News: 1605706162

We know that the power grid has been reported several times as not having a lot of headroom as a number of older less efficient power stations were turned off.

Moving the power generation from within the car / van / lorry to a power station means that they will need more power generation and huge amounts of it. This will take a very long time to plan and build, so I guess this is where the nuclear option comes in. It makes sense as its going to be a lot of base load. I thought those stations take 10-15 years to get approved and start build due to the safety and planning involved ?

Then there will need to be a way to get it from the stations to the consumers, so presumably some upgrades to the national grid to get the significantly higher amounts of power around, that will take time.

Then there is the little tiny problem of getting it from the substations to the cars on peoples drives and on street corners. I'm not just talking about one or two little charging nodes like we have today, but large numbers of them, which means complete streets will need connections and the connections will need to be uniform so that anyone can plug in any car, so that means standardisation across the industry - impacting existing electric cars.

How will this work with the crazy small plots that houses are crammed into - where will the kit go, how will it be safely maintained. Same issue for flats and car parks where the spaces are already too small.

How will it handle people with more than one car - many have 2 cars, some more (i.e. with the kids are growing up but still at home)

Then they have to get the distances up so that people can get from A to B in one go without having to take long charging breaks. This means full cars where people are moving things around, not just one person doing a daily commute - all the workloads need considering.

A whole set of new cars will need to exist that can use the new charging stations, so changes to what each manufacturer does today.

I fail to see how anyone with any basic understanding of the work involved could realistically say that this will be done in 9 years. Started within a decade, yes, but completed for everyone - not a chance.

Now add in the idea that all heating moves to electric and gas is not used any more - do the whole same thing again re power and stations

Rinse and repeat for motorbikes, scooters, lawn mowers, 2 stroke garden tools etc since without a set of cars consuming petrol and diesel, the chance of getting fuel for all the other engine types will decrease too.

So, what we are realistically being asked to accept as an idea is a complete move from the main power source for everything outside of the house to something that has struggled to take off over several decades and that this will magically happen at the same time as the aftermath from Brexit and at a point where the country is increasingly screwed due to COVID and many businesses are struggling or have already failed.

I wonder how those businesses will cope with replacing their entire fleet of vehicles - vans, HGV's etc with the supposed new models in the same time frame.

Its almost like we are trying to get to a point where its impossible to live with a reasonable lifestyle.

We also need to think about if we have a single charging network with one standard to make it flexible, what happens when we need to change it in 5 years time to some newer, faster charging method to fix say the issue of how long a vehicle takes to charge.

The yard stick is that we can re-charge our vehicles in about 3 minutes, so its going to be hard to tempt people away from that level of flexibility.

Nailed it.

I’ve been saying this for a couple of years ... the gov’s focus would be far better put making legislation that all new commercial roofs are solar if possible, and every new parking space in the country (whether residential, workplace, or public) needs infrastructure for power delivery.

Then, and only then, they can start considering the legislation of plug-in electric cars.

As someone who lives half way out in the sticks with regularish powercuts and a 60 mile round-trip commute to the office (praise COVID!), even I can see the problems. (And I’m fortunate to have a driveway to my house.)

For those with a 50 mile commute each way and no driveway at home... forget it.

All new builds should include solar collectors for hot water and possibly heating as well as PV

Incentives would be worthwhile to make it more acceptable.

Re the smoke in tge article: are there mirrors behind it?

And while you make me think about it - parking spaces. Anyone else fed up of all the new builds with 1 small parking space for mum, dad, and the two kids?

Parking space per bedroom, with power delivery infrastructure in place for all new builds.

If they’d legislated that back in 2017... I’d not be feeling so ranty right now...

Absolutely - Solar is a good option, but only works when its sunny. We live in England, which is well known for not being sunny. Right now, dark grey sky, rain and currently zero power coming from my 80W panel that's just trying to keep one 80AH lead acid battery topped up against a load that takes about 500mA - a Pi, an Arduino and some other fairly low power stuff.

I have to take the battery to my garage and swap it each week to a different one. In the summer, it works fine, but for 6 months of the year, its absolutely no good and thats even when I keep brushing off the leaves from the panel. Don't forget the things that can screw up solar even when there is sun - welded on leaves, green algae, etc. No solution is perfect or maintenance free.

Any replacement / set of replacement solutions need to work in all months of the year and in all environmental conditions (wind, rain, sun, snow, etc)

Another thing that comes to mind is population density.

Building out this infrastructure in sparsely populated areas (and there are a lot of them in the UK) is going to be far more expensive than it would be for a city. Interestingly, more and more people are moving away from cities but cities and rural areas alike have many challenges that seem to have escaped the politicians.

