Six car-makers team to build European 'leccy car charge bar network

Re: 4 car makers not 6.

You should probably add SEAT, Skoda, Bentley and Lamborghini to the VAG list too...

Re: UK Charging points

What will probably happen instead is that we will just see lots of different chargers at various service stations on our motorways

You mean kinda like now, where we have pumps with nozzles for two types of petrol, two types of diesel, and autogas all serving the same bay.

Given what we have already, it's hardly a stretch to imagine a charging unit with a choice of adaptors.

Re: UK Charging points

"Given that Tesla have now set up charging points across just about all of Western Europe (excluding Western Span and Portugal for some reason), allowing you to drive from Malaga to Narvik ..."

... taking at least three times longer than you would need to do the same drive in a proper car.

Re: Oh no...

The problem is one of the infrastructure to supply this amount of juice to each charging station - not a problem while there's so few all-electric cars around and the charging stations can be subsidised by petrol / diesel sales.

Lets say a typical petrol/diesel filling station has 10 bays, and a refill takes 5 mins and costs £50each, they can *potentially* service 24 * (60 / 5) * 10 = 2,880 vehicles per day or take £144,000 revenue per day (so long as the fuel reserves are sufficient of course).

Lets say a typical recharging station has 10 bays, takes 30 minutes to charge and costs £25each, then they can potentially service 24 * (60 / 30) * 10 = 480 vehicles per day or £12,000 revenue per day.

But of course, the filling/charging stations aren't 100% busy 24 hours /day, lets say they are 25% busy throughout the day, then it's £36,000 for a petrol/diesel station and £3000 for recharging station.

Both need to be able to accomodate peak times, where 10 vehicles are refuelling/recharging at the same time, which is a huge problem for the charging station - if each car needs a 400kilowatts feed, then they need a 4megawatts feed - equivalent to the needs of about 4000 homes.

So only answer is to put a medium-sized fossil fuel burning power station at each recharging station to guarantee delivery for peak times. There are currently about 8,500 petrol stations in the UK, so we would need 6 times more than that for an all electric (because electric cars take 6x longer to recharge) so that's 51,000 electric charging stations / 4MW powerstations ...

Re: Interesting supply questions

I'm sure I'm missing something, but if the charging process is 90% efficient (seems unlikely any real-world system will do much better than that), that means 35kW of waste heat that has to be disposed of somehow without raising internal temps too high. I'm sure this has been thought of, just keen to know how it's done.

This is why existing high-power charging systems stop at ~80%, beyond that point the internal resistance of the battery is high enough for heating to become a real problem. It's possible to continue at a lower power setting to get up to 100%, but the idea (for these superfast chargers) is to plug in for 15-30 minutes and then move on.

Re: Interesting supply questions

I thought BMW's i thingie with the range extender option sorted this problem (Where the engine is purely there to recharge the battery if charge gets below a certain point)?

Re: Interesting supply questions

If each car can pull 350 kW, and there are half a dozen charging points in one place, that's a helluva big mains cable!

Let's do the math. Six charging points, 350 kW each... 2.1 MW. I have some experience with electric utilities. Typical primary distribution systems run from (very old, being replaced) 9 and 12 kV at 10-20 amp lines to newer 24 and 36 kV at up to 50-100 amp. Two lines of 24 kV at 50 amp would deliver 2.4 MW. One line of 36 kV at 100 amp would deliver 3.6 MW. Each station would have to have the equivalent of a small distribution substation out back. That would be a fair amount of capital expenditure, but once paid the ongoing maintenance would be a lot lower. It's not the set-up that's the problem, it's the total cost of ownership. Just as people who buy cheap inkjet printers often find that over a year it would have been more economical to have purchased a laser printer, the major cost will be actually using the damn thing.

