or best not, there's no way it's in any shape to deal with the entire nation switching to electric vehicles.

This statement, although parroted extensively, is false. Evs are charged at night. There is plenty of electrical bandwidth for trickle charging.

Norway already sell 90% EV, so if there is an issue, they will see it first.

Norway grid != UK grid... Norway has mostly hydroelectric power, the UK has a mixture of natural gas, coal (yes, still) nuclear, wind, and a smattering of others. (Our hydroelectric capabilities are mainly aimed at balancing out temporary blips in the mis-match between generation and consumption.)

I am fully in favour of us going to EVs in the UK, but that *will* result in higher domestic power bills, because we will be increasing the amount of natural gas (and possibly coal) that we burn, and that is likely to push up wholesale gas prices. II'd suggest this will result in "normal" electric tariffs having peak and off-peak prices, rather than that being limited to specific tariffs (octopus flux, economy 7 (does that still exist?) etc.)

coal (yes, still)

PSA: Just one, Ratcliffe-on-Soar. 2GW, due to close in September (at the moment).

Norway's population is 1/10th that of the UK, has a well-funded grid and government services, and is mostly powered by hydro.

To say that the situation is very different in the UK is understating it massively.

In other news, OVO just changed my "storage heating" price to actually be more than my "off-peak" price, because they presumably literally don't want me to use my storage heating overnight. I don't anyway, but it's the first time I've ever seen a storage heating price go above standard off-peak pricing.

It would, hence, literally be cheaper for me to plug my storage heating into my normal circuits, or run an electric fire, than use it for its intended purpose - part of which is from the original 70's design of struggling to cope with peak demand on the UK electrical network and pushing people to do energy-heavy things overnight.

If they are discouraging that, why you think that several million cars (and an order of magnitude more population) switching to electric cars in the UK won't have a detrimental effect, I can't fathom. Hell, in 2022/2023 we literally had warnings that the grid may have to move to a rolling-blackout system if the load grew much more in a cold winter.

Whole grid capacity is 80gw/hour. Current use right now is 40.35gw/hour. Overnight (from 11pm to 6am) looks like it's about 28gw/hour. So there's 7 hours worth of 12gw available (to make night match day). That's 12 million hours (or 300 million miles) worth of home charging available every night. Not everyone will need to charge every night, and there's already tech out there that balances when people charge. If there was enough generation to run flat out then your overnight capacity jumps up to 52gw/hour, which is 1300 million miles of charging capacity.

That's based on current numbers, not what it's going to look like in 11 years. According to https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/summary we need about 700 million miles of capacity per day to cover every car out there.

If everyone can cook a Turkey on Christmas Day at the same time, they can charge a car.

An oven is rather less than a car.

A fan oven element is 1500W and it is on for about 50% of the 4 hours it takes to cook a turkey. That's 3kWh.

A car is 60-100kWh.

More faulty math…. 110kW is a full charge…. So 400 miles or so?

Which is how much average person drives in a month

So… worst case 4kWh a day?

In the chargers at work;

- It's charged during the day

- It's paid for by the user (we used to have 2 free chargers but we have 6 paid for chargers now). We also put in points for whole car park but we do need to upgrade the local substation on the business park.

- The users generally keep the car connected for most of the day. There is a WhatsApp group so people know when points are free. We have ~400 cars on site although most are currently petrol/diesel or hybrids.

No matter how you frame it, my electricity bill is up by 20%, so I am only using a little more power a day than before.

If I need to plug in the car all the time if it only charges when power is available, that’s fine…. But I can’t see a point where EVs will cause a problem on the grid in terms of consumer power draw. Peak power draw has always been at meal time.

If my car is totally flat (which, obviously, it'd never be) then it'd need 51kWh. I normally charge at about 50% so 25kWh at -say- the 2.5kW that the "granny" charger can supply would need ca. 10 hours. Off a 7kW wall box, make that ca. 3.5 hours. I'd add a few hours longer at a couple of hundred watts every month or so, to balance the batteries.

I don't know if your ovens are particularly crap over there, but American ovens are 5000W, and yes, that's at 240V, we have that here for high power appliances.

