Car EV charging point advice

[securespark]

Several EV manufacturers are offering free charging points.

 

[EFLImpudence]

I wonder why?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Out of curiosity which EV did you go for? I've been thinking about this for a while.

 

[ericmark]

One guy across the road got a long wheel base Renault Kango van for his milk round, his round is 68 miles the range on the van is 100 miles so reasonable leeway, he does not use the heater, and has found some advantages in that it is so quiet the kids don't hear him so less milk stolen off the van. Summer no problems, winter he has needed to be recovered a few times, if the batteries are near depleted it goes slow, and Police have stopped him crawling up the local duel carriage way hill on his last leg home for not making normal progress.

It seems he has bought the van, but not the batteries, these he rents and are changed with no extra charge to him when faulty. He says it saves him a lot of money, simple fact is he pays not duty on his fuel, but he has to use it every day he can, and have a petrol pick-up ready in case the electric is not re-charged.

He feels it is the re-charge time which is the problem getting the 100 miles, if something goes wrong and his return is delayed, then it is not charged for long enough.

My son likes the idea of an electric car as fuel to and from work would be free, work has charging points and there is no charge to use them, however it is the having a second car which messes up the idea. Seems charge times are 6, 9 or 12 hours depending on charger but he says from fully discharged hot after just been driving it takes longer.

Also the price excludes mandatory battery hire from £33 per month, based on based on 6000 miles per annum, Excess mileage is charged (inc VAT.) 6.25p. You will not own the battery. As a business it is working out for him, but not as good as the sales data said it should have.

 

[davelx]

I've test driven one of those, and a friend of mine has bought one. They are rather good! They can be fully charged from a standard 32A/1P industrial socket overnight with the cable supplied as standard.

I shall be keeping my Ampera for a few more years, then probably go for the new Tesla Model 3 which is due out later this year.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I was thinking about the road where I live.

30-odd houses, some houses have more than 1 car, some have none - if we take the 3 with me in the middle, between us that's 6 cars and a van.

I've never counted them up, but I'd be amazed if the total was under 40.

So, roughly 40-50 vehicles?

If we all went out tomorrow and bought electric ones, who here thinks that the LV network would have the capacity to charge all of them up overnight?

What if everybody in a 5 mile radius did it?

Consider your average budget to mid price hotel - Travelodge/Premier Inn/Holiday Inn/etc, with a low-hundreds number of cars in the car park. And they all want to recharge overnight. Hotel supply going to cope, is it?

What about the electrical equivalent of this? How easy would it be to supply?

There are over 25m cars on the roads in the UK, of which less than 100,000 are electric. If even 1 in 10 drivers went out and bought an electric one tomorrow, and 100,000 became 2.5M, what would happen? Where would they charge during journeys in the day? How would they charge overnight?

The average throughput of a filling station in the UK is 5.09M litres pa, nearly 14,000l/day. Petrol and diesel are different fuels, but if that were all petrol, and if there were no peaks and troughs, and if they are all open 24x7, that makes the average filling station a 5.5MW load. Of course it isn't all petrol - diesel is more energy dense, and there certainly are peaks and troughs, so a 5.5MW capacity wouldn't hack it. Nowhere near. Even allowing for the much better efficiency at point of use, converting that much energy consumption from hydrocarbon to electric would be "challenging".

Road transport uses 45 million litres of petrol and a little over 77 million litres of diesel per day. No - I don't know how much is cars and how much haulage, buses etc, but that is over 1.2 TWh per day. What's our total generating capacity?




Sorry, folks, electric cars are a pipe dream. As long as the take-up is minuscule everything is fine, but if we all, or even a significant minority, buy into the idea that they are the future then the future becomes a destroyed electricity network and cars that sit immobile.

 

[davelx]

I



Sorry, folks, electric cars are a pipe dream. As long as the take-up is minuscule everything is fine, but if we all, or even a significant minority, buy into the idea that they are the future then the future becomes a destroyed electricity network and cars that sit immobile.

Yes, I believe you are correct in the medium-long term, as no-one seems to be looking at the impact on the electricity supply network. Hydrogen seems to be the way to go - much better energy/weight ratio for a start, but it's a chicken and egg problem with petrol stations not wanting to invest in putting it in until there is enough demand - which there won't be until the stations put it in! Sounds like it needs government intervention.

 

[bernardgreen]

as no-one seems to be looking at the impact on the electricity supply network

Milton Keynes Council who have a lot of charging points around their area have seen the problems that fast re-charging of vehicles will create for the supply network.

 

[John D v2.0]

I think if 1 in 10 people went out and bought an electric car the lead times would become so long there would be plenty of time to roll out new power networks before they were all delivered.
If the network isn't coping with the load, the suppliers will upgrade it, but it won't Galen overnight.

 

[EFLImpudence]

Do you think that is how power companies work?

 

[securespark]

I think if 1 in 10 people went out and bought an electric car the lead times...

Groan...

 

[ericmark]

Why do you think they want smart meters, it's so they can turn off the meters to high power users.

Now Smart White meters that would be different, if every house had a essential and non essential supply at different rates then yes being able to turn off non essential supplies when there was a peak demand would make some sense.

However what is not essential as far as auto switch off, if my washing machine is switched off, it does not start again where it left off, but starts from scratch and needs more soap. And if I need to go to work in the morning walking out to find car has not charged would not really be an option.