So it takes 30 minutes to an hour to fully charge an electric vehicle... that's 175 to 350 kWh per car. Say you average (for nice round number purposes) 10 cars per day per charge point, that's 1.75 to 3.5 MWh per charge point per day, or 10.5 to 21 MWh per day. Around here, the local electric utility charges between $90-95 for a MWh. Call it $100 for ease of calculation, and that's $1050-2100 per day per station. That's $383,250-766500 per year.Someone will be forking out up to THREE QUARTERS OF A MILLION DOLLARS on a yearly basis for each station, just for the electricity. You may substitute in what your local utility charges per MWh to get a rate in your area. Exactly who will be paying for this? I should hope that it'd be the people who plug their electric cars in, but I can't see any mention of a fee structure in the article. I may have missed it, so if there is one, could someone please let me know where it is?

Then there's the question of where the actual power is going to come from. Allegedly there will be 400 stations across Europe. That's 4200-8400 MW of power generation that has to come from somewhere. Major European power stations generate 500-2000 MW, so that's an additional four-five new power 2000 MW plants, either fossil-fuel, spewing lots and lots and lots of carbon to feed those nice clear electric cars, or nukes, and good luck getting those things in Germany or, to a lesser extent, Britain. If anyone thinks that solar or geothermal or wind or wave/tidal systems can do the job, let's see the numbers. (Yes, you can do geothermal in Iceland. Now you have to run a really big power cable across the North Sea to mainland Europe... And there are quite likely to be, ahem, secondary effects, from yanking all that heat out of Iceland.) And hydro is not likely to be effective, as most spots in Europe which can have hydro already do, and the rest can't have hydro for legal/political reasons.

Frankly, I just gotta see this.

Re: Interesting supply questions

"If each car can pull 350 kW, and there are half a dozen charging points in one place, that's a helluva big mains cable!"

I was thinking that too. Especially for the more rural motorway service stations.

Re: Fast, how fast?

The biggest (at present) Teslas have 100kWh batteries, so that would suggest 15 minutes to get from zero to ~80% full, which is where these systems typically stop.

In comparison, the Nissan Leaf is 24-30kWh, but that doesn't offer anything like the range needed for a general purpose vehicle (as opposed to a commuter car).

Re: Where's the power coming from?

"Given the lead times for building power generation plants somebody had better start planning now. Perhaps the car manufacturers - so keen to bang the drum for electric cars - could pay for them :-)."

Then we have to consider that EV drivers are getting a free ride at the moment, even if they pay for their "fuel". Electricity for vehicle use is taxed at 5% the same as for domestic use. Other car drivers have to pay taxes of about 157%.

So the hypothetical and completely untrue 100kWH capacity of a Tesla costs £14 to "fill" at present prices. Pay the fuel duty on that and it would cost £36 to fill. If the driver had to pay the fuel duty on the fuel used to create the electricity it would cost the driver £110 to "fill" their tank. Ouch.

It's about time that we started to tax EVs properly - they can keep their free Vehicle tax concession as an incentive to go green.

Re: Where's the power coming from?

> Given the lead times for building power generation plants somebody had better start planning now.

One issue is not so much the overall generating capacity, but the rating of cables between the power stations and the towns.

I know of one leccy supplier that is investigating the use of large battery storage units within towns that would be charged up during periods of low demand overnight and used to help with supply when demand is higher during the day.

Re: Electric cars are a deadend

not this horse s#it again.

Fun fact: About 3kwh of electricity and another 3 kwh equivalent of heat energy goes into making every gallon of petrol - Depending on heating usage and time of year I get between 3.3 and 5.2 miles per khr from my leaf. My bosses 6 series beemer and Range Rovers can therefor quite often uses more elecricity than my electric car!

Hydrogen is the real massive waste of time here. It takes a minimim of twice as much electricity to make the hydrogen than it does to charge a battery. How come that double amount of electrcity is always deemed to come from renewable sources whereas every electric car is deemed to be charged from coal fuelled powerstations?

Also most cars are charged overnight by electricty which has to be generated anyway to keep the powerstations ticking over, but yes we do need to the look at both the grid and generation but we need to do that anyway.

Going back to the hydrogen nonsense, its really is a nasty reactive element that embrittles and knackers everything it comes into contact with. The REAL reason the car makers want to go this way is that you will be forced to regualarly replace expensive highly engineered components for the lifetime of the car. Car makers make more money on the upkeep of a car than they do on its initial sale. Battery cars on the other hand seem to be degrading far slower than it was originally feared.