Nobody is running a car battery to zero and charging it to full every day, a typical day is maybe 5-20 kWh depending on weather and how much you drive.

Well, the sort of fan oven that I cook my turkey in has various elements. The one around the fan is 1400W, and the grill has 1x 1400W + 1x 800W. But in normal "fan oven" mode, it uses only the one around the fan, and to stay at 170C, it's less than 50% duty cycle at steady-state.

I expect that your 5kW "American Oven" only uses that much if cooking in several compartments at once, and even then, not for a high duty cycle

I cook with gas. Just saying.

Heat with oil. Much cheaper.

Heat with oil. Much cheaper.

Warm up with arson. Free for the lifetime of the building.

Well, it's not really a valid comparison. Norway has a touch under 5.5 million inhabitants, of which 83% live in urban areas mostly situated in the south of the country. They are a quite rich nation, so their infrastructure is generally more modern, and the majority of their power is generated from hydro electricity,

They have a mostly electricity based power system with some district heating, with a high capacity grid that has been modernised regularly to cope with the fact that most of the generation is done away from the centres of population.

They are in a much better place than the UK to allow for the switch to EVs, and a smaller overall number of vehicles overall to replace. And they have a taxation break system that means that even Tesla can compete with ICE cars on a financial basis.

I'm interested in seeing whether there are many electric snowmobiles, or whether these are remaining petrol powered. I'm also interested in whether electric chain saws are as prevalent as EVs.

SNP solution, if Scotland got independence it would of course instantly become Norway.

But that would also mean England would get independence and so logically also become Norway.

Then the only problem is how to charge Wales

Wow - electric whales now as well as electric cars!

"Evs are charged at night."

If that were universally, or even significantly, true, then the entire thrust of this article - namely the need to do something re public charging provisions - would seem to be rather pointless, no? I mean, if most/all EVs really are being trickle charged overnight (which implies home or perhaps workplace charging for those doing shift work at an EV-friendly employer), then why would there be anywhere near as much of a need to provide other means of charging them? As EV proponents also like to point out, the number of people who actually need to be able to drive hundreds of miles a day is so small as to be irrelevant as an argument against EVs in general - on a case by case basis, SOME drivers might genuinely be hindered by the present maximum range available in an EV, and would therefore need to be able to recharge, preferably ASAP, whilst away from the home, but if EV proponents are correct then there aren't nearly enough people like that to justify the need for so much additional charging infrastructure.

And yet, here we are, with an article stating quite clearly that there IS a lack of charging infrastructure, and that something DOES need to be done about it in order to facilitate the growing demand from EV users. Which is entirely at odds with your claim that EVs are trickle charged overnight. You're correct in implying that many of them ARE charged like this, but it's not valid to go from there to a position of "there's not going to be a problem with the grid", because we're not talking about merely having more EVs trickle charging overnight, we're talking about having more of them fast-charging whilst en route from A to B...

What about the white vans? Currently diesel, there'll be a clamour to change these to electric; how will those be trickle charged overnight?

Lorries? How will they do an 8 hour driving shift with electric charging?

And how will you charge all the cars parked in the street? Lots of cables to trip over.

Electric vans already exist, and trucks will do battery swaps at service depots.

This is actually one of the most short sighted, blinkered statements I've ever read. Very much along the lines of 'your doing it wrong', 'you didn't plan your journey' or 'every EV owner charges overnight on a home charger'. No they don't, and they never all will. The current infrastructure is woeful, and an installed charger does not mean a) it's actually connected to the grid, b) it's actually working or c) can provide anywhere near the charge it's capable of. A 250kW feed to 10 chargers, if they're all in use, means a max of 25kW per charging point, which is pretty slow (2 hours for a decent amount of electrons), which is unacceptable to almost everyone if they have to use the cripplingly expensive public charger network, and you will have literal riots because of it.

Now just imagine that 10-20m EV's plugin overnight on a 'trickle charge' as you say, which is highly likely to be 7kW or the max on a single phase supply for at least 4-6 hours. That overnight quiet period that the Grid normally relies on is now extremely busy, and I won't even mention the problems we'll have with over-demand and rolling blackouts.