It's like the bio-fuel, I went to an IET lecturer on Diesel under the wire, where they talked about the problems with this countries electric trains, it seems it was done on the cheap and not as reliable as needed, the answer is to use Diesel engines when the electric fails. The question was raised why not use bio-fuel, the lecturer said he expected that question so had looked into it. And it seems to run the Diesel engines we have today on the UK rail network would need an area 10 times the size of the UK to grow the crops to make bio-diesel.

Trains are the answer unlike road transport there is no need for batteries, be it a trolley bus, tram or train not having to lug heavy batteries around means they have a huge advantage. However chicken and egg again, if when my car is ready for renewal there is a viable public transport system in place, like it was when I lived in Hong Kong, then I would consider not having a car, however as it stands I can't get any of the family to hospital without a car, it would not take much to change that, a simple shuttle bus from station to hospital, and hospital appointments which have a reasonable accurate time. Leaving hospital after the train has stopped running is not an option.

It is the same with work, catching a bus or train to work is great, but the firms have to change to suit, if there is a break down at 2 am then they need to send out a car, not expect you to use your own. If the bus gets into Chester at 8:55 am then the firm must adjust start time to allow you to walk from bus stop into work, expecting people to arrive an hour early in case the bus is late is not an option.

Some firms already do things to get workers to use public transport or even push bikes, but so many still have systems which penalise people for being just 3 minutes late. Very common 3 minuets late means 1/4 hour docked off pay. I used the train into Liverpool for one job, the return trains after 5:30 pm where reduced to one an hour, that was great, train left with ample time for me to get from work to station, however if they asked me to do overtime I clearly want it in increments of one hour, working for 15 minutes and as a result being an hour late home was no good for me.

So come knock off time I was gone, did not matter what went wrong, I was gone, this is where it all fails.

 

[SimonH2]

It's good to know that the grid is now getting more electricity from windfarms than from coal.
It's also (and today is a dull wintry day) currently getting more from Solar than from coal.

Which is absolutely completely irrelevant.
Just about all the time, all windmills and solar panels run "flat out" - ie whatever they are able to produce given the conditions is taken into the grid. Somebody else has to open and close the taps to make up for the variation in output - which is a hidden cost that renewables supporters never include in their claimed "cheap" electricity.
So what happens when you plug your car in to charge ? It takes power from the grid, the grid frequency will drop ever so slightly, and the generator that is currently running in variable output, frequency controlling mode will very slightly open the taps. This IS the case regardless of the output from windmills and solar panels - it only ceases to be true if load is so low, and renewables output so high, that ALL gas and coal stations are fully shut down. That isn't anywhere near at the moment - so you can rest assured that your "green" car is gas or coal powered.
To claim anything other than that is just greenwash (aka a bunch of lies) of the sort that the green lobby seem very keen on spewing out.

Hydrogen seems to be the way to go - much better energy/weight ratio for a start ...

Hydrogen is crap as a fuel - it has a very poor energy/weight ratio, take s lot of energy to get to a state where it can be put into your tank, and is not green in it's production.
Near enough all hydrogen for transport is stored as a gas under VERY high pressure. This means a very strong tank, which is both expensive and typically very heavy. I can't remember the figures now, but from a tank I went to many years ago, I think it was something along the lines of a tank weighing in the region of 50-100kg to store just ... 7kg of fuel So a heavy tank with naff all fuel in it - a composite tank might be lighter but is very complicated and expensive to make.
And hydrogen is so small that steel is porous to it - your tank will empty itself in a week.
And as the hydrogen diffuses through the steel, it affects it qualities - IIRC it makes it brittle, and so the tank has to be a lot stronger initially (and hence heavier) than it would be storing a different gas.
And lastly - where does the hydrogen come from ? There are two main methods of production - electrically disassociating water, and steam reforming of coal. The electrical method just creates hydrogen and oxygen - but needs massive amounts of electricity, and so cannot be green until we have so much nuclear and renewables that we are burning zero coal or gas which isn't gonig to be any time soon. Steam reforming of coal creates massive amounts of CO2 - but I believe it's the predominant method at the moments, so anyone running on hydrogen is running a coal powered car

Of all the alternative I know of, methanol looks the most sensible - sort-of non toxic as (unlike petrol and diesel) there is an antidote if you drink or aspire it, liquid at room temperature without pressurisation, miscible with petrol and ethanol in any ratio, and can be stored, transported, and dispensed with the same facilities as petrol. However it still needs a supply of hydrogen - so the same problem applies in that it's not green until we have an excess of "green" lecky.

 

[JohnD]

you can rest assured that your "green" car is gas or coal powered.

That would only be true if all electricity was generated from gas or coal, and there was no nuclear, hydro, wind or solar power.

But there is, and it isn't.

Hydro reacts very fast to fluctuations, even though its capacity is small.

 

[JohnD]

. I can't remember the figures now, but from a tank I went to many years ago, I think it was something along the lines of a tank weighing in the region of 50-100kg to store just ... 7kg of fuel So a heavy tank with naff all fuel in it - a composite tank might be lighter but is very complicated and expensive to make.
And hydrogen is so small that steel is porous to it - your tank will empty itself in a week.
And as the hydrogen diffuses through the steel, it affects it qualities - IIRC it makes it brittle, and so the tank has to be a lot stronger initially (and hence heavier) than it would be storing a different gas.

Or to put it in simpler terms

"It would be foolish to assume that hydrogen will be stored and carried in unlined steel containers."