Where the city was laid out properly in a planned manner (Welwyn Garden City comes to mind) it may be possible to build out the base infrastructure (but that still leaves the detail of tiny parking areas as you note).

For older cities this will be a nightmare. I know many of those places quite well; Edinburgh would be really interesting, as would the older parts of London and as for Newcastle, let's not even go there.

Where I live (in the middle of a farm) the population density is really low, but being rural the need would be high for charging points at almost every dwelling and the cost of hooking that up to the (supposedly fully upgraded - yeah right) grid would be exorbitant.

When I say sparsely populated, it means that unlike in a fairly densely populated area, trying to use my postcode to find the house simply gives you a roughly 1 square mile zone of probability rather than to find the house number you need with all of them visible which can be interesting when we get new delivery drivers. Depending on which map service is used, my location comes up as either about 1/4 mile to the west or 1/2 mile to the east of the actual location.

I do not have gas to the house, but I do have an oil fired Rayburn (a type of Aga - it was here when I moved in as every installation of that type is bespoke); the fuel it uses is kerosene 28, and the primary users of kerosene are jet aircraft (which is good for me right now as total demand is way down and my oil is much cheaper). That also heats my hot water tank (there is an electrical heating element within it, but that is only turned on when we turn off the Rayburn and that has been for a grand total of 4 days over the last 2 years).

Trying to phase out that fuel would raise quite a ruckus (a lot of places in the southwest have this sort of arrangement as do many other places around the country).

The electric meter housing is not suitable for a smart meter (thankfully!). Would there be an incentive (discounts) on electricity to charge these vehicles? How would, or even could, that be implemented? (separate meters perhaps but I can see that being easy to subvert). If there are no incentives then will power theft suddenly go through the roof? Possibly.

So there are even more issues than you list (that is not a criticism in any way) and no easy answers.

I am taking all these announcements with a pretty large grain of salt right now as I cannot see how all this could be achieved in 20 years, let alone 9.

I fail to see how anyone with any basic understanding of the work involved could realistically say that this will be done in 9 years. Started within a decade, yes, but completed for everyone - not a chance.

It doesn't have to be done in 9 years. 2030 is when ICE vehicles will be no longer sold, not no longer driven. Over maybe the next 15-20 years(*) the number of ICE vehicles will diminish to near zero which means you only need charging support for 100% electric vehicles by 2045-50. That's 24+ years to get everything in place.

I wonder how those businesses will cope with replacing their entire fleet of vehicles - vans, HGV's etc with the supposed new models in the same time frame.

Same thing applies. Fleets will be replaced over a period of years(**), not instantaneously at 2030-01-01T00:00:00.

(*) From the SMMT: "The average age of a car at scrappage in 2015 reached 13.9 years, which is on a par with the 2014 performance."

(**) Average EU heavy commercial vehicle age is 12.3 years.

@Arthur the cat - Good info, thanks.

Still the same problem about the supporting infrastructure and making sure that those new cars / vans / busses / lorries that people do buy in those years are chargeable in all the places they want to go. Its the circular loop of not being able to sell them until the infrastructure is there vs not having the cash to implement until they are sold.

Without the infrastructure, we will probably get more blockages on roads where the cars have gone flat and turned into bricks, but unlike a petrol / diesel, unless someone comes up with a very long set of jumper leads or a boost pack, how will those vehicles be cleared ?. Will this be the new menace - congestion caused by dead cars

Given that there are large tracts of dense housing, urban and, in my case rural, where there is no off-street parking in the form of drives and on-street parking is bumper to bumper it's not a question time but of feasibility. The only solution would be to knock down the houses, rebuild at lower density and find somewhere else to build houses for those displaced. Unless there's a subsidy to do this existing houses in these areas will be blighted.

I lie. It's not the only solution. The other solution is to reorganise society so we are no longer dependent on the car. In another post I described housing near here. When they were built there was no problem with car parking - cars didn't exist but there workplaces within walking distance. However for decades planning policy has been to separate workplaces and housing. As we're in between several conurbations most of the residents in the houses I described will be employed in cities over 20 miles away for which there is no effective public transport service.

We have a problem which has been created over several decades by public policy. It is a complex problem of which carbon dioxide production by cars is no more than a symptom. No amount of hand-waving at the symptom is going to make it go away in 15 to 20 years or ever. It will need hard thinking and, like all problem solving, that depends on recognising what the actual problem is in the first place.

