonk, the UK has plenty of power, it's the ability to delivery it that is a little wonky."
That's pretty much what he wrote except for one qualification: "little".
A row of lamp-posts charging cars are going to need a much heftier supply than one just lighting the road. That's the sort of infrastructure problem he referred to. Than, of course, unless you put the lamp-posts a lot closer together most drivers won't be able to park next to one to charge up. Cue nightly fights between drivers trying to get charged.
A decade? Nowhere near long enough. You're talking about replacing multiple decades of investment in both the grid and vehicle refuelling.
@Commswonk, the latest fast chargers are 120kW. A 1/2 hour stop for food and bladder relief should be able to add 180+ miles range, or about another 3 hours of motorway driving (by which time you'll probably be in need of another stop anyway).
MOST charging will happen at a slower rate over night and shouldn't stress out the power network. No, the whole fleet isn't going to migrate overnight, and no, everybody with an EV isn't going to need a full recharge every day, so moderate your numbers. It's more practical than you think.
the latest fast chargers are 120kW
OK, and how many of them can you run off a typical site supply ? A 200A 3phase suply only gives 150kW - so that's only one charger leaving just 30kW for the rest of the site. So fine, at the moment you stand a half decent chance of getting to the ONE charger such a site could support - now count the number of cars typically in the car park of a motorway service station and you'll see that a single charger (or even 2 or 3, which would mean slower charging) would have a very long queue if EVs became more than a tiny fraction of cars on the roads.
So the answer to that is usually "just upgrade the supply" - made by people with no idea of the technicalities involved in that. At the very minimum, it means putting in larger supply cable(s) - which quite likely means a lot of digging. But then the local substation may not have the capacity - so that's a transformer upgrade. And the (typically in the UK) 11kV feed to the substation probably doesn't have the capacity - so that's more (typically digging) cable upgrades.
So charge at home/work - problem solved for most. Err what ? Until I moved last year, I was lucky if I got to park on teh same street, let alone actually outside the house - so no charging there. At work it's pot luck in the car park - so no luck there. That's the reality for the vast majority of drivers - can't charge at home or work.
Charging at the supermarket has all the same problems as discussed above - fine if there are hardly any EVs around, not fine once there are enough that you have to queue for the charger.
And that's before we discuss where the lecky comes from. In this country, when you plug in an EV the additional load on the grid is taken up by a fossil fuelled station. That is only going to get worse as nuclear station (what's left of them) shut down. And unless the wind is blowing at just the right speed, and the sun is out, then we wouldn't have enough generation capacity anyway if enough EVs are added.
So yes, EVs do work for some people, while the numbers are low. They work for people who have the luxury of their own off street parking they can get lecky to and who are on a substation with enough capacity (not too many neighbours with EVs). Or they'll work for people who have a public charging point nearby - and not too many EVs so they are in use when you want to use them. Or they'll work for the commute if your employer spends sh*tloads of money on multiple charging points (again, as long as there aren't more EVs than charging points).
" the latest fast chargers are 120kW. A 1/2 hour stop for food and bladder relief should be able to add 180+ miles range, or about another 3 hours of motorway driving (by which time you'll probably be in need of another stop anyway)."
That assumes than pulling into a service station car park you'll be able to park at one of these chargers. If we went all-EV that means that most if not all parking places in the car park would have one.
Now tell us how you're going to get the required number of megawatts into a motorway service station car park.
" the latest fast chargers are 120kW. A 1/2 hour stop for food and bladder relief should be able to add 180+ miles range, or about another 3 hours of motorway driving (by which time you'll probably be in need of another stop anyway)."
Question:
How many 120KW chargers can a motorway service station support instantaneously?
That is precisely the number of cars that can charge at one time. In your example, double that number of cars per hour can charge up.
How much does it cost to keep that number of chargers running 24 hours a day?
Let's say 10p per KWh to make the maths nice. That's £12 per hour per charger. Let's just say that's a significant portion of motorway service revenue, per vehicle. I don't imagine people spend more than £24 on non-fuel items when they go to a motorway services, on average. Of course, you can charge them for the use of the charger... probably £24 an hour would be about normal rates for a standard 50% markup.