Finally, in Norway, a large percentage of cars sold are EV's because the government there massively (and I means MASSIVELY) subsidizes every single EV sale, technically making them cheaper than ICE cars to buy. Take that away, and it would be a different story - the same as most regions that subsidies them. Case in point - Germany. They've just stopped all EV subsidies, and EV sales have crashed.

No - most are charged during the day.

Most terraced homes can trickle charge overnight by running a trip-hazard cable over the payment onto the street. I've seen that near me.

I'm personally on a shared drive so we'll take turns on who blocks the other in...

The grid can cope. How do i know? The National Grid say so: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars

for those like me, who are too hard of click:

"Do the electricity grid's wires have enough capacity for charging EVs?

The simple answer is yes. The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.

Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.

Nevertheless, at National Grid we’re working with the distribution networks, government, the regulator and industry to provide the green energy infrastructure around Britain – the wires, the connections to charge points – to support the needs of a decarbonised transport network into the future.

We’re constantly evolving and upgrading the grid to make sure our electricity networks are better equipped to carry more clean energy, in order to prepare for an increase in EVs and other aspects of the clean energy transition."

The national grid wires might cope but the local distribution is not under their control.

It has taken over 4 years to get the chargers on the southbound side of fleet services hooked up.

The IET say the grid needs major upgrades to cope with EV charging.

At the local level the grid is massively overstretched due to lots of building and not much planning ahead.

Yep! I 2 R strikes again!

230V cables just weren't designed to carry tens never mind hundreds of kilowatts!

I'd live to see the IET pull their finger out and raise the threshold for domestic voltages, i.e. a 1000VAC standard specifically for EV chargers would be nice, but as it stands we have nothing between 400V and 11kV

I have passed a law declaring my petrol car zero emissions.

Yes. Mine is 96% emission free.

It is generally used for only 1 hour a day and less at weekends. So with only 1 hour in 24 having "emissions" I feel quite green!

Have you thought of declaring those emissions to happen abroad and so being entirely carbon free in the UK?

I anticipate the UK's definition of "zero emissions" being watered down somewhat as the date draws closer.

Maybe I could just pay a 3rd-party to supposedly plant a few trees on my behalf for every journey I make? I understand that this works just fine for "Carbon neutral".

If you read today's Private Eye you'll find that the National Audit Office report (on whether Biomass is carbon neutral or not, whether CCS can work at all, and whether BECCS really is "negative emissions") is overdue, while Drax is fervently lobbying everyone in government to continue its subsidies that it collects for chopping down forests in Canada and South America, milling and drying the wood into pellets at great CO2 cost, shipping the pellets to the UK in diesel-powered ships, and burning them in their old coal power station at a fraction of the MWh/MtCO2 efficiency even of the coal that it replaced

Drax knows that the government's targets cannot be met without them, which gives them a lot of lobbying power, but nobody knows if Drax's carbon capture technology works at all, because it doesn't exist yet

We could have cars powered by steam engines billowing black smoke wherever they go, but as long as we shovel imported wood chips from foreign felled forests into the boilers, it would be counted as "zero emission" under the rules currently applied to Drax, and you should be subsidised for it!

"shipping the pellets to the UK in diesel-powered ships"

And then transferring to a diesel engine train across to the power station at Drax. Yes I work near a rail line and those trains go past every day.

1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.

2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.

3. Charge spots, there's just 4 in my 60,000 pop size town about 10 miles outside London!

4. Fast forward to 2045 when all those batteries will need replacing, you mean we don't have plans to set up huge plants to handle recycling millions of batteries a year?

5. Average new EV cost today is around £50k and average 2nd hand petrol car is around £5k, inflation and people's budgets's stretch already.

6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min.

7. Are the RAC, AA, GreenFlag, etc all ready to head out and repair EVs? I assume they're already doing some of the work on the road. More spares in vans needed during the final 5 year countdown.

Just the few I could think of while I'm on lunch break.

1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.

2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.

