Electric Conversion

[sprint95m]

Hydrogen is a non-starter, the government isn't going to fund a hydrogen infrastructure, while battery EVs are constantly improving and dropping in price.

Did the PM not commit to hydrogen just short ago?
The UK cannot rely on Russian natural gas forever and there is always the potential
for Russia to increase trade sanctions by turning off the supply......


Ian

[xvivalve]

If electric vehicles are the future, then personal transportation isn't.

Battery production relies on fairly difficult to acquire materials which exist in relatively small quantities.

To fully charge a single vehicle on a 100 amp domestic supply can take 8.5 hours, if the wife and children have cars too, then not all will be able to be charged overnight.

The existing electrical infrastructure is already on its last legs and demand is outstripping the available supply; additional loading will start causing cable faults. A client of mine is currently having to install a 3 phase supply to accommodate an air source heat pump and two EV charging points; it won't take many to demand such supplies before existing sub-stations are at capacity, a lot already are!.

Where I live, most folk have to park on the street due to no off street parking; around 6 pm most evenings, you'll see folk trawling the streets looking for somewhere to park as the number of cars to most houses require more space than the frontage width of the houses; imagine doing this AND looking for a charging point. Who will pay for and install the on street charging infrastructure for areas like this?

[cliftyhanger]

If electric vehicles are the future, then personal transportation isn't.

I have a strong suspicion this may be the case. I think we will see a change to electric driverless taxis roaming the streets, with private ownership plummeting. Not immediately, but in the coming years.

My daughters are mid 20's now ( ) and yes, both own little puddlejumper cars, the daughter who was an ace rally navigator has little interest in driving, seeing it as a necessity. No2 daughter who expressed little interest in cars until she was 16, and since has developed a love of fast cars and trackdays.

But most of their friends have little interest in driving, many don't own or express any interest in owning a car, happy to use a bus or taxi. And I can understand why. People are pushed into buying new cars via lease etc, and the costs don't make sense. Probably £50 a week before putting fuel in it.

But this is not going to happen overnight, or the next decade. But it will start to gain momentum. Just as te horse and cart looked to be here forever at the beginning of the 20th century, and suddenly in a short space of time were replaced by cars. 100 or so years on, it may well happen again.

[sprint95m]

Who will pay for and install the on street charging infrastructure for areas like this?

You are not alone in wondering this.
To me a possibility is that car parks will be kitted out with charging points,
so when you are doing your shopping you could pay for a battery charge at your local supermarket.
People want convenience.


Ian

[tinweevil]

Since the QI klaxon has gone off twice over rare earth metals I'll leave these here:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/ar ... ually-rare
https://massivesci.com/articles/rare-ea ... -that-rare
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstal ... rent-rare/

Hint: They aren't. Not at all. Not even slightly. There are economic issues with them not least that the Chinese have, by a combination of government subsidy, zero health & safety and zero environmental protection, driven all other producers out of business. But they are not rare.

[tinweevil]

240V at 100A for 8.5 hours = 204kWh. That is:
2 x Tesla S 100D (300+ miles range)
5.5 x VW e-golf (144 mile range)
3.8 x MG5 (214 miles)
3.2 x Leaf E+ (239 miles)

However, none of these can be charged off 240V at 100A, the connectors simply don't exist.
Nissan quote 11.5 hours is the best you can do off 240V zero to 100%

I'm not saying you have to like them but please try to keep your objections based on facts rather than recycled myth.

[Carledo]

240V at 100A for 8.5 hours = 204kWh. That is:
2 x Tesla S 100D (300+ miles range)
5.5 x VW e-golf (144 mile range)
3.8 x MG5 (214 miles)
3.2 x Leaf E+ (239 miles)

However, none of these can be charged off 240V at 100A, the connectors simply don't exist.
Nissan quote 11.5 hours is the best you can do off 240V zero to 100%

I'm not saying you have to like them but please try to keep your objections based on facts rather than recycled myth.

I don't know what the electricity board rates the cable INTO the average house domestic meter at, once out the other side, only a cooker will run as much as 30A. It seems unlikely to me that anyone has the facilities in a domestic house to supply 100A, let alone traipse a 100A charging cable across a public footpath. 30A @240v AC will make you jump a bit and kill a pacemaker, I should think 100A would be lethal, H+S would have a field day!

I'm also interested in this 204kwh figure, thats enough to run my 5 adult occupied, not very environmentally friendly house, for almost a fortnight! That's NOT cheap motoring!

Steve

[geeksteve]

The existing electrical infrastructure is already on its last legs and demand is outstripping the available supply; additional loading will start causing cable faults.

The National Grid seem to disagree:

Even if the impossible happened and we all switched to EVs overnight, we think demand would only increase by around 10 per cent. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.

Perhaps individual incomers in peoples houses may need upgrading - but that's something that could easily be checked in advance.

