UK's national grid 'ready' for e-car expansion

Presumably based on...

Everybody just using normal 13A domestic sockets.

Which'd mean dog slow charging, not the fast-fast that keeps getting pitched. I wonder how likely the National Grid is to cope with the "uncontrolled charging" scenario then..?

No use saying "Ah, well, that could be managed and staggered" - if I want to recharge for another 100 miles range in 15mins, I want to do it now so I can leave in 15mins, not in four hours when it's all got less busy.

Oh FFS.

Our energy use is unsustainable as things stand. Everyone who isn't part of a special-interests lobby and has read beyond the powergen propaganda knows this to be true. So where will we be getting the power to drive these electric cars, even if they ever become viable for the mass market? Unicorn piss?

Honestly, I can't help thinking we could probably figure our way through this crisis if we didn't waste so much effort fooling the public into thinking the future can in any way resemble the status quo. I despair. We deserve extinction. Just a shame that we're using up all the fossil fuels in the process, so whatever species follows us up the evolutionary ladder will never have an industrial revolution...

Hmmm indeed....

Even if the national grid is up to the job (it's certainly possible), the "research team emphasise that local improvements may nevertheless be necessary", according to the press release.

I'd like to see the costs for that.

That's potentially a lot of new substations, new cables to be laid, new electrical installations in each house (if you want anything faster than an overnight charge). At a modest £500/house the additional infrastructure cost comes in at well over £1billion...

grid may be fine but...

We have a pretty good national power infrastructure, but not enough juice to put on it. Sure we might be able to support many leccy cars plugged in over existing wires but we would have to actually buy the leccy from France as we don't produce enough and are destined to produce less thanks to the Labour inability to do anything unpopular for the long term good.

This is like saying that you Virgin Media 20MB is good enough for anything. Sure the pipe is big but if they don't have any good content then it's next to useless.

Overnight OK?

The only thing that surprised me was the claim the grid/power generation system can sustain unrestricted charging. Which is surely not an issue anyway as most people would choose to do most charging at 'white meter' charges (look how far people drive to say 2p/litre on petrol).

Overnight there is plenty of capacity - even with the projected loss of nuclear and some major coal fired plant. Indeed it can help the system by using otherwise unused power capacity (particulary nuclear and wind with almost zero marginal cost and CO2 impact). Electric car batteries provide a user paid solution to the grids perennial problem in not be able to store electricity.

BTW chacking the Nat Grid monitor - the channel link from France is nearly always 'full-on' supplying 2Gw to us from their nuclear/wind fleet. Presumably because they can make a better offer than local generators. I wonder if another 2Gw link might be better than the projected Kingsnorth coal power station blowing our CO2 target from the same Kent coast.

hmmm

1 GW / 3000000 cars = 333 Watts each.

Thats not enough to power my drill and is a about half a bhp.

Are we sure they are talking about cars? sounds more like the figures are for bicycles. how are those figures calculated??

David...

The whole POINT of leccy cars is that they're massively more efficient than those using ICEs. Overnight charging (the obvious approach for most cars, most days) will have bugger all effect on on generation needs, or may even make more efficient use of baseload power that's already being generated to do little more than keep office lights on all night. You could turn off HEP, wind, coal at night, but there would be little point and/or major problems if yo so did.

As for you, Steve, have you not heard about our government's brilliant ideas to tax you as you drive via road pricing?

Bull

They are already paniking about the Olympics coming to town and causing rolling blackouts. I personnally don't want to sit in teh dark so a bunch of people in leotards can leap about (more so if I can't see it on my telly and have a cuppa at the same time, whilst charging up my electric car and listening to an internat radio station and all this while I wait for my dinner to cook on the electric hob, whilst my boiler keeps me warm.)

More importantly where's the green? But there is hope...

None of you have yet pointed out the slight problem of (I quote the Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2008 report):

"In 2007, every 1 toe of secondary electricity consumed by final users required, on average, 1.0

toe of coal, 0.9 toe of natural gas, 0.4 toe of primary electricity (nuclear, natural flow hydro and

imports) and 0.2 toe of oil and renewables combined."

I am currently looking into this whole area for my PhD. My point is a lot more energy goes into providing electricity than electricity actually gets delivered. I don't yet know the maths involving just how much more energy efficient electric vehicles are, but I have understood that unless they are substantially more efficient, in theory we could end up burning MORE fossil fuels were road transport to go electric, not less.

However, there is yet hope - I've spotted a few papers on Vehicle-to-grid power (V2G) you might find worth looking into. There are a few researchers who believe that electric cars could balance an increase in renewable energy supplies by offsetting their intermittency (and tendency to over-produce electricity) by providing distributed managed storage (amongst other things). This could also offset the costs of infrastructure, or possible upgrades to local network capacities (allowing the faster charging you are interested in).

But still one resounding problem remains: implementation. Should we find ways to make charging universal - not mattering where you park your car, then all should be fair. Otherwise, people rich enough to afford houses with garages or at least driveways, could benefit from the virtue of selling power back to the grid, while those of us who for instance live in converted-to-flats town houses in unsavoury areas will be prevented from doing so. Truly, the more money you have, the more money you get. I have heard a few physicists musing the idea of inducive charging (hands free, plugs free).

Help please (Emily Parry) or any one.

Can anyone tell me what the "toe" is in Emily Parry's post above means? I see Emily's quoting the Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2008 report. And I assume it's not a typo as the rest of Emily's post reads just fine.

Thanks for taking the time to post.