After you uprate the home distribution boards you'll need to uprate the underground cabling and put in more local 11kV transformers - not cheap! And then you'll find the 11kV local distribution system is overloaded and need to build more 33 and 66 kV mini substations. Really not cheap! Then lo and behold the 33/66kV grids are overloaded and we need more 132kV subs. Only Then will we suddenly realise the 400kV national grid can't take it. Too late, the lights just went off!

We are decommissioning two out of our three energy distribution networks (the gas grid and road-hauled petroleum) and placing their combined loads onto the one which is already the most overloaded, most expensive, unreliable, difficult to restart, and vulnerable to attack ...

Are we so sure that this is the best thing to do given the state of the world? Suppose our enemies turn round and say Thanks for getting to net zero by destroying yourselves for us, we'll burn all the fossil fuels from now on, btw it was all a big hoax from our propaganda dept.

I have already doubled my carbon footprint to ensure further sea level rises.

Soon the Dutch will pay for their overthrow of James 2nd

Soon the Dutch will pay for their overthrow of James 2nd

Considering a third of the Netherlands is below mean sea level and another third is below mean high tide level, I think they've already thwarted your plans.

Fun fact: Schiphol airport is the only international airport that's located at the same place as a [1]major naval battle .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Haarlemmermeer

1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.

Vast majority of EV charging will be overnight, which will be fine.

2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.

Most EV owners don't need anything more than a 13A plug to charge their 10-30 miles overnight.

5. Average new EV cost today is around £50k and average 2nd hand petrol car is around £5k, inflation and people's budgets's stretch already.

Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand? The first reputable article I find for this says that average used car price (including the trifling number of EVs) is £17,815.

6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min.

Not true, doesn't take much research to see what transfer rate the higher end chargers have.

I personally wouldn't post things that are so easily disproven.

> Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand? The first reputable article I find for this says that average used car price (including the trifling number of EVs) is £17,815.

Who in their right mind would buy a second-hand EV? You have no guarantee that the battery hasn't been 'abused'.

But yes, it should have been new vs new comparison, excluding subsidies and loss-leaders

> Most EV owners don't need anything more than a 13A plug to charge their 10-30 miles overnight.

Most people who drive more than 10-30 miles a day DON'T DRIVE AN EV, so this argument doesn't stack up

> Vast majority of EV charging will be overnight, which will be fine.

No, because as soon as people making longer journeys and vans/HGVs are forced to be electric, we will need a LOT more public fast charging

"Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand?"

Perhaps because in most peoples minds, EVs still are thought of as something you buy with delivery miles on the clock, rather than something for which the used car market is equally viable. And looking at Autotrader right now, where across the whole of the UK, their EV listings account for a mere 4.4% of all vehicles available, it's not hard to understand why this would be...

"Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand"

There will be next to no second hand market, so the drivers who currently buy second hand will be forced to buy new. I suspect the plan is to force everyone into leasing.

Leased cars still go on the used market.

That's how I got a really good deal on a plug-in hybrid, bought it off lease when it was 3 years old for a really great price because gas prices were down. That was nearly 8 years ago, it's been the best car I've ever owned, and the battery is still in great shape.

My next car will be a used EV.

"Just the few I could think of while I'm on lunch break."

Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle - I haven't asked those nice meerkats to do a recently recent comparison, but when I did one last year to see where the market was at the time, the quotes I was getting back for EVs were quite frankly insane compared to those for equivalent spec/size/etc ICE cars of a type I had any interest in using as my commutemobile - *well* into 4 figures for EVs vs mid-high 3 figures for ICE. And from what I hear from others who have been looking at insurance costs more recently, including EV owners themselves (so not the sort of people you might expect to come out with negative comments re EV ownership), the situation really hasn't improved.

"Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle"

That really isn't my experience - I'm on my 2nd EV now and will be moving to my 3rd in a few months time, and the insurance premiums have been pretty much the same as what I was previously paying for my ICE cars, despite the EVs being considerably more expensive and much higher performance. Comments I see about insurance in various EV forums suggest that this experience isn't unique to me. My wife went from an ICE Mini Cooper to an Electric Mini EV and her premium went down by almost £100/yr.