A service station might service... let's say 100 vehicles an hour (there's about a 40 minute dwell time at your average motorway services... so at any one time the number of people visible in one is going to be about "that many vehicles per hour" - 100 seems reasonable, but I can't trace statistics for this - a vehicle or so a minute actually seems quite generously low).
That's 12MW of charging power per motorway services. Wiki has a list of 100+ motorway services. That's 1.2GW. About the equivalent of 4.6m solar panels (~300W on average, according to energy.gov). That's JUST the motorway service stations. Nothing else.
And even with 120KW, you have to wait around for an hour before you can continue. And then do the same 3 hours later. You wouldn't even get from London to Cornwall without TWO STOPS OF ONE HOUR EACH of just sitting around doing nothing. If you go to Land's End from London, possibly three.
That's assuming every service station has 100 "fast-chargers" chargers, that all work, there are no queues for them, and you're happy to pay ~£60 for the privilege of "fast-charging" and sitting around doing nothing just to get to Cornwall.
Or you could just get in a petrol car. Put in £60 of petrol. Get to Cornwall. Done.
The economics isn't there until: Electricity DRASTICALLY drops in price (which isn't likely when subsidies for things like solar expire). Batteries triple in capacity. The National Grid gets hundreds of billions of pounds to upgrade capacity down to hundreds of individual service stations and smaller charging points.
I don't know if you notice, but it's hard to do all those things at the same time - each one makes one of the others more expensive (yep... bigger batteries? Oh, now you have to charge for three hours or require a 360KW charger...)
> People who don't have driveways do tend to go shopping.
Unless they live within walking distance of the shops. Also, those shops would need a lot of fast-charge points.
> People driving long distances tend to pass service stations.
My relatives came over from the continent recently. They have a Tesla, and were surprised at the lack of infrastructure in the UK. Why? Total number of charging points in the county they were staying in, according to their app? 1. Wasn't near the motorway, either.
"They are fitting fast charging points at service stations, and supermarket car parks are getting charging points also."
1. How fast is fast in relation to fuelling and equivalent mileage into a petrol-powered car?
2. How many charging points are there in a supermarket car park in relation to the number of cars that might need charging there if the country went all-EV?
3. How would you provide sufficient power to such places if the country went all-EV and the majority of vehicle owners depended on them?
I'm assuming you usually fill up at your sons house with a Jerry Can of some sort?
Seriously just charge your car at a service station (or two, OK maybe three) on the way. There is no denying that for that journey its going to be a faff but its not generally that hard and console yourself that for the 98% of the rest of the time you wont be visiting any petrol stations and will charge at home. Also feel smug that in the cold weather that your car will have defrosted and preheated itself.
"Seriously just charge your car at a service station (or two, OK maybe three) on the way. "
Time spent at a service station filling with the burny stuff is about 5 minutes.
The reason for having service stations in isolation is... the burny stuff tends to be burny if not looked after, so you don't want the flames spreading to other things if it does.
A service station model with its limited number of pumps is 100% the WRONG paradigm for charging electric vehicles. You need to be able to park, plugin and go do whatever you need to do at your leisure, coming back some time later to unplug and drive off - at your leisure.
Having to unplug after a set period and move to another parking place means whoever designed the setup had the entire point of the exercise go whooshing over their head. EVs don't usually catch fire when charging - unless you're charging them at stupidly high rates, which damages the batteries anyway.
The model for a motorway services would be a chargepoint at _every_ parking bay. In a shopping centre it would be the same thing. Ditto in hotels for travellers.
The bigger problem at the moment isn't lack of charge points, it's lack of infrastructure capacity to feed them in most urban areas. Royal Mail were perfectly correct that having that many EVs attempting to charge overnight in London would overload the local substation and/or distribution cabling - if you want to build a data centre inside Zone 2 (similar power requirements) you need to apply for the power capacity and wait up to a decade for it to become available.