Sources:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/jo ... ctric-cars
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/jo ... les-busted

[Tony Burd]

I read somewhere you will treat your electric car the same as your SmartPhone, you plug it in at every opportunity, you don't need it to be fully charged all the time.
My next company car will be a Tesla Model 3 Long Range (the current tax benefits make it a no brainer) I do about 15K miles a year. Longer journeys will need planning & if I need to charge it may add 30 mins to the journey time but for me the savings will be worth it.
I can get my petrol head fix at the weekends from my classics

[tinweevil]

100A is the standard supply into a home. 16A is the largest common used single phase plug & socket.

Cheap motoring: I pay 16p / kWh on a bog standard tariff so that 204 kWh would cost me £32.64. Using the tesla as it has the worst power to range ratio of the examples above you get 600 miles at 5.44 pence per mile. That's about a third of the cost of doing 600 miles in my BMW that returns 42mpg.

Yes you'll increase your electricity consumption hugely but compared to what you'll be saving on fuel does it still look expensive?

[Carledo]

Since the QI klaxon has gone off twice over rare earth metals I'll leave these here:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/ar ... ually-rare
https://massivesci.com/articles/rare-ea ... -that-rare
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstal ... rent-rare/

Hint: They aren't. Not at all. Not even slightly. There are economic issues with them not least that the Chinese have, by a combination of government subsidy, zero health & safety and zero environmental protection, driven all other producers out of business. But they are not rare.

OK they aren't rare, just difficult and prohibitively expensive to acquire in an environmentally friendly fashion. Eventually the Chinese will push their luck too far and their monopoly will be broken, the US are already investigating it, as are Japan and others who don't like relying on the capricious nature of the oriental giant (and I don't blame them)

HOWEVER, when the US and others do get their mining act in order, it will have to be done "right" and the cost will be passed to the consumer (with interest, as always) To my way of thinking, "rare" = "expensive", the elements may not be rare in and of themselves, but if getting them into a usable form is difficult, ecologically unsound and expensive, they might as well be rare! All the stuff from mobile phones to wind turbines that rely on these elements will get much more expensive once they are mined and processed in an environmentally friendly way (if that's actually possible) I can see it making a set of car batteries (quite low on the demand scale surprisingly) go from painfully expensive, as they are now, to too expensive for anyone to countenance in the future.

There has to be a better way! Short of the semi-mythical rabbit hole of cold fusion, Hydrogen fuel cell seems to be it, at our current level of knowledge.

Steve

[Tony Burd]

100A is the standard supply into a home. 16A is the largest common used single phase plug & socket.

Cheap motoring: I pay 16p / kWh on a bog standard tariff so that 204 kWh would cost me £32.64. Using the tesla as it has the worst power to range ratio of the examples above you get 600 miles at 5.44 pence per mile. That's about a third of the cost of doing 600 miles in my BMW that returns 42mpg.

Yes you'll increase your electricity consumption hugely but compared to what you'll be saving on fuel does it still look expensive?

Off peak deals around at the moment 4.5p per kWh, just over 1p/mile

[cliftyhanger]

I don't know what the electricity board rates the cable INTO the average house domestic meter at, once out the other side, only a cooker will run as much as 30A. It seems unlikely to me that anyone has the facilities in a domestic house to supply 100A, let alone traipse a 100A charging cable across a public footpath. 30A @240v AC will make you jump a bit and kill a pacemaker, I should think 100A would be lethal, H+S would have a field day!



Steve

Most houses have 100A supply, but there are plenty rated at 63A and 80A, though the fitters are happy to change a 63 to 100A fuse if they are there.

30mA is the current where very bad stuff starts happening to the human body, hence the std RCDs used are 30mA, to prevent serious harm most of the time.

30A flowing through the human body would be VERY bad.

[Bumpa]

There has to be a better way! Short of the semi-mythical rabbit hole of cold fusion, Hydrogen fuel cell seems to be it, at our current level of knowledge.

Steve

I've just spent a few days in Aberdeen and I saw a brand new double-decker bus running on a Hydrogen fuel cell. Interestingly there was no obvious difference in the appearance of the bus compared with regular buses, except for the large "Powered by Hydrogen" written on its flanks. Read about it here
https://news.aberdeencity.gov.uk/the-wo ... -aberdeen/

The single deck hydrogen buses the city has had for several years have a taller roof, which is obviously where the hydrogen cylinders are stored. You can't make a double-decker any taller so where the H2 store was is hard to say. If only hydrogen could be made and distributed like petrol is. Then I reckon the fuel cell car would be a real winner.

[xvivalve]

The 100 amp domestic supply I was quoting was not intended to be the charging rate, else your fridge freezer would defrost whilst your car used all the capacity!!! I cited a "100 amp domestic supply" simply to highlight what most folk have going into their homes; for diversity's sake, we usually calculate a max demand of 80 amp to be accommodated by the 100 amp supply. Because my current client is exceeding the 80 amp total demand, he has been forced to go to the expense of a 3 phase supply.

When commissioning new buildings, electricity capacity from the existing substations is invariably a problem, and has been so over my 35 year career to date, irrespective of what National Grid may claim when you aren't actually asking for the supply to be provided.