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Bring the people 'beautiful' electric car charging points, calls former transport minister

Peter2 Silver badge

Seperate issues there.

Does the local grid have enough capacity? No. Not even close if people want to carry on as normal. If your drawing 13 amps out of a socket for charging an EV without putting in a seperate supply then there are only 17 amps remaining in the ringmain until the ring main breaker trips. In other words, cook a meal in the microwave and put a kettle on to make a brew, and a breaker is likely to pop.

You can solve that by running a dedicated supply to the EV, but most older homes only had 60 amp supplies installed in total. That's not a happy combination. Upgrading to a 100/200 amp supply won't be cheap or easy.

Think about the amount of work involved there, digging up the entire road, everybodies driveway and then having a sparky install the new supply inside the house. Consider the new smart meter rollout, this is a gargantuan task in comparison to that and smart meters are something like a 1.3 million deployed, which is what, 2% of meters?

Points by the side of the road next to lapposts would seem rather more acheivable, but it's still a massive infrastructure task.

And if we ignore that and assume that we could install a new supply where needed this afternoon and gift everybody a new EV, then with thanks to Ledswinger for a more accurate estimate than my own back of the envelope calculation:-

EVs typically get about 3.5 miles per kWh, depending on size, efficiency, ancillary load, driving style. So at 244m miles annually, that would be a total energy use of 70 billion kWh (excuse my non-SI approach to the units). In turn that's 191 million kWh per day, and over an assumed seven hour charging period we're talking an EV charging load (before network, and charging losses that total around 15%, maybe more) of over 27 million kW, or 27 GW.

https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/4/2017/11/30/what_will_drive_our_cars_when_the_combustion_engine_dies/#c_3362810

For context, we can generate 45GW minus unreliable sources of power such as imports and sources such as solar and wind, or 55GW including these at the 100% capacity they've never delivered. Adding an additional 27GW to the grid while similtaniously closing 10GW worth of coal plants and the older nuclear plants appears to represent a significant technical challange in 15 years, given that it took seven years to start construction of hinkley point C after it was approved.

But of course, by all means let's come up with a nice design for charging points and argue over what we call them. Important things first, of course. We can ignore the minor details like the obvious need to increase generating capacity by a factor of 50% as insignificant and unworthy of consideration by our glorious elected officals.

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