In the longer term, the problem is lack of power stations to feed EVs. There's about 20MW difference between daytime "peak" and night time "offpeak" draw at the moment but with a large EV fleet plugging in, the overnight draw could trivially easily end up higher than the daytime one. At that point you're going to need more generating capacity AND more national distribution capacity. None of this comes cheap and you can't do it with windmills or solar or undersea interconnectors (apart from the approx 2GW per cable limit on undersea links, the european grid is facing exactly the same growth in demand and lack of capacity. You could bore a couple more chunnels just for power but that's fairly expensive...)
You could bore a couple more chunnels just for power but that's fairly expensive...)
Every European country seems to have the same solution for power shortages: buy the extra power needed from their neighbours.
There's a certain impractical circularity about that...
"There is no denying that for that journey its going to be a faff but its not generally that hard and console yourself that for the 98% of the rest of the time you wont be visiting any petrol stations and will charge at home."
It probably becomes harder than you think if he has to queue for an hour or so at each service station waiting for his quarter of an hour or however long it takes for the "quick" charge.
Electric cars have nasty charging issues. Autonomous electric cars are a solution.
In your use case you drive to your sons house and get out without having to worry that there is nowhere to park what with all of the parking filled with residents cars. Your car then drives itself to a local charging center and meets you outside your sons house close to fully charged when you want to go home.
How about a plug-in Hybrid? Assuming that your local trips aren't all that long, you operate it as an EV most of the time. For longer trips, you switch to gasoline. Toyota has been selling them for for five or six years. I believe Ford has also. They are significantly more expensive than Toyota's non-plug in hybrids, but look to be comparable in price to lower end EVs.
+1 for plug-in hybrids
I picked up an 11 month old plug-in hybrid saloon with 6,000 miles on the clock for £19k. 2 litre petrol engine, 31 miles to a charge (OK, so more like 23 if I hammer it down the motorway at 85-90mph). The few times I've taken it on 150+ mile journeys, it's still done about 60mpg which isn't bad for a 2 litre petrol - the key is not to use all the charge on the motorway but to save it for any stop-start traffic jams and stop-start at the end of your journey.
Costs me about £12 a month to charge it overnight, £0 a month in tax, and about £40 a month in petrol; compared to the same miles in my old diesel which cost me about £200 a month in diesel, and £20 a month in tax. Basically (taking into account the savings), repaying the bank loan costs me about £120 a month, which isn't bad at all.
"Costs me about £12 a month to charge it overnight, £0 a month in tax, and about £40 a month in petrol"
The £0 a month in tax won't last. The numbers on the road right now are small enough for HMG to afford this as a political gesture. As the numbers mount they'll need the income. They'll also need more income to replace fuel duty. Perhaps a flat rate tax equivalent to existing VED and a mileage charge to replace fuel duty.
Like all the other things that make EVs practical now the taxation advantage doesn't scale.
How often do you go see your son in Norfolk?
There are a few rapid chargers on the way there, a few there, and since you cant park at his house then you might as well pick a lot that has charging facilities.
I hear this argument all the time.. "But It will not get me where I want to go", and then you ask the question about where they want to go and how often with the reply from them "Far away, once or twice a year, but haven't been in three years".
I think it's been thought out quite well. If you (like most car drivers) reside near where you work then it's worth it, If you are too far out then it is not worth it. Why should the 90% of potential electric car owners need to pay triple the price just so you can go see your son a couple of times a year?
I have known plenty of people who had cars with dual fuel tanks in them, 500+ miles of range (larger vehicles) and they could still manage to run out of fuel. If it's not good for you don't buy it. The biggest problem I found with our electric car was that some plonker in a large luxury sedan would use the charging bays to park in thus making it difficult to charge. Perhaps we should start giving fixed penalties for those drivers and use the funds to fix this poorly thought out thing you imagine?
The biggest problem I found with our electric car was that some plonker in a large luxury sedan would use the charging bays to park in
Let's look at the opposite situation. Maybe you have charging bays where you can stop for 30-60 minutes for a quick top-up when shopping or grabbing lunch, but what about when you go on holiday and take a plane or a train? Your car sits in an airport or station car park for two weeks. It'll be fully charged after the first 8 hours or so, do you then become that plonker blocking the space for days? Or will car parks have to employ attendants to move cars around?
For long term parking you only need a 13A socket. Every bay could have one at very little cost.