Re: Electric cars are a deadend

Hydrogen?

Perhaps you need to get up with the latest news.

Even those who were big fans of Hydrogen are moving away from it as fast as they can.

Tesla (love or hate Musk) have shown the way to all the other car makers.

They seem to be scrabbling to catch up with Tesla at the moment.

As has been said, the biggest issue is the Battery and the time it takes to charge.

My PHEV has spent most of the morning charging at home. The nice sunny day means that when it is done the leccy meter will start spinning backwards. By the time the sun sets the meter will be almost back where it started this morning.

If more people had their own generator (eg PV) then the overall baseload for EV's will be reduced.

I have suggested here before (and got downvoted for my pains) that ALL new buildings are constructed with a PV array on the roof.

Re: Electric cars are a deadend

"That's why I bet on hydrogen"

Hydrogen has so many technical problems that the best way to use it is to bind it with lots of carbon atoms to keep it from attacking everything in sight.

There are more hydrogen atoms in a litre of diesel than a litre of liquid hydrogen

IE: for transportation systems where electrical sources can't be used, the liklihood is that hydrocarbon fuels will be syntheised using a modified haber process and nuclear energy source.

Hi Elon Musk. Welcome to El Reg

Honestly, you are speaking right out of the Musk Manifesto.

He's promoting the idea that Tesla owners let other people drive their car while they aren't using it.

It is not a big step to the idea that no one owns their own car.

Are you now a shareholder in Uber by any chance?

Put all this together and you can get to your utopian view of the future.

The problem is (As usual), that the vested interestes will get in the way.

By vested interests, I mean Big Oil and all the conventional car makers.

With no one owning their own car and effectively sharing it, means that the car makers will need to produce IMHO about 1/10th of the cars that they do at the moment. Do you honestly think that they will sign their own death warrant?

you have a nice idea. Sad that it won't come about.

I hope it never happens. That would quite literally double the amount of cars on the road. picking you up dropping you off again picking you up again dropping you off again.

Its a popular idea because ALL subscription models make the the people who run them more money in the long run than a traditional sale would.

It's already here (kind of).

Car-vending machines or swap batteries rather than sit and wait to recharge..

a la Wikipedia

"...The Kandi EV CarShare is a carsharing program in the city of Hangzhou.

The system operates only with Kandi EV all-electric cars, which are available to customers in automated garages that run like vending machines.

The rental price is US$3.25 per hour. Leasing is available from US$130 to US$160 per month, which includes insurance, maintenance, and the electric power through swapping batteries at the program garages.

Then, Kandi recharges the batteries at its convenience. The leasing option, called "Long Lease," is available from 1 to 3 year contracts.[6]..."

Ideal for car sharing

I don't own a car, I'm in a car share scheme. I'm not alone, car ownership in this country has been declining for a number of years. The charging station solution is ideal for car share schemes since the car can be plugged in at the dedicated parking bays.

As for the rest of the discussion, it seems everyone has missed that the standard these companies have agreed on allows much faster charging. Some people like to drive flat out to reach a destination but plenty of others, say with kids in the car, stop fairly regularly and have plenty of time to top up a battery.

"As a rough guesstimate, assume a car uses 50bhp travelling at motorway speeds."

Try 15-20kW, even a slab-fronted van only pulls about 30kW at 60mph on level ground.

not all vehicles need to be electric-only. A free-piston sterling range extender would be far more efficient than any existing IC engine and the added weight isn't so much of a problem on a EV as energy used for acceleration can be recouped during deceleration.

Re: I can't see the point.

I never need to visit a filling station. My Model S is ready with a fully-charged battery every morning. The Economy 7 electricity works out at about 2p to 3p per mile.

If I'm going on a long journey, I stop every few hours to plug in at a Tesla Supercharger, while I take a toilet break and have a leisurely cup of coffee, and 45 minutes later I'm good for another three hours' driving. And that electricity costs me nothing.

Now do you see the point?