Re: Fag packet calculation time...
"...where someone did the figures of what it would take if everyone moved to Electric vehicles by 2040..."
Someone did the calculation but got it totally wrong?
Average UK Mileage = 7,900 miles per year.
Assume by 2040 that an electric car can do 300miles per charge. So a vehicle only needs a full charge on average for a total of 26 days in the year - That's once every two weeks.
Each car needing to charge once every two weeks at night when electric usage is low (much lower than the late afternoon, early evening in winter.
Therefore with an intelligent charging system that could time the charging based upon current demand you could probably get away with charging most electric vehicles with very little extra network capacity.
Add in a mass storage system to pick up the excess from wind and solar in their peak times, as well as some more interconnects and it would be about there.
Consider somewhere like Thailand and other hot developing countries which saw a mass increase in Air Con units (sometimes multiple per house, or in each room in even lower end hotels) and how their creaking infrastructure was still able to cope.
The UK does not utilise air conditioning to any great extent and the power requirements of an EV would be less and more manageable than if the UK regularly saw heat waves for months in the summer and switched to having air con units as standard.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