"cars on peoples drives and on street corners"

Cars on drives and street corners are the easy bit. Not far from here are several hundred metres of road with houses opening directly onto the footpath. There are cars parked there more or less bunper to bumper outside the owners' houses. For a good deal of that there are houses and therefore cars lining both sides of the road. And that doesn't even take into account the Pennine phenomenon of the stacked house - the house that opens onto the pavement may have another house underneath it accessed by a flight of steps at the end of the row, or, on the other side of the road, another house above it. How anybody expects all those to be replaced with electric cars all being charged I don't know.

I fail to see how anyone with any basic understanding of the work involved could realistically say that this will be done in 9 years.

I was assuming that's why they have a parallel plan to get people cycling and walking.

Mind you I might be be misunderestimating them. All their other delusional fantasies have tuned out just fine. Haven't they?

I was assuming that's why they have a parallel plan to get people cycling and walking.

I assume that was a bit of sarcasm :)

On the fairly rare occasions I actually go into the company offices, neither of those are really options for me. If you have ever driven on the A38 in south east Cornwall you would understand why to say nothing of navigating the Tamar over to Plymouth - I would have to use the Torpoint Ferry and the road to Torpoint is 'interesting'.

I am pretty sure that an electric vehicle would get far less mileage on that road than on the (benign) test track too.

Word-bleating.

Not sure that announcing yet another splurge on the national credit card is sufficient to move the agenda away from the enormous fuck up of his first year in office. Or that his second year will not be even worse.

We've all had office lunches like that.

I'm lucky enough to live in a house with half of the roof south facing.

Also fortunate in having a garden.

Would love solar panels & heat pump in garden .. but I cannot afford it *as large outlay and takes a long time for returns to work through, not viable when you live hand to mouth)

If government provided that for free (& similar for other people in same position) then would help with CO2 emissions a lot & reduce the strain on the grid

Lets address car use, I live in the sticks (hence luxury of a garden).

If there was free and frequent public transport (electric for CO2 saving) & a good public transport network I would not need my car

However instead there is very expensive, infrequent public transport & a dismal network, so I and many others are forced to have CO2 emitting cars, so *proper* public transport would be a huge green success.

I live in an area with rivers a plenty but none of them have any run of river generating plants (compare with Scotland where they are doing a great job of adding small power generators on rivers, getting green power and its relatively reliable) - obviously river flow varies, but unless ludicrous drought scenarios causing river dry up, always know what worst case minimum power generation will be, and also good flows in Winter where (in UK) lots of leccy demand as cold & dark a lot. So small river hydro deploys would be a good green move, especially in low population area as depending on the river flow and drop could supply anything from a few hundred to a few thousand homes with leccy

There are lots of small scale generation projects in England and Wales. Shareenergy has a range of projects which you can invest in, tax-free.

https://www.sharenergy.coop/

"What's more, the government is promising a homegrown industry to make batteries."

In fact they said some time ago that the UK would become a world leader. I suppose that's why Honda decided to move out of the UK to concentrate on producing EVs.

@Dr Syntax

But clearly not fully home grown battery industry, since the government barred the sale of acid to people as some idiots thought it was a good idea to throw it at other people.

not fully home grown battery industry, since the government barred the sale of acid

You are aware that Li-ion batteries have an entirely different chemistry to Lead acid ones?

A very quick calculation of the extra electrical power needed.

Income from Fuel Duty was £28.4B in 2018-9 (source OBR). Road fuel is taxed at 57.5p/l so neglecting heating oil and red diesel that gives a total annual usage of 50e9 litres.

Averaging the energy density of petrol and diesel at 35MJ/l, assuming an IC engine efficiency of 30% and an electric engine efficiency of 80% (including distribution and charge/discharge losses) gives a total annual energy requirement of 6.5e17J, or 21GW. That's around six Sizewell-B - sized stations.

Its hard to know how much extra energy we do need for car electrification.

On one hand we have statements that we already have enough because car charging is most likely to occur at low demand hours.

On the other, we have people saying we just need all that extra offshore wind and we will be fine.

Then we have yet more saying we need 16 x 440MW mini nuke plants.

There is of course just simple other increases in electrical consumption to factor in - organic growth, extra houses etc. Then there is how all new houses shortly aren't allowed to use fossil fuelled heating at all (gas, coal or oil) - which means electrical heating somehow (heat pumps or simple electric heaters).

Combining both transport and domestic heating, we shortly need three times the electrical power available today.

THREE TIMES

And all of our current nuclear plants are EOL by 2030.

Probably should have started this sooner. Much sooner.

Still at least the smart meters can finally be used for what they were deployed for - rolling blackouts to ration electricity to domestic buildings. Your electricity today is from 1400-1600hrs, use it wisely.