Of course insurance premiums can be very obscure, in the way that a slightly different vehicle, a different postcode, a different description of the same job or a different brand from the same insurer can cause premiums to double or even worse, so I've no doubt there are some people in some circumstances who may be getting obscene insurance quotes for EVs, but I don't think it's a general 'thing'.

As for 17 year olds driving 500+ bhp vehicles though, that's going to be a different matter, just as it already is with ICE vehicles.

That's the plan. Once all cars are EVs all insurance will be 1000quid/month and the UK's GDP will soar to levels where we can afford Liz Truss as PM

"1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.

2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.

3. Charge spots, there's just 4 in my 60,000 pop size town about 10 miles outside London!"

Yes, the grid needs to be upgraded across the board and across all levels, from home breakers all the way through the grid including public charging infrastructure. It's a massive cost ( quick Googling revealed an estimate at £54bn : https://www.power-technology.com/news/national-grid-upgrade-network/?cf-view). However as far as I can work out that's over an 8-year period, making it £6.75bn/yr. Average per household electricity bill £1923 X 25.2 million households gives a total household electricity spend of £48.5bn. Domestic consumption is 35% of total electricity usage (but industrial rates are cheaper, so broad-strokes estimate I double instead of triple to get total spend). That gives approx £100bn/yr electricity spend. Set against that, an extra £6.75bn/yr is a significant, but not unsupportable, increase.

4. Fast forward to 2045 when all those batteries will need replacing, you mean we don't have plans to set up huge plants to handle recycling millions of batteries a year?

I don't know about current plans, but 2045 is far enough in the future to both make and implement said plans. That's also not considering improvements in battery technology giving longer useful battery life that will extend this timeframe.

"5. Average new EV cost today is around £50k and average 2nd hand petrol car is around £5k, inflation and people's budgets's stretch already."

Apples and Oranges. Non-EV is about £5k less than equivalent EV, but costs same or more over lifetime to run.

"6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min."

Only partly true based on older EV cars and infrastructure. Current EV models (eg Hyundai Ionoq) can charge at 200+kW, which is less than 15 min for a 250km range top-up. Still far from petrol/diesel, but newer charge / battery technologies and better infrastructure will bridge the gap

"7. Are the RAC, AA, GreenFlag, etc all ready to head out and repair EVs? I assume they're already doing some of the work on the road. More spares in vans needed during the final 5 year countdown."

They have plenty of time to prepare and train up! Also, EVs have considerably less moving parts so will be less prone to mechanical breakdown. Still to be seen what the electric / electronic reliability is like (but given how much electronics already are in ICE cars I wouldn't think much different). In any case vast majority of RAC etc callouts are related to flat starter battery or tyre-related

"EVs have considerably less moving parts so will be less prone to mechanical breakdown"

So far it appears that EV failure modes are dominated by software failures or catastrophic electrical failures. Neither of these are fixable at the side of the road.

A colleague from a previous job had a Zoe that dumped him by the side of the road. It went to Renault for diagnosis who reported NFF but replaced the entire motor and control unit as a precaution (still under warranty thankfully) and it promptly died on the side of the road again.

Ford have just bricked some of their EVs with a failed s/w update and not long ago there was a recall as the safety plugs were melting and stranding drivers. A Kia in Canada (I think) has been written off as it grounded out on some rough terrain and has bent the battery pack causing an internal water leak.

"Ford have just bricked some of their EVs with a failed s/w update and not long ago there was a recall as the safety plugs were melting and stranding drivers. A Kia in Canada (I think) has been written off as it grounded out on some rough terrain and has bent the battery pack causing an internal water leak."

Maybe, but OTA s/w updates aren't unique to EVs, Modern ICEs are drive-by-wire and are just as software dependent and prone to this. Likewise, they suffer from catastrophic faults that strand drivers. And they have mechanical vulnerabilities. Several early (modern) ICE Mini Cooper S's had their engines trashed sat at junctions if a car drove across in front of them through a big puddle and splashed water into the supercharger/air intake on the bonnet.

The fact that EVs have similar vulnerabilities to ICEs doesn't really seem to take the debate in any direction.