Heathrow has 50,000 parking spaces, and plans to add 40,000 more. 50,000 13A sockets would require 150MW to fully supply them all. And that's just one airport.
"Heathrow has 50,000 parking spaces, and plans to add 40,000 more. 50,000 13A sockets would require 150MW to fully supply them all. And that's just one airport."
You're assuming every car in long-term parking will be charging for the full time they are parked. And that every driver will decide to charge at the airport.
Most likely they would set the price of charging at the airport higher than the price of the average person's electricity at home. So those who need to will pay the premium to charge at the airport and those who don't will just wait until they get home. Of course how much it costs them to install and maintain the necessary electrical feed will factor into the price they levy for charging. I don't know for sure but I suspect this will only be a small margin over the cost of what parking costs already.
Also, as they have a pretty good idea how long each car is going to be parked, with a little more technology applied to the problem they could easily switch ports on and off to smooth their usage (or even take advantage of variable wholesale rates) while still ensuring each vehicle gets as much charge as its owner wants/needs.
Long term parking can be an ideal location for 2-way charging. The cars can sell power back to the grid as well. The Nissan Leaf in Japan already has this feature so it may even be built into models in other markets.
If the carpark knows roughly when you are going to get your car it should be able to balance supply for all.
Actually, i was at Heathrow two days ago, and I noticed that they were digging up some of the short-stay car parks to install more EV chargers. There are a few at every terminal, and they're adding more...
So they're certainly keen on the idea....
Alan: since you can't park at your son's house anyway (street parking reserved for residents), what you need is a flying car, which you can land on the roof. What you do then is up to you, but we have recently heard about an electric flying taxi which may suit you. It may still not quite have the range, but perhaps you can land it on the roof of a train going tin the direction you require. You'll have to take off again whenever there's a train tunnel and land after it.
I assume presently your wife drives you over and immediately returns home until called for.
As the article notes, 50% of the cost of an EV is the battery. If you're looking to reduce costs, that's where to look.
There are probably tens of thousands of battery research projects underway around the world, who regularly report 'breakthroughs' - none of which make it to market.
Could the solution be for the government to throw money at the problem? £500million is a lot. Give dozens of £5million+ grants to researchers and for pre-production work. Choose a few off-the-wall ones while they're at it. Most would be wasted but if even one hits the nail on the head, it's money all the way to the bank (and foreign licence fees)
@ Pen-y-gors
"Could the solution be for the government to throw money at the problem? £500million is a lot. Give dozens of £5million+ grants to researchers and for pre-production work. Choose a few off-the-wall ones while they're at it. Most would be wasted but if even one hits the nail on the head, it's money all the way to the bank (and foreign licence fees)"
Why is the solution to charge everyone which as you say will be mostly wasted? Surely the solution is to let people choose to invest in whatever solutions they want to try even if its a more efficient fossil fuel engine. That way the only money wasted is by those choosing to try, people get a working solution compared to some failed half arsed gov approved garbage, and since the money to the bank would be private profit anyway they keep their gains.
I can take a fairly good guess about who that manufacturer is, and I can tell you that the reason they've stated isn't totally true. They have another factory in Slovakia, big enough to hold two (or three) of their UK plants there. One particular plant in the UK will be closed shortly, and another plant is safe until at least 2021. All because of money, cost of manufacture of the workforce and - I'm sorry - Brexit. As well as capacity of their UK factories as they're hemmed in where they all are.
Agency workers will be the first to go, but the workers of this company who were already shafted with the demise of Rover in the mid 2000's will be shafted again.
- They take a long time to recharge...
- You need a power outlet to recharge them...
(Or like Tesla's plan... you could exchange the whole pack at a gas-station)
- There's a HUGE amount of infrastructure / extra cabling needed for all those charging points...
- Making those batteries isn't exactly environmentally friendly...
The best way is still some form of liquid that can be easily transported, power the car and can be purchased at every gas-station... (And no... I'm NOT talking about Hydrogen...)
Some form of battery technology with an easily exchangeble liquid electrolyte maybe ?
Pump the old (used) liquid out, pump the new (energy-containing) liquid in and you're good to go !
The used liquid can then be transported to a facility where it can be regenerated and re-used...
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