The National Grid [1]disagrees with you .

TL;DR: "Enough capacity exists"

[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-myths-about-electric-vehicles-busted

"end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030"

FFS can journos actually bloody read the press releases properly.

Hybrids are still allowed after 2030.

2035 is the cut off date.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-takes-historic-step-towards-net-zero-with-end-of-sale-of-new-petrol-and-diesel-cars-by-2030

I’m a huge fan of electric vehicles, I’ve owned and driven them for years and can’t imagine ever owning another IC powered vehicle as anything other than a weekend plaything ever again.

That said:

This is a Boris announcement, and with that in mind I’m not expecting to see hordes of happy people driving their EVs over the garden bridge to Boris Island airport any time soon...

You live in a property where installation of a charging point is feasible, right? Millions of car users don't.

People who live in cities (including me) are an obvious market for electric cars. Short journeys and stop start traffic (and congestion charging) play to an electric car's strengths.

However, like most people who live in cities (at least European ones), I have to park my car on the street. And not 'on the street outside', but more 'on the street, somewhere near' my house. Even if I could regularly park right outside where I live, I'd have to somehow run a charging cable across the pavement to reach my car.

So, the only solution for cities is to have some kind public charging infrastructure, but what would that look like? I've heard suggestions that charging points be added to street lights, which is fine on the face of it, but on my road there's about ten cars for every street light, and probably double that further up the road.

So you'd need to add more charging stations, and to get past the aforementioned 'charging cables across the pavement' problem, they'd have to be by the kerb. However, not all cars are the same size, so depending on who'd parked where, you might have to stretch a cable quite a way to reach your car, and if you're unlucky, the charging post will block one of your doors.

Honestly, I've no idea what the solution is. I guess it will have to involve a (gradual) shift in attitudes towards car ownership, with less people owning their own cars. I could live without mine, but I've owned a car for more than half my life now, and I don't want to have to deal with the loss of the feeling of freedom that it gives me.

"I don't want to have to deal with the loss of the feeling of freedom that it gives me."

I don't think TPTB have ever been happy with us having the degree of freedom that the car brought. They probably had the same attitude to the bicycle.

Indeed - remember the old quote (can't remember where from), the history of the motor car in one sentence?

"The French invented it, the Germans developed it, the British tried to ban it."

I've heard suggestions that charging points be added to street lights, which is fine on the face of it, but on my road there's about ten cars for every street light, and probably double that further up the road.

You can have two chargers per lamppost and you don't need a 1:1 chargers to cars ratio. The average car trip in a city(*) is less than 5 miles, battery ranges are 200-300 miles. Even with 4 trips a day you'd only need to charge your vehicle once a week. That's ignoring chargers in office car parks, retail parks, etc. Go for your Ikea meat balls, charge your car while eating them.

So you'd need to add more charging stations, and to get past the aforementioned 'charging cables across the pavement' problem, they'd have to be by the kerb.

There's a bloke literally round the corner from me who runs a lead from his house across the pavement to his car. He uses a cable protector over the pavement for safety. The unevenness due to tree roots and repeated utility company excavations is more of a problem.

(*) Note: average in city . I'm not talking about Lands End to John O'Groats before anyone starts banging that drum.

"You can have two chargers per lamppost"

Doesn't cut it when the ratio is much higher. Even if you only need to charge it every few nights you're going to need cooperative neighbours and a rota to get a chance when you need it.

It's not a typo, Boris disabled auto-correct when he became a politician.

Well, I guess we're all totally buggered, aren't we? Best pack up now and invest in a nice cave before all the nice ones get bought up by the 1%. After all, if we don't get serious about what we're doing to the planet living in caves again will be the least of our worries, but it never hurts to be early into a future market.

OTOH, despite having to cope with political disaster zones of incompetence, arrogance and greed - so what's new, read your history and discover that it ever was thus - there is the faint possibility that with hard work, good will, a bit of luck and quite a lot of sacrifice and 'learning to do things differently' we may actually pull through in some semblance of heroic good order. No guarantees though - driving any kind of car may not be a long term prospect, but then other ways of life are possible. Even better ways than what we think of as 'normal'. Then again ... now where did I see that rather excellent cave the other day?

I park my car between 20m and 300m from my house.

The lamp posts are only on street corners.

My work is 13 miles (actually 35 at the moment to to covid relocation) over very hilly terrain, which I've seen even the fittest people struggle to achieve a little over walking spread.

I work anti social hours.

There is no train line.

There are no buses.

This is a common situation for a few thousand that work in the same village... and the next village, and the next village.

Answers on a postcard.